VARIABILITY OF RATE OF CULTURAL CHANGE 357
damming the barbarians back for generations or perhaps even for cen-
turies. By the time when the sudden bursting of a barrage that has been
cultural as well as military brings the flood of Barbarism down in spate
upon the long sheltered but now at last defenceless remains of a garden-
city within the fallen ring-wall, the cultural differentiation between the
unreclaimed barbarians and the sophisticated citizens of a cosmopolis
has become so extreme that the effort of cultural acceleration required
of the barbarian invaders, if they are to make good their Time-lag behind
the conquered subjects of the vanished universal state, usually proves to
be beyond the limits of the Human Psyche's adaptability. The bar-
barians' fate is therefore often an ironical one. The more sensational
their military and political triumphs, the more demoralizing their
spiritual bouleversement is apt to be.

These encounters between marchmen just within the fringe of a
civilization's domain, or barbarians just beyond its pale, and the more
highly cultivated communities in the interior are variations on the same
historical theme as the encounters between representatives of two or
more different civilizations; and in our study of these we have noticed
that, when a civilization is hit by the impact of a more powerful and
aggressive society of its own kind, one of the defensive responses that
the children of the assaulted civilization are apt to make is the attempt
to fight the aggressor with his own weapons which we have labelled
'Herodianism'.1 Since Time is of the essence of the Herodian's problem
if his policy is to be justified by success in making an assaulted society able
to hold its own before it has been overwhelmed, Herodianism neces-
sarily calls for an effort of cultural acceleration; and this is assuredly the
explanation of the success of the Herodian movement which was an
abortive Scandinavian Civilization's prevailing reaction to the impact of
an early Medieval Western Christendom.

The writer of this Study vividly remembers the impression made on
him by a visit to the Nordiska Museet at Stockholm in the summer of
the year 1910. After passing through a series of rooms displaying chefs-
d'oeuvre of the Scandinavian Palaeolithic, Neolithic, Bronze-Age, and
pre-Christian Iron-Age cultures, he was startled to find himself walking
through a room displaying Scandinavian-made products of the Early
Modern Age of Western history in the style of the Italian Renaissance.
Wondering how he could have failed to notice the Scandinavian-made
products of the Western Middle Ages, which must surely be on view in
their due place in the sequence, the English visitor retraced his steps—
to find that there was, sure enough, a Medieval room, but that its con-
tents were so inconspicuous, by comparison with the trophies of the
pre-Christian ages, that after all it was quite easy to traverse it unawares.
Thus the visual impression made on a traveller through this series of
rooms in a museum of Scandinavian arts and crafts was that Scandinavia
had passed in a flash out of a Late Iron Age in which she had been
beginning to create a promising distinctive civilization of her own into
an Early Modern Age in which she had become an undistinguished
participant in a standardized Italianate Western Christian culture; and
i See IX. viii. 580-623-