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THE MAKING OF THE
WESTERN MIND
THE WEST FRONT OF THE PARTHENON
(Photographed from within the colonnade, Athens)
4 no^ •
THE MAKING
OF THE
WESTERN MIND
A SHORT SURVEY OF EUROPEAN CULTURE
.r.'O" BY
F. MELIAN STAWELL
AND
F S. MARVIN
U6 3og
1 , I ■ 3. Lj
WITH 12 ILLUSTRATIONS
METHUEN & GO. LTD.
36 ESSEX STREET W.G.
LONDON
First Published in 1^23
PRINTED IN GREAT BRITAIN
" The soul has that measureless pride which con-
sists in never acknowledging any lessons but its
own. But it has sympathy as measureless as its
pride, and the one balances the other, and neither
can stretch too far while it stretches in company
with the other. The inmost secrets of art sleep
with the twain."
Walt Whitman.
PREFACE
THE authors of this little treatise are in general
agreement with one another. Each, however, is only
responsible for certain parts, to wit, F. S. Marvin
for the two chapters on Science and the concluding chapter
on Recent Developments ; F. Melian Stawell for the rest,
as well as for the choice of illustrations, the chronological
table, and the translations in the book, unless otherwise
stated.
Warm thanks are due to G. Lowes Dickinson, C. R. L.
Fletcher, Baron Fr. von Hiigel, and Miss Elizabeth Levett
for suggestive comment and criticism.
F. M. S.
F. S. M.
vn
TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAP. PAGE
I Introductory .... . . i
PART I.— AXCIE.N'T
II Heixenism ...... 5
III Hebraism ....... 19
rv The Hellenistic World .... 24
V The Coming of Christiakity . . .28
VI Rome — Republican, Imperial, and Decadent 33
PART II.— MEDIEVAL
VII Europe and the Barbarians : The Dark
Ages and Monastic ism .
41
48
53
56
69
S4
XIII The Xew Architecture : Romanesque and
Gothic ....... 89
ix
VTII Mohammedanism ....
IX The Work of Charlemagne
X The Beginnings of Xew Fez try
XI The Feudal Empire, the Church, and the
Young Nations ....
XII England and the Fromise of Seif-Gov
ERNMENT .....
THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
CHAP. P*''^
XIV The New Life in Italy : Giotto and
St. Francis ...... 95
XV The Philosophical Outlook of the Middle
Ages 99
XVI Dante io8
XVII Chaucer and His Foreign Teachers . 113
XVIII France, the Troubadours, and the Be-
ginning of Prose . . . . .117
XIX The Protest of the Peasants. . . 126
XX The Hundred Years' War and its Results
for France ...... 131
XXI Italian Cities and Italy's Leadership in
Art 133
PART III.— RENAISSANCE
XXII Italian Art and the Transition : Italy's
Loss of Freedom ..... 141
XXIII The Reformation and the Genius of
Germany ...... 151
XXIV The Dominance of Spain .... 162
XXV The Rise of the Dutch Republic and the
Decline of Spain . . . . .167
XXVI The Renaissance in France : Rabelais,
Montaigne, and the Huguenots . .172
XXVII The Renaissance in England : Eliza-
bethan Literature .... 182
XXVIII The New Learning in England : Francis
Bacon ....... 191
XXIX The Awakening in Science (by F. S.
Marvin) ....... 194
XXX The Struggles for Liberty in Germany and
England : English Thought in Religion
AND Politics ...... 208
TABLE OF CONTENTS xi
CHAP. PAGE
XXXI Despotism in France : Literature and
THE Forces of Criticism . , . 217
PART IV.— MODERN
XXXII The Triumphs of Mathematics (by F. S.
Marvin) ....... 227
XXXIII The Rise of Modern Philosophy : Des-
cartes, Spinoza, Leibnitz . . .237
XXXIV The Strengthening of Criticism in France :
Voltaire . . ... 248
XXXV The New Creed of Reform : Rousseau . 253
XXXVI Eighteenth-Century England and Expan-
sion Overseas . . , . .258
XXXVII Germany and Music ..... 263
XXXVIII Germany and Philosophy : Kant, Hegel,
and Modern Thought .... 269
XXXIX Goethe
277
XL The French Revolution and Napoleon . 284
XLI The Romantic Revival and the New
Realism ....... 291
XLII The Industrial Revolution and the Emer-
gence of Modern Problems. . . 300
XLIII The Nineteenth Century and Recent
Developments (by F. S. Marvin) . -315
Chronological Table . . . -337
Index ....... 348
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
The West Front of the Parthenon . . Frontispiece
(Photographed from within the colonnade.)
FACING
PACE
Riders in the Parthenon Frieze .... 8
(British Museum.)
Interior of Santa Sophia (Constantinople) . . 38
Interior of Durham Cathedral .... 90
South Transept of Chartres Cathedral . . 92
Head of the Virgin lying dead .... 94
(From a porch of Chartres Cathedral.)
The Kiss of Judas ....... 96
(From a fresco by Giotto, at Padua. Photo : Alinari, Florenee.)
A Miracle of the Holy Cross . . . . .138
(From the painting by Gentile Bellini, Venice. Photo : Alinari, Florence.)
Pallas Athena taming a Centaur .... 140
(From the painting by Botticelli, Florence. Photo : Brogi, Florence.)
Mother and Child ....... 144
(From the drawing by Michael Angelo, Florence.)
A Dwarf ......... 166
(From the painting by Velazquez, Madrid. Photo : Anderson, Rome.)
Faust and the Magic Disk . . . . .170
(From an etching by Rembrandt, British Museum.)
XIU
THE MAKING OF THE
WESTERN MIND
CHAPTER I
INTRODUCTORY
WE are living in an aftermath of war and revolution.
The menacing features it would be foolish to deny,
but it would be equally foolish, and more paralysing,
to overlook the hopeful signs. Among these is surely the
prevalent desire to study history on broader lines and with a
spirit that'^shall be international as well as patriotic. The work
for this book has been undertaken in the hope of serving that
end by learning to understand better the main forces that have
gone to build up European culture and the main contributions
of Europe's different nationalities to the common stock in
literature, science, politics, philosophy, religion, and art.
The effort brings home to the student, and very forcibly,
the underlying unity that subsists between the nations of the
West. Between all nations doubtless some unity is latent,
but Europe and her children hold in common a peculiar and
opulent inheritance, developed, even in the midst of incessant
strife, by a common partnership. Nation has learnt from
nation, and in the end all the great developments of European
culture have been international.
To recognize this is not, however, to obliterate the national
boundaries. On the contrary, as we study the compUcated
story of European civilization we can see how in the shelter of
each nation distinctive types of excellence have been fostered,
1 1
2 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
and we come to feel that, even as each period in time seems
to have its allotted task (a task that, once achieved, is never
exactly repeated), so each nation that is a natural unity has
been able to give, sooner or later, something to the world that no
other could have done. In this light the desire to suppress any
one people appears more than ever as a sin against mankind.
What would the inheritance of Europe have been if Persia
had crushed the Greeks ? What would it be without mediaeval
Italy, and with no Dante ? or without Spain of the Renais-
sance, and with no Cervantes, no Velazquez ? Without Hol-
land, and with no Rembrandt, no Declaration of Dutch
Independence ? Without Germany, and with no Bach, no
Beethoven, no Goethe, no Kant ?
The richness and complexity of history is too great to be
summed up under any one formula, but, if history is intelli-
gible at all, certain conclusions can and should be drawn.
And a survey, impartial at least in desire, indicates that
there are two chief factors making for all noble achievement
in culture, one the love of liberty, the other the search for
unity, and both of them are needed alike in thought and in
practice. Neither liberty nor unity can, it is true, of them-
selves produce the vital element of genius. But without them
genius withers. Either alone, it is true again, is incomplete
without the other, while to combine both in a perfect har-
mony is an achievement, maybe, beyond the power of man.
Yet it is an achievement at which he must aim or perish.
These considerations will meet us again and again in our
course, and the moral, that Europe must now set herself to
gain at once greater liberty and greater unity, stares us in the
face at the close.
Since the object of this attempt is to trace the chief threads
in Europe's web of culture, it has been necessary to pass
lightly over events military and political, and seek only to
embody as succinctly as possible the main results accepted
by most historians and essential for any understanding of
European development in the matters of the mind.
The treatment is on the whole chronological, and an effort
has been made never to forget that each stage in history has
INTRODUCTORY 3
in it something of unique value which we can leam to appre-
ciate, and in that sense make our own, but which we cannot
reproduce. We shall never build another Parthenon or write
another Divina Commedia. Indeed, if we could, there would
be less need to study and reverence the Past.
It uill be convenient to follow the time-honoured division
into Ancient, Mediceval, Renaissance, and Modern. No
sharp-cut lines of demarcation are possible in history, but
these titles mark fairly well the outstanding periods in
European civilization. First, the long stretch from the dawn
of regular history to the fall of the Roman Empire in the West,
say from the latter half of the second millennium B.C. up to
the sixth century A.D., roughly two thousand years in all, the
period which saw not only the achievements of Greece,
Palestine, and Rome, but also their stagnation and consequent
submersion beneath the barbarian floods. Next, the thousand
years or so onwards to and including the transitions of the
sixteenth century and the seventeenth, beginning with the
chaotic struggles of the new rising nations, followed by the
first blossoming-time of romantic poetry and religious art,
and merging, through unnumbered conflicts between nation
and nation, city and city. Church and State, into the
conscious grandeurs and crimes of the Renaissance, the
conscious desire to recapture the Pagan freedom of thought,
and then to go beyond it and conquer unkno^vn worlds.
Finally, our own modem period, the age of science and
of experiment in all directions. The best hopes of this, the
youngest birth of Time, are, as we have said, bound up with
its power to appreciate the varied aspects of the three that
went before, to realize the value of Europe's spiritual achieve-
ment in itself and to see that it is throughout a joint work
wrought by many hands, on the basis of a common inherit-
ance.
To the Mediaevalists we are drawn by the faith, the fervent
beauty, the picturesque splendour, the human love and
tenderness that shine out, strangely and strongly, through
their turbid and savage strife. But in other ways — ways
equally important — ^we feel ourselves more at home in the
4 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
light of reason that shone for the ancient Greeks in Athens.
In mediaeval thought we are baffled again and again by sheer
puerilities, but even where Plato and Aristotle are obviously
in error, their errors are those of grown men trying to follow
reason, and our own reason grows, not by sweeping that
ancient work aside, but by working ourselves to find out
where exactly it was at fault. With the men of that transition-
time usually called the Renaissance, we are, not unnaturally,
still more in sympathy, for they, like ourselves, felt the
double attraction of the past and the future. Their age
outdoes ours in its wealth of imaginative genius, but many
of their problems were the same and much of their spirit.
Their attitude to the past, for all its admiration, was not
devotional, but critical, and even those who worshipped the
classics hoped to go beyond them.
PART I.— ANCIENT
CHAPTER II
HELLENISM
THE glory of Greece may sometimes have been over-
praised ; but it is, if anything, scant praise to admit
that the Greeks laid the foundations for all our
intellectual growth, and laid them in liberty.
We do not know as yet at what date their Aryan ^ fore-
fathers, splitting off presumably from the common family
north of the Danube, found their way into the sunny penin-
sulas and islands of the Eastern Mediterranean. But it must
have been at least well before the first millennium B.C., and
from the first they must have been in contact with the highest
civilizations then accessible to Europe, notably the Egyptian
and the Cretan, and the latter may have been near akin to their
own. In any case they made good use of their opportunities.
It is a reasonable conjecture that as early as 900 B.C. they had
produced the two epics at once the most human and the most
poetic ever known, the epic of war and love and tragedy and
a nation's doom in the Iliad, the epic of home and personal
adventure and hard-won happiness in the Odyssey. Breadth
of sympathy and delight in personal vigour are the leading
notes in each, as characteristic as the superb sense of beauty
and the swift and stately diction.
^ We may use this name, old and convenient, if slightly inaccurate,
for the common stock, probably situated between the Danube and the
Baltic, speaking a common language, from whom sprang Hindus,
Persians, Greeks, Italians, Celtiberians, Celts, Teutons, and Slavs.
6 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
No battle-poetry has ever been more magnificent than
that of the IHad, and yet, as Shelley said, the poet is never
so truly himself as when he reaches " the high and solemn
close of the whole bloody tale in tenderness and inexpiable
sorrow." And both poems are marked in almost every canto
by the spirit of free enterprise and free judgment. Kings
and priests are reverenced, but no tyranny is tolerated ; the
men are taunted as " not men but women " if they submit
tamely to wrong done in high places. Agamemnon must
bow to the will of the army assembled in council ; the son
of Ulysses must prove himself fit for leadership before he can
establish his right to be lord of his island.
The achievements from the eighth century onwards, after
the opening of the classical period proper, are as closely bound
up with liberty. It is from the city of Mitylene, struggling
for self-government, that spring the songs of Sappho, intense
and clear, perfect with the unforced perfection of flowers.
It is to democratic Athens that we owe Tragedy, the " many-
folded fires " of .^ischylus,
" the secret of the night •
/ Hid in the day- source,"
followed by the Sophoclean harmony of self-controlled
sorrow and heroism, and the Euripidean passion of pity and
indignation. It is to Athens that we owe Comedy, as
it shines in the brilliant laughter of Aristophanes, often
scurrilous but always searching, and lit, whenever he chose,
by a radiance of choral song. Tragedies and comedies alike
are aglow with the fire of freedom and the pride in the Demos
of Athens. Jebb spoke of their language as " the voice of
life," and such in truth it is, supreme in flexibility, vividness,
melody, clear subtlety of suggestion and appeal. But let us
add that it is also the voice of free life. That is as certain
as that it has always been both the allurement and the despair
of translators. It bears the stamp of the people who made
it, alert, enterprising, unfettered. And while they were
pouring out such treasures of literature they were also elabora-
ting architecture, sculpture, painting. The Parthenon, even
HELLENISM 7
in ruin and dismemberment, astounds us by its union of
simplicity, massiveness, and rich restraint of ornament — the
tall fluted columns, golden-white against the amethyst hills
and the blue sea, bearing lightly the huge marble slabs and
the low-pitched roof, unadorned except for the sculpture, in
and below the eaves, of those lithe and stately figures, splendid
in gracious realism and suavity of line, that speak for ever
of Athens' confidence in herself and her ideal for those citizens
of hers who were to be a law unto themselves.
Greeks showed the same fearlessness in plotting out the
true methods of science and philosophy. Already in the
sixth century Thales and other lonians, while their coast of
Asia Minor was still unenslaved by Persia, had made a momen-
tous beginning in mathematics, speculated on a common
physical basis for all matter, and dreamed of reaching a
dominant point of view from which the entire world could
be understood as one connected whole.
Pythagoras, a little later, migrating from Samos to the
Greek colonies in Italy in order to escape the oncoming
tyranny at home, won equal renown for his further discoveries
in mathematics and for his foundation of an independent
brotherhood with its own ideals of righteousness in life.
Anaxagoras, later still, coming to an Athens that had won
her liberty to the full, takes the bold step of recognizing Mind
as the guiding principle in the universe. These three early
thinkers may stand among many as examples of those Greeks
who awakened in Europe the hope, common alike to science
and philosophy, that certain intelligible principles could be
found from which could be deduced as consequences the
bewildering details of appearances.
That the Greeks did not fully realize the need for scientific
experiment is true ; but the sagacity of their scientific hypo-
theses is often astounding. It may be enough to recall the
anticipation of the atomic theory by Democritus, who argued
that all the processes of nature were derived from the move-
ments of minute particles through space.
Socrates, on the other hand, turning aside from such
investigations as too remote from human life to be fruitful,
8 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
brought philosophy " into the market-place " by the fascina-
tion of his lovable and strenuous life, his devout and humorous
search after clear thinking in all conduct, preaching valiantly,
in season and out of season, the truth that " the life
without thought was no life for man." And thus, more
perhaps than any single teacher, he set free the mind of the
common man. And if, in alarm, his beloved Athens put
him to death, we ought to recognize with Hegel that his
criticism was much too powerful and solvent to be merely
" innocent." The man who could be satisfied with no second-
hand definition of righteousness, who could not even rest in
the answer that it was obedience to the will of the gods, shook
to its foundations the fabric of Greek mythology and ritual.
It was an unsound fabric, weak for all its charm, and the
shaking was sorely needed ; but we do less than justice
either to Socrates or to his judges if we do not realize what
the shock must have meant, and how it may have unsettled
the looser minds. Liberty, like all great things, has its dan-
gers. Moreover, it is clear that Athens repented of this, her
almost solitary act of persecution. The disciples of So-
crates were honoured for honouring their master, and Plato
could safely put his name at the head of everything he
wrote.
In the system of Plato and Aristotle — for in essentials the
two philosophers had one system and the same — the search
for satisfactory causes and definitions, inaugurated by the
lonians for physics, extended by Socrates to ethics, and pur-
sued fearlessly with the free man's readiness to follow the
argument wherever it might lead, culminated in the famous
and fruitful doctrine of Ideas, the doctrine that every natural
thing had a dominant character, its " Form " or " Idea,"
from which its distinctive behaviours were derived and by
which they should be judged. The " form " was " natural "
in the sense that it was not imposed simply from without.
If we planted a wooden bed, writes Aristotle in his pithy way,
and the wood could still grow, it would grow up not a Bed,
but a Tree. To discover the fundamental Forms and trace
their consequences and connexions was the prime business
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HELLENISM 9
of thought, and the rules of the syllogism were framed with
the express object of keeping the results clear. What Aris-
totle always demanded was not an " empty " syllogism but
one where the " middle term " should register a genuine and
vital link between the Idea and its further consequences.
The stars, to paraphrase an instance of his own, are not
distant because they twinkle ; they twinkle because they
are distant. Again to Aristotle, as to Plato, it was a corollary
of man's Form that he should seek to follow Reason and live
in harmony with his fellow-citizens. Therefore, only in a
well-ordered State could man attain the true end of his being
and a happiness worthy of himself. The State, said Aristotle,
in a passage of permanent inspiration, may have been brought
into being for the sake of life ; it exists for the sake of the
good life.
That the discovery of the true Forms meant long and
patient search, observation as well as analysis, Aristotle knew
well enough, and even Plato, though far less interested in
science proper than Aristotle, points an argument by appeal-
ing to the scientific method of Hippocrates, who insisted, as
one of the first principles of medicine, on the study of the
human body and its natural functions. ^
Further, in Plato and Aristotle, the orderly search for the
Ideas was linked with a remarkable philosophy of religion.
For the Ideas were conceived as good in themselves and as
ultimately brought into operation by the desire of every
natural thing to attain, so far as it could, a supramundane
Goodness, to " copy," as they said, or to " share in," the
Perfection of a Type existing, in some real but mysterious
sense, bej^ond this manifest world, in " a Place above the
Heavens," as Plato's eloquence phrased it, in the " Idea of
Ideas " as Aristotle put it, the life of God, the desire of the
world, the Point on which hung all the heavens and the earth.
In man this effort towards Perfection involved the pursuit
of a happiness that culminates in the Knowledge of Truth,
his natural faculties being wrought into a harmony dominated
by this. Aristotle's doctrine of " the golden mean " implied
^ Phaedo, 270 d.
10 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
not merely balance and limitation, but balance and limita-
tion to serve this definite and sublime end.
But was man capable of such sublimity ? Here the answer
of the Greeks was at least doubtful and grew more and more
despondent as the years went on. Faced with the baffling
intricacy and evil of the physical and moral world, they could
not shake off the suspicion of an irrational element in things
that reason could never understand nor effort subdue. The
apparent progress of the world at certain epochs might be
balanced by recurrent cycles of decay. This doubt, paralysing
as it was to the most characteristic part of their hopes, was
deepened by the final political failure of their country, a
failure disastrous enough, after its opening brilliance, to make
any man lose heart. Their first triumphs in culture, after the
bloom of the Epic, had been won in connexion with their
resistance as freemen to the aggressive tyranny of the Per-
sians (490-480 ff. B.C.), Aryans like themselves, though neither
nation knew it, but Aryans who had built up a brilliant
empire on the basis of despotism.
The history of Herodotus is planned to exhibit the clash
of the opposing ideals and the deliberate choice between
submission to a magnificent autocrat and loyalty to the laws
and covenants agreed upon by equals. But, Persia once
defeated, the cities and men who had stood side by side
against her turned on each other in fratricidal conflicts, as
needless as they were murderous. Their sense of unity was
too weak, and the liberty they loved was too often only their
own. Of all the conflicts the most tragic was the long Pelo-
ponnesian War, waged for nearly a generation between Athens
and Sparta (431-404 B.C.), though recognized for the curse
it was by many of Athens' clearest minds, by Thucydides its
historian, by Eiiripides the poet, writing his most moving
play of " The Trojan Women " immediately after the Athenian
violation of Melos, even by the poet's inveterate critic
Aristophanes, who strove to end it by kindly laughter.
The comedy of Aristophanes called " The Peace-maker,"
Lysistrata, where valiant true-hearted women on either side,
Athenian and Lacedaemonian, join together in an effort to save
HELLENISM 11
Greece by withdrawing from all men until the foolish war is
given up, strikes the reader through all its indecency and
uproarious mirth as one of the most humane protests ever
written against political madness. It was written in vain,
but it is a deathless thing. The chorus, now fragmentary,
with which it closes is among the most musical ever sung for
us by " that graceless master of Attic grace."
" Suddenly out of the darkness
Flashes the golden mirth,
Aristophanes' song with its laughter and light,
And the cry for peace, for the union of old,
Athens and Sparta side by side.
Like gods defying the Persian host !
Women and love and the glory of old.
Let them end the weariful war !
Drown it in laughter, riot, and song.
Dance and hymn to the gods !
Athens, Sparta, sing to the gods !
As the Spartan maidens dance and sing
In the deep Eurotas vale.
Pure and holy and fair
The daughter of Leda moves in the dance.
Leads the dance like a fawn.
And summon her too, sing to her too.
The Warrior Maiden, the Lady of Might,
The Queen of the Brazen House !
• ••••••
But the lovely song stops short,— broken and far away ! "
In the history of Thucydides — one of the earhest, and
perhaps the greatest ever written — the tragedy is put before
us with a many-sided terseness, an impartial sympathy too
pregnant to err by over-simplification, too wisely modest to
claim knowledge where knowledge was not, but philosophic
enough to search for underlying causes and bold enough to
state them when found. Thucydides saw and admired the
admirable conception of civic life upheld by the Athenian
Pericles, a life free, democratic, joyous, adorned by an art
that was never luxurious and a culture never effeminate.
But he saw also the narrowness of the Periclean imperialism :
the hard conviction that " the School of Hellas " had the
right to take the money of her allies — the Dehan League that
12 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
had helped to defeat Persia — and use it for her own beautify-
ing (the Parthenon was built with the funds), the right to
push her own dominion and commerce at the expense of all
her rivals. He shows us the web of good and evil further
complicated not only by the selfishness of Sparta, confessedly
oligarchic and militarist, but also and throughout Greece by
the fierce quarrels everywhere between " oligarch " and
" democrat," the " class-wars " of antiquity.
Thucydides rarely moralizes openly, but the sequence of
his chosen facts utters moral after moral. The overwhelming
defeat in Syracuse, for example, whither Athens had gone
to plunder the rich Greek colonies of Sicily, follows, with the
Nemesis of an ^Eschylean tragedy, straight on the arrogant
cruelty with which she had crushed, immediately before, the
innocent island of Melos that had only desired to stand neutral
in the conflict. It was the prelude to the fall of Athens. From
that fall, it is true, she recovered astonishingly. But neither
she, nor Greece as a whole, ever recovered sufficiently to
oppose a united front when Philip of Macedon and Alexander
his son, men of an allied but rougher race, swept down from
the North, following an age-long track, to substitute personal
empire for the civic freedom so nobly attempted, and so
ignobly defeated, by the Greeks themselves.
It is indeed most important to reiterate with Pindar that
the Athenians had
" laid the shining steps
Of Freedom's temple."
After expelling kings and tyrants they had conceived and put
into practice government by the majority of the full citizens,
trusting first and foremost to free speech and persuasion ;
they elected their officials for limited terms, to be subject
to impeachment when the term was over"; they gave the plain
citizen a controlling voice, not only in the Assembly, but in
the jury-courts ; and more than once they shared in noteworthy
experiments towards federation. And they knew well what
they were doing. It rings out, as we have said, from almost
all their writing, and the thrill of it can be felt even through
the imperfect medium of translation, the thrill of pride in
HELLENISM 13
that ordered freedom which taught the citizen ahke to com-
mand and to obey. Nor are the instances Athenian only.
Herein Athens only emphasized what marked out the Greek
in general from the barbarian. In Sparta itself, the most
rigid of Hellenic States, there was nothing like irresponsible
despotism. Sparta had her share in the tradition of the
Homeric songs, where the scenes of debate are almost as
stirring as the scenes of battle, and the shrewd old loyal
swineherd, grumbling at the half-hearted work of the slaves,
admits " that a man loses half his manhood when he falls into
slavery." Herodotus the Ionian makes the exiled Spartan
king tell the Persian Xerxes to his face what Lacedaemonian
liberty could mean :
" No men are braver than the Spartans taken singly, and
when they unite they are the noblest of mankind. For
though they are free they are not free in all things : they
have one master and that master is the Law, whom they
fear far more than any of your subjects fear you " (vii. 104).
Or take the splendid answer of the same Spartans when
Hydarnes the Persian envoy tried to win them over by fair
promises :
" Hydarnes, in this matter you cannot give us counsel on
equal terms. Slavery you understand, but you have no
knowledge of freedom. Had you ever tasted its sweetness
you would have bidden us fight for it, not with spears but
axes " (vii. 135).
But Athens remains the leader. There is no wider sweep
for the free spirit than the passionate outcry of Prometheus,
the Liberator and Friend of Man, presented by .^schylus
at the opening of the drama chained to his lonely cliff, silent
before the minions of Zeus, but appeahng when rid of them
to the elemental powers of Nature as witnesses to the wrong
he suffers from the Rulers whose equal he is and who ought
to be his allies :
" O sacred sky, and swift-plumed flying winds.
Ye river-founts, and sparkling from the sea
Unnumbered laughters ! Earth, mother of us all 1
All-seeing Sun 1 I call on you, on you !
See what I suffer, I a god, from gods ! "
14 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
It was an appeal to echo down the centuries and inspire more
than one poem in our own days — the Release of Man in
Shelley's " Prometheus Unbound," the apostrophe to Liberty
in Coleridge's " Ode to France " :
" O ye loud Waves, and O ye Forests high.
And O ye Clouds that far above me soared !
Thou rising Sun ! thou blue rejoicing Sky !
Yea, everything that is and will be free ! "
The same note is repeated again and again throughout the
play and taken up with exquisite effect at the close by the
gentle, lovely daughters of Ocean, when the lackey of Zeus
suggests that they should desert the Benefactor before the
thunderous onslaught of the Tyrant :
" Choose other words for us,
Give other counsel.
Then we may listen 1
Never to this !
Play the coward, thou hintest ?
Nay, but with Him
Suffer the worst 1
We were taught to loathe traitors."
Nowhere indeed do the great Greek writers give more
winning expression to the love of freedom than when they
unite it, as they often do, with the tenderness of womanhood
or the dignity of old age. Unsurpassed among all heroines
of liberty is Antigone, fiery and merciful, defying her city's
cruel commands because of her burning love for her dead
brother. She flings back contempt in the face of the king who
would convict her of lawlessness :
" It was not God proclaimed those laws to me.
Nor justice dwelling with the Lords of Death.
Those light decrees of thine have no such power
That thou, a man, shouldst override God's laws.
Unwritten laws, unfailing, not of to-day
Nor yesterday, but laws that live for ever.
And no man knoweth when their day appeared."
(Soph: Antig.)
It is the same Antigone who utters the divine words that
sweep all petty enmity away :
HELLENISM _ 15
" I'll love with you : I will not hate with you ;
I was not born for that."
With equal greatness of soul Iphigenia, growing up in one
terrible hour from a girl into a woman, takes command of
her overbearing mother, Clytemnestra the queen, and offers
herself at her father's bidding as a free sacrifice for a free
people, putting aside with ineffable gentleness the help of the
young Achilles, who loves her and would save her at the risk
of his own life. She stills the hurrjdng words of furious
alarm and desperate resistance :
" Mother, let me speak !
This anger with my father is in vain,
Vain to use force for what we cannot win.
Thank our brave friend for all his generous zeal
But never let us broil him with the host, —
No gain to us, and ruin for himself.
I have been thinking, mother — hear me now ! —
I have chosen death : it is my own free choice.
I have put cowardice away from me.
Honour is mine, now. O mother, say I am right !
Our country, our own Hellas, looks to me :
On me the fleet hangs now, the doom of Troy,
Our women's honour through the years to come.
My death will save them, and my name be blest.
She who saved Hellas ! Life is not so sweet
I should be craven. You who bore your child.
It was for Greece you bore her, not yourself.
Think ! Thousands of our soldiers stand to arms;
They man the waiting ships, they are on fire
To serve their outraged country, die for Greece :
And is my one poor life to hinder all ?
Could we defend that ? Could we call it just ?
And, mother, think ! How could we let our friend
Die for a woman, fighting all his folk ?
A thousand women are not worth one man !
The goddess needs my blood : can I refuse ?
No : take it, conquer Troy ! — This shall be
My husband and my children and my fame.
Victory, mother, victory for the Greeks !
Barbarians must never rule this land.
Our own land ! They are slaves, and we are free."
(Eur: Iph. in Aulis.)
And beside these women of the poets we may put the man of
16 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
actual life : — Socrates speaking in his own defence, not yielding
one inch of his dignity and independence, refusing to purchase
acquittal by truckling to his judges, " unlike a free-born
man," appealing to the example of those Homeric heroes
who " cared not for death or danger in comparison with dis-
grace," and yet with such reverence for his country's laws
that he refuses to escape by flight from the execution of the
sentence when once it is passed against him. Nothing could
be more instinct with sanity, heroism, and tender humour
than the passage where Socrates in prison explains to
his old friend Crito (who has been urging on his beloved
master that the really brave course is to run away) how he
cannot leave because he hears the laws of his city calling on
him to stay :
" ' Listen to us, Socrates, to us who brought you up. Do
not set your children or your life or any other thing whatso-
ever above righteousness, lest when you go to the other world
you should have to defend yourself for this before those who
govern there. In this life you do not believe that to act thus
could be good for you or yours, or righteous or just, and it
will not be good when you reach that other land. As it is,
if you go, you will go wronged — wronged by men though
not by us — ^but if you went in that disgraceful manner,
rendering evil for evil and wrong for wrong, breaking your
own pledge and covenant with us, injuring the last beings
whom you ought to injure, your own self and your dear ones
and your country and us, your country's laws, then we shall
bear you anger while you live, and in that other land our
brothers, the Laws of Death, will not receive you graciously,
for they will know that you went about to destroy us, so far
as in you lay. Therefore you must not let Crito over-
persuade you against us.' Crito, my dear friend Crito, that,
beUeve me, that is what I think I hear, as the Corybants hear
flutes in the air, and the sound of the words rings and echoes
in my ears and I can listen to nothing else. Believe me, so
far as I see at present, if you speak against them you will
speak in vain. Still, if you think you can do any good,
say on."
HELLENISM 17
Crito. " No, Socrates, I have nothing I can say."
Soc. " Then let us leave it so, Crito ; and let things go
as I have said, for that is the way that God has pointed
out " (Plat. Crito. fin.).
Assuredly the Greeks, and especially the Athenians, en-
visaged a marvellous union of liberty and law, if too few of
them showed the tenacity of Socrates in serving it to the end.
Nor was it for want of keen and incessant discussion on
the problems of government and sovereignty that they took
the line they did. Plato is among the most searching critics of
democracy, and his conclusion in the " Republic " (and perhaps
still more in the " Laws ") that the supreme authority must be
left in the hands of trained thinkers, might have led to a
despotism of doctrine as crushing as that of the Inquisition
itself. Indeed it is far from impossible that many of the
later champions for the supreme ascendancy of the Church
were not uninfluenced by Plato. Greek institutions for
political liberty are the more impressive when we remember
this atmosphere of unlimited discussion in which they were
formed.
Most miserably, however, as we saw, the Greeks themselves
destroyed by their narrow selfishness what they had designed
to create, and moreover, in every city of Greece, however
" democratic," the basis was always slave-labour, probably,
even at its lowest, in the proportion of three to one. True
it is that some Greek thinkers, Plato and Aristotle included,
show that their consciences are not quite at ease about slavery,
but they made terms with their consciences, for they did not
see how to secure, without ample leisure, the cultured life
that was to them the crown of life, and yet the manual toil
necessary for the means of living left no room for leisure.
Such toil, then, must be done by those who were unequal to
the demands of culture, and to secure the doing of it com-
pulsion was deemed necessary. The narrow-based city-
structure broke down, and with Alexander and his successors
we come on the first large empires ruled by Europeans
(336 B.C.).
Alexander's first project was to overcome the Persian
2
18 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
Empire — that strange compound of courage and corruption,
tenacity and weakness, religion and immorality, that had
never been without a certain fascination for the Greeks,
from Herodotus to Xenophon, even when they defied it. It
did not fail to fascinate Alexander, who seems to have dreamt
of uniting Greek and Persian under one autocratic rule. In
any case his own amazing career as conqueror, explorer,
founder of cities, did open all the gates between Europe and the
Near East. And the opening led to large results. The con-
tact between Hellenism and Hebraism, for example, became
direct, close, and continuous. Much was achieved in those
centuries, lacking though they are in the greatest names, when
Alexander's generals and successors were ruling kingdoms
throughout Greece, Asia Minor, Palestine, and Egypt, king-
doms that, however despotic at the centre, still tried to foster
both local freedom and Hving culture among their strangely-
mingled subjects. Liberty suffered, but there were genuine
gains from the attempts at unification.
Above all, the way was prepared for that rehgion which
ever since has called the West to unity, the religion taught
by Jesus Christ the Jew.
CHAPTER III
HEBRAISM
BY the days of Alexander the Hebrew tribes — a branch
of the Semitic race distinct at least as far back as the
second millennium B.C., when they journeyed out of
Babylonia into Palestine — had completed a period of growth
roughly contemporaneous with the development of Greece
from the time of Agamemnon. The mythology they had
brought with them from far-off depths, Semitic, Sumerian,
primeval, had been refined and deepened by the Prophets
and their priestly successors. Like the Greeks, the Hebrew
tribes cherished their liberty, fiercely resenting either foreign
domination or oppression at home. They had not the Greek
genius for constitution-making, but they had, as men of their
race have shown on occasion since, the power both for good
and for evil of judging (and destroying) the existing order
by setting up a higher standard of freedom and equity.
Their experiment in kingship was undertaken reluctantly,
and on their return from the Exile abandoned without regret.
Thoroughly typical instances of their readiness to defy tyranny
and officialism are the cases of Nathan, the prophet, crying
to David himself, " Thou art the man ! " of Amos lashing
the rich and the rulers not even as " a prophet or a prophet's
son," but as a simple dresser of sycamore trees. Hebrew
poetry, like Greek, was nurtured at the breasts of this free
spirit, and Hebrew poetry remains as mighty a bequest to
modern Europe.
But again, like the Greeks, the Hebrews had been rent
asunder by fratricidal conflicts, Israel cursing Judah and
19
20 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
Judah Israel. Like the Greeks, but even more completely
than the Greeks, they had fallen a prey in their weakness
to foreign conquerors, carried away captive by Assyrians
and Babylonians. But, unlike the Greeks, they learnt much
from defeat and captivity. The distinguishing mark of these
Hebrews was their peculiar religious gift, an apprehension,
more intense than can be given in any words but their own,
of a Power manifested in Nature and Man, but infinitely
beyond both. Man was a worm before Him, and the isles
of the sea but as dust in the balance. Any dignity in man
lay in his power to obey the commandments of the Lord.
This belief put a limit on their speculation, but also it gave
them a principle of unity which the Greeks too often lacked.
The whole nation could be united by its service to its God.
That service was indeed at the outset very narrowly
conceived. The Hebrews recked little of art or science
or metaphysics or history. There is the sharpest contrast
here to the Greek ideal of the individual's many-sided
development culminating in knowledge, friendship, beauty.
One might even say that the ancient Hebrew cared little
about individual development at all ; certainly it was not
till a late period that he began to long for individual
immortality. The typical prophet, up at least to the time of
the Exile (sixth century B.C.), found the significance of life
only in walking humbly with his God, and dealing boldly and
justly with his fellow- worshippers. His God was at first con-
ceived as concerned exclusively with the righteousness and
safety of the nation, and the conception had all the nobility
and much of the narrowness of patriotism. But under the
stress of suffering and thought it widened out into something
far nobler. Especially in the Second Isaiah, writing when at
last the Jews were released from Babylon by the Persian Cyrus,
do we find developed the thought of the Nation as a Being
not merely entrusted with a Law that could give light to the
whole world, but as destined through its sufferings to save
that world. With a disregard for the ordinary limits of
personality often noticeable in Jewish Uterature, this prophet
conceives the Suffering Servant sometimes as the whole
HEBRAISM 21
People, sometimes as the Elect among them, the Remnant,
sometimes as one individual Person, it may be his own better
self or a supreme Man of Sorrows, either past or to come.
By his sorrows shall that Servant win rejoicing. " He shall
see of the travail of his soul and be satisfied : by his know-
ledge shall my righteous servant justify many, for he shall
bear their iniquities."
Inevitably this innocent sufferer, this Holy One of Israel
who poured out his soul unto death for the sake of the trans-
gressors, was identified, by all who entered into Isaiah's
spirit, with the divine Messiah who was to redeem the world.
And this was the easier because the Hebrews were familiar
from time immemorial with the idea of a Divine sacrifice,
a victim without spot, slain for the sake of the people.
Modem research has shown how deep and widespread was
this worship of a Dying God, dying to rise again, a God with
whom, whether by literally eating his flesh and drinking his
blood, or in less material ways, his worshippers could enter
into communion, and thus, through him, with one another.
The roots of this world-wide sacrament are multifarious, and
it varies from the lowest savagery to the most mystical forms
of devotion. There are traces of a primitive confusion between
the material vehicle and the force embodied in it, as when
savages eat the heart of a brave enemy to possess themselves
of his valour ; there are signs of the profound impression
made on early man by the natural drama of autumn and
spring, the corn dying, the seed being buried in the ground,
and rising again with fresh life the following year. But the
ritual could never have won the hold it did if it had not
symbolized much more, first, the unity between all living powers,
and then — of still greater importance and more and more
prominent as time went on — the truth that the world advances
through the suffering of heroic natures and that lesser men
and women can " be saved by them and joined with them."
The full emergence of this conception into the religious con-
sciousness is one of the gifts that Hebraism, through Chris-
tianity, helped to give the Western world, and the clearest
signs of it meet us first in Isaiah. This was his contribution,
22 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
a memorable one, to the problem of undeserved suffering, a
problem pressing heavily on the Jewish thought of the time.
The Jew had always had a keen sense of retributive justice,
but in earlier days his concern for the nation had quite over-
shadowed the individual. But now, after the misery of the
Exile, the nation crushed and all but trampled out, the
question had to be faced. Jewish answers varied significantly.
The long wrestle in Job ends without any clear-cut solution :
there is perhaps a hint of immortality, but the real succour
comes to Job, as it might have come ages afterwards to
Spinoza, simply through his sense of the fathomless majesty
in the whole imiverse. Others, like Job's comforters, fell back,
in sheer defiance of fact, on the assertion that the good were
always rewarded in this Hfe and the wicked punished. Finally,
during the centuries between the Exile and the Birth of
Christ, the nation lying under the shadow first of Persia, then
of Greece, and lastly of Rome, comfort was looked for in the
new hope of immortality, an immortahty marked by definite
reward and punishment. The nobler among the adherents
of this new belief show anticipations, not insignificant, of the
Christianity that was to complete their hopes.
Heaven and Hell now first become prominent in Judaism,
and with them the belief in a personal Devil for ever opposed
to the Lord. The dominance of such ideas in Palestine,
aided as they were by echoes from Egypt and by Persia's
religion of a cosmic struggle between Ahura Mazda, the lord
of light, and Ahriman, the spirit of evil, was the prelude to
their overwhelming influence in Europe, where indeed they
found congenial soil. For the present they helped to lead
a large section of the Jews to an increasing reverence for the
Law as a perfect code and an increasing reaction of hardness
towards the Gentile, a fanatic disregard for the sweeter
counsel symbolized by the story of Ruth, the alien who was
true of heart, or Jonah, the prophet who had learnt that the
Lord could have compassion even upon Nineveh.
For after the Exile there are two main tendencies to be
distinguished in Jewish thought : the one already mentioned,
wider and tenderer, of which the Second Isaiah is the type
HEBRAISM 23
and which was to flower out later in Christianity ; the
other, noticeable for example in Ezekiel and Ezra, narrow
with a tragic narrowness, concentrating itself in a passion
of remorseful resolution on the determination to keep the
Law down to its smallest details and thus unite the nation
in cleaving to the Lord, pure from idolaters.
The first was incomparably the finer, but it was attended
by its o^vn perils. Among its less high-minded supporters
there could be a weak submission to foreign rule, a paltering
with Greek effeminacy or else a despairing sadness as
paralyzing to the full powers of man. The threnody of
Ecclesiastes expresses that despair with an imaginative force,
a depth and a sympathy that put this little book among the
grandest monuments of Pessimism ; but it is a grandeur of
death. The sadness of many a disillusioned Greek had met
with, and intensified, the WTiter's own. In the eyes of the
Preacher there is nothing in life but recurrent cycles of baffled
effort and triumphant tyranny. " All the rivers run into
the sea, yet the sea is not full ; unto the place whence the
rivers come, thither they return again " (i. 7). "I returned
and considered all the oppressions that are done under the
sun, and, behold, the tears of such as were oppressed and
they had no comforter " (iv. i). Revolt is futile. " Curse
not the king, no, not in thy thought, and curse not the rich
in thy bedchamber, for a bird of the air shall carry the voice,
and that which hath wings shall tell the matter " (x. 20).
Yet even Ecclesiastes will not wholly turn aside from effort.
He bids men go on toiling and learning, useless as it may
seem, " ploughing the sands," casting seed-corn upon the
barren waters. Maybe, after all, something will come of
it. For wisdom in his eyes still excelleth folly " as far as
light excelleth darkness."
CHAPTER IV
THE HELLENISTIC WORLD
IN point of fact the Greek genius for free inquiry, the
Greek " love of wisdom," was still of a force to be felt
even after Alexander, when, though Greek liberty was
dying, it was not yet dead. Especially in science did it
make its power known. Hellenistic art and literature,
no doubt, should not be despised. The famous " Dying
Gaul," one of the most touching figures ever modelled,
is a marble copy of a bronze set up in Pergamus by
Attains I after a victory over the Gauls of Galatia. The
Hellenists noted and wondered at the iron self-control with
which these Northern barbarians could die. They had too
little of that in their own composition, but they could still
respond to the aesthetic appeal of heroism. The old heroic
literature had, indeed, died out. In the old days ^Eschylus
had dealt with nation-wide, world-wide problems : the
struggle of Greek against barbarian in " The Persians," the
civil strife when brother is slain by brother in " The Seven
against Thebes," the revolt of the innovating Liberator
against entrenched authority in the " Prometheus," the
curse of overweening ambition in the trilogy of " Agamem-
non's House," where wrong breeds wrong and revenge revenge
until at last Justice takes the place of Vengeance and the
pure in heart join with daemonic Principalities and Powers
to establish the ordered life of the City.
Issues as large had been raised by Sophocles and Euripides.
The " Antigone " of Sophocles, chosen by Hegel as the very
type of tragedy, turns on the clash between the rights of the
24
THE HELLENISTIC WORLD 25
individual and the rights of the State. Euripides had burned
with the fire of spiritual revolt, flaming out against the cruelties
in the mythology of his time, the hypocrisies of war, the
injustice to slaves, to women, to defeated enemies. Within
a generation after the death of Alexander (323 B.C.), how the
range of poetry has dwindled ! Whether in Greece herself —
and in the Peloponnese there were recurrent struggles for full
freedom — or in Asia ]\Iinor, or at Syracuse under an inde-
pendent tyrant, or at the brilliant Alexandrian court founded
by the ]\Iacedonian Ptolemy, what poets there are never touch
on politics except as courtiers. Sparkle they have and charm,
even freshness, as in the delicious pastorals of Theocritus,
but the abounding strength has gone which could encounter
all the facts of life. The strength which still remained
worked in the safer realm of pure science, or quietly in history,
or aloof on the grave heights of philosophy. The Greek
Euclid (fl. 300 B.C.) consolidates or extends the earlier work in
geometry. The Greek Archimedes, half a century later, links
mathematics and physics, stating, for example, the principle
of the lever, learning how to determine the specific gravity
of a material by comparing its weight in water and in air.
The Greek Hipparchus (fl. 150 B.C.), studying the heavenly
bodies, prepares the way for Ptolemy's theory of their motions
elaborated in the second century of our era, a theory coherent
enough to satisfy men until the day of Copernicus. The
Greek Polybius (fl. 127 B.C.), like the Greek Plutarch two
centuries later, writing of liberty as of a vanished dream,
bows before the new order introduced by Rome.
Stoicism meanwhile built, century by century, its castle of
refuge for all those who, in the saddening world, despaired of
altering the face of things, saw no chance for the individual's
development in human joy, and yet longed to be at peace
with the universe. The inteUectual roots of Stoicism are
Greek, but growing up as it did in Asia Minor from the day
of Alexander onwards, it owed much to the devout spirit of
the Jews, — (there is indeed some reason for thinking that the
founders, Zeno and Cleanthes, may have had Hebraic blood), —
and as the years went on it owed much also to the discipline
26 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
of Rome, who emerges, a century after Alexander, from her
mastery of the Western Mediterranean to dominate Macedonia
and the Near East and so to challenge the leadership of the
known civilized world. The finest prose of Stoicism, indeed,
was written under the Roman Empire itself. Drawn from,
and appealing to the three great cultures of the Ancient
World — Greek, Hebrew, Roman — Stoicism appeals in every
age to the disappointed and heroic heart. The individual
must find his peace in possessing his own soul, unshaken in
will, unshattered by personal or public catastrophe, satisfied
that in living the life of self-control he is at one with those
divine forces of Reason which build up the connected harmony
of the universe. Thus even under the shadow of oppression
he may find freedom for his own soul. But the Stoic freedom
was gained through mutilating man's desire. To be at one
with the universe a man must recognize that he was only a
part — and a transitory, subordinate part — of the vast Nature,
God, Reason, Destiny, that embraced him ; he must submit
himself to the Whole and not expect the Whole to concern
itself for him. He could touch the Divine life for a moment,
then he passed, and his place knew him no more. The answer
chimed with the austerer notes in men's thought, whether
from Greek philosophy, assuming a Perfection in which man
had no abiding share, or from Hebrew religion, worshipping
a God before whom the generations vanished as a watch in
the night, or Roman morality, demanding the complete
sacrifice of the citizen to the Commonwealth. But it re-
sembled Hebrew and Roman rather than Greek in its con-
tempt for all human excellence other than moral strength.
It is significant that even the Greek Epictetus praises the
Cynic ascetics as the chosen " athletes of God." But nar-
rower though it was here, it was wider than the classic Greek
in its growing insistence on the solidarity of all men ; little
in themselves, they were all alike part of the All, and in this
consciousness the Stoic attained his greatest triumph. The
classic poet had cried to Athens, " Dear city of Cecrops," the
Stoic emperor will cry to the universe, " Dear city of God."^
1 Marcus Aurelius, " Meditations," Bk. 4.
THE HELLENISTIC WORLD 27
Epictetus the slave, old, crippled, and despised, will count
himself a glad father to all men, singing hymns of joy all day
long.
But the triumphant note of Epictetus is comparatively
rare ; broadly speaking, the Stoics show that they lived by
a religion without hope. Those who wanted more turned to
the Mysteries, Greek, Egyptian, or Persian, that promised
redemption through sacramental ritual. Less ardent natures
contented themselves with a " philosophy " of personal
pleasure, refined or gross according as temperament inter-
preted the ideal of harmony in this life set up by the Greek
Epicurus (d. 270 B.C.). The Platonic hope of a free develop-
ment up to full satisfaction in the boundless sea of beauty and
the clear vision of absolute truth was fading from men's
minds. Even when revived later in the Neo-Platonism of
Plotinus (d. A.D. 270), it appeared rather as a way of escape
from the concrete world, than as a fulfilment of what
was best in it. Nor was there as yet any general hold
on the idea of world-progress as something to live for over
and above the happiness of men alive, although we find
occasional foreshadowings of this hope, as in the Lucretian
outline of historical evolution or in the Hebrew prophecies
of Israel's destiny.
CHAPTER V
THE COMING OF CHRISTIANITY
INTO such a world came Christianity. Round the figure of
Christ have gathered centuries of love and hatred, worship
and bitter controversy, the bitterer perhaps because of all
we cannot know and would give so much to know. But out
of the confusion and obscurity some things emerge plainly
enough. Jesus of Nazareth lived in the faith that " the
Maker and Father of the universe " was not, as Plato had
said, " hard to find and impossible to declare to all men,"
but a Spirit who could be found when sought by chil-
dren and the simple-hearted. He himself, so He believed,
was one with that Spirit, and all men and women, if they
chose to give up their selfish selves, could be united with Him
and His Father, and enter the Kingdom of Heaven, in this
world and in the world to come. He died for that faith,
and, as He foretold, it has been a light for myriads since His
death. But the interpretations of His teaching, both for
conduct and theory, have been myriad also. Some conse-
quences, no doubt, are clear : an altogether new sense of
freedom and unity ; the Spirit of God gave man a courage
and certainty beyond his own and fiUed him with unbounded
compassion for all other men as sons of the one Father :
privilege and pride and lust were swept away, and suffering
could be not only endured but accepted with joy as somehow
working in the end for the sufferer's good. But what shall be
said of other matters ? Did Christ preach practical commun-
ism ? Franciscan poverty ? Asceticism in any sense ? Non-
resistance in the full sense ? Did He believe in everlasting
23
THE COMING OF CHRISTIANITY 29
hell ? Did He demand faith in Himself as one in whom dwelt
all the fullness of the Godhead ? Did He look for an
immediate and catastrophic " End of the World " ?
Passages equally authentic, so far as we can gather, can be
quoted in either sense, and devoted Christians have given
diametrically opposite answers, even if we grant that, to every
one of these questions, the typical answer has been Yes. Christ,
like Socrates, left nothing written, and His words, vivifying,
unforgettable, were never systematic. Dispute was inevitable :
even in the earliest days disputes between the Jewish Christians
and the Hellenizing Christians almost tore the Church in two.
It was just here that St. Paul, however we may criticize him,
did inestimable service by concentrating on the common
elements in the new religion, the new confidence, sympathy,
and joy, widening, so far as he could, the bounds of dogma,
dogmatist though he was himself, and organizing for the
central rite of the infant Church that ritual of the sacrificial,
sacramental bread and wine which linked a thousand
memories of the race with the hope of a new power, flowing
from a Man who had died for men, and making all things
new in one wide fellowship.
Along with this, we must confess, Paul is responsible for
legalistic theories about the Fall and the Atonement that
fettered the freer spirit of Christ. None the less he insisted
that the love he put at the head of the Christian virtues in-
cluded faith and hope for all men. And the inclusion is fully
endorsed by the comparisons of history. Buddhism had
preached as much tenderness. Stoicism as much endurance.
But the failing heart of the ancient world clutched at the
Christian hope that man was not left alone and desolate, a
miserable copy of a Perfection he could never reach, a feeble
flame beating helplessly against a closed ring of irrational
matter.
In Paul's own epistles we can see how this new hope could
give new life to the old shining dreams of Platonism, and new
width also, for while Plato hesitated to include more than a
chosen few, Paul dreamed of a goal where all men should have
the liberty of the children of God and be as stars differing only
30 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
in glory from one another. The intellectual sympathy, how-
ever, that can be discovered between Platonism and Paulinism
did not permeate the early Church. It was not till the re-
birth of thought centuries later in Italy that the possibilities
of the union were realized. Indeed, it is important to
emphasize at the outset that early Christianity did lower,
and most gravely, the respect for intellect and science, exult-
ing that what had been hidden from the wise and prudent
was now revealed to babes. In this, no doubt, it did not fully
understand its own central idea that the highest thing in the
universe may be incarnate in the highest powers of man. Its
reverence for brotherly love and sincerity of faith hid from it
too readily the value of other greatnesses.
Meanwhile the general import of the Christian hope goes
far to explain the passion in the controversies over the
question whether Christ was the same as the Father or
only like the Father. To say He was only like was, so felt
the Hellenist Athanasius, to give up " our all." Doubtless
these embittered polemics bid fair to destroy the childlike
love and trust that was supposed to signalize the Christian.
When we read how the leaders of the Church met in those
Councils where the Spirit of God was believed by the devout
to guide His servants into all truth, too often it is the spirit
of faction that strikes upon us most, though real great issues
for religious thought were actually at stake as well. Indeed,
what we have chiefly to note in these first centuries is a
perceptible hardening among the Christians, not unlike the
old hardening of the Pharisees, their former kindred and
enemies, round the sacrosanct Law. There were many reasons
for this. Christianity had first to struggle for its life against
ruthless persecution from the Roman Emperors (Marcus
Aurelius, the Stoic saint, included). The autocratic Empire
could not tolerate defiance by irresponsible individuals, still
less from a strong organization that stood outside its own
hierarchy. Overt defiance might be limited to few cases, but
the Roman rulers were accomplished enough to discern how
obstinate a foe they had in the conscientious refusal to recog-
nize the State's right to override all private scruples. It was
THE COMING OF CHRISTIANITY 31
the problem of Sophocles' " Antigone " once again, and on a
larger scale : an intelligent despotism had to solve it either
by crushing the conscience of the Church or allying itself with
her. The attempt to crush was made first, and the natural
result was embitter ment. Before the persecution of Nero,
the first in the sinister list, St. Paul had boldly appealed to
the very Caesar under whom, four years later, he was to suffer
martyrdom. To the writer of the Apocalypse, immediately
afterwards, Rome has become a harlot drunk with the blood
of the saints, and indeed Nero, a Beast not only in the
imagination of St. John, had drunk enough and to spare of
blood. ^ The Romans, it may be noted, felt this themselves.
A revolt compelled Nero to suicide, and the conscience of the
people justilied the compulsion.
Paul had looked to Rome as the crowning-place of his
mission, and his work there, fertilized, according to tradition,
by his martyrdom, together with that of his colleague and
rival, St. Peter, was in fact to bear rich fruit later. But
inevitably for the time- there was a reaction. Inevitably the
young community tightened its lines. And when, after three
centuries, Rome with her genius for acknowledging, just in
time, the forces that move men, came forward under Con-
stantine to make Christianity the established religion of her
own vast empire, from the bounds of Persia on the East to
Britain on the West, then the temptation to rigidity assailed
the Church in an even more insidious form. She had become
the ally of a world-wide despotism. This is curiously reflected
in the history of doctrine, defined alternately by the Councils
of the Church and by the Emperors.
Incidentally the alliance nipped whatever seeds of socialism,
as we should call it now, had been cherished by the first
generation of disciples. There is no further dream of recon-
structing the fabric of society on earth after the pattern of
the Heavenly Kingdom. Paul had been right in divining
that the Church must somehow come to terms with secular
* I follow Renan in taking a.d. 6o as the year of Paul's departure for
Rome and 68 or 69 as the date of the Apocalypse, the Neronian
persecution, during which Paul was martyred, bursting out in 64.
32 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
and pagan life, but the price she paid for this was perhaps
higher than he knew. The early enthusiastic faith, ready for
experiment, confident of persuading men to be Christian,
rapidly stiffened into impenetrable orthodoxy, all the more
rapidly because of the Jewish tradition on the one hand
pointing to a divinely-revealed Rule, and the Greek tradition,
going back to Plato, on the other, convinced that the truth,
once discovered by the cultured intellect, could and should be
imposed on the incapable vulgar. The dogmas of ecclesias-
tical infallibility and of Hell for the heretic took firm hold, in
spite of men like Origen, on the Fathers of the Church. More
especially when the sterner Latin Fathers replaced the
influence of the subtler and more sympathetic Greek.
The setback to free inquiry was aU the greater because of
the neglect into which Science now fell under Roman rule, a
neglect again increased by the ascetic contempt of " matter "
prevalent in all schools of religious thought. Orthodox
Christianity did indeed struggle, in the name of the Incarna-
tion, against its extremer forms, but on the whole the Church
was at least as saturated with it as the average Stoic or
Neo-Platonist. The whole spirit of the time, so far as it was
definitely religious, taught men to look on this world as a snare
to escape from, or at best as a training-ground for character,
never as something of absorbing interest and value in itself,
more than worthy of a man's whole study and devotion.
And the Christian distrust of the intellect could not but
increase the harm. It is also, we may note, in these early
years of Christianity that hermits and monks first make their
appearance in the life of the Western world. St. Anthony,
the recluse of Egypt, stands as the first founder of Christian
monasticism.
CHAPTER VI
ROME. REPUBLICAN, IMPERIAL, DECADENT
ROME, with all her power, was little likely to rescue
science. No Roman, even of the classic prime, except
Lucretius, shows real enthusiasm for scientific know-
ledge, and it is not without some reason that the careless
slaughter of Archimedes by a Roman soldier at the sack of
Syracuse has been taken as symbolic of Rome's whole atti-
tude.^ Vaguely she respected knowledge and art, but first
and foremost she was absorbed in Government, and her
astonishing success in this, all deductions made, might seem
to justify her.
" Let others learn the courses of the stars,
Map out the sky, or plead with subtle skill.
Or mould us hving faces from the marble :
Thou, Roman, shalt remember how to rule,
Lay down the laws of Peace, and teach her ways,
Pardon the fallen, overthrow the proud."
Virgil's well-known lines mark the scope of the Roman
Imperialism at its best, but with the scope the Umitations
are unconsciously revealed.
At the time when Virgil wrote and Christ was born Rome
had dominated the Italian Peninsula, destroyed her Semitic
rival Carthage, subdued Celtic Gaul and Celtiberian Spain,
and, piece by piece, absorbed the divided dominions of Alex-
ander, partly because of their internecine struggles, as in
1 In fairness we should add that Cicero, certainly a typical Roman,
cleared with his own hands the tomb of Archimedes from its overgrowth.
(See "The Living Past," p. 144.)
3 33
34 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
Greece and Palestine, partly because of her own huge strength,
but also because, once she had conquered a country, she did
maintain, on the whole, better than her rivals the standards
of law and justice. Complete independence of herself she
would never allow, but there was something in the claim of
the consul Flaminius ^ that " it was not the Roman way to
destroy those who had been their enemies." On the contrary,
Rome was always eager to incorporate in her own system
any efficient elements in a former administration, so that in
the Near East she became not so much the successor as the
new and energetic partner in the Hellenistic enterprise. But
she had done nothing really to solve the problem of rich and
poor, slave and free ; she had scarcely dreamt of a solution.
And she had lost her republican freedom : her citizens had no
longer the right, simply as citizens, even if they held no office,
to a direct voice in public affairs. In a sense she had been nur-
tured in that freedom, for her history begins with the expulsion
of kings, and repubHcan rights (though only after a long
struggle) had been extended from patrician nobles to all the
freemen in the city. But the Roman plebeians, once fully
enfranchised, showed themselves every whit as narrow to
outsiders as ever their patrician opponents had been to them,
and Roman victories went far to breed in the whole city the
vices of an oppressive, ambitious, and quarrelsome oligarchy.
The Republic fell, largely because the Empire offered a truce
to factious intrigue, a better chance to the Provinces saved
from the greedy officials who courted the favour of a corrupt
electorate, and a chance at least as good to the poor and the
enslaved.
Roman law, and law was one of Rome's real glories, was
built up mainly in Imperial times, and with the help of those
Greeks and Syrians that the Empire accepted as Roman
citizens. None the less the loss of liberty meant a loss of
creative powers, and the sternness of Tacitus shows how
keenly the acuter minds could feel that loss. Nor is Tacitus
Rome's only witness to the value of freedom. It is important
to remember that, except for Virgil and Horace under Augus-
1 Polyb. Bk. 1 8, § 37.
ROME, REPUBLICAN, IMPERIAL, DECADENT 35
tus, captivated by the fair hope of peace and union after
bloody civil war, all her most remarkable writers were bred
up in liberty and bear the marks of it, Lucretius, Catullus,
Livy, Cicero. And thus their writings have lived on side by
side with the Greek as an influence for freedom down the
ages. Hobbes in England, fleeing for refuge to absolutism,
felt good reason to fear it : " By reading of these Greek
and Latin authors men from their childhood have gotten
a habit, under a false show of hberty, of favouring tumults
and of licentious controlling the actions of their sovereigns
and again of controlling those controllers." France, how-
ever absolutist her own government, never forgot the
classical heroes and martjnrs of freedom. Even under
Louis XIV Corneille thrills to their memory, and every
reader knows the part it played, when fully aroused in the
French Revolution.
On the other hand Imperial Rome has cast a spell
as potent and as far-reaching by her work in welding
the nations of Europe together, teaching order to the
barbarians, enlisting the intellect of Greece so that the
Empire became almost as much HeUenistic as Roman, accept-
ing religion from the Jews, building up a fabric that, however
rigid, endured for centuries because it recognized so much
of human solidarity. She stands for unity as the Republicans
stood for hberty. And the potency of her spell has been both
for good and evil. Charlemagne, Barbarossa, Innocent III,
Louis XIV, Napoleon, HohenzoUerns, Tsars, British Imperial-
ists, aU, in varjdng ways, have remembered Rome and her
Empire of the World. And there have been idealists like
Mazzini, apostle of the most generous political gospel ever
preached, who have dreamed of uniting what was best in
both classic traditions, the Republican and the Imperial.
Rome, Mazzini said, had twice given the word to Europe,
once as Rome of the Ancient Empire, once as Rome of the
Mediaeval Church ; he called on her to give it a third time as
the herald of Modern Europe united in a Federation of free
and equal States.
At its best the Roman Empire, succeeded by its spiritual
36 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
heir, the Roman Church, cherished the hope of universal
peace based on universal law. He must be blind indeed who
would deny greatness to it, this hope, to quote Seeley, '"' of
the whole race passing out of its state of clannish division,
as the children of Israel themselves had done in the time of
Moses, and becoming fit to receive a universal constitution."
But this noble dream from the day of its birth till now
has been obscured and defaced by the petty ambition and
greed of man. It has an immortal destiny, but it was con-
ceived in iniquity. From the first the Roman Empire sinned
against freedom. The opponents of Caesar, even his mur-
derers, had a tragic sense of the truth ; tragic, we say,
because they themselves were caught in a conflict, to them
insoluble, between two spiritual forces, both, as Tacitus
recognized, needed for the world, government and liberty.
Such a conflict, as Hegel knew and Shakespeare felt, has in
it the very essence of tragedy. " Nihil contra Deum, nisi
Deus ipse " : " Only God can hamper God." If Julius him-
self, one of the greatest architects of order who ever lived,
was part of the divine, so also were those who clung to the
shadow of Republican liberty, and approved the cause that the
gods of this world had disapproved. The German Mommsen,
panegyrist of Julius, has seen this plainly. And that in
consequence the empire Julius founded was not, and could
not be, anything but the least bad of the courses then open
to statesmen. Caesarism made in the end not for life but
for death.
The long sequel of the Roman Empire, its slow " Decline
and Fall," in spite of the ability of its autocrats, abundantly
illustrates this. Gradually even local liberty was stifled and
with it imaginative genius. The later Roman Empire is
marked by an ominous dearth of science everjrwhere, a pre-
vailing deadness in literature — St. Augustine's is the only
vivid name — and in Europe by a complete absence of vital
art, except for what radiated from the focus of Constantinople.
There the old root of Greek imagination, still sensitive to
any magnificent appeal, put forth the last of its great blossoms,
the austere and grandiose flower of Byzantine Art, an art
ROME, REPUBLICAN, IMPERIAL, DECADENT 37
rigid and hieratic enough, but able to body forth with a
unique dignity the stupendous visions of the Christian
Church, the majestic ideals of the Empire, the mysterious
broodings of the East, and by so doing to keep ahve a tradi-
tion of splendour in Art that was to guide the Italian painters
when, ages afterwards, they rose in the light of the Rebirth.
But with this one exception a paralysis seems to fall on the
imagination of Europe. And the knowledge of this one fact
should be enough to make a nation feel alarm as well as pride
if she finds herself compared to Imperial Rome.
But ]\Iommsen is equally right in emphasizing the truth
that Republican Rome herself had, in earlier days, by her
selfishness and corruption, barred her own way to better things.
Had the early Republicans, we may ask ourselves, instead of
scouting the offer of the hardy Italian tribes whom they fought
so fiercely and so long, accepted the proposal that one consul
at least should always be a Samnite, had they even co-operated
with Carthage instead of destroying her, how different, and
how far happier, might the tradition of Europe have been !
The Roman Empire, we might say with Dante and Augus-
tine, was indeed given by God, but given, we should add,
because of the hardness of men's hearts. Julius and Augustus
saved all that could then be saved, but it was far from all
that man desired. And here we come to the centre of the
difficulty. Man at his best desires two things, never wholly
to be reconciled on this planet : perfect freedom of individual
judgment, and complete harmony with other men both in
thought and in action. Obviously, so long as men hold con-
tradictory views, this double goal can never be reached.
But, equally truly if less obviously, the best in man cannot
be at peace unless he can count himself as advancing towards
it. For at bottom he believes that his own personality depends
on all other persons, and his own opinion needs all other
opinions before it can reach truth. In short, he believes he
was made for life in common, as Aristotle said, and can only
grow to his full stature in a society. Perhaps he can never
reach this goal, but he can never cease to struggle for it.
This way and that he tries, and hence the age-long conflict
38 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
between the two principles on which all communities hang,
between order and freedom, public authority and private
judgment, law and conscience, government and individual
enterprise, the man and the state, a nation and its rivals.
The common consent of Europe has recognized, ever since
the revival of learning, the service rendered by Roman Law
to one at least of these two basic principles. And at the
close of the Middle Ages, to men bewildered and wearied by
the divided loyalties of feudalism, the extravagant claims of
the Church, the senseless practices of ordeal and wager by
battle, Roman law, as they struggled to evolve order out of
chaos, could bring inestimable help. Help, but, as we shall
see, danger also.
On the good side, even a cursory glance at the Codex (com-
pleted under Justinian circa a.d. 550) can make us under-
stand how Roman Law evoked the enthusiasm of men so wide
apart as Dante and Rabelais. For that Law, whatever its
defects, did aim at thorough-going justice, did try to 'build
up a complete system of order, where men and women could
be dealt with directly, their special duties and rights recog-
nized as before an omnipresent and consistent Judge. The
Codex had some reason for its high claim to be "a Temple
of Justice," even if after all the justice was but " Roman "
(i. 17).
There is a greatness about it, a comprehensive sweep of
design which it does not seem fanciful to compare with the
grand structure of Santa Sophia, the Church of the Holy
Wisdom, built by a Greek architect under Justinian himself,
the boast of Constantinople to this day. And if the code is
harsh, notably in the sanction of torture to procure evidence,
and in the treatment of slaves and heretics, still it was less
harsh than many in mediaeval days. Less harsh too in its
treatment of slaves than the Roman Republic had ever been.
The softening is notable, and to be ascribed in the first instance
to Stoicism with its stress on the solidarity of mankind. In
the long development from Hadrian early in the second
century a.d., directing skilled jurists to consolidate the
" judge-made " law of the praetors — itself an inheritance
INTERIOR OF SANTA SOPHIA
(Constantinople)
ROME, REPUBLICAN, IMPERIAL, DECADENT 39
from Republican times — a high place is held by the labours
of the Antonine emperors, genuinely anxious to bring the
laws of Rome nearer to the law of Nature. None the less,
and here lay a deep defect, Roman law never repudiated
slavery, and the rift runs right through its magnificent scheme.
Ulpian may write in its pages : "By the law of Nature men
are bom free and equal " (Digest i. 4 ; Ixvii. 32). But the
pages go on to enumerate the disabilities of the slave.
In spite of this, the code through its insight into the true
nature of law did lay corner-stones for the building of an
ordered and free society. It countenanced no such absur-
dities as trial by ordeal. Its maxims have become household
words among us all : " No man shall be a judge in his own
case " (Codex iii. 6). " No appeal for mercy shall be made
while a case is being tried " (Codex i. 21).
This reverence for law extends into the political sphere,
and the Autocrat himself acknowledges its superiority : "It
befits the majesty of the Monarch to declare that he himself
is bound by the laws. So true is it that our authority rests
on the authority of justice, and for the Imperial Power to
submit to law is greater than Empire itself " (Codex i. 14).
Nor was that superiority acknowledged only in words.
Theodosius the Great submitted in act when he did penance
before St. Ambrose at Milan to expiate a deed of lawless
cruelty committed in the haste of his anger. That penance is
the more noteworthy, because the massacre at Thessalonica,
savage and lawless as it was, had been provoked by a mon-
strous outbreak of unruly Greek citizens against loyal Gothic
soldiers, soldiers whom Theodosius with a statesman's insight
was trying to win for the Empire.
But, and here we come on the second grave defect, in the
last resort, under the Roman Empire the law was made —
not by the people, but by the Emperor. " All the rights and
all the powers of the Roman people have been transferred
to the Emperor." " To him alone is it granted to make the
laws and to interpret them " (i. 17).
The ominous doctrine is set out by Justinian himself and
follows immediately on the proud humility of the Theodosian
40 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
saying. 1 The two together foreshadow many a later quarrel
between constitutional monarchy and despotism. Both
were in fact constantly quoted, e.g. the Theodosian by Milton,
and, before Milton, as the legend of the French Huguenot
treatise Vindicice contra tyrannos.
^ The saying stands in the name of the younger Theodosius. But
the utterance seems too remarkable to be his own. One speculates
as to its history. Is it due ultimately to the influence of his grand-
father, the great Theodosius himself ?
PART II.— MEDIEVAL
CHAPTER VII
EUROPE AND THE BARBARIANS: THE DARK
AGES AND MONASTICISM
WHILE the Graeco-Roman Empire lasted, there
was httle quarrel from within. The forces of its
despotism were so strong and its structure so firmly
knit that the Empire might have endured indefinitely —
as it was it survived with the Greeks in Constantinople for
more than a thousand years — had it not been for the persistent
pressure of the barbarians from North and East, a pressure that
has left ineffaceable marks on almost every country in Europe.
In the Republican days Rome had been menaced from the
West by Celts of Gaul and Celtiberians of Spain, but the
conquests of Caesar and Pompey removed that danger for ever.
The men Rome dreaded later were chiefly of Germanic stock,
travelling West and South, and it was largely to guard against
them that Constantine {circa a.d. 300) shifted the main seat
of government from Rome to Byzantium, thenceforward
Constantinople in his honour, a step that led to the division
of the Empire into East and West.
We call these wandering tribes barbarian, and so the}^ were,
but many of them, fathers of modern Europe — Franci, for
example, Alemanni, Saxones, Gothi, Vandali — were not only
vigorous and able, they were also keenly sensitive to civili-
zation. Often they entered the service of the Empire peace-
fully, as soldiers or administrators, and served it well. The
Goths, in particular, attract us both by their ability and their
41
42 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
chivalry. In the century of Constantine they were Christian-
ized, peacefully and within their own borders, by Ulfilas,
a countryman, "or at least," as Gibbon writes, ^ " a subject of
their own." And the statesmen on either side, Roman or
Teuton, dreamed again and again of uniting the Gothic strength
with the Roman reverence for law. But the turbulence of
the one race and the prejudice of the other prevented it.
It is significant that no " barbarian," however loyal or
capable, was ever allowed to become Emperor. That
aspiration was accounted treasonable ; and when, in 410, Alaric
the Visigoth, the king of the West Goths, defied the weak
Honorius in the West and captured the city that had been
inviolate for eight centuries — nearly as long as from now to
the Norman Conquest — it seemed to many that the founda-
tions of the world were shaken.
Then it was that St. Augustine wrote his " City of
God," a book that must have done much to strengthen
the Bishopric of Rome — already showing signs of its
commanding position later — for its pages were expressly
written, as Augustine tells us himself, both to defend
Christianity against the charge of having caused the ruin and
to comfort the faithful with the assurance that, though her
secular Empire might be taken from Rome, as it had been
given to her, by the decree of the One True God, yet there
remained a greater and more abiding City than the Rome of this
world, to wit, a heavenly. A new unity, the unity of the
Church and her discipline, was growing up for the West,
when the old unity of the Empire was breaking down.
Rome was naturally the centre of the new system both
because of her political prestige in the past and the sacred
traditions of St. Peter and St. Paul. But the dreaded
barbarians, though Augustine was blind to it, were in the
end to bring a new element of freedom and vigour into Europe.
The Goths, though Christian, were Arians, and the orthodox
Augustine never thinks of heretics as fellow-citizens in the
Heavenly City. Even when Galla Placidia, daughter of
1 "Decline and Fall," xxxvii. The ultimate nationality of Ulfilas
is doubtful.
EUROPE AND THE BARBARIANS 43
Theodosius himself, married Alaric's successor, the chivahous
Ataulf, the best she could do was to persuade her husband to
take his Visigoths to Spain (her father's early home), and rule
it as a loyal province of the Empire. The same opposition
between Arian and Athanasian helped to destroy the second
attempt at a Romano-Gothic kingdom made a century later,
when the Roman Empire was tottering in the West, under
Theodoric the Ostrogoth, a man praised expressly by Procopius,
the acute and impartial Greek, as " no tyrant, but a true king,
loved beyond measure by Goths and Italians ahke . ' ' The testi-
mony of Procopius is the more remarkable seeing that he was
the secretary of Belisarius, the renowned Byzantine general,
who did so much to break the Goths and drive them out of
Italy. And it is confirmed by all we know of Theodoric's
career, admirable except for the slaughter of his barbarian
rival Odoacer at the beginning of his reign, and his persecu-
tion of the Romans whom he believed to be conspiring against
him at the close, among whom should be mentioned Boethius,
the " last learned man " of the dying classic world.
Between the two Gothic waves there swept across Europe
from East to West invaders of a widely different type, Attila
and his Huns — the first vanguard of the warlike stock, nursed
on the tablelands between China, India, and Russia, that has
sent swarm after swarm to disturb the West, Hims, Bulgars,
Avars, Magyars (Hungarians), Turks, and Tartars. Pressing
on again and again, sometimes by devious routes, the various
swarms have been further modified both by the blood and the
culture of the nations with whom they mingled, and yet we
seem able to discern features common to them all. Brave,
proud, tenacious, often chivalrous, they are also prone, even
more than Westerners, to tyranny and cruelty, and far less
easily civilized. They have done little for culture and much
for war. None the less their daring and simplicity has never
been without its charm, and even in Attila's day there were
men and women here and there fascinated by the wild freedom
of their life and its contrast to the Imperial rigidity. But
thousands more were only terrified by the Scourge of God
and his savage horsemen ; and the common terror united
44 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
barbarians and Imperials in a common resistance. Roman,
Celt, and Teuton met the torrent of invaders on the eastern
plains of France (a.d. 451) and hurled them back, to be
swallowed up in the deserts from which they came.
As Attila retreated, he struck again at civilization, plunging
into Italy. It is said that he was turned back from Rome by
the pleading of Pope Leo I, and there can be little doubt that
the story at least marks a stage in the growing power of
the Roman Bishopric.
Attila's last assault, if abortive, was dreadful, and a group
of Northern Italians, with desperate courage, fled to the
lagoons at the head of the Adriatic and there, unmolested by
the barbarians (who never had ships), untroubled by their
merely nominal allegiance to Constantinople, and guided by
the old freer traditions of Roman civic life, Venice arose,
built up from the sea. And Venice, as Machiavelli pointed
out long afterwards, grew great because she had "her begin-
nings in freedom." (" Discourses on Livy.")
The Northern invasions did not cease when the Goths were
driven beyond the Alps. At the end of the sixth century,
after nearly two hundred years of barbarian flood and ebb,
the greater part of Italy, though neither Venice nor Rome, fell
under the Teuton Lombards (Langobardi, Longbeards), a
virile and gifted race, if less remarkable than the Gothic.
And, though the influence of race has often been over-estimated,
it seems paradoxical to deny that the prolonged infusion of
Northern blood played an important part in the change from
Italy of the Empire to Italy of the Middle Ages.
And now the chaos deepens in the history of the West.
Until the time of Charlemagne, two centuries later, there is no
organization strong enough even to compare with the broken
Empire. Independently and confusedly the shifting tribes
are gradually settling down into positions more or less char-
acteristic of modem Europe, invaders fusing, more or less
completely, with invaded. In England, for example, the
Celtic Britons, long since separated from the Rome that had
ruled them and Christianized them, are forced under
Teuton pagans — ^Angles, Saxons and Jutes from the shores
EUROPE AND THE BARBARIANS 45
of the Baltic and the Northern Sea. In France, Celtic and
Romanized Gauls submit to Teutonic Franks from the Rhine —
a pure German stock — and mingle with Teutonic Burgundians
on the Rhone.
IMeanwhile in the bankruptcy of civil government the Chris-
tian Church stands out prominently, especially in Italy, where
the Popes champion their countrymen against the Lombard
invaders on the one hand and the caprice of Constantinople on
the other.
Gregory the First and the Great (590-610) is a fine type of
his order, with many of its virtues and not without its hmita-
tions. A strong and wise administrator — and St. Peter's
patrimony was already large — he was unremitting in relieving
the temporal necessities of his poor, while his supreme interest
lay in serving the spiritual life as he conceived it by the
spread of the true faith. The Lombards he usually referred
to as " unspeakable," yet he saved Rome from their hands
by timely concessions and wise pleading, and he won a pro-
found influence over their Queen Theodolinda, hoping,
through her, to win them for orthodoxy, and possibly recogniz-
ing that they were too strong ever to be driven out of the
country though never strong enough to unify it.
Gregory's most attractive side, as well as his most char-
acteristic, is, indeed, shown by his missionary zeal. Historians
have loved to tell how he had pity, as a young man, on the
angel-faced English children sold as slaves in the Roman
market, and how later on he sent Augustine, the Bene-
dictine monk, to reclaim the island that had lapsed, after
the Saxon invasion, into heathen barbarism, and how Augus-
tine and his fellows brought back the Faith to the South,
rivalled in the North by St. Columba from the still faithful
Celtic Ireland. In acts like this Gregory must be recognized
as a true seeker for unity and truth. Yet we cannot help
also suspecting in him, as Milman suggests, something of the
wily Italian ecclesiastic when we read the different letters he
wrote in the same month to Ethelbert the Saxon King, and to
a colleague of Augustine's. (Bede, " Eccl. Hist.," chap. 30, 32.)
The priest is told to lead the idolaters gently, transforming the
46 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
heathen temples, not destroying them. Ethelbert the king,
on the other hand, is urged by the shining example of
Constantine the Great and warned by the appi caching terrors
of the Day of Judgment to " overthrow " the sinful structures
and " terrify " as well as soothe. The odious part, as so often
afterwards, was left to the secular arm.
Again, Gregory reflects the prevailing temper of the Church
m his monkish cast of mind. The highest reaches of the
spiritual life are, for him, divorced both from the daily
sanctities of common humanity and from the intellectual
search for knowledge. He puts celibacy far above marriage,
and, himself ignorant of Greek, speaks with pain and astonish-
ment of clergy so far forgetting themselves as to teach grammar,
" when even a layman, if really religious, would avoid such
matters." (Letters, ix. 48.)
His chosen emissary was, as he himself had been, a
Benedictine monk, and the name of the Italian St. Benedict,
half a century before {circa 540), stands as the great reorgan-
izer of Western monasticism. Ever since the early days of
Christianity there had been hermits and recluses, but Benedict's
achievement lay in the establishment of brotherhoods vowed
not only to abstinence but to an arduous life in common.
With him revive the old ideals of religious communism, the
active sense of the glory in bearing hardness and sacrificing
private gain for the sake of the brethren.
There is a greatness in this resolute self-denial carried
through in a world scrambling after booty and power. The
value of that example must always be set against the mon-
strous elements in the monastic rule, the inhuman tyranny,
the deadening vacancy, the later corruption. Moreover
Benedict by insisting on manual labour challenged directly
the old narrowness of the classic ideal that had ruled out from
the highest life all men engaged in such toil as unfitted for
culture. Here the classic order of merit is absolutely reversed
by Benedict : the labour that for them fettered the spirit for
him sets it free. And if his own conception was narrow it here
corrected a narrowness that could be as inhuman as anything
monkish. The cold contempt for a man who works with his
EUROPE AND THE BARBARIANS 47
hands was changed by a true follower of Benedict into rever-
ence. It is impossible to say how much our modern belief
in the dignity of labour may not owe to the steady example of
a rule of life so remote from modern belief on the whole.
Nor was the effect of monasticism on culture merely nega-
tive. Most monks, like the clergy in general, were
expected at least to read and write and know enough
Latin for the Mass, and thus, in spite of Gregory's warning,
there were monasteries such as Monte Cassino in Italy
(Benedict's own foundation and famous up to our own days),
Jarrow in England, the home of Bede, and the Irish schooling-
grounds of Johannes Erigena (John the Scot), where scholar-
ship could find a nursing-place. Nor was it scholarship only
that the cloister protected. The lovely illumination in many
a manuscript proves the shelter monasticism could give to
at least the minor forms of art.
None the less the spirit dominant among the devout of
these centuries was simply obscurantist. The trend was still
increasingly away from the toil of thought and observation or
the sustained effort of the higher arts to the routine duties of
simple piety and manual labour, or to the ecstasies of rapt
devotion. It is easy to persuade men to remain ignorant, and
it was long before the fetters thus imposed were shaken from
the human spirit. Reason rusted with neglect, and when men
argued at all utterly childish arguments entangled their
genuine thought. The unsound traditions lingered long, so
long that even as late as the fourteenth century a mind
vigorous and proud as Dante's must be concerned to rebut such
reasoning as that because Levi was older than Judah the
Church must be given more power than the State. (" De
Monarchia," Bk. iii. chap, v.)
CHAPTER VIII
MOHAMMEDANISM
MEANWHILE, just when the learning of the West
seemed to have sunk to the lowest level, when
European thought was slumbering in chains and
European government was all but choked in anarchy, far
away, in the arid land of Arabia, the Semite Mohammed
was building up a religion which was to vivify and unify
the Near East and make a bid to capture Europe itself.
Like most prophets, Mohammed was at first scorned by
his own people, but, unlike many, he won them before his
death (632). And the date of his flight to Mecca only ten
years earlier (622), the Hegira, marks for Mohammedans
the beginning of their era.
At once, almost, after his death the new religion spread
widely, and far more rapidly than Christianity had ever done,
sweeping with whirlwind speed over Syria, Palestine, Persia,
Egypt — Egypt dominated ever since, till our own time,
by Mohammedan Arabs or Mohammedan Turks — forcing
itself to the very gates of Constantinople, driving along the
northern coast of Africa, firing the Moors and Berbers, crossing
into Spain, overthrowing the Christian Visigoths and thrusting
the Christian remnant back on to the Pyrenees, penetrating
finaUy into France, there, however, to be met and defeated
by Charles Martel the Frank, grandfather of Charlemagne,
the " Hammer of the Moors " (Battle of Tours, 732).
Later, Mohammedanism was to be welcomed by the
Turks (on their way through Persia), and penetrate to
India. Look at it how we will, it is an astounding
48
MOHAMMEDANISM 49
achievement. " To the Arab nation it was as a birth from
darkness into light ; Arabia first became aHve by means of
it. . . . These Arabs, the man Mahomet, and that one
century, is it not as if a spark had fallen, one spark, on a
world that seemed black unnoticeable sand, but lo, the sand
proves explosive powder, blazes heaven-high from Delhi to
Granada ! " ^
This is not the rhapsody of a mere rhetorician. Carlyle
was far too great an historian to lose touch with fact.
IMilman ^ quotes an account of contemporary Arabs taunted
with Arabia's poverty, disunion, and ignorance, and answering
boldly : " Such were we once. Now we are a new people.
. . . God has raised up among us a man, a true prophet.
His religion has enlightened our minds, quenched our hatreds,
made us a band of brothers under laws dictated by the wisdom
of God. He has said, ' Consummate my work : spread the
empire of Islam over the whole world : the earth is the
Lord's ; He has bestowed it on you.' "
Here we have the note that signalizes both the greatness
and the danger of a militant religion. It is true that men
can be made into a band of brothers by common action
and common belief. Mohammed's genius had given his
followers a belief in God, a goal for time and eternity, and a
clear code, of no insuperable difficulty, to guide them through
life. Men linked by the thought that they are carrying out
the commands of Absolute Wisdom are of all men most
closely linked. And all the closer, we may admit, if war for
their faith is added. In the comradeship of a disciplined
army, facing the last perils together and undismayed, men
find what at their best they most desire — union in willing
service for an end that mocks at mere life. This is the germ
of truth in the glorification of war. But it is also true, and
this truth ]\Iohammedanism did not grasp, that force alone
cannot unite men and only too often destroys all unity. The
mind is only fettered, not bound, if love and reason do not
1 Carlyle, " On Heroes and Hero-worship." (The Hero as Pro-
phet.)
^ " Latin Christianity," Bk, iv. c. i.
4
50 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
bind it. The dissensions in the early Moslem world, following
swiftly on the first brief union, furnish apt enough examples.
Christ's distrust of force, hke his reverence for women and
his sympathy for suffering, marks one of the leading differences
between his doctrine and that of Mohammed. No doubt
Christians have incessantly defied his teaching. But it has
acted as a check for all that : " Truces of God " have softened
barbaric fighting : Quakers have abjured all war : fervent
Romanists have hated the temporal power of the Pope. For
this reason, among others, there has never been a Caliphate
in Christendom, an autocratic authority spiritual and temporal
at once. Always the instinct has revived that, in the words
of the first English historian of the Church, " The service of
Christ ought to be voluntary, not by compulsion " (Bede,
c. 26). What this has meant for freedom is incalculable,
while it is noteworthy that no Mohammedan country has yet
freed itself from despotism. And it is fair to surmise that
the aggressions of Mohammedanism in its early period did
much to lead Christians still farther astray. War pro-
vokes war though waged for the glory of Allah the Com-
passionate or in the name of the Prince of Peace. The
Crusades, however much we may applaud their devotion
and the unity of purpose they awakened in Europe itself,
did form a link in the chain that has bound the Near East
in bonds of desolation to this day. But in comparing the
religion of the Koran with the Christianity of the time, we
cannot fail also to be struck by likenesses. There is the same
burning belief that man is made for something more than
physical comfort : that a Power infinitely greater than
himself has " created the heavens and the earth in truth,"
" caused the morning to appear," " ordained the night for
rest, and the sun and moon to be the measure of time," sent
" the rain from heaven and the springing buds of all things
and the grain growing in rows and the palm-trees clustered
with dates " (Sale's tr. abridged). And this Power speaks
to man directly by the Prophets, bidding him at once
submit to the All-powerful Will and stir up his own will to
lay hold of Paradise and escape from everlasting Hell.
MOHAMMEDANISM 51
It is easy to point out the defects in Mohammedanism, but
of far greater value to lay stress on its services. Though its
morality was less lofty than the Christian it was also less
liable to extravagance ; its sense of the inadequacy of all
human experience did not so easily pass into a contempt of
normal human life or inspire distrust of all secular learning :
there was indeed no monasticism in early Mohammedanism,
— " no monkery in Islam " — rather at first a ready welcome
for scientific knowledge and philosophic speculation. And
the welcome in the end reacted, strangely and powerfully, on
Europe. It was actually through the work of the infidels
that the study of Greek thought regained enough strength
in Europe to help form, among other mighty structures, the
basis for the grandiose Catholicism of the thirteenth century.
For, among the ]\Ioslems, that conscious corporate activity
of which we have already spoken, stimulated, as it has often
done, the whole intellect of the people caught up by it, and
Moslem philosophers, doctors, mathematicians, seized on
what they could in the derelict inheritance of Greek science.
At Cordova in the twelfth century their work reached a
climax, and then followed the life-giving touch with Western
thought, but even in the time of Charlemagne, both legend and
history show us the rival leaders of Islam in contact with the
Emperor of Western Christendom not only for war but for
peace. Every one knows the story of Roncesvalles, where
Charlemagne's rearguard, withdrawn from Spain, was cut
to pieces by the Saracens, and Roland, dying, blew his horn
in vain. The songs that culminated in the Chanson de Roland
at the end of the eleventh century show how deep must have
been the impress of the danger to Christendom from the
aggressive force of Islam. But Charlemagne also welcomed
in peace ambassadors of the more tolerant Haroun al Raschid,
the Arab prince ruling in Persia and Syria, and at variance
with the Mohammedans in Spain.
There is something charming to the imagination in the
intercourse between the two legendary heroes of East and
West, " Aaron the Just " sending to Charlemagne treasures
of Eastern silk, a mechanical water-clock, the marvel of its
52 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
time, a well-beloved elephant, and a message confirming the
Franks in the guardianship of the Holy Places of Jerusalem.
Here at least " the GoodHaroun al Raschid " showed himself
ready to follow the wiser and milder texts of the Koran,
written, it would seem, before incessant strife had roused the
Prophet to glorify war against the Infidels, texts warning the
Faithful not to revile even the idols of the idolaters : "We
have not appointed thee a keeper over them, neither art thou
a guardian over them " (Sale's tr.). " Unto every one of you,"
so Allah speaks to the men of the Three Rehgions, Moslems,
Jews, and Christians, " unto every one of you have we given
a law and an open path, and if God had pleased he had surely
made you one people : but he hath thought fit to give you
different laws that he might try each of you in what he hath
given to each. Therefore strive to excel one another in good
works : unto God shall ye all return, and then will he declare
unto you that concerning which ye have disagreed."
CHAPTER IX
THE WORK OF CHARLEMAGNE
IT has been said that the chief constructive forces in the
Dark Ages are to be found in the Christian Church, Islam,
and the Franks ; and undoubtedly the Frankish Charle-
magne is among the notable organizers of political unit3^
An epoch is marked by his deliberate, if reluctant, attempt
to revive the Roman Empire in the West, an attempt fraught
with influences good and bad both for secular and clerical
government. Imperialism was re-born and the new-born
Papacy confirmed when at Rome on Christmas Day, a.d. 800,
Charlemagne rose from his prayers before the altar in the
Basilica of St. Peter and suffered Pope Leo to set the crown
on his head while the people shouted, " Long life and victory
to Carolus Augustus the Good, Giver of peace, crowned by
God, Emperor of the Romans ! " (Einhard, " Annales," 801).
This alliance with Leo III, who had called in the Frank
to help him against the Lombards, made permanent the
temporal power of St. Peter's chair, which, ever since the
days of Gregory, had been growing in proportion to the grow-
ing repugnance felt in Italy against the domination claimed
by Constantinople. And if the alliance of new Papacy
and revived Empire — the Holy Roman Empire that
lasted, in name at least, until the nineteenth century
— symbolized, and was long to symbolize, the essential
unity of Europe, it was also destined to breed strife
and hamper freedom. Charlemagne himself, with all his
genius for order, followed the bad precedent of Imperialism
in trying to force together nations widely different and
53
54 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
needing wide elbow-room for their own experiments. His
methods of " Christianizing " could be as rough as any
Moslem's, and much of his huge empire — stretching from the
Western shores of France to what is now Hungary in the
East and from the mouth of the Northern Elbe to Rome in
the South — ^was only held together by the false cement of
fear. We read of men baptized in masses by sheer force and
thousands of " traitor " Saxons executed in cold blood.
None the less Charlemagne gave back to Europe an ideal
of unity with something Roman, as Bryce observes,^ in " its
striving after the uniformity and precision of a well-ordered
administration, which should subject the individual to the
system and realize perfection through the rule of law."
That ideal was far from being attained, but it was something
to have conceived it, still more to have taken steps towards
the carrying out of it.
Two efforts of Charlemagne's are typical : first, his appoint-
ment of what Hodgkin describes as " imperial commissioners,"
the missi dominici, men who were to travel through his wide
dominions controlling the administration of the local counts
and generally upholding justice, and next the plans he made
to bring some sort of harmony into the divergent laws of the
different peoples he ruled. True that these plans, as Einhard
notes expressly, were never fulfilled, but at least the Emperor
took care that " the laws of all the nations under his control
should be put into writing where they were not already
written down" (" Caroli Vita," c. 29). Similarly, he was
unremitting in his efforts to unify and foster culture. He
loved to hear readings from Augustine's " City of God " — a
trait which throws light on his reverence for the Church, and
indeed on the birth of the Holy Roman Empire itself — and
at the same time he is the first ruler of whom we are told that
he was at pains to have the wild songs of the younger nations
recorded and preserved. Unlike Gregory, and like Alfred a
century later, he urged the bishops and abbots to study
letters and found schools " so that those who desire to
please God by living rightly should not neglect to please
1 " lae Holy Roman Empire," v. p. 73.
THE WORK OF CHARLEMAGNE 55
Him also by speaking correctly." (Letter to Abbot Bagulf,
quoted in Robinson's " Readings in European History,"
Vol. L)
The Emperor himself, so Einhard his secretary tells us,
worked at Latin, Greek, grammar, arithmetic, and astronomy,
choosing the best masters he could find East or West in
Europe, a certain Peter the Deacon from Pisa and the scholar
Alcuin from England. A human touch shows us the old
warrior toiling to master writing, keeping the tablets under
his pillow and practising at odd moments, though his fingers
had grown too stiff ever to succeed.
He stands in history, and with right, as a link between
Old and New, both for empire and for culture. He marks
both a reminiscence and a rebirth.
CHAPTER X
THE BEGINNINGS OF NEW POETRY
THE Prankish songs which Charlemagne is said to
have saved are now, at least in their original
"barbaric" form, no longer known to us. But
it is hardly fanciful to discern in the scattered poems and
legends that do survive from the young life of that growing
Europe the signs of new and great literatures arising, litera-
tures on which the world has fed ever since.
And we can mark in them distinct elements of race, Anglo-
Saxon, for example, Norman, Celtic. But we should add at
once that nothing is more noteworthy in the new literature,
or later in the new art, than the intermingling of different
races and cultures and the consequent stimulus to feeling and
thought. England, France, Italy, the nations that were most
prominent in the revival, were all of mixed origin. It has been
said that Romance first sprang up in Europe from such
comminglings, and at least we can say that they offered it an
admirable soil. Poetry, like Philosophy, ever finds a beginning
in wonder, and many signs show how deeply the imagination
of the new-comers could be stirred by the adventures of the
wanderings, the encounter with the mysteries of Christianity,
and the august traditions of Rome.
There was a foundation, certainly, and a solid one, of pure
native imagination. No mythology is so heroic as that of
the pagan North with its gallant vision of Father Odin
welcoming to Valhalla, that great hall roofed with golden
shields, the warriors who were chosen by his war-maidens
to stand beside him on the last grim day when the gods
56
THE BEGINNINGS OF NEW POETRY 57
were to do battle with the giants for the safety of the world.
And the Northern poems it inspired are not unworthy
of their theme. ^ But the temperament to which such dreams
were natural was all the more sensitive to other impressions
of immensity. In England, Bede, the historian, himself a
scholar trained both in Latin and Greek, writing from his
monastery at Jarrow towards the end of the seventh century,
tells a famous and lovely story that serves well to illustrate the
ready response of these pagans to new light. In Northum-
bria the King's Council were sitting at debate on the new
religion. One of them, a heathen priest, with a frankness that
makes no secret of his simple greed, was for choosing the new
because the old had brought him no success. But in another
there speaks the poetry of our race, not its commercialism.
To him the life of man, compared with the unknown worlds
before it and behind, seemed short as the flight of a sparrow
through a fire-lit hall on a winter's night. The bird flies in
from the darkness : it flies out into the darkness again. " Even
so we look on this life of ours for a little while, but of what
went before or of what is to follow we know nothing. If this
new teaching can tell us more, let us follow it."
The Anglo-Saxon poem on the half-mythical hero Beowulf,
completed probably in the century of Bede, strikes the same
note of adventurous and new-found wonder. The poem itself
is probably among the earliest to take on a definite shape, as it
is certainly one of the most delightful, among the new heroic
songs that are something more than mere lays. They come
after a long silence. It is startling to reflect that since the age
of the Antonines — half a millennium back — there had been no
grand poetry in all the Western world ; scarcely, indeed, any
poetry at all. Latin song, never exuberant, had dwindled
rapidly as the Early Empire passed into bureaucratic despot-
ism, the echoes of the once glorious music of Hellas weakened
and sank as her internecine jealousies sacrificed the last hopes
of her liberty ; the sweet singers of Israel were silent after
the ruin of their city ; the fiery visions of the Apocalypse,
the pitiful pleading of " Esdras " close the majestic series of
1 Collected in the "Elder Edda.'
58 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
those prophecies that are also poems. Beowulf, whatever its
Hmitations, shows the promise of a world once more alive to
poetry, and that a poetry to stir and touch the heart.
Fresh, bold, humorous, it is also, within its range, one of the
kindliest of all adventurous songs and softened ever and again
by a notable sense of mystery.
Englishmen, in whose land it took final shape and in whose
ancestral speech it is written, may be proud to follow its lead.
The hero himself is a Geat (probably a Jute from Jutland),
but the poem opens with eulogy of " the Warrior-Danes," a
distinct nation, if a kindred, and of their renowned leader
three generations back, the grey-haired Scyld Scefing, who
puts out to sea at his death. And here in the very opening
moves a spirit of mystery, recalling, not only the story of the
sparrow, but many a dream in later English song, from
Langland and Spenser to Wordsworth and Tennyson. We
breathe the air of that country where poetry and religious
musing meet and dim visions haunt the waking mind. Scyld
Scefing had been sent, so the legend ran, mysteriously to his
people out of the sea, like Arthur, a child from none knew
where.
Now
" The time had come
For the greybeard to go
To the care of the Master."
He calls on his thanes, " his dear comrades," to carry him
down to the sea :
" There rode the ship
At the edge of the water,
Outward-bound, gleaming,
Fit for the hero :
And they laid him there
On the breast of the ship,
Piling up treasures, —
Battle-gear, helmets.
Spears, bright byrnies, —
To go with their lord
In the realms of ocean.
No ship was ever so fair !
THE BEGINNINGS OF NEW POETRY 59
Rich as the jewels
Long ago given
By those who sent him
Over the sea,
A Uttle child
Alone on the flood.
High over his head
They set a gold standard.
And they let the sea take him.
Heavy of heart.
But none ever learnt.
In hall or afield.
Who met that ship and her burthen."
(26 ff.)
It is to the hall of Hrothgar the Dane, descendant of this
old hero, the great hall " gold-gleaming, lighting the land,"
that the royal young Beowulf comes from oversea, in pure
love of fame and independent adventure, to free these
foreigners from the nightly ravages of the grisly monster, the
half-magical sea-bear Grendel. And when the deed is accom-
plished, both leaders find the crown of it in the friendship it
has wrought.
Beowulf speaks to the Danish king :
• " This will I say to thee, leader of men !
H ever again
I can do thee service and win thy love,
I shall be ready."
And Hrothgar answers :
" This thou hast done,
Beowulf, my friend ! —
Thou hast put friendship between our peoples.
And stilled the envy,
The secret hatred.
Hid in their hearts."
This loving-kindness is as characteristic of Beowulf as the
quiet laughter with which he faces, unarmed and relying only
on his human strength, the tussle with the monster and his
possible " burial " in the creature's maw.
60 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
" Grendel will keep me
If I fail ;
He buries the booty, he eats the prey,
Alone, without mercy.
On the blood-stained moor.
No need to care for this corpse of mine !
But send to my kinsman.
If I fall.
The best of the byrnies
I wore in battle : —
The gift of his father
And Weyland's work.
The rest is the Wyrd's :
Let her do as she will."
(445 ff.)
This belief in " the Wyrd," the Northern Goddess of Fate,
intertwines, as in so much heroic poetry, with an unflinching
confidence in a man's own will :
" Death waits for us all :
Let him who can
First win him renown."
(1387 ff.)
But in this poem it intertwines also with the new faith.
At the close Beowulf, old and childless, as he lies dying after
his last fight against a monster, the fire-dragon that was
destroying his people, gives his battle-gear to his cousin,
and himself meets death, awed but expectant :
" Thou art the last
Of all my kindred.
The Wyrd has sent them
To dwell with God.
The brave men are gone.
And I must follow."
(2814 ff.)
We may speak of " Beowulf " for convenience sake as an epic,
but its title to the name is doubtful. It has not the wide
sweep nor the powerful unifying plot of the true epics, but
still it is epic in its strong simplicity, its sense of the value
and pathos of man's short life spent in a worthy cause. Such
THE BEGINNINGS OF NEW POETRY 61
unity as it has is given by the unity of Beowulf's own character.
Self-rehant to a fault, he is the incarnation of free individual
enterprise, the new spirit now broad awake in the world.
He is a born leader and born explorer, avid of strange adven-
tures and unknown lands :
" WTio trusts himself,
Let him travel and learn ! "
Through the poet's eyes we see the ideal Germanic chief of
those early days, a man chosen king not simply because of
his race but because he had proved himself royal, a man whose
thanes were his comrades, a man who, as Saxon Alfred put
it later, would count his honour the less if he were the king
of slaves and not free men, a man who delighted in success
and the feats of his youth and yet was only the more dauntless
for disaster and old age.
" Thought the bolder, heart the higher,
Courage the more,
As our might lessens ! "
So sang the poet of Maldon Battle when his lord had defied
the Danes and fallen, defeated and dead. The daring freedom
of Homeric times has returned, and with it the impulse to
heroic song. And after song followed the beginnings of a
manly prose.
England in Saxon times is already sufficiently conscious of
something approaching the unity of a nation to care for the
history of her own people written in her own vernacular.
And Alfred, the king who did most for her freedom and unity,
carrying on also a hundred years after Charlemagne Charle-
magne's work for culture, speaks with a simple forthright
voice that shows us the man himself in the style. Very
endearing is the naivete in the paraphrase he made for his
people of the sophisticated " Consolations " written by the
late Latin Boethius. " Parents," wrote Boethius to comfort
the childless, " have been tortured by their children," meaning,
of course, by their poignant anxiety for them. So artificial
a comfort is not understanded of Alfred. He takes the words
literally and adds for his people's sake : " We do not know
62 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
when this was done, but we know that it was a wicked deed."
If we hesitate to call " Beowulf " or " Maldon " epic we need
have no such scruple about the poem most akin to them, the
famous Chanson de Roland, that is to say, in the final form
given to the age-long legend by an unknown bard towards the
end of the eleventh century. We say " unknown," but Leon
Gautier in his admirable edition gives reason for holding that
the poem as he prints it is the work of the Norman cleric called
Thorold who followed William the Conqueror to England and
was appointed by him Abbot of Peterborough. Certain it is
that the poem is Norman-French and bears the marks of its
long ancestry.
The capable piratical Northmen, already heard of in the
time of Charlemagne, and, in 862, summoned by the Slavs of
Russia to rule the country, which was " rich and fertile " but
"with no order in it," had, by opening of the tenth century,
forced their settlement in France from the hands of the central
government (912). Quick to learn, they soon absorbed French
culture, learning and legend, and for all their independent
audacity they could feel the spell of the past and the empires
the past had made. Norman and Saxon were close akin by
race, but not only is the " Chanson " the work of a far greater
genius, we feel also behind it, what we never feel in
" Beowulf," the mighty structures of Latin Christianity and
Franco-Roman civilization. Instead of naivete we find high
and gracious manners — even at the point of death Roland
and Oliver bow with loving courtesy to each other — instead
of quaint rhythms and a childlike bareness of diction (as of a
baby giant) we find a developed language, sinewy and free,
and a measure among the stateliest ever fashioned in France : —
" Halt sunt li pui et tenebrus et grant."
(" High are the peaks, and shadow-gloomed, and vast ").
(Wyndham's tr.)
Again, instead of a free-lance adventurer we have the splen-
dour of a feudal monarch, whose subjects, however proud and
beloved, are at least as much his servants as his friends. It
is Oliver's most poignant regret that neither he nor Roland
THE BEGINNINGS OF NEW POETRY 63
will ever again be able to serve Charles, the mightiest king
who ever reigned (1727 ff.), and with his last breath he prays
for the Emperor and " France dulce " (2015 ff.).
There are passages in the poem that would suit to a nicety
the men of Napoleon's vieille garde, with their memories of
the Grande Armee, and their proud devotion to the man who
ruled all but the whole of the European world. The political
background is no longer a loose arrangement of independent
tribes. It is a great and imperial country, " le grand pays "
{tere majiir), claiming European rule and defying the huge
host of the Paynims.
The Christian religion has become an organized certainty.
Scyld Scefing in " Beowulf " had set sail for the unknown,
but the poet of Roland and OHver knows quite well whither
the souls of his heroes are travelling and how they are to go.
So far as in them lies, the paladins perform the last rites
of the Church, and God sends His angels, St. Gabriel, St.
Raphael, and St. Michael, "of the guarded mount," to carry
the spirit of Roland to Paradise. We are in the atmosphere
of the Crusades, and indeed the poet himself may well have
known of the First Crusade and shared the indignation and
alarm aroused in Europe by the coming of the fierce Turks in
place of the milder Arabs.
Further, we may recognize, perhaps, in the very fabric
of the poem that genius for unity and order developed so
early by these Northerners under the influence of Roman
tradition. It is at any rate remarkable that the men who
were to be among the strongest rulers and builders of their
time should at the outset produce a true epic with a plot at
once broad and coherent far above its possible compeers.
The mere outline of it shows this.
Charlemagne, after seven years of victory in Spain, is per-
suaded to retire by false promises sent from the Moslem king.
Roland, Charlemagne's nephew and finest soldier, suspects
the offer, but Ganelon, Roland's father-in-law, who proves
traitor in the end, urges acceptance, and Charlemagne, with
certain reservations, accepts. Then comes the question : Who
shall go to the Moslems on the return embassy, which may be
64 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
full of peril ? Roland and Oliver both volunteer, but the king
will not hear of it : their lives are too precious to be risked.
Then Roland proposes Ganelon as one of the wisest and
doughtiest barons, and the choice is approved by the court and
confirmed by the king. But Ganelon is furious : Why should
his life be held of less account than his son-in-law's ?
Treacherous himself, he suspects Roland of playing him false
and threatens him with undying hate. Roland answers with
a proud and chilling courtesy, a cool confidence that only
exasperates Ganelon the more. He goes on the embassy, but
keeps his vow of vengeance. A dastardly attack is concerted
between him and the Moslems, to be delivered on Charle-
magne's rearguard, which Ganelon intends shall be led by
Roland. He returns to his lord with fair words from the
Saracens, and the withdrawal is agreed upon, Roland com-
manding the rearguard at Ganelon's suggestion. Though
not suspecting treachery, both Roland and Charlemagne
discern the malice in the proposal, but Roland's pride is up
and he insists on accepting the perilous station. The same
fierce self-reliance makes him refuse Charlemagne's offer of
additional support, and later, when attacked by the Moslems,
refuse to blow the horn for help, although Oliver, a Patroclus
to his Achilles, urges him once and again to do so in time. In
the end he does blow it, but too late to save himself or his
men. Few passages in literature are more deservedly famous.
Oliver's reproach to him for his delay :
" Vostre proecce, Roland, mar la veismes."
("Your valour, Roland, has been ill for us.") (1731)
Oliver's flashing wrath at the thought of blowing the horn
after all only to reveal their failure. Archbishop Turpin's wise
and calm advice, reconciling the friends so that the horn is
sounded at last and Charlemagne, far off on the borders of
" France la douce," hears it and knows that his dearest and
best are in mortal peril and turns back in burning haste — all
this is worthy to be compared with Homer. Oliver's very
words, putting his finger on the tragic pride that had des-
troyed them all, offer a striking parallel to Hector's
THE BEGINNINGS OF NEW POETRY 65
bitter self-reproach when he stands outside the Skaian Gate
to meet his doom, because he knows that his rashness has
led to the disaster at the Ford, and he cannot bear to face his
countrymen and hear them mutter, " Hector trusted to his
own valour and destroyed the people."
Charlemagne and his army come too late for succour but
not too late for vengeance, and that vengeance is taken with
a pitilessness markedly different from the kindly temper of
" Beowulf." There is no hint of torture in the Anglo-Saxon
poem, and there are several passages praising mercy. But
Ganelon is torn to pieces by wild horses, and the poet goes
out of his way to approve the cruel punishment :
" Guenes est morz cume fel recreant.
Ki traist altre, nen est dreiz qu'il s'en vant."
(" So Ganelon died a foul traitor's death ;
No traitor should have cause to boast his deed.") (3973)
Such were these Normans, poetic, powerful, haughty,
passionate, fiercely jealous of individual renown and yet
acknowledging Suzerain and Church as supreme. Their
poetry is a strong shoot from that mighty Northern tree
which had already produced the rich mythology of Odin
and Valhalla, of the Giants and the Dwarfs, the Volsungs
and Nibelungs — a mythology made alive once more for
ignorant moderns by the magic of Wagner's music.
Thus, if England has done great things in poetry, it need
scarcely surprise us when we remember that the Conquest
brought a second infusion of Northern blood and Northern
legend to the descendants of Beowulf's comrades.
Furthermore, the other main element in the blended
English stock, the Celtic, was itself rich in poetry. Celtic imag-
ination was of another character, more fanciful, more extrava-
gant if you will, wilder and fiercer, but with its own poignant
sweetness of love and waihng, its own exquisite notes of elfin
wonder. A modern Irish poet, himself dowered with many
of its fairy gifts, speaks as a denizen of that strange world
when he tells us " its events and people are wild, and are Uke
unbroken horses, that are so much more beautiful than horses
5
66 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
that have learnt to run between shafts." And Yeats goes on
to contrast this marvellous moonlit atmosphere with the
actuality of the Icelandic Sagas where the fallen fighter draws
out the weapon that has kiUed him, looks at it with a grin
— " These broad spears are coming into fashion " — and dies. ^
Each reader must choose for himself which he prefers, but
the wise will give thanks for both and recognize the two well-
springs that have fed the full river of Enghsh song. The
sovereign loveliness of Keats's imagination,
" Strange ministrant of undescribed sounds,
That come a-swooning over hollow grounds,
And wither drearily on barren moors,"
finds a real, if childhke, forerunner in the wistful tenderness
that enfolds the first meeting between Deirdre the Beautiful
and her lover Naoise under the menace of coming doom.
Naoise and his two brothers are strolling on the hiUside, when
Deirdre sees them from her palace-prison and her heart goes
out to Naoise, and she follows them. His two brothers see
her first, and they dread her beauty, because she has been
chosen as a bride by Conchubar, the High King of Ulster.
" Ainnle and Ardan had heard talk of the young girl that
was at Conchubar's Court, and it is what they thought, that
if Naoise their l^rother would see her, it is for himself he would
have her, for she was not yet married to the King. So when
they saw Deirdre coming after them, they said to one another
to hasten their steps, for they had a long road to travel, and
the dusk of night coming on. They did so, and Deirdre knew
it, and she cried out after them, ' Naoise, son of Usnach, are
you going to leave me ? ' ' What cry was that came to my
ears, that it is not well for me to answer, and not easy for me
to refuse ? ' said Naoise. ' It was nothing but the cry of
Conchubar's wild ducks,' said his brothers ; ' but let us
quicken our steps and hasten our feet, for we have a long
road to travel, and the dusk of the evening coming on.' They
did so, and they were widening the distance between them-
1 W. B. Yeats in the Preface to Lady Gregory's " Cuchulain of
Muirthemne," from which the following rendering is taken.
THE BEGINNINGS OF NEW POETRY 67
selves and her. Then Deirdre cried, ' Naoise ! Naoise ! son
of Usnach, are you going to leave me ? ' ' What cry was it
that came to my ears and struck my heart, that it is not well
for me to answer nor easy to refuse ? ' said Naoise. ' Nothing
but the cry of Conchubar's wild geese,' said his brothers ;
' but let us quicken our steps and hasten our feet, the darkness
of night is coming on.' They did so and they were widening
the distance between themselves and her. Then Deirdre
cried the third time, ' Naoise ! Naoise ! son of Usnach, are
you going to leave me ? ' ' What sharp, clear cry was that,
the sweetest that ever came to my ears, and the sharpest that
ever struck my heart, of all the cries I ever heard ? ' said
Naoise. ' What is it but the scream of Conchubar's lake
swans ? ' said his brothers. ' That was the third cry of some
person beyond these,' said Naoise, ' and I swear by my hand
of valour,' he said, ' I will go no further until I see where the
cry comes from.' So Naoise turned back and met Deirdre,
and Deirdre and Naoise kissed one another three times and
she gave a kiss to each of his brothers. And with the con-
fusion that was on her, a blaze of red fire came upon her, and
her colour came and went as quickly as the aspen by the
stream. And it is what Naoise thought to himself that he
never saw a woman so beautiful in his life ; and he gave
Deirdre, there and then, the love that he never gave to living
thing, to vision, or to creature, but to herself alone."
The original underlying that was composed in Ireland, so
Irish scholars tell us, ^ either in the seventh century or the
eighth — and therefore about the same time as " Beowulf "
— by bards from the Gaelic branch of the primitive Celtic
stock. At that date indeed Ireland, in spite of her bitter
internal warfare, held a foremost place in poetry, religion,
and scholarship.
But there were also other Celts in Britain itself, Britons of
Wales and Cornwall, for example, and they, together with the
allied Britons of French Brittany, had their own wealth of
legend and poetry, from which grew up by degrees a cycle of
romances that have enchanted Europe ever since, the cycle
> e.g. Alfred Nutt in the note to Lady Gregory's trans., op. cit.
68 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
of Arthur the King and his Knights of the Round Table. In
their developed form we can see that these tales brought two
fresh and fertile themes into European literature, first the
struggle between loyalty and romantic love — as in the tales of
Tristan and Iseult, Lancelot and Guinevere — and then, linked
and contrasted with romantic love, the thirst for a religious
purity unattainable on earth, as in the Quest of the Holy
Grail. ^ But this developed form does not appear till the
twelfth century, and we must leave it till later. Let us glance
meanwhile at the broader political movements since Charle-
magne.
^ See A. Lang, "Higt. of English Lit.," pp. 60, 61 (ed. 1912).
CHAPTER XI
THE FEUDAL EMPIRE, THE CHURCH, AND THE
YOUNG NATIONS
THE outstanding features of the political growth from
the ninth century to the twelfth are the emergence of
the European nations in something like their modern
form, the fact of feudalism (the passion and the loyalty of
which are vividly reflected in the Chanson), and the first
critical struggle between Empire and Papacy.
Charlemagne's huge empire split asunder soon after his
death, to be divided, in a manner noted by all historians as
significant, between his three grandsons, Lothair, eldest-bom
and Emperor, Louis the German, and Charles. The brothers
quarrelled savagely over their shares, but in 843 a temporary
settlement was made by the Treaty of Verdun, precursor of
many another equally abortive.
The main outlines, indeed, of France (under Charles) and
Germany (under Louis) were destined to be permanent, but
the border-lands between, which fell to Lothair (and one of
which, Lorraine, took its name from him), were to excite the
cupidity of the other two countries all down the centuries.
Lothair as Emperor had also feudal lordship over the North
of Italy, and for nearly a century the Imperial power was in
fact held by a descendant of Charlemagne. But during the
whole time it was held more and more slackly, and this weaken-
ing was increased by the very nature of the feudalism now
becoming prominent.
Under feudalism the mere holding of land, always an
advantage to the possessor, carried with it additional and
69
70 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
excessive powers. The landowner, though a vassal of the
king, and therefore in strict feudal theory not the ultimate
owner, could be, in his own territory, " a ruler and a judge, a
commander of troops, even a collector of taxes." ^
It is obvious what confusion and disorder might arise when
these petty " kingdoms within a kingdom " were uncontrolled ;
but obvious also how natural was their growth in a time of
individual enterprise and incessant warfare, a time also when
communications were of the scantiest, and the central govern-
ment was none of the strongest. The whole political history of
the next few centuries is coloured by the fact of feudalism, and
the efforts in different lands to buUd out of its jarring elements
a stable government under which men could recognize one
another as united in the same community and obeying the
same laws.
Owing to the supremacy of the king such a unification
was possible, but it was essentially a unification that worked
through privilege and thus essentially incomplete. And
from that incompleteness was to spring a crop of injustice and
revolution, a crop the whole of which is not yet gathered in.
Such as it was, the unification was a heavy task and one
not always achieved. In Germany, for example, during the
century after Charlemagne, the country was divided into
four great Duchies — Saxony, Franconia, Swabia, Bavaria,
— or, if Lorraine is included, five. These were practically
independent, though ready to acknowledge an overlord, who
was for many years a Franconian, with all the prestige of the
Franks.
But the first quarter of the tenth century was marked by
the accession to the kingship of Saxony's duke, Henry the
Fowler, great-great-grandson through the female line of
Charlemagne, and a man, it seems clear, of considerable force
and ability, indeed a typical Saxon of the time in his organizing
power. For the Saxons, once Charlemagne's most doughty
foes, proved to be his most remarkable successors. Henry,
nominated by the late king, the Franconian Conrad, was
chosen largely through the united support of his own race and
1 Grant, " History of Europe." Part II, c. vi.
THE FEUDAL EMPIRE 71
the Franconians, winning the allegiance of the rest through
skilful concessions to local independence, and through the
renown of his victories against the still heathen barbarians on
the East and South-East. He resumed the pioneer work of
Charlemagne, half conquest, half civihzation, thrusting back
the Magyars, successors of the Avars and the Huns, towards
the land now called Hungary, crossing the Elbe and conquering
territory from the Slavs, notably the land that was to be the
March of Brandenburg, and, centuries later, the home of the
Hohenzollerns, when they had travelled upwards from the
South.
Vivid lights on the German temperament in these days may
be found in the epic of the Nibelimgenlied, put together later,
probably in the twelfth century, but going back through the
folk-lore of many centuries both to primitive Northern
mythology and to historic echoes of the Hunnish power.
Unruly, savage, greedy, and treacherous, so do the leaders
appear in this long string of poems — a work that is indeed far
less subtle and moving than the parallel version farther north,
the VolsungSaga of Scandinavia ; but they appear also endowed
with surpassing daring and resolution. Magnificent in its
fierceness is the defiance between Hagen, who has slain the
unsuspecting hero Siegfried, and Siegfried's widow Kriemhild,
who has married Etzel (Attila), the King of the Huns, in
order to compass her terrible vengeance and lured to his court
her own brothers with Hagen in their train. The proud
loyalty of a willing vassal flames out in Hagen's reply when
the mocking queen uncovers her deadly purpose :
" She said, ' Now tell me. Sir Hagen, who sent for thee,
that thou hast dared to ride into ^:his land ? Wert thou in thy
senses, thou hadst not done it.'
" ' None sent for me,' answered Hagen. ' Three knights
that I caU master were bidden hither. I am their liegeman,
and never yet tarried behind when they rode to a hightide.'
" She said, ' Now tell me further. Wherefore didst thou
that which hath earned thee my hate ? Thou slewest Sieg-
fried, my dear husband, whom I cannot mourn enow to my
life's end.'
72 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
" He answered, ' Enough ! . . . It was I, Hagen, that
slew Siegfried, the hero. . . . Avenge it who will, man or
woman.' " (Tr. by Margaret Armour.)
It needed the strength of a Charlemagne to bring order
among men and women like that, but the vigour of them is un-
deniable. Henry the Fowler and Henry's son Otto I, Otto the
Great, toil on at the work. They have at least some personal
loyalty to work on and abundant spirit for fighting. Otto
and his warriors defeated the Magyars in a decisive battle
on the Lech, due west of Munich, (955), and thereupon he
established, among other " Marks " intended to guard the
frontier, the Bavarian " East Mark " that was to grow into
the " Eastern Kingdom," the Oester-reich, the Austria of a
later day. Finally in 962 he was crowned Emperor at Rome.
There were many reasons for this attempt of Otto's to make
the Holy Roman Empire once more an effective power, ^ among
them the memory of Charlemagne and the past, the distracted
state of Italy herself, torn by civil strife, devastated in the
North by Magyars, attacked in the centre and South by
Moslems, and suffering spiritually from the shameful position
of the Papacy, at once corrupt and weak, and yet still an
invaluable sj^mbol to all Christians of Christendom's essential
unity. Otto, moreover, needed the help of the clergy in
struggling against his own barons for a unified and settled
government. To counter the growth of powerful and
insubordinate families he endowed the celibate bishops in his
realm with much territory and wide administrative powers.
These bishops he appointed himself, and on this matter
centred many a desperate conflict between his successors and
the Popes.
For now comes into full sight another dominant feature of
the Middle Ages, the struggle, namely, between the Temporal
^ The actual title " Holy," according to Bryce {op. cit. c. xii.), is not
known to have been used before the time of Frederick I (in 1157).
But the idea, dependent on the union of Empire and Papacy as leaders
of Christendom, goes back to Charlemagne, and behind him again to
St. Augustine and indeed to the official acceptation of Christianity as
the religion of the Empire.
THE CHURCH 73
and Spiritual Powers, a struggle which goes down to the
root-problems of government and society. Once understood,
it is impossible not to sympathize with the ideals of both
parties, however selfish their contest for mastery. Through
the confused and sordid turmoil we discern great issues at
stake and difficulties not to be solved completely while man
remains imperfect.
For, in the first place, many of man's finest purposes cannot
be served by force. Religion, for example, is worthless if it
does not spring from the heart, and the heart cannot be forced.
On the other hand, for a community to hold together with
justice in this faulty world, there must be some means of
chastising those flagrant wTong-doers who seek to prey upon
it. Force therefore, if only the force of expulsion, seems
unavoidable as a last resort in any organized political State,
but force, even if it makes men act rightly, runs the risk,
since it works by threat, of making them act from wrong
motives, especially if it is used, as it often is used, not merely
to make men do what they admit to be their duty, but actually
what they believe to be ^\Tong. Now it is true that though
this was not clearly realized by Christian Europe for many
centuries, it was felt obscurely from the first, and hence the
Temporal and Spiritual Powers, even when allied, were, on the
whole, kept distinct in Christendom. The Church did not
always forget the lesson of her Founder that His kingdom was
not of this world, and that not force, but persuasion, was her
allotted instrument.
But sometimes, and very often, she did. Nor can we alto-
gether blame her. If a great society believes itself the guardian
of vital truth, truth that guides conduct and leads to infinite
happiness, while the neglect of it means everlasting torture,
the temptation is strong to use the fatal short-cut of force, in
the hope that, even if the obstinate are not cured, at least the
poison of the infected may not infect others. Even in the
modern State, with the experience of centuries behind us
and without the spectre of eternal damnation before us, is
there anyone who could claim that we have yet mastered the
right uses or learnt the just limits of force ? i\Ioreover, these
74 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
limits change with the changing conscience of man. Most of
us welcome compulsion now in the cause of secular education,
but, if we do, we ought not to be horrified at compulsion in
mediaeval times for religious training. To the average
mediaeval conscience, the ordinances of the Church were not
only right, but essential. Indeed, we can best understand
both the breadth and the narrowness of the Mediaeval Church,
her influence, and the hostility she aroused, if we think of her
as what she claimed, not without cause, to be, the Supreme
Educator, teaching not only for time but for eternity, pointing
out to men the highest life conceivable, and showing them the
only path towards it.
Naturally, in common with all educators who work through
institutions, she felt the need, and the temptation, both of
independence and of power. This can be seen alike in the
work of the monasteries and of the prelates, notably in the
striking figure of the Italian Hildebrand, Pope under the name
of Gregory the Seventh (1073). Hildebrand himself began
life as a monk,^ and throughout was in close touch with the
great house of Cluny, the reforming monastery founded in
Burgundy at the opening of the previous century (910),
although there are signs that he went beyond the Cluniac
leaders in his zeal for the powers of the Roman See.
To correct the corruption rife among too many of the clergy,
Hildebrand saw that strict discipline was needed from within,
and that such discipline was impossible if the appointment of
the bishops was practically in the hands of a layman. Hence
his first concern was to challenge this claim on the part of the
Emperors. The Emperors must not " invest " the bishops
on their own authority. It was a spiritual matter, and to be
dealt with by the Church. Here at once he came into conflict
^ This has been questioned by a few modems, but to doubt it seems
not only a needless setting aside of tradition but exceedingly difficult
to justify in face of Henry IV's public letter to Hildebrand as "jam
non apostolico sed falso monacho," and his indictment of him as a
disgrace to the " monachica professio " (Migne, Patr. Lat. S. Greg.
VII. Ad Concilium Romanum III Additio, p. 794). Otto of Freising
reports a tradition that Hildebrand was at one time Prior of Cluny,
but this is now generally disbelieved.
THE CHURCH 75
with the young and headstrong Emperor, the German Henry
IV, and here he was on strong ground.
But, in point of fact, Gregory went much further, and virtu-
ally claimed that in view of the Church's sacred character the
Pope must be recognized as the ultimate Head of the State
and of all States. In the second sentence of excommunication
passed on Henry IV, he prays for all the world to understand
that inasmuch as the blessed Apostles Peter and Paul, the
sainted Fathers and Princes of the Church, could bind in
heaven and loose in heaven, even so on earth they could
" grant or take away from any man, according to his desert,
empires, kingdoms, principalities, dukedoms, marches, counties,
and all other possessions whatsoever." They were rulers in
spiritual things : what must be their power in temporal things ?
They were to judge angels, what might they not do with men ?
" Let all kings and all princes of the earth learn to-day how
mighty ye are and what your power is : let them tremble,
and mock no longer at the commandments of your Church." ^
It is obvious, as Bryce^ points out, that claims such as these
made civil government all but impossible. One is scarcely
surprised at the Emperor's fury with a man of this temper,
at his sneer that in Hildebrand was exemplified the typical
priest drunk with power, of whom his precursor, Gregory the
truly Great, had spoken. Writing before the excommuni-
cation, but provoked beyond endurance by Hildebrand's
lordly tone over the question of the investitures, and at
least as eager as Hildebrand himself for power, Henry takes
upon him to dethrone the Pope. St. Peter, the true Pope, had
written : " Fear God and honour the King." "St. Paul
would not have spared an angel from heaven had he preached
another gospel," and the unworthy Gregory, because he has
slighted the will of the Emperor, the appointed of God, has
brought himself under St. Paul's curse, " damned in the eyes
of all our bishops and in our own." Henry, in set terms,
bids his opponent come down from the Apostolical seat that
he has disgraced.
^ Migne, Patr. Lat. Concil. Romanum VII.
* " The Holy Roman Empire," c. x.
76 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
The letter from which these aggressive words are taken
makes a super-Pope of the Emperor, and it is not surprising
that the actual Pope retaliated. Henry's claims are
at least as arrogant as Hildebrand's own. Nor was it
possible to support them in the eyes of Christendom. The
impossibility became manifest even to Henry when the
chief barons of Germany seized the opportunity to revolt.
He was forced to submit and undergo his humiliation before
the Pope among the snows of Canossa (1077). Gregory
himself wrote in triumph " to all the Archbishops, Bishops,
Dukes, Counts and Princes in the German Realm who
defend the Christian faith," recounting how the king, humbled
to penance, had obtained pardon and absolution, having come
" of his own accord . . . with no hostility or arrogance in his
bearing to the town of Canusium where we were tarrying.
And there, laying aside all the trappings of royalty, he stood
in wretchedness, barefooted, . . . clad in woollen, for three
days before the gate of the castle, and implored with much
weeping the aid and consolation of the apostolic mercy,
until he had moved all who saw or heard of it to such pity and
depth of compassion that they interceded for him with many
prayers and tears and wondered at the unaccustomed hardness
of our heart ; some even protested that we were displaying not
the seriousness of apostolical displeasure but the cruelty of
tyrannical ferocity." ^
Henry's humiliation, however, was not for long. The tide
soon turned; Christendom did not at bottom desire a Caliphate,
and indeed the close of the last quotation from Gregory him-
self indicates that already there were devout sons and daughters
of the Church who thought he had gone too far. Among
these may have been Hugh, the Abbot of Cluny, and Matilda,
the Countess of Tuscany, who were witnesses of the hollow
reconciliation. Henry gathered his forces again and returned
to the attack in a manner suggesting that his parade of penance
had been rather diplomatic than real. The city of Rome itself
^ Translation based on that of Robinson, " Readings in European
History," i. p. 283. Original in Migne, Patr. Lat. S. Greg. Registrum,
Lib. iv., Epistola xii.
THE CHURCH 77
turned against Gregory ; he was forced to retreat, under
shelter of the Normans from the South, even out of the
acknowledged Papal dominions and died, embittered but
indomitable. " I have loved righteousness and hated iniquity :
therefore I die in exile."
Still the struggle about the Church appointments went on
until a compromise was arranged by the Concordat of Worms
(1122) ; the Emperor giving up the claim to invest the bishops
with the spiritual symbols of ring and staff or to control the
elections, while, on the other hand, the elections were to be
held in his presence, and the clergy were to do homage to
him for their temporal possessions.
Like all compromises, the Concordat has been claimed as a
victory for either side, but it is perhaps best looked upon as an
admission, reluctant and incomplete yet significant, that not
supremacy but co-operation is the fundamental secret of
society. The sovereign Emperor must admit that a com-
munity may exist inside the political community with special
rights and privileges of its own, free from his incessant inter-
ference ; the leaders of the Church must allow that not creed
but common work on a common soil is to be the predominant
force in fusing men into nations, and they must make their
terms with that.
Both sides were slow to learn, but gradually the struggle
for " the temporalities " on the part of the Popes was more
and more confined to Italy, the nation from which, as a rule,
the Popes were drawn. There were eddies, it is true, as is
evident from the dominating position of Innocent III, more
than seventy years later. Hildebrand had boldly claimed
feudal overlordship in England, but he could not press the
claim when met by the curt refusal of William the Con-
queror :
" I never intended and I do not intend now to swear fealty
to you. I never promised it, nor can I find that my pre-
decessors ever did so." ^
* " Fidelitatem facere vobis nee volo : quia nee promisi, nee ante-
cessores meos antecessoribus tuis id fccisse comperio." Migne, op.
cit.
78 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
Innocent III revives the claim and exacts submission from
King John. Yet in the end it is only to be repudiated by the
growing national feeling of England.
That potent spirit had indeed been growing everywhere,
and in Italy and Germany it complicates the struggle between
Emperor and Pope. For, however much the Italians may
have sympathized with the ideal of a united Christian Empire,
the head of which should stand above all the separate States,
they could not fail to resent the pressure on themselves of an
Emperor who was in practice invariably a German.
Especially was this felt in the towns, throbbing with a
vivid and turbulent life that recalls the cities of Greece, both
in their artistic achievements and in their aggressive in-
dependence. Even to look at the splendid architecture of
Italy in the twelfth century is almost enough to make us
understand how the cities rose against the claims of, say,
Frederick Barbarossa (Emperor 1152). The modern reader
cannot share the obvious belief of Barbarossa's uncle. Otto,
Bishop of Freising, in the righteousness of the custom that
" when the Emperor enters Italy all magistracies and offices
are suspended, and all things are regulated by his will, acting
in accordance with the instructions of the law and the decisions
of the jurists." It is the Imperial tradition revived in its
most despotic, if legalist form, and inevitably it came into
conflict with the revived Republican principle of free self-
government in the cities. Otto himself, who thought much
on government, recognized that cities such as Milan deliber-
ately modeUed themselves on " the greatness of ancient
Rome." " Indeed," he goes on, " they love liberty so well
that, to guard against the abuse of power, they prefer to be
governed by consuls rather than by princes." He is shocked
by their admitting to knighthood and ofhce " men of the
lowest and most mechanical trades who, among other peoples,
are shunned like the pest by those who follow higher callings."
Yet he says in so many words that "it is owing to this that
they surpass all other cities of the world in riches and power."
Citizens of this type fiercely resented the Imperial claim
to override their decisions, as well as the exaction of a crushing
THE YOUNG NATIONS 79
tribute " whenever the kings decided to visit Italy." Nor
were they conciliated by what Otto tries to justify as the
inevitable result of their insubordination, when " those cities,
towns, and castles which ventured either to refuse the tax
altogether or had paid it only in part " were " razed to the
ground as a warning to posterity. "^
In point of fact the historic warning — which Otto did not
live to see — was given to the Emperor himself (and to all
those who try to hold do\ra an alien and unwilling people by
sheer force). The to\vns of Northern Italy formed themselves
into the " Lombard League," defied the Redbeard who had
seemed unconquerable, and defeated him. The Pope (with
whom he had quarrelled) supported them, and in 1177,
under the porch of St. Mark's at Venice, Frederick submitted
to the Pope as the supreme reconciler.
" It was just a hundred years since the great humiliation
• of Canossa, and this was a humihation almost as complete.
He knelt before the Pope and begged for his forgiveness,
and when the Pope mounted his mule he held the stirrup
and would have held the bridle if the Pope had not declined
the comphment." 2
But the real humiliation was rather before the cities than
the Church, to which indeed Barbarossa had always professed
devotion : " The cities were now recognized as practically
independent ; they governed themselves ; they had their own
armies, their own fortifications, their own jurisdiction." ^
So ended the most brilliant attempt since Charlemagne
to unify Italy and Central Europe under one sovereign head.
A century later, indeed, another effort, and a brilliant one also,
was made by Barbarossa's grandson, Frederick II, Emperor
of the Holy Roman Empire, and lord of Naples and Sicily
through his Norman mother Constance, heiress of the bold
adventurers who had fought the Saracens and made themselves
rulers in the land under the overlordship of the Pope, even
before the Norman invasion of England. But Frederick IPs
^ Otto von Freising, " Deeds of Frederick," Book II. c. 13. (Trans-
lation based on that of Robinson, op. cit.)
' Grant, " History of Europe." p. 280. » Op. cit.
80 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
attempt failed in its turn. His despotic temper roused the
Northern Communes of Italy once more, and once more the
Papacy was wise enough to support the people against the
despot. It had reasons of its own for this. Frederick, once
its candidate for Empire, had shown himself not only an
audacious speculator in religion, but a far too ambitious
Empire-builder, prepared, in defiance of solemn engagements
given personally, to grip the Popedom between his Northern
and Southern dominions. The struggle was undecided at
his death (1250), but soon afterwards his whole dynasty
was swept away, the power of it being nowise founded on
liberty, and his race being dogged to its doom by the hatred
of the Popes, a hatred kept alive through fear. Naples
and Sicily were left to be for centuries the prize of war
between French and Spanish claimants.
These repeated and vain attempts to unite Italy and
Germany under one Empire were costly to both. The
Emperor's constant absence from homxC, across the Alps
in Italy, made it impossible for him to cope with his own
turbulent barons, and the chance of a solid union in Germany
disappeared for many a long day. In particular is to be
noted the increasing chaos in her judicial courts. The faint
promise of a coherent system embodpng popular elements
died away in a confusion of separate jurisdictions, largely
feudal and seignorial, left, moreover, without the guidance
either of a clear and consistent law or a uniform body of
judges appointed from above.
There was rich material for corporate life in mediseval
Germany, as we shall have occasion to note later, but it was
lost through lack of any unifying policy. The early history of
the Holy Roman Empire is strewn with lost opportunities for
Germany, notably in connexion with the towns. The develop-
ment of the towns, so important for the growth of modern
life, so characteristic of the leading European nations in the
thirteenth century, and recalling so significantly the city-states
of Greece and Rome, was as marked in Germany as elsewhere.
The reawakening desire and need both for commerce and
life in common had led the townsmen either to take for
THE YOUNG NATIONS 81
themselves (as in Italy), or more often (as in England) to win
by definite grants the right to definite liberties and even to
a large measure of self-government. Freedom from all serfage
was one of the foremost privileges, and the principle that he
who had lived in a free city for a year and a day became a
free man whoever his lord might have been, one of the great
forces for general emancipation in Europe, found popular
expression in a German proverb, " Die Luft der Stadt macht
frei." The townsmen, moreover, were organizing themselves
into guilds of craftsmen and traders and struggling with what
we should now call economic problems — how, for example
prices should be fixed : whether solely by the cost of the
materials plus a fair reward for the craftsman's labour, or
whether an additional sum might be asked when the com-
modity was in high demand — problems to be debated in our
own time with a renewed and deepened intensity. Arts and
letters, furthermore, clustered in the city. When we deplore
the evil side of the towns we should remember also that many
of our finest achievements have been made possible only
through them. " Not through the mighty woods we go, but
through the mightier cities."
In the young vigour of these early German efforts a wise
and bold ruler might have found a factor of the highest
value for uniting the country on a basis of freedom. The
privileges of the towns might have been confirmed and
developed on the understanding that they were to co-operate
with the king in maintaining order and serving the nation at
large. Frederick II in particular had the chance offered to
him. But on his rare visits to Germany his policy seems to
have been nothing but narrowly opportunist, playing off the
barons against the cities and the cities against the barons
simply to suit the apparent convenience of the moment, the
broad result being to leave chaos and conflict to the German
people.
Across the Alps, on the other hand, no Teutonic Emperor
could really identify himself with his Italian subjects. Had
the Holy Roman Empire been effectively established in
Italy by a German it would probably have been only a
6
82 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
despotism, militarist and external. We cannot regret its
failure, though we may regret, and deeply, that the struggle
for and against it left either people rather a congeries of
jealous units than a united society, and Empire and Papacy
profoundly embittered against each other.
On the Italian side Dante, and on the German Vogelweide
(d. 1230) cried out each on the distraction of his country.
Walther von der Vogelweide, perhaps the loveliest of the
Minnesingers, was a patriot and a man of religion as well as
a true poet. His passion for the welfare, unity, and freedom
of his fatherland was every whit as spontaneous and strong
as his passion for love and beauty. The coronets of the barons,
he protested earnestly, were outblazing the light of the
Crown ; the realm had less order in it than the animal
kingdom ; and the disorder was fomented by the Italian
Popes, a schemer like Innocent III keeping two German
candidates in play and cheating both. Vogelweide foresaw
even at that date a breach between clergy and laity and the
consequent break-up of Christendom.
" O German people, that this should be.
The hive with a king, and kingless we !
0 German people, hear my cry !
The coronets carry themselves too high !
Let the lonely Jewel of the Crown
Outblaze them all on Philip's Throne ! "
" I heard the lies they told in Rome.
1 saw them cheat two kings at home.
Clergy and laymen fell to strife,
The laitterest known in all this life :
The clergy strove and struggled sore,
But the laymen numbered more and more. . . .
Evil in cloister-garth and cell, —
A good monk wept, as I heard tell,
He cried to God, for his heart was wrung,
' Alas, the Pope is rash and young 1
May Christ have mercy on Christendom ! ' "
Vogelweide is sensitive to the whole of life, and at times his
breadth of view strangely anticipates Goethe's. Fervent
pilgrim as he was, he can think of God as receiving the prayers
of all creeds.
THE YOUNG NATIONS 83
" Christian and Jew and Heathen serve Him
Who gives the bread of Ufe to all."
His protest against the selfishness of the struggles for
dominance in Church and State was unavailing, but it remains
of enduring significance.
CHAPTER XII
ENGLAND AND THE PROMISE OF SELF-
GOVERNMENT
OF all the young nations England, from a political
point of view, showed the fairest promise. Spain was
divided between Christian and Moslem. Russia was
flung back, and for centuries, by the Tartar invasion (1223), and
so was left far in the rear even of the civilization attained by
her sister country of Poland, already organized into a kingdom.
France, like Germany, though as yet without Germany's
temptation to waste her strength beyond the Alps, was split
up among quarrelsome vassals, although a nucleus of the future
kingdom began to form itself at the end of the tenth century
round Hugh Capet, successor to the degenerate Carolingian
line.
But in England less than a hundred years later, the Norman
conquerors had the ability and the luck to enlist in their
service both the Saxon strength and the Celtic fire of their
new subjects. From the first, indeed, Norman William took
the line that he was not an alien conqueror so much as
the rightful heir of the Saxon king, Edward the Confessor.
The chief pitfall of feudalism he avoided by ensuring, first,
that none of his barons held too much land in any one place,
the possessions he granted them being scattered about
over England. And, next, that landowners should swear
fealty direct to himself, and so guard against the divided
loyalties which grew up thickly on the Continent and increased
the chaos. The direct evidence of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle
is worth repeating : " All the men of consequence who were
on the land all over England, whosesoever men they were, all
84
ENGLAND AND SELF-GOVERNMENT 85
bowed down to him and became his men and swore oaths of
fealty to him that they would be faithful to him against all
other men." ^
The " good order," a requisite of any real unity, that
William brought into the country is also clear from the
reluctant admiration of the Chronicler. " A man of substance
might walk through the realm with his bosom full of gold and
come to no harm. Nor durst any man slay another though
he had done him never so much evil."
William's work for justice and unification was carried
further by Henry IL grandson indeed of a Norman, Henry I,
but also of a princess with Saxon and Celtic blood, Edith
(called ]\Iatilda), daughter of Malcolm the Scottish king and
niece of Edgar ^theling. In 1166, just a hundred years after
the Conquest and eleven before Barbarossa's defeat, we can
trace in the Assize of Clarendon the beginnings of our modern
trial by jury. Only the beginnings, it is true. Neither the
Saxon trial by ordeal nor the Norman wager of battle did
Henry set aside, nor was the " jury " he established a real
jury of judgment. What was done was to provide that in
criminal cases twelve men sworn to speak the truth should be
appointed to make a preliminary inquiry, and if they con-
sidered the evidence grave enough to present the accused for
trial, then, though he should go to the ordeal, the sceptical
king added that whatever the result, he must leave the
country within forty days on pain of death.
The growth, uninterrupted, of a true jury system from such
small beginnings is a classic instance of the value in getting
a rational scheme started, on however small a scale, in place
of an irrational. In civil cases also a jury was allowed as
an alternative to wager by battle. And " from admitting
that after all Might was not Right, it was but a short step to
agree that Chance was not Justice. Trial by battle fell into
disuse, and soon afterwards trial by ordeal followed it. In
1216 the Church forbade the further use of ordeal." 2 This
^ Tr. based on Gardiner's in the " Student's History of England."
^ "The Groundwork of British History," Warner and Martin, c.x,
fin.
86 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
experience between individuals within the nation may yet be
repeated between nations within the world.
Trial by jury was not only a victory for reason over super-
stition and force, but through it the principle was established
that the people themselves should have a vital share in the
administration of justice. Never, perhaps, since the days of
Republican Greece had this principle received in an organized
State anything Hke such emphatic assertion. Its value for
liberty is obvious ; still more, for the enlistment of liberty
in the service of law. It corresponds to a sound instinct
deeply rooted in those peoples of Europe who were awake to
freedom. The scheme would have been a priceless boon to
the Germanic tribes caught in a maze of conflicting jurisdic-
tions, many of them simply imposed from above, and still
hankering after the older, more democratic method of more
primitive days, where, as a modern German has put it, a man
was accustomed to ask his neighbour for justice as he would
for a light. 1 Furthermore, the habit of sitting on a jury
must have done much in England to instruct public opinion
on weighty legal matters, and so to fortify that reasonable
criticism of Roman Law on the part of expert jurists which
made it possible for England to assimilate so much of the
good and avoid so much of the harm in that rich but complex
inheritance. Maitland points out how in the fourteenth
century Wyclif the schoolman, commenting on the study of
law in the Universities, can protest " that English was as just,
as reasonable, as subtle as was Roman jurisprudence." 2
The advance towards a free and reasonable organization of
justice had its parallel in politics. Already Henry II could
rely on the old national levy, the fyrd, and dispense with
foreign mercenaries. The very misgovernment of John at the
beginning of the thirteenth century led to the Great Charter
with its stress on principles of freedom, never since quite
^ J. Grimm in the Preface to Thomas's " Der Oberhof zu Frankfurt
am Main." Quoted in Blondel's " La Politique de Fr6d6ric II en
Allemagne," p. 164.
2 " Political Theories of the Middle Ages." Gierke, Preface by
Maitland, p. xiii.
ENGLAND AND SELF-GOVERNMENT 87
forgotten by Englishmen. Certain modern critics emphasize
the privileges that the barons won by the document, but it
is essential to reiterate that the barons coupled also with their
claims demands for the privileges of towns and for the rights
of the subject as such. The modern maxims, " No taxation
without representation," " No arbitrary imprisonment with-
out trial," are already in substance acknowledged :
12 (14). " No scutage or aid shall be imposed in our king-
dom save by the Common Council of our kingdom, except to
ransom our person, to make our eldest son a knight, and once
for the first marriage of our eldest daughter ; and for these
purposes it shall only be a reasonable aid."
39 (46). " No free man shall be taken or imprisoned, or
dispossessed, or outlawed, or banished, or in any way injured,
nor will we go upon him, nor send upon him, except by the
legal judgment of his peers or by the law of the land."
And towards the end of the century — 1295 according to the
old dating, 1275 according to the latest research — ^Edward I
summons a Parliament comprehensive enough to serve as a
model for every Parliament that followed, comprising as it
did representatives not only of the barons, but also of the
clergy, the small clergy as well as the great, the knights of
the shires, and the citizens and burgesses throughout every
county in England.
" Whatever affects all should be approved by all " — so run
the statesmanlike words of the Royal Summons. The little
sentence touches the heart of self-government, and we have
not yet exhausted the implications that it holds. The
rise of the representative system is of cardinal importance
just because through its machinery it was to make self-
government possible over a large area. A genuine element
of representation, it should not be forgotten, had been present
alike in Greece and Republican Rome. Officials were elected,
and for limited terms ; the people were not governed solely by
irresponsible and hereditary magistrates. But the effective
area of the electorate was too small. Now, after the long
interval of the bureaucratic Empire, followed by the loose
organization of peoples emerging from barbarism, the prin-
88 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
ciple is revived and extended. Many of the barbarians, indeed,
with their habit of controlUng their king by his council of wise
men and his assembly of free warriors, had done much to
prepare the ground.
And it is well to note that the effort is not made in
England alone. In Spain both Castile and Aragon possessed
a Cortes, representing clergy, nobles, and commons. In
France Philip IV (Phihp the Fair), in his struggle against
Papal encroachment, and whether influenced by the Spanish
example or by that of the local " Estates " in provinces
such as Languedoc, or by the step of his English con-
temporary, or by all three, summons the first " States-
General " (1302), and thus implicitly recognizes that it is at
least wise in a crisis to consult the nation at large. In
Italy the communes, choosing their own officers, are, as
we have already noted, conspicuous for their energy and
independence. In Germany the highest office, that of the
Emperor, is itself in principle elective. But England out-
stripped her neighbours in three ways. First, she tried the
experiment more persistently and on a scale at once large
enough to mark it off from those of the city-states, differing
herein alike from the ancient and the mediaeval Italian, and
yet not so large as to become, in those days of imperfect
communication and no printing, simply ineffective for the
mass of the population, as was notably the case with the
German " election " of the Emperor. Next she drew her
representatives from almost all classes, not excluding even the
peasantry, in so far as the poor parsons could speak for them.
Thirdly, these her representatives held on, more and more
firmly, to the two decisive powers, to the power of the purse
(granted by the Charter), and then, through the power of the
purse and their own resolution, to the power of the sword.
Thus she has some reason for her proud boast that the
assembly at Westminster is the " Mother of Parliaments,"
but she should not speak as though the idea had been peculiar
to herself. Nor should she forget that for centuries she has
failed to apply it consistently to the country of her neighbour,
Ireland.
CHAPTER XIII
THE NEW ARCHITECTURE: ROMANESQUE
AND GOTHIC
BUT if, during these early days, England laid the
foundations of a political system steadier than any of
her neighbours, it must be remembered that she was
slow to develop it. There was not in England during the
twelfth century or the thirteenth anything like the vigour
of corporate life that we can discern in the Italian cities.
Nor was England leader in any art. There the primacy belongs
to France and Italy. The age was, at first, pre-eminently the
age of architecture, and it was from the " Romanesque " of
France and the Norman conquerors that Englishmen first
learnt to build. They did indeed learn their lesson nobly,
but they never surpassed their teachers, and they had much
to learn. We look at the clumsy, heavy Saxon work just
before the Conquest, and, however touching we may find its
single-minded effort to express a vision beyond its grasp,
we can only feel it the fumbling of a 'prentice hand when we
think of the buoyant ease and mastery shown by, let us say,
the early Norman work at Caen. The Church of St. Etienne,
begun by Wilham in that city, has indeed a jubilant hghtness
of effect not elsewhere found in union with the Norman
majesty. The WTiite Tower, still essentially " the Tower of
London," built by the Conqueror to command the town, on
the margin of the Thames and at the corner of the old Roman
wall, looks to-day what it was meant to look centuries ago,
a confident symbol of strength, beautiful through the high,
free grace of its proportions.
89
90 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
The greatness of English architects lay in the swiftness with
which they seized on the foreign culture and developed it in
their own way. The interior of Durham Cathedral, arch after
arch repeating the same splendid theme, at once simple and
infinitely diverse, solemn and gentle in the golden-coloured
light, is a thing among the marvels of architecture — and it
was built within a century of the Norman Conquest. And
as the twelfth century closed, another style, the Early English
Gothic, derived again from the movement abroad, superseded
the Norman. It was less majestic no doubt, but delicately
fitted to express the visionary longing for a resting-place
of peace and purity, still on earth, though freed from the dross
of earth, and looking far beyond it, a longing that lit the central
fire for the work of the Church and all her influence.
Already we can see in the Galilee Chapel of Durham an
effort to make the round arch adapt itself to the new concept
of form, but it was soon felt that the pointed style with its
soaring arches, its flying buttresses, its slender spires, offered
a more expressive medium for the lyric aspiration that filled
the hearts of the devout. The Early English Chapel of the
Nine Altars at Durham was commanded by the very man,
Richard de la Poer, to whom we owe Salisbury Cathedral,
an example, perfect as a sonnet, of one clear emotion, rendered
visible in stone. As it stands among the stately trees, matching
itself against them and overtopping them, it illustrates the
truth of Hegel's assertion that the impulse to architecture
springs not simply from the desire for shelter but from the
desire to symbolize the Absolute. And that same desire,
in a dumb and savage way, had been felt by the primeval
builders who reared the huge monoliths on the downs ages
before the lovely and conscious monuments of Christendom.
Stonehenge and Salisbury — a mighty gap lies between them,
but they are linked by a true resemblance.
Durham and Salisbury, it should be added, like most
English cathedrals, suffer from a paucity of stained glass.
This is partly due to Puritan destruction, but even allowing
for that, we can hardly suppose that the English artists
produced such a wealth of splendid glass as the French.
INTERIOR OF DURHAM CATHEDRAL
THE NEW ARCHITECTURE 91
And the strange effect of the colours on a grand scale is one of
the most moving elements in mediaeval architecture. It can
transport the imagination of the beholder, directly and
mysteriously, into another world, and certainly the most
overwhelming examples of its power are to be found in
France (see below, at the end of the chapter).
In Italy, from the twelfth century onward, the new hfe
overflowed abundantly into other spheres, but, as in England
and France, it is in architecture that we see it first. And from
the outset ItaHan architecture had a markedly distinct
character. It was, certainly, " Romanesque " like the others,
but it took its own way in developing the round-headed
Roman arches and the long straight lines of the Roman
basilica, and it developed them with a fine precision quite
unlike anything Northern and at the same time tenderer
than anything classical, marked indeed at its best by a sense
of form derived perhaps from Greece and Rome, but
warmed by a religious faith that Greeks and Romans never
knew, and irradiated, at its best, by an unsurpassed fantasy.
The clear severity of outline in the facade of San Miniato,
or the noble six-sided Baptistery at Florence, so beloved of
Dante, " il mio bel San Giovanni," do recall the stately,
austere rhythms of Virgil and Lucretius, but, once inside the
Baptistery walls, we are aware that the grand lines of
dome and gallery are aglow with the luminous dimness of
mosaic and marble, dark and light at once, as though a veined
inverted tulip-flower hung over the heads of the worshippers.
The splendours of St. Mark's at Venice were, we know, in
part directly inspired by the Church of the Apostles at
Constantinople, itself inspired by the Mother Church of Santa
Sophia — but the fairy domes of St. Mark have an aerial
lightness utterly different from the sternness of any Byzantine
exterior. Both without and within, St. Mark's is finished like
a jewel, and indeed much the same might be said of almost
all Itahan architecture at this time. Nothing is left rough,
nothing uncouth, any feeling for the grotesque is mellowed
into fancifulness, any extravagance subdued, until indeed
the Northerner, with his love for romantic mystery and strange
92 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
contrasts of tragedy and farce, may be tempted to rebel.
Ruskin, in a passage once celebrated, tells how at first he
resented the unflawed perfection of Giotto's Campanile and
thought it " meanly smooth and finished " till he came to
live beside it in summer and winter and watched it in sunlight
and moonlight, when indeed it looks like a shaft of magical
white fire held motionless against the darkness. Then he
came to place it where it should be placed, among the great
things of the world, still feeling, and glad to feel, the sharpness
of the contrast between the suave loveliness shed from " that
serene height of mountain alabaster, coloured like a morning
cloud and chased like a sea-shell," and the grandeur of a
grey English cathedral, cliff-like among the green lawns and
waving trees.
It would, however, be a capital error, and go near confusing
the unique value of visible form with that of spiritual edifica-
tion, if we thought of mediaeval architecture as always
inspired by religious emotion. These builders had the in-
stinct for harmony in every building, religious or secular,
magnificent or humble. Under their hands a barn could
hold its own with a church. This was so throughout the
greater part of England, France, Germany, Italy. But in
Italy, perhaps, the instinct was most widely spread, and
certainly it is in Italy that the ravages of rebuilding have
left least trace on the everyday dwellings. To-day there are
still places, as in Siena or Venice, where the wanderer lingers
to look simply at wall and angle and chimney-pot, his steps
trammelled by sheer beauty, so compelling is the grace that
lives in form and proportion and in them alone. Nor is the
proportion only in details, but in the harmony of each city
as a whole.
Many points in Italian religious architecture, as for example
the details in Giotto's Campanile, take us back to the influence
of France. For it was from France that the pointed style,
the so-called Gothic, first came over the Alps, and France,
furthermore, was before Italy in the mastery of sculpture.
It was not till the second half of the thirteenth century
{flor. 1260) that Italy produced in Niccolo Pisano a sculptor
SOUTH TRANSEPT OF CHARTRES CATHEDRAL
THE NEW ARCHITECTURE 93
of the first rank, and it was long before otliers followed him,
while he himself, there is reason to think, owed at least as
much to French work as to the rediscovery of classic.
Certainly as early as the twelfth century the French builders
of Chartres show an amazing power in the treatment of their
figures, both in themselves and in their relation to the
architecture, concentrated and clustered as they are round
the three great portals, leaving the precipitous lines of the
building overhead untouched and free. Nowhere is the power
of characterization inherent in mediaeval sculpture better
seen than at Chartres, making the building, together with its
noble structure and the uneartlily splendour of its glass, one
of the most impressive in the world. The figures do not
surpass, though they often recall, in purity and strength of
line and love of natural form, the best of early Greek work.
But they express emotion and individuality in a way seldom
even attempted by the Pagan sculptors. The undesigned
likeness and the difference are both startling. For example,
the movement and the draperies of the angels raising the
Virgin after death are astonishingly like those of the attendant
nymphs in the " Birth of Aphrodite " on the so-called
" Ludovisi Throne," but the face of the dead woman shows
a new thing, the look of ineffable security that the Church
promised to those who died trusting in the promises. We
have only to compare the finest of the pathetic sepulchral
slabs at Athens to feel the difference in the age of faith.
Yet — and here we see what makes Chartres a treasure-book
of knowledge for the Middle Ages — the sculptors with all
their devotion show us other sides essential to a solid view.
Figures of clerics and monks, anything but ideal, are modelled
with an observation at once so incisive and so restrained that
we wonder how far the delicate irony is conscious. We are
shown not only the high-minded intellectual, but the domineer-
ing fanatic, the priest who is also pre-eminently a debonair
man of the world, and the foolish young deacon who has not
stamina enough for workaday life. We learn to know them
here as we might from the pages of Chaucer. Chaucerian,
too, is the outlook on mundane things, the tolerant amusement
94 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
with which different types of worldly womanhood are given :
the spoilt young beauty, or the queen of lofty charm
and intellect, gracious, supercilious, and remote. Moreover,
together with this zest for life are signs of the renewed thirst for
knowledge, scientific, philosophic, all-encompassing : the thirst
which had not been felt in its fullness since the days of Greece,
and which already in this early Revival — long before what
is usually called the Renaissance — could recognize something
of its true kinship with Greece. Pythagoras, Aristotle,
Euclid, their figures are thought with good reason to hold
an honoured place at Chartres,
Still it is " other- worldhness " after all that is the dominant
note. As in the Baptistery at Florence, so here, and indeed
far more than so, we experience an actual shock of awe on
entering the building. The light of common day has gone :
something apocalyptic meets us in the long aerial lines ht
by colours unimaginable, one would have said, on earth.
Not only is each window a glory in itself, but, consciously or
unconsciously, the whole scheme has been built up in a
harmony to enhance, subtly and impressively, the rehgious
appeal of the Church and her ritual. At the entrance of the
nave the colours on either side, though always intense, strange,
and rich, are, compared with what is to come, in a lower and
quieter key. Then at the centre there blaze out from the
transepts majestic, unearthly figures in flaming scarlet and
gold beneath rose-windows bright with purple. Beyond in
the ambulatory of the chancel the colours recall those in
the nave, but are warmer and deeper, and, finally, in the
tall windows that close the apse high shafts of silver and
pale amethyst send down their clear light on the culminating
station of the priest.
The effort of the artists in the service of the Church to
symbolize something that included the whole of human life,
and went far beyond it, has never been more nearly achieved
than at Chartres. It is easy to credit the records that the
whole countryside toiled at the building, for the whole
building is an expression, at once ordered and spontaneous,
of a vast and unifying faith.
HEAD OF THE VIRGIN LYING DEAD
(From a porch of Chartres Cathedral)
CHAPTER XIV
THE NEW LIFE IN ITALY: GIOTTO AND
ST. FRANCIS
THE variety at Chartres may help us to realize how
charged with varied emotions the Middle Ages could
be, emotions often conflicting and strugghng either
for unity or mastery. Three men, beside the builders of such
monuments as Chartres, Giotto, Dante, and Chaucer, may be
taken as types of genius working, in different ways, for unity.
Giotto (i267(?)-i337), one of the greatest artists who ever
Hved, appeals to us also as a great humanist. The shepherd
boy of Fiesole entered into, and enriched enormously, the
new inheritance of painting opened up to him by his master
Cimabue (i24o(?)-i303), who, in his turn, had taken over the
accomplished Byzantine tradition and filled it with a fresh
and tender life. The portrait of St. Francis, in the fresco at
Assisi, due either to Cimabue or a pupil and based apparently
on a fair record of the saint's bodily presence, is at once
intimate and grand, noble in design, and instinct with the
impress of a singularly attractive personality. Vasari's
charming story of Cimabue's Madonna being carried in
triumph through the streets of Florence bears witness to
the enthusiasm for expressive form and colour now aUve
in Italy, an enthusiasm that was to bring forth the most
perfect painting ever known in Europe.
Giotto, carrying on his master's work, laid the best founda-
tions both for the decorative achievement and the dramatic.
Nothing could be finer than his glowing, luminous colour, his
sense of balance and broad rhythm, or the subtle and majestic
95
96 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
simplicity of his contours — especially in his latest and grandest
period as shown in Santa Croce at Florence and the Arena
Chapel at Padua. But from the very first he shows also an
intensity, sincerity, and breadth of sympathy to win all hearts.
Nothing can surpass his feeling for the sweet and poignant
domesticities of marriage and motherhood. It is characteristic
of him to delight in the touching legend of Joachim and
Anna, long childless, and, in their old age, separated by the
misguided Priest, to be reunited at last by the Angel of God,
who sends them to meet each other at the Golden Gate, and
comforts them with the promise of a child, Mary the Mother of
the Lord. At the same time Giotto is unsurpassed as an inter-
preter of the Franciscan story, the legend of a Saint vowed to
celibacy and self-denial. Not that Giotto shared the Francis-
can faith : there are verses of his extant in which he smiles
openly at any worship of poverty, and when he paints St.
Francis giving his purse to the beggar, the cunning depicted
in the sturdy rogue's face tells us plainly that the painter
understood well enough the abuses of indiscriminate alms-
giving. But he loved the boundless love of Francis for all
things living and even for things we call inanimate, the love
that made him conquer his natural loathing and nurse the
lepers — " the Lord Himself did lead me among them, and I
had compassion upon them " ^ — the love that made men fancy
he could tame wolves and win the birds to join with him in
worship, the love that sings all through his Canticle.
The modern mingling of reverence for St. Francis and
criticism of his doctrine is curiously like what we can con-
jecture of Giotto's attitude, and in more points than one
Francis himself bears a resemblance to a modern man of
genius, Leo Tolstoy. Both men raised a burning protest
against the unspoken belief that a man's life consists in the
abundance of his possessions — to Francis a breviary was
already more than enough for a true friar to possess — both of
them went back to primitive Christianity in exalting brotherly
love even to the neglect of all other " active " virtues — both,
1 In " The Mirror of Perfection." Also in the " Life " by Thomas
of Celano.
THE KISS OF JUDAS
(From a fresco by Giotto, Padua)
THE NEW LIFE IN ITALY 97
though Francis far more than Tolstoy, looked to Death as the
Guide into a vaster world and claimed for man that his real
greatness lay in union with a God greater than himself. Both,
by the sharpness of their negations, all but cut themselves off
from the very civilization which supported them ; both were
followed by a few whole-hearted disciples and by a far greater
multitude giving them a reverence which nevertheless they
could not square with their own workaday creed. Both, by
their espousal of humility and submission, tended to hamper
the growth of independence. We see this again, and still more
strongly in the influence of St. Dominic, the Spanish contemp-
orary of Francis (Franciscan Order founded i2og, Dominican
1213). That Dominic was the first founder of the Inquisition
is admitted, and there can be little question that " The Hounds
of God " {Domini Canes), in spite of their services to thought
— for they were a learned Order — did infinite harm in height-
ening the fanaticism ready to flame up in Spain's devotion,
always ardent of itself and inevitably excited by the struggle
with the alien Moslems. The relentless crusade against the
free-thinking, and indeed often wild-thinking heretics who
centred at Albi, in the brilliant, restless civilization of
Provence, was actively supported by Dominic, and it is the
first organized persecution on a large scale of Christians by
Christians, full of ill omen for the future, even if we admit real
cause for alarm in the subversive theories of the persecuted.
Tyranny joined with bigotry in the attack.
Years after Francis and Dominic, Machiavelli, with his
accustomed insight, notes the support that the doctrine of
submission could give to tyranny, at the same time paying
the founders full honour for their faith in Christianity and the
succour they gave to Christian institutions.
" For had not this religion of ours been brought back to its
origins by St. Francis and St. Dominic, it would have been
utterly destroyed. They, by their voluntary poverty and
their imitation of Christ, rekindled in men's minds the dying
flame of faith ; and their Rules saved the Church from the
fate prepared for her by the evil lives of the great clergy.
Living in poverty themselves, and gaining authority with the
7
98 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
people, they made them beheve it was wrong to speak ill even
of what is wrong ; and that it must be right to obey our rulers,
who, if they sin, should be left to the judgment of God."
" A teaching," adds Machiavelli, " which encourages rulers to
behave as wickedly as they like, for they have no fear of a
punishment which they cannot behold and in which they do
not believe. Nevertheless it is this renewal which has main-
tained, and still maintains, our religion."^
The divided loyalty which appears even in this late passage,
recognizing one rule to live by and one to revere, was very
characteristic of the ferment in the mediaeval spirit from the
twelfth century onwards, avid as it was beginning to be of
secular knowledge and earthly splendour, conscious that the
fullness of both would never satisfy man. But the spirit
cannot rest in a divided loyalty either of thought or feeling.
An artist like Giotto, through the sheer strength of his
humanity, his hold on the inner links of beauty, could achieve
a reconciliation of feeling, but a reconciliation of thought was
needed also. And this, to some real extent, was achieved,
though achieved, as we shall see, at a price.
1 "Discourses on Livy," Bk. III. c. i. Tr. based on that of N. H.
Thomson.
CHAPTER XV
THE PHILOSOPHICAL OUTLOOK OF THE MIDDLE
AGES
DRAWING alike on Pagan thought and early Christian,
the mediaeval thinkers built up a unifying system
which culminates for us in the writings of Dante, and
that system, broken as it is, will always have light for the
world. It goes back, along one line, to Aristotle. That
" master of those who know," working on the basis laid down
by Plato, developed, as we have already suggested, a view of
things which, whatever its imperfection, could scarcely fail
to inspire that eager world, and can be full of inspiration for
us even now.
Putting the gist of it into modern words, we may summarize
it roughly as follows : First, looking at the physical world,
Aristotle held that if we could understand motion in its
ultimate nature we should realize that it was an expression of
vital energy, not indeed the highest expression, but still a
genuine expression, and furthermore, that if we were to
conceive motion in its entirety we must conceive it as in some
sense curvilinear and returning on itself. This is because we
can neither grasp as a whole a sheer unlimited movement in
unlimited space — " an infinite regress," to use the technical
phrase — nor yet can we admit any arbitrary limit set to space
or movement from without. But circular movement might
seem to have a principle of limitation in itself, being neither
unhmited nor externally limited but as it were self-limited.
Such a movement Aristotle and his followers beheved to be
the movement of the heavenly bodies, and it may be worth
99
100 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
noticing, first, how close, this belief is, after all, to the
Copemican theory, and, next, how significantly, from time to
time in the history of thought, theories as to a possible curva-
ture of space have been propounded as suggesting a solution
for the problems of the mathematical infinite.
Further, Aristotle looked on the movement of the heavenly
bodies (which started all other movement) as itself aroused
by a conscious desire for the Absolute Good, the stimmum
honiim, which is also God. Aristotle did, indeed, actually
conceive the highest stars as living and thinking beings far
greater than man, a.conception that, as it stands, we certainly
cannot accept to-day ; probably it was not even accepted
by most men of his own time, still less, so far as we know, by
mediaeval thinkers. Yet, in spite of the fallacies of a crude
anthropomorphism, we must admit that we do not seem
able to understand any ultimate activity in itself except after
the analogy of desire for " what is good or seems good," nor
feel complete satisfaction in any explanation that fails to
show us not only that a thing is there, but that it is good for
it to be there. To us, as to Greeks and mediaevalists, the
starry heavens still seem in a special way to proclaim the
glory of God. Something deep in us responds to the line with
which Dante closes his " Drama of God," the poet in Paradise
finding his desire and will at one with —
" The Love that moves the sun and all the stars."
This movement, in Aristotle's scheme, is communicated,
mechanically, through contact between one sphere and
another, from the highest circle of the furthest stars down to
our own earth. And there it stimulates a pregnant movement
in the four natural elements (the Hot, the Cold, the Wet, and
the Dry), elements which possess already, each in itself, an
inherent principle of activity, a principle among the many
manifestations of what Aristotle calls Nature, Physis {(pvaig).
Such a principle constitutes the essence of every natural
object, being something that causes the thing to possess a
character of its own, not simply one imposed on it from
without. And this principle, once more, is conceived on the
MEDIEVAL PHILOSOPHY 101
analogy of desire. Even throughout what we call the in-
animate world, and in its lowest forms, this principle manifests
itself by the tendency of each natural thing to persist in being
what it is, the conatiis in siio esse perscverari as Spinoza
phrased it centuries later. A higher manifestation appears in
the living world of plants and animals, where the natural force
not only makes for persistence but enables the organism to
grow, to use the surroundings for its own advantage, present
and future. Higher still, in the world of human consciousness,
the natural man not only grows, but, being definitely conscious
and able to direct his will, can set before himself an ideal of
how he desires to grow and, within limits, attain to it.
From lowest to highest each natural object, creature, soul,
reflects so far as it can some aspect, some form, or idea, or
thought of God. Man is the highest creature in the scale that
we know on earth, though far from the highest possible.
Thus in a sense the love for God, the thirst for diverse
forms of perfection, is the motive power of the whole universe,
" that sustaining Love
Which through the web of being bhndly wove
By man and beast and earth and air and sea
Burns bright or dim, as each are mirrors of
The fire for which all thirst."
Shelley may be found an admirable commentator on Plato,
Aristotle, and the mediaevalists, indeed on all Natural Mystics,
ancient, mediaeval, or modem.
In any case there can be no doubt that this vast and
elaborate scheme, whatever may be thought of its truth,
fired the mind of Europe afresh when Europe awoke from her
stormy sleep. And not the mind of Europe alone or even
first. The thinkers of Islam, still full of Mohammed's belief
that the whole universe was the work of one God and there-
fore that nature and the joys of sense were somehow conse-
crate, had, as we saw, already seized on what they could of
Aristotle's teaching, brought to them, strangely enough,
through Syria and Persia by Christian heresiarchs banished
from Orthodox Constantinople in the early centuries of our
era. Finally at Cordova in the twelfth century a chmax was
102 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
reached in the work of Averroes, the commentator on Aristotle,
" Averrois che il gran commento feo," Averroes whom Dante
saw in Limbo together with his precursor Avicenna and —
fit companions for the two — the Hellenic and Hellenistic
founders of medicine, Hippocrates and Galen, with other
sages of the past, all honouring the master Aristotle, lit by
the one circle of light in that dark land, an oasis of green
rolling meadows within a seven-walled castle,
" An open place, full of clear light, and lofty."
(" Inferno." Canto IV.)
Averroes may have been, and was, severely criticized in detail
by Christian scholastics, but none the less his genius, though
hampered by ignorance of Greek, did stimulate with splendid
results the influence of Aristotle on Christendom, and this
towards the belief, at once rational and mystical, that man
by training his reason, his will, and his powers of contempla-
tion could attain an ineffable union with that Supreme Reason
which is God. " The noblest worship that can be paid to God
lies in the knowledge of His works leading us to the know-
ledge of Himself in all His reality." ^ For Averroes there
was nothing inherently impossible in any creature attaining
this union. But in point of fact he looks on it as only attained
by a few chosen spirits among mankind. " It depends,"
writes Renan in his brilliant book, " on a kind of elective
Grace."
" Grace " — ^the very word leads us to the typical Christian
doctrine of the time. It has been said,^ and truly, that in the
early centuries the leading ideas of the Church were Sin and
Redemption, while from the day of the Dominican monk,
Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), they come to be Nature and
Grace, and the God of Grace is also the God of Nature. None
the less, Grace is higher than Nature. " It does not destroy
Nature," but it " perfects Nature," " Gratia naturam non
tollit, sed perficit." The natural man alone cannot attain
full blessedness : he must be endued afresh with power
^ Quoted by Renan, "Averroes et I'Averroisme."
^ By Baron Fr. von Hiigel.
MEDIEVAL PHILOSOPHY 103
from on high. " No created creature has sufficient strength
to win Eternal Life, unless the Supernatural Gift of Grace
be added to him " (Qu. 114A, 2).
The likeness to, and the difference from, Averroes appear
even in these brief quotations. Averroes, like Aristotle him-
self, is far more rationalist ; he has only a hint, as we saw,
of anything approaching a theory of supernatural grace,
while the reliance on grace is absolutely essential to Aquinas.
Averroes further, again like Aristotle, cared little for indi-
vidual immortality ; while to the Christians of the Middle
Ages that hope was all in all.
In point of fact, the thoughts stimulated through Averroes
prompted Europe to widely different and often jarring views :
to the orthodoxy of Aquinas and Dante, to the eclecticism of
the Emperor Frederick II, to the bold experimentation of
Roger Bacon, the Franciscan friar trained at Oxford and
Paris, perhaps even, five hundred years later, to the " God-
intoxicated " Pantheism of the Jew Spinoza.
It was all but inevitable that conflict should mark Christen-
dom's reception of the new learning, coming, as it did, largely
from infidel sources. Two powers had long been at work
among the faithful, the reviving desire for reason and the old
dread of rationalism. The study of Greek thought had never
absolutely died out in the Christian Church : the Platonic
echoes in St. Paul had been taken up and intensified by many
of the early Fathers, Greek themselves. Even in the Dark
Ages, the Irishman, John Erigena (sometimes called John the
Scot), could deepen the Platonic tradition, though it is true
that the appearance of such a thinker in the ninth century
was, as Wicksteed observes, something of a portent. And
when the sap of intellect and imagination was rising high once
more, the Crusades, from their first inception in 1095, had
helped, in spite of many drawbacks, to widen Europe's out-
look both towards the Present and the Past. On the other
hand, there were men like St. Bernard of Clairvaux (1091-
1153), endowed with eloquence and intellect — his preaching
for the Crusades was famous over Europe — and yet one to
whom all secular learning still seemed a worldly snare fettering
104 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
his spiritual advance.^ The struggle between him and
Abelard towards the middle of the twelfth century marks
already (though Abelard knew no more of Aristotle than
some of the work on logic), an acute stage in the conflict
between the reborn curiosity of reason putting all things to
the test and the fervid, unquestioning piety whose watchword
was, " Faith is not Opinion but Assurance." ^
What would men like Bernard's followers think of paltering
with the views and doubts of Moslem infidels ? Thus both
in the twelfth century and the thirteenth we are faced with
sharp contrasts. As early as the opening of the twelfth we
find Bernhard of Chartres, student of Plato and Aristotle,
speaking with enthusiasm of the ancients : " We are dwarfs
mounted on the shoulders of giants ; we see more and further
than they, but not because of our own sight or stature."^
Thierry, Bemhard's younger brother. Master at Chartres
in II2I, accepts all he can of the scientific inheritance pre-
served or expanded by the Arabs, the medical tradition, for
example, going back to Hippocrates, Ptolemy's work on
astronomy, and the use of the zero number, either discovered
by the Arabs themselves, or, as some hold, taken over from
Indian thinkers, a discovery invaluable for mathematics.
In Spain the Archbishop of Toledo, Raymond, follows up the
example of Chartres by founding a whole school of workers,
many of them Jews, to translate the Arab treatises into Latin
and diffuse them over Europe.
On the other hand, we find the Church authorities insist-
ing at the University of Paris that books on the teaching of
Aristotle must be burnt. It is in the thirteenth century and
at a time of acute danger to renascent thought that two
devout Churchmen come to the rescue, the German Albertus
Magnus, Albert the Great (d. 1280), and his greater pupil, the
Italian Thomas of Aquino (d. 1274). Especially through the
work of Aquinas a way is found by which Aristotle can
definitely be reconciled with Christian dogma. Up to a
1 " Life of S'. Bernard," by Cotter Morison, p. 1 1. ^Op. cit. p. 317 ff.
^ .4^ ;f^ John of Salisbury, "Metalogicus," III. 4, quoted by Uebersveg,
" Geschichte der Philosophic, " Vol. 2.
MEDIAEVAL PHILOSOPHY 105
certain point Aristotle may be trusted ; after that, and in
matters where his insight failed, Revelation and Faith take
up the tale. Henceforward devout Christians need not fear
to study Aristotle, so long as they do not study him inde-
pendently. A victory for thought is won, but the limitation
indicates it will be a Pyrrhic victory, to be paid for at a
heavy price.
Yet it is easy to understand the timidity of Churchmen.
The Sicihan court of the Emperor Frederick H may furnish,
amid much they could welcome, alarming examples of what
they feared. Nowhere did the new teaching find a more
ready welcome than with him : his masterful, many-sided
intellect was eager to lay all lands under contribution. At
Naples he founded a University, " so that those who hunger
for knowledge might find within the kingdom the food for
which they were yearning." ^
It was at this University that Thomas Aquinas studied
as a lad, and, after Frederick's death, came back to teach :
it was there that the translation of Averroes' Commentary
on Aristotle's Logic was completed by a Provencal Jew, who
prayed that the Messiah might come in the reign of his patron,
while Michael Scott, damned as a wizard by Dante, " magni-
fied the renown " of Dante's own " Philosopher," according
to Roger Bacon, by bringing to the knowledge of " the
Latins " his work " on natural science and mathematics." ^
There is something, no doubt, singularly fine in this large-
ness of intellectual sympathy. It recalls the unifying grasp
of Frederick's own Norman forefathers. Travellers to-day
can marvel at the twelfth century Cathedral of Monreale, above
Palermo, built high among the lonely hills, like an enchanted
Castle of the Grail, where the first impression suggests the
force of Norman builders, while within the church stand
ancient columns, the upper walls are brilliant with majestic
Byzantine mosaics, and the fairylike cloisters and fountain
of the adjacent court reveal the influence of Arab fantasy.
Frederick himself, even if we credit all the tales of his gibes
1 Grant, op. cit. p. 290.
2 Renan. op. cit. p. 204. " Opus Majus," pp. 36-37.
106 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
at the clergy and the friars, seems to have dreamt in his
devouter moods, hke Roger Bacon himself, of "an enlarged
and renovated Catholicism which should bind together and
incorporate all that was best and noblest in Hebrew, Greek,
and Arabic tradition." ^
But assuredly, audacious and self-indulgent as he was,
Frederick was not the man to enlarge the bounds of know-
ledge without scandal. A soldier who persisted in a Crusade
when excommunicated by the Pope, an Emperor who crowned
himself King of Jerusalem with his own hands, an amorist
whose mistresses were chosen from East and West, such a
one would hardly have been surprised to learn that Dante,
in spite of all that Frederick's enterprise had achieved for his
own master Aquinas, in spite of Frederick's own savage laws
against heresy, put him down into the Inferno among the
heretics.
The dread of such experiments in life as those made by the
free-living, free-thinking court of Frederick, like the earlier
dread of the Albigensians, reinforced the fear naturally
inspired by any independent interpretation of Aristotle. Nor
without reason. All thought is dangerous. It could not be
a force for freedom if it were not. Roger Bacon, girding at
the work of Albertus and Aquinas, was a real menace to the
calm and order of the Church. Yet it is from such encounters
that further truth arises, and Bacon's condemnation is an
ominous landmark in the chequered history of culture. A
" progressive schoolman," Bacon could admire Aristotle
profoundly, agree to call him the Philosopher par excellence,
and yet criticize him as freely as he criticized his commenta-
tors. " Aristotle made many mistakes," he will write, and
not merely mistakes judged from a theological standpoint.
In this free spirit he showed himself a truer follower of such
a master thinker than any slavish disciple. Bacon's own
service to thought, a worthy service, lay precisely in his
conviction that men must search freely for themselves, make
experiments, and ultimately, therefore, take nothing simply
on trust. Catholic doctrine shrank from this virile teaching.
^ J. Bridges on " Roger Bacon."
MEDIEVAL PHILOSOPHY 107
Bacon was condemned to silence, and the freedom of thinking
hampered for centuries. A similar, and far deeper, reaction
took place in the Mohammedan world. Renan points out
that Averroes, who had so great a following among Christians
and Jews, founded no vigorous school among the men of his
own religion, was indeed the last of the great Mohammedan
scholars, and left the field to an orthodoxy grown once again
fanatical through fear. " The fate of Islam was the fate of
Catholicism in Spain, and might have been the fate of all
Europe." ^
^ Renan, op. cit. p. 30.
CHAPTER XVI
DANTE
WE can feel the danger of reaction quite markedly
in Dante (d. 1321), the supreme representative in
poetry of medieval faith and thought. It is far
from easy to sum up this man's work, even apart from the
wealth of his genius. About the splendour of his poetry there
can be no question : he is among the chosen sublime masters.
Deeply learned in the most flawless poet of his country's
classic past, he took the humble vernacular of his own day,
and made of it a language august and simple, piercing and
delicate, fit for his winged and steadfast imagination. Some-
thing of his content can come across in a translation, but
nothing of the bright, mysterious music wherein the secret of
his heart is hidden. Furthermore, the man himself is at once
so human and so hide-bound, so compassionate and so ruth-
less, so eager for unity and the breadth of knowledge, and
yet so narrow in the exclusiveness to which he found himself
forced, that one can hardly speak of him without paradox.
Most enthusiastically he welcomes the broadest elements in
the teaching of Aquinas and his school. To a religious poet
of his depth the blessing of the Church on the good work of
the natural man as the necessary prelude to grace, and on
all the lovely works of Nature as witnesses to God, must have
brought sheer exultation. Like Wordsworth, he is happiest
when he lives " in the eye of Nature." The morning sky can
heal the wounds of Hell :
" The sweet clear sapphire of the eastern blue.
Brightening through all the calm depths of the sky
Up to the highest heaven, comforted me."
108
DANTE 109
In the system of Aquinas, where the grace given through
the Church is conceived as crowning Nature and the Nature
that turned from grace as something lost and damned, Dante
found the principle of unity on which his genius fed. The
whole of life grouped itself before him on this basis as a
terrible and triumphant drama, and, master of symbolism as
he was, he fuses physical horror with spiritual, and evanescent
beauty with eternal. The cosmical setting of his theme is
instinct with the poetry latent in science because to him time
and space and movement were manifestations of the thirst
for the Divine. The Hell he evokes is appalling because his
vision is the realization of a Power turned directly and
irretrievably against its true Good ; his Purgatory thrills
with hope because it is the place of man's spirit lifting itself
into harmony with its true self ; his Paradise is immeasurably
beyond our modern dreams of progress because he has taken
flight altogether beyond this world and found a rapture loftier
than any other poet has ever attained. It is the rapture in
the vision of absolute truth bringing absolute harmony among
all who behold it. And this vision of truth is recognized for
Nature's goal. His words in Paradise — surely the noblest
defence of doubt ever written — could stand as a motto for the
most daring of all philosophers, the thinker who counted man's
recognition of inadequacy for a sign that he had hold on
Adequate Truth, the German Hegel.
" I see well that our thought can never rest
Until it find the sunlight of that Truth
Apart from which there is no room for other.
It lies down in that Truth, when it has reached it,
Like a wild beast in its lair. And reach it can.
If not, the world's desire would be in vain.
Doubt springs from that, like a strong sucker growing
At the base of all our truth. And it is Nature
That drives us on from peak to topmost peak."
(Par. IV.. 124 ff.)
The same trust in Nature breathes through the climax of
the Purgatorio when Dante has struggled to the top of the
Mountain, and Virgil tells him that he is now the master of
himself, fit to meet Beatrice face to face, and that it has
110 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
become his bounden duty to follow his own desires. Strange
hkeness to Rabelais, across the gulf of difference ! The
summit of the Mount of Purification could be called an
" Abbaye de Thelema," a " Monastery of Man's Will " :
" Look up and see the sun that shines upon thee.
The small soft grass, the trees, the glad wild-flowers !
Henceforth thy own desire be thy guide.
The steep ways and the narrow He behind thee.
Thy Will is free now, sane, and purified :
Thou wouldst do wrong didst thou not follow it.
Obey its Rule. Behold, I make thee here
Over thyself Crowned King and Mitred Priest."
And the same sympathy with the natural thirst for know-
ledge fills the glowing passage that inspired Tennyson's
" Ulysses " and was itself inspired by echoes of the Odyssey,
where the old Wanderer tells the poet that he could not rest
at home after his retinrn, not even to comfort his aged father
and Penelope and his son, but was driven out once more by
" the thirst to see and know the world
And all the sins and splendours of mankind.
• • • • • • •
Thus I set sail
In one hght ship, with that small company
Faithful to me for ever. . . .
My comrades and myself were old and worn.
Slow travellers, when at last we reached the strait
Where Hercules set bounds to say, ' No farther ! '
' Brothers,' I said, ' now we have reached the West
After ten thousand dangers, shaU we fail
And grudge the httle left of waking life
To the great venture past the sunset gates
Into the unkno%vn world ?
Think of your birth, not bom to Hve like brutes.
But to serve thought and follow after valour.' "
(Inf. XXVI.)
Yet Ulysses is thrust down into one of the lowest circles in
Hell, imprisoned for ever in a tossing spire of flame. Here,
indeed, the modem reader, however appalled by the poet's
ruthlessness, can understand his moral sc£de. Ulysses is
DANTE 111
condemned for that spirit of lawless and treacherous intrigue
which was the curse of ancient Greece and mediaeval Italy,
killing all hope of the unified and honourable government
desired by Dante beyond all things earthly, even earthly
knowledge.
But we are revolted when we find the poet treading down
his own human pity for those unbaptized " heathen " who,
however innocent, nay, however noble, must be damned
eternally. That Dante allows one or two specified exceptions
only increases the pitiless effect of the general conclusion.
His own protest in the Heavenly Sphere of Justice is so heart-
felt and so moving that we are tempted to ask why it did not
shatter the merciless doctrine outright :
" A man is bom in India, and there's none
To speak to him of Christ, no book to teach him,
And all his acts and thoughts are good and true.
So far as Human Reason guides him, pure
In word and deed.
But he dies unbaptized.
Where is the Justice that can damn his soul ?
Was it his fault he could not learn the Faith ? "
Yet Dante bows submissively to the Angel who tells him
that so it must be, and the submission checked the sweep of
the poet's thought and stifled his tenderness until we find the
man whose compassion had made him fall fainting
" as a dead body falls "
at the doom of Paolo and Francesca, the man whose verses
drop tears of blood for the tearless agony of Ugolino, coming
himself to aid in the torture and justifying his aid. It is
impossible to forgive the spirit that made Dante break his
word to the damned soul in the desolate circle of ice, after he
had promised the unhappy wretch that he would touch his
eyes with a human hand to melt the frozen tears and let him
weep once more. It is impossible to reconcile that spirit with
the exalted rapture that closes the Paradiso when Dante
looks into the Light of God and sees within its depths
112 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
" Deep down, bound up by Love into one whole.
All that is scattered through the universe,
All things, all deeds, all natures, — in such way
That what I saw was one unbroken light."
The truth seems to be that Dante felt he could not give up
the doctrine of Hell without giving up both the inspiration of
the Bible and the inspiration of the Church, and both to him
were vital. A breach there would have been fatal to the
security of his whole system. Excessive claims of the Church,
indeed, he rejected passionately : she was not to touch the
sphere of civil government, the sphere of the Natural Man,
guided by the dictates of Natural Reason, bound to use the
sword in defence of civil justice, unable to suffer interference
with this God-ordained work. But none the less, in Dante's
view this civil government that was to embrace all Christen-
dom under the over-arching rule of the Emperor was, after
all, only the work of the Natural Reason and only made up
one-half of what man needed. The other, the better half,
lay in the search for the Beatific Vision, and of the gate to that
diviner world the Church held the keys (" De Monarchia,"
Bk. III., chaps. 8, 9, 15). It is a coherent scheme and a stu-
pendous one, but like many such it pays the price of coherence
by cutting out all that does not agree with it.
CHAPTER XVII
CHAUCER AND HIS FOREIGN TEACHERS
WIDELY different was the spirit of Chaucer half a
century later {circa 1 340-1400). Far inferior as
a poet, a fact he recognized himself, and not for a
moment to be compared with Dante as a thinker, he is infinitely
tolerant, where Dante is hardly tolerant at all, and there are
times when we feel that his sunny kindness, a kindness never
separated from shrewd insight, is more to us than all the
austere glories of the Italian. His unity is looser than Dante's,
but it is larger. Certainly it may be said that the nation
which produced Chaucer gave the better promise of unity and
peace on earth. The humorous good-nature, the sense that it
takes all sorts to make a world, this that has been the safe-
guard of English politics, is of Chaucer's very essence. Every
one who dehghts in the prologue to the " Canterbury Tales,"
with their rich fellowship of diverse characters, must feel with
Matthew Arnold : " The right comment on it is Dryden's :
' It is sufficient to say according to the proverb that here is
God's plenty.' " ^ And this liberal sense of unity springs from
Chaucer's own creative joy in all his different types, bad or
good, and some of them very bad. He does not obscure the
values : good is still good and bad bad, but he makes us feel
the human worth in them all, from the devoted single-minded
parish priest and the " verray parfit gentil knight " to the
scurrilous miller and the shameless pardnour, from " the
mincing lady Prioress " to "the broad-speaking gap-toothed
» Preface to Ward's "Poets."
8 113
114 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
wife of Bath." Coarse old profligate though the wife is, we
cannot help exulting in her cheery cry :
" But, lord Crist, when that it remembereth me
Upon my youthe and on my jolite
It tikehth me aboute myn herte-root !
Unto this day it doth my herte good.
That I have had my world as in my tyme ! " '^
There is some satisfaction in remembering that Dante
never had a chance to put the impenitent old woman into Hell.
Nor Chaucer's Cressida either. The long poem of " Troilus
and Criseyde " is of extreme interest, not only for its own
charm but because of the light it throws, along with its
original, Boccaccio's poem of " Filostrato," on the chivalric
code of love. The very errors of that code, damned without
hope by Dante, have their worth for Chaucer and for Boccaccio
as among the forces of human life. For Boccaccio, indeed,
prodigal as he is of licentious grace and abrim with the zest
of living, they have an ensnaring charm. The code was
curiously inconsistent (as in fact most codes of love have
always been) ; it had a fineness of its own in the loyal service
of the lover to his mistress, but it was vitiated by the double-
faced attitude towards marriage. It did not believe that
passion could live in wedlock, and, lusty and poetic as it was,
it had just discovered the poetry of passion. So it was ready
to forgive everything to a grande amoureuse, as the French-
speaking poet " Thomas " forgives Isolde her cruelty and
treachery because of her consuming love for Tristan.
Yet it was a devout age with all its crimes, and could not
refuse an inner homage to the sacrament of single marriage
blessed by the Church as inviolable. Between these two
loyalties the compromise is apt to be ludicrous. The lover
need not dream of marrying his mistress ; indeed, he had
better not if he wishes to keep desire at full flood, but he must
at all costs preserve the secret, for his lady will be shamed if
the truth is known, and yet the secret itself is not shameful,
1 The Prologue to the Wife of Bath's Tale, "Canterbury Tales,"
469 ff. The vowels are to be pronounced much as in French.
CHAUCER AND HIS FOREIGN TEACHERS 115
but a grace and glory of delight. The direct result was to
encourage weakness in woman and duplicity everywhere.
In nine cases out of ten she must jield, and both the lovers lie,
if they are to come up to the required standard. Chaucer,
never deceived, however indulgent, observed the good and
bad of it all \vith searching s^mipathy, and he has given us in
Criseyde exactly the charming, unstable creature, delicious
and frail, sure to be nurtured by such a code. It is scarcely
possible for her to say " No " in earnest to any ardent lover,
and just as, encouraged by her youthful uncle, the gay gallant
Pandarus, she yields to Troilus in secret against her vow of
chastity and her love of fair fame, so she yields to Diomede
against her vow of fidelity and her love of Troilus. And yet
in such a way that we cannot be stern with her ; not, that is, as
Chaucer tells the story. He has softened and subtilized his
heroine until in her mixture of tenderness and deceit, remorse
and lightness, she recalls Homer's Helen, though without
Helen's matchless dignity. Boccaccio's Griselda never feels
compunction, and openly admits to herself that she prefers a
lover to a husband.
The same free handling of a much-admired foreign model
appears in Chaucer's rendering of Patient Griselda's storj^
known to him, not in its original (and most brilliant) form in
Boccaccio's prose Decameron (which he does not appear to
have read), but as told to him in Padua by Boccaccio's friend
and sometime mentor Petrarch, the gentle lover, humanist,
and publicist, " Fraunces Petrark, the laureat poete," " the
worthy clerk," "whose rhetoryke swete enlumined al Itaille
of poetrye."
All three \\Titers have left their mark on the subject. To
Boccaccio belongs the honour, as in the Cressida story, of first
telling the tale with his unrivalled clarity and skill, and drawing
the first strong lines of the characters. Petrarch has given it
a high dignity, as Chaucer gladly acknowledged, by his sense
of the power to endure that it implies in human nature ; but
Chaucer himself does most to win our hearts by his frank
outburst of indignation at the monstrous tyranny of the
husband :
116 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
(1. 620) " O needles was she tempted in assay !
But wedded men ne knowe no mesure
Whan that they finde a pacient creature."
Likewise are we refreshed by his robust refusal to take
Griselda's lamb-Hke submission as a model for the women of
his own country. Chaucer offers indeed a classic instance of
how a poet can be formed by the loving, yet discreet and
independent, study of foreign models.
English literature, perhaps owing to the disturbance of the
Norman Conquest and the intrusion of Norman-French, was
then lagging far behind French and Italian, and Chaucer had
the wit to lay France and Italy under contribution wherever
he could. In the sheer craft of words and rhythm he owed most
perhaps to his French models. Certainly he studied them
first and his metres are taken from theirs, including even the
lovely " heroic couplet," the rhyming line of five accents in
which the " Canterbury Tales " are written and which has
been used so often since by our poets, and with such varied
effects. But it has never, we may add, been used, except
perhaps by Marlowe, with the mingled softness, lightness, and
strength given to it by Chaucer, and it is obvious that he
must have profited greatly from the liquid delicacy and
golden depth of his Italian masters, who themselves had
learnt from and then outdone the French.
CHAPTER XVIII
FRANCE, THE TROUBADOURS, AND THE
BEGINNINGS OF PROSE
INDEED, as Matthew Arnold was the first to emphasize,
although France led the way in developing the romantic
forms of verse and the Ij-tIc, following on her success in
epic, yet she never reached the heights to which some of her
scholars attained.
Where do the long-winded troubadours stand now com-
pared with Dante, Chaucer, Boccaccio ? We cannot read
their interminable couplets without effort. The character-
drawing is slight, and their moralizing, though often acute,
has lost the freshness it once had. Their greatest charm lies
perhaps in a certain flowery fancy, as in the opening of the
Roman de la Rose. Yet the slighter lyrics show greater
charm, as for example in this short- winged flight :
" Voulez-vous que je vous chant
Un chant d'amour avenant ?
Vilains nel fift mie.
Ains le fit un chevalier
Sous I'ombre d'un olivier;
Entr' les bras sa mie.
Chemisette avait de Un,
Et blanc pcHsson d'ermin,
Et bUaut de soie.
Chauccs eut de jaglolai,
Et solers de fleur de mai,
Estroitement chaucade.
Ceinturette avait de feuil
Qui verdit quand le temps mueil,
117
118 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
D'or ert boutonade.
L'ansmoniSre etait d'amour,
Li pendant furent de flour ;
Par amour fut donade.
Et chevauchoit une mule :
D 'argent ert la ferreure,
La sella ert dorade. '
Sur la croupe par derriers
Avait plante trois rosiers
Pour faire li ombrage.
Si s'en vat aval la pree :
Chevaliers I'ont encontree,
Biau I'ont saluade :
' Belle, dont estes vous nee ?
' De France sui la loee,
Du plus haut parage.
Li rossignox est mon p6re
Qui chante sur la ramee
El plus haut boscage.
La sereine ele est ma mere.^
Qui chante en la mer salee
El plus haut rivage.'
' Belle, bon fussiez vous n6e :
Bin estes emparentee
Et de haut parage.
Pleust a Deii nostre pere
Que vous me fussiez donnee
A fame esposade 1 ' "
" Will you hear a song of love.
Loyal love and true of heart ?
Churl could never make it :
Made by true knight on a day.
Underneath an olive-tree.
Clasping his own lady.
1 Cf . the Roman de la Rose, and its English rendering, where sereine is
translated by " mermayden." The word is also influenced by serin,
meaning fringilla serina. Something like a bird-woman is doubtless
intended. An echo of the delicious verse survives in the refrain still
popular in France :
" Mon pfere etait rossignol,
Ma m^re etait hirondelle."
FRANCE AND THE TROUBADOURS 119
Shift she wore of linen Hght,
Cloak of ermine snowy-white,
Surcoat soft and silken ;
Buskins bright with cloth-o'-gold,
Shoes of pearly hawthorn-buds,
Fashioned straight and slender ;
Girdle of the freshest leaves
Gathered when the woods were green ;
Clasp of it was golden ;
Hanging purse of lasses'-love
Hung by flowery chains above.
Gift of loving-kindness.
On an ambling mule she rode ;
All his hoofs were silver-shod.
And his harness gilded.
Close behind her on the croup
She had planted roses three.
Made her saddle shady.
Down she rode along the mead :
Noble knights have met the maid,
Lou ted low and asked her : —
' Fairest lady, whence come ye ? '
' France,' she said, ' has honoured me.
High in chivalrye.
My father is the nightingale.
Singing on the topmost bough
In the copse at evening,
And my mother is the bird
WTiose enchantress-voice is heard
By the salt sea- marshes.'
' High your birth, O lovely maid !
Noble parents have you had.
High in chivalrye :
Would to God our Lord that He
Gave you of His grace to me.
My own wedded lady ! ' "
That little song by an unknown author of the thirteenth
century breathes the fanciful grace of the Provencal Courts
of Love, and suggests later delightful affinities with Italian
120 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
fantasies such as Botticelli's " Masque of Spring," and later
still, with Marlowe's " Shepherd Song," where the maiden is
offered
" A belt of straw and ivy -buds
With coral clasps and amber studs."
It makes us comprehend how France captivated the poets of
other countries by her melodies, and how Brunetto Latini,
Dante's master, could, to Dante's indignation, choose her
language in preference to his own.
Yet, after all, jewels of pure poetry such as this were rare
in France and somewhat lacking in weight. Already she was
showing that her real strength was to lie in prose.
Already by the close of the twelfth century the romance
most enchanting to us nowadays is the prose idyll — ^verses
only appearing as interludes — known as " Aucassin and
Nicolette," justly celebrated, moreover, for the direct and
startling picture of peasant suffering that breaks through its
amorous blossoms. Where verse is used at any length it is
apt to be most telling when used as in the fabliaux, not to
awaken magical echoes in the heart but to point a neat moral,
or to heighten with its crisp chiming the witty brilliance won
by shrewd observation of men and animals. The peculiar
combination of fancy with dry, caustic humour that marks
the typical fable is eminently characteristic of France, as
befits the land that was to produce La Fontaine. Animal
fables are instinctive in most peoples, but France first of
modern nations gave them a polished form, and therein set
up a piquant model for all Europe.
It is curious to note, also, how early is foreshadowed her
acknowledged superiority in historical memoirs. Quite apart
from their high value as history, it is a delight to read as
literature the account given by Villehardouin (1130-1213) of
the splendid and sordid Fourth Crusade, with its pictures of
the sea " a-flower with ships " and blind old Dandolo leading
his Venetians to the sack of Constantinople, or, a century
later, Joinville's still finer story of his master, that true saint
and noble king, Louis IX. Through Joinville's eyes we can
see Louis under the oak-tree at Vincennes in the summer-
FRANCE AND EARLY PROSE 121
time, his councillors on the grass beside him, he himself
hearing case after case, always read3^ to give a helping hand
to any whose cause was pleaded amiss, or coming into his
garden at Paris, with his cloak of black taffeta and his
peacock-feathered cap, " to settle the troubles of his people,"
or giving audience in his palace to " aU the prelates of
France," who had determined to insist on his enforcing
their decrees of excommunication by confiscating the goods
of the recalcitrant. " To which the king answered that he
would gladly do so, wherever it was proved to him that they
were really in the wrong. But the bishop said that the clergy
could not possibly consent to defend their decisions before
him as though he were their judge. The king said in that case
he could not act : it would be sinning against God and against
reason if he forced men to submit when the clergy were doing
them injustice. ' I will give you an instance : the Count of
Brittany pleaded for seven years against the prelates in his
province, although he was under excommunication all the
time, and pleaded to such effect that in the end the Pope
condemned the clergy. Now if I had forced the Count to
submit in the first year, I should have sinned against God
and against him.' "
" On that the bishops gave way," writes Joinville, " and
I never heard that the demand was repeated " (c. 13, § 64).
The perfect courtesy, justice, and firmness of the king
could not be better given. The passage is a model of light
terseness, giving in easy colloquial form the gist of many a
vital struggle between the rising forces of national unity under
the king, and the desire of the clergy to unify all things under
themselves. Deservedly famous, again, is Joinville's account
of Louis' knightliness as a Crusader, but of equal interest the
pendant where he shows with characteristic freedom of speech
the harm the Crusaders did by risking disorder at home.
St. Louis and the King of Navarre both urged him to take the
cross a second time. " But I answered that while I had been
in God's service oversea their owm Serjeants had plundered
and ruined my people. And so I told them that, if I wished
to please God, I would stay where I was to help and protect
122 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
the men and women who were given into my charge " (c. 144,
§ 735).
Throughout Joinville gives us the direct sense of reahty
that so many of the romances miss, and probably were con-
tent to miss. Professor Ker points out that, curiously
enough, when French prose was at these first fine beginnings,
far away in the North the Icelanders had already developed
a prose literature, their virile sagas and histories, in a style
that has never been surpassed for strength and power to thrill.
Dramas they never wrote, but their work has dramatic
elements in the nervous intensity with which the situations
are realized and the characters left to disclose their secrets by
what they do and say themselves, not by the comments of
the narrator. The Icelanders lived far away from feudalism
and the customs of chivalry, but the high sense of honour that
is the most attractive part of chivalry never received more
poignant expression than in their writing. And together with
honour, humour and tenderness come shining through the
fierceness of their tales, tales of warriors as they are. But let
us follow the example of their sagamen and as far as possible
allow them to speak for themselves.
Here are two passages from the central situation of the
Njala, where the sons of Njal have the house burnt over their
heads by their foes, and with them perishes their father, the
old man without fear or failing, wise and gentle beyond his
fellows. At the approach of the assailants he makes his one
mistake in counsel, bidding his sons go indoors with him,
never believing that the men against them will sink so far
beneath the code of honour as to burn them house and all.
" ' Let us do,' said Helgi, ' as our father wills ; that will be
best for us.'
" ' I am not so sure of that,' says Skarphedinn, ' for now
he is " fey " ; but still I may as well humour my father by
being burnt indoors along with him.' " ^
It falls out as Skarphedinn foresaw. The passion of strife
overcomes the noble-mindedness in the leader of the band.
He gives the order for the burning. But he knows quite well
1 " Saga of Burnt Njal." c. 127. Tr. based upon Dasent's.
FRANCE AND EARLY PROSE 123
that it is a monstrous deed, and he can still honour Njal.
When the house is ablaze, " Flosi went to the door and called
out to Njal and said he would speak with him and Bergthora.
Now Njal does so and Flosi said, ' I will oi^er you, master
Njal, leave to go out, for it is unworthy that you should
burn indoors.' ' I will not go out,' said Njal, ' for I am an
old man, and little fitted to avenge my sons, and I will not
live in shame.'
" Then Flosi said to Bergthora, ' Do you come out, house-
wife, for I will for no sake burn you indoors.' ' I was given
away to Njal young,' said Bergthora, ' and I have promised
him this, that we would both share the same fate.'
" After that they both went back into the house. ' What
counsel shall we now take ? ' said Bergthora. ' We will go
to our bed,' said Njal, ' and lay us down : I have long been
eager for rest.'
" Then she said to the boy Thord, Kari's son, ' You I will
take out ; you shall not burn in here.' ' You promised me,
grandmother,' says the boy, ' that we should never part so
long as I wished to be with you ; and I would far rather die
with you and Njal than live after you.'
" Then she carried the boy to their bed, and Njal spoke to
his steward and said, ' Now you must see where we lie down,
for I mean not to stir an inch from hence, whether the reek or
the flames smart me, and so you will be able to guess where
to look for our bones.'
" The steward said he would do so. There had been an ox
slaughtered and the hide lay there. Njal told the steward to
spread the hide over them, and he did so.
" So there they lay down, both of them in their bed, and
they put the boy between them. Then they signed them-
selves and the boy with the cross, and gave over their souls
into God's hand, and that was the last word that men heard
them utter. . . .
" Skarphedinn saw how his father laid him down, and he
said, ' Our father goes early to bed, and that is what was
to be looked for, for he is an old man.' . . .
" Then the great beams out of the roof began to fall and
124 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
Skarphedinn said, ' Now must my father be dead, and I have
neither heard groan nor cough from him.' "
The Icelanders, it is true, never fulfilled their magnificent
promise and their work was little known in Europe at large
till the nineteenth century, when indeed it has inspired many,
and might be a model to many more. In the case of Ice-
land, again, a strong literature shows itself closely linked to
liberty and law. Iceland that had been a home for freedom
— men travelling West to escape being " the king's thralls "
under Harold Fairhair, and building up deliberately an ordered
commonwealth — Iceland lost her freedom through her faction-
fights and after the thirteenth century we have no more
memorable works. " By law," the far-seeing Njal had said,
" by law shall our commonwealth be built up and by law-
lessness wasted and spoiled." It was the waster that won.
But Iceland and France between them foreshadow how
great a part the prose of realism was to play in Europe's
imaginative life.
Meanwhile it is important not to undervalue the influence
of the romances, whether in verse or, as later, in richly adorned
prose. The twelfth-century romance of " Tristan and Isolde,"
for example, part of the Arthurian cycle to which we have
already referred, appears to have taken its first compact form
in the French tongue and under French inspiration, and in
this form it captivated Europe. We find copies of it, faithful
or free, in German, Czech, Italian, as well as in later English
and French. And the charm has lasted to our own day.
Wagner's opera, with all its modern complexity, is but one
more variation on the old theme of that dominating, devouring
passion, compounded of good and evil, warring against other
loyalties, and only through the sacrifice of death working
itself free at last.
The internationalism of the romances is a point not to be
missed. The texture of " Tristan and Isolde " shows threads
that are traceable some to Brittany and the Norman Coast,
some to the Celts of Cornwall, Wales, and Ireland. And
finally it is to the English Malory — English, perhaps of Welsh
extraction — writing after an interval of three centuries, that
FRANCE AND EARLY PROSE 125
the modern reader will look for what is intrinsically most
valuable in the whole cycle of the Round Table stories.
Malory, guided by the most delicate taste, sense of honour,
and sense of humour, worked freely on the ancient material,
the problematic " French book " and the like, and in his
" Morte d' Arthur " he has selected, polished, and enriched,
until, to quote the stately words of his printer, Caxton, the
reader finds before him " many joyous and pleasant histories,
and noble and renowned acts of humanity, gentleness, and
chivalry." ^
At the sorrowful close, when the fair fellowship of the Table
is dissolved in treachery and bloodshed, Malory rises to great
heights. Few scenes in romance have more pathetic dignity
than the farewell of the once guilty, but always lovable,
Lancelot and Guenever, after the Queen has become a nun
and " taken her to perfection." " Therefore, Sir Launcelot,
I require thee and beseech thee heartily, for all the love that
ever was betwixt us, that thou never see me more in the
visage, and I command thee on God's behalf that thou for-
sake my company, and to thy kingdom turn again and keep
well thy realm from war and wrake ; for as well as I have
loved thee, mine heart will not serve me to see thee, for
through thee and me is the flower of kings and knights
destroyed."
It is not surprising that Tennyson felt the impulse to recast
this splendid stuff in modern poetry ; but the attempt was
only half successful, sentimentality too often taking the place
of Malory's solidity.
We have overrun our dates in this outline of Romantic
story and must return.
1 Quoted by A. Lang in "Hist, of Eng. Lit.," g.v. for an admirable
account of the work.
CHAPTER XIX
THE PROTEST OF THE PEASANTS
CONTEMPORARY with Chaucer was William Langland
(or Langley) [circa 1362-1400), a writer far more insular
and far less poetic but still a true poet and one always
noteworthy for the light he throws on the time. In the
remarkable allegory where the visionary seeks after Piers
Plowman, that second Peter, the ideal man of labour and love,
a reincarnation as it were of the Saviour's Spirit, coming to
rebuild His Church and teach men how work and prayer
should fitly go together, we can discern Long Will himself
struggling with the real, heavy problems round him, wondering,
sincerely and sympathetically, how to relieve poverty among
the labourers without encouraging idleness, how to reform the
abuses of the over-wealthy clergy and the lazy friars without
destroying the unity of the Church, how to ensue peace and
ensure justice. Like Bunyan, whom he much resembles,
calling unceasingly on men to repent, Langland calls them to
labour and bear with one another, clinging in the confidence
of the seer to the power of the spirit, fighting as Christ had
fought, His thirst still unslaked, " for mannes soules sake " :
" Was never e werre in this worlde
Ne wikkednesse so kene
That ne love, an him liste,
To laughynge ne broughte,
And pees, thorw pacience,
AUe perilles stopped."
(Passus xviii. fin.).
{" There was never war in this world nor wickedness so fierce that
Love, if he chose, could not turn it to laughter, and Peace, through
Patience, make an end of all perils.")
126
THE PROTEST OF THE PEASANTS 127
But there was to be enough and to spare of war and wicked-
ness before there was any sign of peace or patience. Both
France and England were thrown back in their development by
class war and by national war. Of Piers Plowman's poet, writes
Andrew Lang (op. cit. p. io8), " the moral advice was wasted
on Lancastrian England, which rushed into the madness of
the fifteenth century ; the burning of Lollards ; the attempt
to conquer France — as vain as unjust — the burning of Joan
of Arc ; the twenty years of defeat and disgrace which followed
and avenged that crime ; the fury of the Wars of the Roses,
the butcheries, the murders ; and, accompanying all this,
the dull prolix stuff that did duty for poetry and literature."
The Peasants' Revolt (1381) — and the problem of the
peasants is uppermost in Langland's mind — forms a well-
known landmark in the history of England. It may have
occurred while Langland was actually WTiting and possibly
been inspired by something of his own ideal, though he is far,
as it has been pointed out, from ideahzing the labourers.^
The movement has a definite place in the development of
thought. Here, practically for the first time, we have the
definite emergence of the demand, backed by force, that the
humblest manual worker should be counted as a free man
and have his right recognized to a living wage. The rising was
not the least among the movements making for freedom in a
century marked by Chaucer, Wycliffe, and the Lollards.
Parallel with it came the Jacquerie in France, fiercer,
bloodier, and more ineffectual. And if through the serious
' Kenneth Sisam in an excellent little book, " Fourteenth Century
Prose and Verse " (Oxford University Press), writes : " It must not be
supposed that Layland idealized the labourers. Their indolence and
improvidence are exposed as unsparingly as the vices of the rich. . . .
Still, such an eager plea for humbleness, simplicity, and honest labour
could not fail to encourage the political hopes of the poor, and we see
in John Ball's letter that ' Piers Plowman ' had become a catchword
among them."
It is possible, however, that " Piers Plowman," was a popular
mythological figure before the poem was written. Into the compli-
cated questions about the full authorship of the poem — whether more
than one man had a hand in the work — we cannot enter here.
128 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
eyes of Langland we perceive something of the discontent
fermenting in England, we should remember the picture of
peasant suffering two centuries earlier that met us in " Aucassin
et Nicolette."
The Rising in England, though beaten down, came at one
time near success, and in any case it foreshadows the end in
England of the worst features in feudalism, the slavery of the
lowest land- worker to his lord. We must remember, never-
theless, that the change from serfdom to the " free " wage-
earning status had been going on for a good century before
the Rising in the informal English fashion, quite unsystematic,
and quite as much with an eye to profit as to principle.
Wage-labour was found to be more " paying " than forced
labour. Landlords were glad to let their villeins buy them-
selves off if they could hire free labourers instead. It was the
English translation into hard cash of the deep moral summed
up in the Homeric adage, " A man loses half his manhood
when he falls into slavery."
But the process was wofuUy tedious and incomplete, and
the idea of a fairer distribution of wealth was only the hope of
a few, a hope to which the conscience of the modern world
answers far more readily, however much its practice lags
behind. It would startle Froissart the brilliant and aristo-
cratic chronicler, citizen of France and friend of England,
lover of lords and ladies and all the pomp of chivalry, to know
how a modem poet and reformer could sympathize with the
Dream of John Ball and his plea for enlarging the bounds of
liberty and unity :
" Ah, ye good people, the matter goeth not well to pass in
England nor shall not do till everything be common and that
there be no villains nor gentlemen, but that we may be all
unied together, and that the lords be no greater masters than
we be. What have we deserved, or why should we be thus
kept in serfage ? We be all come from one father and one
mother, Adam and Eve, whereby can they say or shew that
they be greater lords than we, saving that they cause us to
win and labour for that they dispend ? They are clothed in
velvet and camlet furred with grise, and we be vestured with
THE PROTEST OF THE PEASANTS 129
poor cloth : they have their wines, spices and good bread, and
we have the drawing out of the chaff and drink water : they
dwell in fair houses, and we have the pain and travail, rain
and wind in the fields ; and by that that cometh of our labours
they keep and maintain their estates, and without we do
readily their service, we be beaten." (Vol. I, c. 381, Lord
Berner's tr.)
The passage has been the text for William Morris's most
poetic and moving romance. And as readily as Morris will
a modem historian sympathize with the demands, anything
but extravagant, that the men put forward. The gist of
them, writes Trevelyan,i "complete abolition of serfage,"
and " the commutation of all servile dues for a rent of four-
pence an acre," would have done much for " the creation of
a truly independent peasantry such as has never been known
in rural England." These demands the King in his alarm
actually conceded, together with a free pardon to all the
rebels, but neither concession was ever seriously meant. When
the chance came the promises were flung to the winds and the
rebellion ruthlessly crushed.
And although the process of manumission was resumed
until under the Tudors every man was free, the immediate
result was increased hostility between the classes. The land-
lords found fresh ways to keep the upper hand. If the old
labour made itself scarce and dear, there were new methods
of exploiting the land without it. There was an ample mar-
ket for wool on the Continent among the weavers
" of Yprcs and of Ghent,"
and sheep needed less care than men. The great landowners
began to evict their tenants, often without the semblance of
law, or enclose for their own use the ancient common land,
and generally, wherever they could to advantage, turn the
plough-land into pasture. For this no doubt there was a
certain amount of economic justification. In itself the wool
trade between England and Flanders was profitable to both
parties, and to the world at large. To ensure its safety was
» "The Age of Wyclifie,"
9 ^
130 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
the one justification for resuming the campaign against France
that Edward III had begun and that developed into the
disastrous Hundred Years' War (1337-1453). But just as
that war went far beyond all reason and justice, so did the
great nobles despoil the labourers beyond all right that could
be pleaded on economic grounds.
There seemed no voices left to respond to the appeal of
Wycliffe, who, like Langland, loved order but hated oppression.
His plea for human charity and ecclesiastical poverty went
unregarded. The fear of sedition reinforced, and was re-
inforced by religious intolerance, and Wycliffe himself, a father
of free criticism and a leader in the translation of the Bible,
found that he needed all his prudence to escape active perse-
cution. Nor were the nobles content to tyrannize over the
poor alone. They struggled to tyrannize over each other and
over the monarchy. The solitary excuse for Henry V's
monstrous renewal of the war with France lay in his desire to
divert his nobles from their intestine feuds. It failed ; the
Wars of the Roses followed Agincourt.
CHAPTER XX
THE HUNDRED YEARS' WAR AND ITS RESULTS
FOR FRANCE
THE effect on France was almost as grievous. France,
already weakened by the ravages of the war under
Edward HI, by the Black Death, the Jacquerie, and
the struggles of her leading nobles against the Crown, struggles
as selfish as our own but much more formidable — France
seemed to have no vigour left to counter the brilliant general-
ship of King Harry, or even the weaker but no less unscrupu-
lous attacks of his following. Even his death did not help
her (1422). Then appears in the general desolation she
whose bare history outdoes all romance, the beloved of ages,
valiant, compassionate, true-hearted, Jeanne d'Arc, the maid
of Orleans, the saviour of France. The high beauty of her
character, her devotion, her sweet humanity, her inspired
leadership in the field, in debate, in the ways of common men,
make themselves felt even now in the contemporary chronicle
of her deeds and words.
Not only did she set her country free and awaken the spirit
of national unity, but with her the struggle for freedom and
unity never degenerated, as so often with lesser natures, into
the desire to dominate others. She showed no hatred for the
English when she bade them return to their own country.
She loved her banner " better, forty times better," than her
sword. " It was I myself who bore it when I attacked the
enemy, to save killing anyone, for I have never killed any-
one." Jeanne remains for all time an example of what cynics
call impossible : generalship without ruthlessncss, statesman-
ship without deceit.
131
132 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
" Souvenons-nous toujours, Frangais," writes Michelet,
" que la patrie, chez nous, est nee du cceur d'une femme, de sa
tendresse et de ses larmes, du sang qu'elle a donnee pour nous."
But the woman was martyred and the man who carried on
the work of unification was Louis XI (1461-1483), the tools
of whose ability were force and fraud. In the work he
strengthened the foundations of the royal despotism. For
the sufferings of the war, the horrors of the Jacquerie, the
incessant quarrels with the nobles, had made the people only
too ready to acquiesce in order even at the price of liberty.
No attempt was made to reverse the momentous decision
already taken in 1439, itself prompted by the fear of war and
the outrages of the roving " Free Companies," disbanded
mercenaries of all nations whose one object was plunder.
This ordonnance de la gendarmerie allowed the king to levy
a tax on land and property for the creation of a standing
army, and an army in which all the captains were to be
nominated by himself. Thus the French people surrendered
both the power of the sword and the power of the purse for
the sake of peace.
Nor were these sacrifices balanced by any increase in
popular representation. And yet one might have hoped that
the States-General, standing for the three orders. Priests,
Nobles, and Commons, and inaugurated, as we have seen, so
early as 1302 by Philip the Fair (Philip IV), would grow into
a really representative Parliament. Indeed, after the blow
of Poitiers (1356), Etienne Marcel, Provost of the Merchants,
making himself master of Paris, had proposed a scheme that
would have made them really such, for the control of taxation
was to be theirs. But Marcel failed, perhaps because the
excesses of the Jacquerie terrified sober citizens and made all
popular movements suspect, and for years there was no
further attempt. The body called the Parliament of Paris,
indeed, continued its work ; but, although it had the right of
registering the royal edicts, it was rather a royal Court of
Justice than any vehicle for popular political feeling.
CHAPTER XXI
ITALIAN CITIES AND ITALY'S LEADERSHIP IN ART
WHILE France was tending to centralization under
a despot, Italy was left without any central govern-
ment at all. After the crushing of Frederick IPs
dynasty at the end of the thirteenth century, " for sixty
years no Emperor descended on the Italian plain." ^ Nor
could any Pope be a symbol of national unity during the
" Babylonish Captivity " of the Papacy through the greater
part of the fourteenth century at Avignon under the influence
of the French kings, followed by the inevitable setting-up of
an anti-Pope.
The field was left clear in Italy for the struggles between
city and city, and in the cities themselves for the conflict
between the popular leaders, the oligarchs, and the despots.
Everywhere in the end the popular parties were beaten,
and almost everywhere — ^Venice was a notable exception —
the despots won. But the struggle for liberty was long and
hard, and where it came nearest success, in Northern Italy
generally and pre-eminently in Florence, Siena, and Venice,
there too Art was at her best, though the despots also loved
the arts and tried to foster them, and even in certain cases
showed that despotism itself by securing order could prove
better for culture than sheer blood-stained anarchy. It was
the fever of faction that lost Italy her chance of ordered free-
dom— a fever never at rest, and seldom even allayed by the
^ " A Short History of the ItaHan People," by J. P. Trevelyan
(c. xi.)
133
134 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
healing gifts of common sense and compromise. When the
popular parties were at their highest power, they would force
the nobles to leave their castles and enter the cities to be
under the eye of the people. But the nobles only made
castles of their city palaces, and to this day there is a notable
grimness in the fortress- walls of their towering dwelling-houses
at Florence, Perugia, Bologna.
How real the desire for civic freedom could be the student
may learn not only from, say, the surprisingly democratic
ordinances of the Florentines in the days of Dante, when the
city, to quote her latest historian, " bade fair to become a
true republic of craftsmen," but also from the writings of
Dante's contemporary, Marsiglio of Padua. To Marsiglio,
nurtured on Aristotle, the very source of law springs from the
people. Creighton quotes his definition of " the legislator "
as one that could not be improved upon at the present day.
" By ' the Legislator,' " writes Marsiglio, " I understand the
people, the whole body of the citizens, or the majority of
them, declaring by their own will and choice, uttered in
a general assembly, that some special thing in the sphere
of civil action must be done or avoided, under pain of
punishment" ("Defensor Pacis," Part I, c. xii., tr. based
on Creighton's).
If, with such words in mind, we recall the insolent, powerful
faces of typical ItaHan despots, if we remember the unceasing
quarrels between the temporal and spiritual powers, quarrels
in which Marsiglio himself bore a prominent part, we can
form some faint idea of the flaming background for the
Italian Art of the trecento and quattrocento. Its vividness at
least will cease to surprise us, even though we cannot hope to
lay bare all the causes of its splendour and exuberance. The
splendour and exuberance are, however, obviously connected ;
it is not merely the pre-eminent height of individual genius
that amazes us in Northern Italy : it is the crowding multi-
tude of true artists, many of them unknown. It was the Age
of Art, as ours is the Age of Science, an outstanding example
of what has often been seen, but never understood — perhaps
by us never can be — ^the penetrating, transforming power of
ITALIAN CITIES AND ITALIAN ART 135
co-operation in a common task. That power goes down to
the roots of human nature, and when working freely in art or
science, as in poUtics or in rehgion, it hfts the individual
above himself. Though it uses imitation, it is not to be
confused with mere copying, because personal and self-
reliant activity is the very life of it. It grows through the
interplay of personality, and cannot begin to work effectively
without strong personalities to work on, and a strong lead in
the search for a truth desired by many. Given these, and
the infection of a sacred fire seems to run from mind to mind,
lighting up abysses, opening vistas inaccessible to the solitary
worker, and all the while making his own flame burn the
brighter. The artist of original force, like the genuine man
of science, develops his own genius just because he can learn
from his compeers. So it was in the Athens of Pericles or in
the schools of the Prophets at Jerusalem, or on the Elizabethan
stage, but never did the power work with greater amplitude
and opulence than in this Italy of the centuries between
Dante and Michael Angelo. And the fact may bring us
comfort when we moiun over the political feuds. The free
spirit of beauty could make light of party barriers. More-
over, the bulk of the painting at the outset was religious and
could appeal to the sense of a common faith.
One of the first great names in Florentine painting after
Giotto is that of the monk, Fra Angelico (1387-1455), and
some of his finest work lights up the corridors and cells in the
Dominican Convent of San Marco, showing a largeness of
design that does away with any over-sweet or over-childish
sentiment, as for example in the lunette of St. Peter, Martyr,
with his finger on his suffering lips, enduring all things to the
death, or in the large " Annunciation " where the exquisite
outlines of the vernal woods and the broad spaces of the open
loggia enhance the impression of the clear intent look in the
eyes of the girl absorbed in her effort to comprehend the
words of the wide-winged messenger from the skies. Most
impressive of all perhaps is the httle " Annunciation " painted
for an inner cell, where the Angel and the Woman are linked
in a wordless intimacy of union, too deeply charged with its
136 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
solemn and precious burden for gesture or excitement. Of
all themes the Annunciation was best suited to Angelico's
virginal insight, and no treatment of it has ever surpassed his.
But the Angelical Brother, though he painted most for the
cloister, was not cloistered in the study of his craft. A keen
modern critic^ has pointed out not only " the gaiety and
purity of his delight in nature," but also his interest in the
new science of perspective and the new research for natural
form.
It is interesting to compare him with two of his contem-
poraries in a foreign land, the Flemish brothers, Hubert and
Jan van Eyck. The headship of Italy in painting was un-
challenged, but Flanders, France, and even Germany (not
England) could all boast artists of recognized merit, and at
this period the Flemings are, after Italy, the most remarkable.
Their painters initiate a series that continues (with many
changes) down to Rubens, Van Dyck, and Watteau, but at
this period, as elsewhere, their pictures are in the main
devoted to religion.
At the opening of the fourteenth century the Flemings had
already shown their vigour and independence in matters
political (Battle of Courtrai, 1302), and during its course they
exhibit the veins of finer stuff that run athwart the grosser
elements in their national character. Jan Ruysbroeck
(1293-1381) is to be classed among the great mystics of the
world. The brothers Van Eyck, young painters at the close
of the century, show a singular and admirable balance of
the mystical and the mundane. The picture in our London
National Gallery of a man reasoning with his wife in the
warm and ordered comfort of their own bedchamber marks
the beginning of that long series of homely scenes, so different
from the rhythmical forms of Italian painting, and so appealing
in their own way, that culminate in the pathetic splendours
of the Dutch Rembrandt, interpreter, and glorifier of ordinary
life. On the other hand, in " The Adoration of the Mystic
Lamb," begun by the elder Hubert, " as good a painter as
ever lived," to quote his brother's affectionate and extrava-
1 Roger Fry.
ITALIAN CITIES AND ITALIAN ART 137
gant eulogy, and completed by the greater Jan, we feel the
spirit of the Church at her best. The mystery of the Chris-
tian sacrifice is made the centre for human effort, for the
lavish loveliness of nature, and for all angels and archangels.
The white altar, surrounded by adoring seraphs and virgins,
is placed in a flowery meadow, girdled by pleasant orchards
and rocky heights, and to this, as to a goal, come the saints
and martyrs, and the wise kings, and the young knights
riding abreast, and the common people trudging afoot, while
through the gaps, where the green hills soften into blue, shine
out the towers and steeples of a city, fair as the golden
Jerusalem, firmly built as any Flemish town.
As in Flanders so in Italy, the emergence of mundane
themes for art goes on steadily, and in Florence we meet with
the ardent and powerful realism of the sculptor Donatello
{1386-1466), a contemporary of Fra Angelico's. The primacy
in sculpture was now clearly with Italy, where a school was
developed that can alone challenge comparison for range and
mastery with the ancient Greek. Yet in emotional character
it is closer to the early French that had done so much to
stimulate its rise.
Like the men of Chartres, Donatello is fascinated by the
study of expression ; character is everything to him, so that
he will not shrink from any harshness needed for the truth of
his conception, trusting, and with good reason, that his gift
of monumental design will lift the whole thing into sculptural
beauty. Nothing could be fresher, more arresting, than his
rehef of John the Baptist as a boy, the wild-eyed resolute
child, with the little rough head on which the hair, obviously,
could never lie straight for two minutes together, or the
charming ugly lads singing with all their energies, and with
their mouths wide open, on the Musicians' Gallery, or, to
take weightier examples, the figure of the sturdy Shepherd-
King, the David whom Donatello conceived as peasant-born
and endowed with the unconscious dignity, the greater for
its triumph over physical defects, of a vigorous old bald-
headed craftsman. Donatello had a special love for this
figure and liked to swear by " the Bald-head." Nor was he
138 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
at a loss when grace was called for, or the look of breeding
and trained self-control, as in the tall distinguished figure of
the young St. George, alert and ready for action, but with
perfect calm of bearing, his well-shaped hand resting lightly
on the shield before him, or in the monumental simplicity of
the soldier Gattemelata on his charger in the square at Padua,
perhaps the grandest equestrian monument in existence.
Donatello's joy in children and his understanding of them
call up a thousand bright associations with other Florentines :
Luca della Robbia's swaddled babies set in medallions above
the Ospedale degli Innocenti, or Lippo Lippi's " bowery flowery
angel-brood." Lippo, the pet of the Medici, is typical
enough of the countless delightful artists, only just below the
first rank, whom we must pass over here. But room must be
found for Botticelli (1446-1510), if only because of his fervid
emotion, his strange and poignant beauty, so strange that it
repelled lovers of art for centuries, until indeed Ruskin led
the reaction and re-awakened the world to the charm of those
slender dreamy figures, swaying in a soft clearness of light
touched with the pathos that waits on loveliness.
Botticelli's figures divide themselves into two distinct
classes, visions of dove-eyed Madonnas, attended by wistful
St. Johns and ethereal angel-figures, sharp and dehcate as
blossoming almond-boughs, or else enchanting fantasies of
pagan Floras, Venuses, and Zephyrs ; and the division shows
that, as we might expect of a nature so sensitive, he was
almost equally attracted by the humanist ideals of the growing
Renaissance, the revival of the Greek reverence for reason,
physical beauty, and love, and by religious fervours such as
blazed out in a Savonarola, a man who would have swept
aside the beauty of the flesh altogether as something that
merely ministered to the lust of the eyes. One picture of his
combines both ideals in a harmony that is much his own —
Pallas Athena, a characteristic figure with the long sinuous
line of which he had the secret, her grey eyes full of brooding
wisdom, subduing with sovran gentleness the Centaur-Man.
The goddess is clothed in translucent pearly raiment em-
broidered with branch-work of green olive-sprays and a
■/.
en
O
OS
u
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ITALIAN CITIES AND ITALIAN ART 139
repeated device of three sapphire rings interlaced, the
cognizance of the Pitti for whom the picture was painted.
It is the dream of a painter who is a poet and something of
a pubhcist also, and it throws a side-light on that patronage
of culture by which the great families in Italy helped to
maintain their position. The aspiration to unite Pagan and
Christian ideals marks, indeed, much that is most attractive
in the fifteenth century. It is characteristic, for example, of
Vittorino da Feltre, the broad-minded teacher, whose worn
lovable features have been preserved for us by that superb
medallist Pisanello.
In marked contrast to the perfervid emotionalism of
Botticelli we have the calm strength of Piero della Francesca
(1416-1492), to modem minds one of the most sympathetic
in the whole company of these artists. Born in a quiet little
Umbrian town, he was trained at Florence and himself taught
the teacher of Michael Angelo, Luca Signorelli. With Piero,
the ideals of Paganism and Naturalism seem spontaneously to
support and enrich the Catholic dream of another world as
the crown of this. Piero was much like himself when he put
his noble peasant IMadonna, bearing the burden of the unborn
life within her, as guardian of the white-walled Campo Santo
at Monterchi, where the dead lie near the cypress avenue
among the remote Umbrian hills. His stately figures combine
a statuesque majesty equalling the ancient classic pride
with a new and grave serenity of their own. And he can use
with equal decorative effect the dilapidated walls of a farmer's
outhouse and the fluted columns and rich ceiling of a neo-
Pagan palace-hall. Perhaps the greatest of all his works is
the fresco of the Resurrection still preserved in his native
Borgo, where Christ, carrying the banner of victory, strong-
limbed, golden-haired, the look of death still lingering in his
dark wide-open eyes, a mantle flung round him rosy as the
flush of dawn, rises straight before us out of the grey sarco-
phagus, one foot planted on the rim, lifting himself back to
Hfe by a stupendous effort, irresistible, triumphant, but
triumphant through tragedy. The Roman soldiers, in their
rich dark-coloured accoutrements, lie sleeping in front of the
140 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
sculptured tomb. The miracle of life is being accomplished
alone, in the solitary presence of the dawn, the sun not yet
up, the spring-time scarcely begun, one tree leafless against
the quiet faintly-tinted sky.
y
ATHENA TAMING A CENTAUR
(From the Painting by Botticelli, Florence)
PART III.— RENAISSANCE
CHAPTER XXII
ITALIAN ART AND THE TRANSITION: ITALY'S
LOSS OF FREEDOM
PIERO DELLA FRANCESCA comes just before the
climax of the Renaissance in Italy. It is impossible
to assign any one date at which this period begins —
ever since the twelfth century there had been a revival of
thought — ^but certainly by the opening of the sixteenth the
forces of free speculation, criticism, and neo-Paganism were
gathering head. The process was quickened by the fall of
Constantinople, captured at last by the Ottoman Turks in
1453, and the consequent impetus given by dispossessed
Byzantine scholars to the study of classical learning, already,
and more and more widely, being pursued in Europe. Men
were now reading the Greek authors for themselves and
rediscovering much that could not be incorporated in the
traditional theology. It was no longer a mere question of
Aristotle in the light of Aquinas. The situation was full both
of menace and hope. The old unity of the Church was
threatened at its base. What was the new order to be ?
In Italy the situation was at its most dazzling and its most
ominous point. Political stability hardly existed ; there
was no central government, the despots, hating each other,
were all of them insecure, and the republicans were struggling
against imminent defeat. Ecclesiastical authority was under-
mined not only by the growing scepticism but by the corruption
of the clergy and a licentiousness always strong in the Italian
141
142 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
temperament. The period ended in disaster and slavery for
the land, followed by inevitable stagnation, but it was for
the time full of ferment in thought and feeling and crowded
with splendid names.
Among the artists let us take as typical Leonardo da Vinci
(1452-1519) and Michael Angelo (1475-1564). Both were
Florentines, both keenly sensitive, though in different ways,
to the splendour and corruption of their time, and to the
daring spirit that heralded alike the Reformation and the
beginnings of modern science. Both watched, one apparently
with impassive contempt, the other in shame and agony, how
the quarrels of Popes and tyrants led to the extinction of Italy's
freedom, how the French made their disastrous incursion,
pleading their claim on Naples, with the consent, perhaps
at the instigation of Ludovico Sforza {il Moro), despot of
Milan, enemy of Florence, and " the cause of Italy's ruin,"
as Machiavelli called him ; and how the French were followed
by the more lasting curse of the Germans and the Spaniards,
flooding the country to counter the French influence. Each of
them was a many-sided genius, painter, sculptor, engineer,
thinker, but Leonardo leant rather to scientific speculation,
actually forecasting modern discoveries, Michael Angelo to
poetry, patriotism, and religion. No imagination was ever
subtler, more curious, free, and acute than da Vinci's, but in
almost all his work there is an underlying coldness ; it is as
though his vision of the passions and weaknesses in human
nature had frozen his affections. No painting of the Siren
woman has equalled his Monna Lisa ; he has understood the
spell that goes far beyond a merely sensual lure, promising
rather that knowledge of good and evil that will make men as
gods. Yet it is all given with an extraordinary aloofness as
though he were anatomizing a strange creature of the infinite
sea, not as though, like Shakespeare with Cleopatra, he had
lived himself into the woman's heart. It is not surprising that
his caricatures are among the most terrifying in the world,
nor yet that some works which he meant to be subhme, such
as the world-renowned " Last Supper," should be marred, for
all their amazing skill and dignity, by a touch of self-conscious-
ITALIAN ART AND THE TRANSITION 143
ness. He studied human nature too much in detachment to
surprise its last and finest secrets. Only, perhaps, in the faces
of the aged does real tenderness and veneration enrich his
searching psychology — as in the unfinished " Adoration of the
Magi," where the haggard faces of old men who have spent
their lives in the vain search for knowledge peer wistfully
through the dim soft shadows into a sudden light of hope,
or as in the incisive drawing where the deep eyes in the old
father's worn and furrowed face scrutinize the arrogant
features of the magnificent youth who does not care to under-
stand him.
Michael Angelo, on the contrary, is even hampered by his
power for suffering. True, it is bound up with his greatest
achievements (for his temperament was tragic), from his first
Pieta carved when he was only twenty-two, the dead Christ
stark on the knees of a woman who looks at once a youthful
maiden and the bereaved mother of men, to the last study of
the same theme at which he toiled in his old age and, so it is
said, intended for his o\\ti tomb.^ Yet he was also singularly
sensitive to beauty of the free and vigorous Pagan type, and
this sensitiveness increases both the solidity and the pathos of
his work. The sculptured Madonna now in the Medici Chapel
at Florence is no bloodless, nun-like saint, but a woman
formed for the fullness of life and happiness, and the symbolic
" Dawn " and " Night " of the ^ledici tombs beside her, worn
as they are with shame and suffering, are still her sisters.
The whole scheme for the tombs, indeed, shows in another
way that largeness of view in Michael Angelo which could
counterbalance, though not overcome, his tendency to exagger-
ation. The Medici, once citizens, then masters of Florence,
had crushed her liberties at last with the help of Pope and
Emperor,- forcing themselves back on the city that had flung
them out, and he, who had fought them himself, puts below
their effigies figures that typify the elemental Powers of
Nature, Twilight and Dawn, and Night and Day, resentful
^ The first is in St. Peter's at Rome, the other in the Duomo at
Florence.
» Clement VII (Giulio de Medici) and Charles V.
144 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
witnesses of the wrong. The triumph of tyranny is felt to
be an outrage on Nature herself, and the defeated judge their
masters out of the universal disgrace. None the less in the
statue of Lorenzo full justice is done to what was fine in the
Medici, their distinction, their intellect, their force and the
beauty they loved.
So again we can gather even from the unfinished fragments
for the monument to Pope Julius how complete and how stern
in its completeness the presentment of what Julius desired
would have been. The base of the monument for the majestic
figure of the martial Pope was to be supported by captive
slaves and old men, overthrown but indomitable, prostrate
beneath insolent conquering youths. Swinburne has woven
into his verse, written when Italy was at last regaining her
freedom, a reference to lines of Michael Angelo's own that
prove what his feeling was :
" Pale, with the whole world's judgment in his eyes,
He stood and watched the grief and shame endure
That he, though highest of Angels, might not cure,
And the same sins done under the same skies,
And the same slaves to the same tyrants thrown,
And fain he would have slept and fain been stone."
This sad proud spirit, as of eagle- winged hopes fettered by
the weight of a world gone wrong, fills the painting of the
Sistine roof with the heroic gloom that darkens its glory.
The grace and vigour of human life in youth, maturity, and
old age, open out above us, splendid in athletes, scholars,
prophets, women of intellect, and nursing mothers, but faces
and figures are tense with the burden of the doom they appre-
hend or strained by the intolerable waiting for deliverance.
Significantly the painter has made a tragic use of a joyous
neo-classic theme, naked boys playing with shields and
garlands. The boys have grown to be young men facing
battle, steadfast or overwrought, the garlands have thickened
into heavy coils, and the shields they strain themselves to
lift suggest a long and doubtful struggle. The instinct of
centuries has chosen the " Creation of Adam " as the finest of
the separate pictures among the crowding visions — a man with
MOTHER AND CHILD
(From the Drawing by Michael Aiigelo, Florence)
ITALIAN ART AND THE TRANSITION 145
a woman's wistfulness in his face, a strong man nerveless for
all his strength, lying, weak from the birth still uncompleted,
on the primeval hills above the void, sustaining himself by
his desire for the life-giving touch from the finger of God.
Anyone can find flaws in Michael Angelo's work. Perhaps
there never was an artist so great who was at the same time
so faulty. In sculpture, painting, architecture, everjrvvhere
there are obvious blunders and faults of taste. His fury of
emotion could not master his'medium, and if he left so many
works incomplete it is partly because the conception itself was
never completely sculptural, nor pictorial, nor architectonic.
And he was a bad master to follow. The over-emphasis that
we forgive in him became empty rhetoric in his imitators.
He comes too at an age when the once rushing stream of
Italian art had begun to fail. Freedom was failing and with
it inspiration. The sculpture and painting of the two centuries
before his own had been marked by a signal union of deep and
sincere emotion with an intimate sense for the direct appeal of
form and colour, over and above any content that could be put
into words. Some such union, no doubt, is the distinctive
mark of all the arts that appeal to the eye ; they exist to
express something that can only be so expressed, and hence all
mere words about visual art, valuable as they may be for clues,
are apt to seem a little impertinent. Moreover, the unique
significance of form and colour, thus apprehended by the true
artist in a way that eludes explanation, leads him to discoveries
that go beyond the appearances of Nature, however closely
they may be connected with them. His task is always to
make something new. Yet every true artist has felt the
stimulus of Nature, and the least inadequate theories of
aesthetics are those that admit an unknown unity from which
both Art and Nature are derived.
Italy's painting and sculpture up to the height of the Renais-
sance had held in a marvellous fusion and for their mutual
enhancement the three elements, decorative, descriptive, and
dramatic, all of which we have to recognize if we are not
to mutilate the ample inheritance her artists have bequeathed
to us. Their achievement was made the easier, perhaps, by
10
146 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
certain simple and inspiring conditions under which they
worked. They shared with their pubhc a grand mythology,
the Christian, as yet unshattered by criticism and of which
the central idea was exactly that an ineffable Thought had been
made manifest in flesh. Their early lack of technical skill in
the minor branch of mere representation was of actual service
to them. And that in two ways : there was the less danger
of complete distraction from their peculiar task of pure design,
and on the other hand the excitement of discovering for
themselves the laws of perspective, the possibilities of light
and shade, the facts of anatomy, vivified their perceptions
and prevented them from becoming the slaves of outworn
tradition. Thus, and for a long while, they kept the good
of a living and growing science without the dead weight of
pedantry and irrelevance. And in the fifteenth century the
bounds of their art had been widened to include the secular
as well as the sacred. But in the sixteenth century comes
the faU.
That fall is not fully explicable with our present knowledge.
The ultimate causes for the dying away, as for the rising up,
of genius still lie beyond our ken. But some points we can
explain. It is easy to understand why religious painting
becomes ineffective. The most vivid minds in Italy were
ceasing to believe the old mythology in the old and simple
sense. The steady growth of learning and criticism had
produced its inevitable result. The widening knowledge of
Greek, for example, brought to light not only the weaknesses
of the Fathers, their discrepancies, credulities, and ignorances,
but the strength of the Pagan ideal, the humanity and richness
of those spirits that Dante had put into everlasting hell.
Nor were the professed leaders of the Roman Church the men
to avert the change. Criticism had only too much to feed on
in the self-seeking of the Medici Pope, Leo X (1513), the
military aggressiveness of Julius II (1503), the excesses of the
Borgia Alexander VI (1493). Pinturicchio, painting the wicked
old Borgia in his charming and quite irreligious frescoes, must
have smiled more than once in his sleeve. Change of doctrine,
certainly, is not enough to account for the dwindling of
ITALIAN ART AND THE TRANSITION 147
religious art. Rembrandt the Protestant would alone prove
this. Even the bitter scepticism of the amazing Fleming,
Pieter Brueghel the Elder {circa 1525-1569), does not lessen
the dramatic force with which he handles religious themes :
it only changes the direction. His " Adoration of the Magi " ^
suggests no sudden unveiling of unhoped-for truth, but it
is overwhelming in the sternness with which it presents a
mockery and a cheat. In Italy, however, religious doubt had
not, speaking broadly, the stress to ennoble the souls it shook,
and in Italy religious painting was clearly on the way to the
soulless insipidities of a Carlo Dolci. Yet there might still
have been, one fancies, under happier conditions, a great
school of secular painting. And so at first there was. The
grace and sweetness of Raphael's Madonnas are, we realize
now, little but echoes of something far deeper and more
moving, but in portraits Raphael's hand is freer and his
genius masters triumphantly the grim strong face of Julius,
or the unscrupulous self-indulgent jowl of Leo X, connoisseur,
schemer, and sensualist, to whom the Papacy was a gift to
be " enjoyed," with his serpent-hke nephews behind him.
But Raphael (1483-1520) is almost the last painter of
commanding genius to be found in Central Italy or Florence,
and it seems impossible to dissociate the decline with the
extinction of freedom. For, with the marked exception of
Venice, the greater part of Italy, after the complicated
struggles in the sixteenth century, lay prostrate in the centre
under the Pope and in the North and South under Austria or
Spain. But Venice, though sorely crippled by her rivals, still
kept her independence and in Venice painting still kept much
of the old vigour. We can watch the change from the work of
Giovanni Bellini, a man full both of the old religious fervour
and the new joy in life, on through the superb romantic charm
of Giorgione to the more mundane brilliance and gorgeous
" poesies " of Titian, Tintoretto, and Veronese, without feeling
the destruction of power (Titian, 1477 ?-i576 ; Tintoretto,
1519-1594 ; Veronese, 1528-1588).
But Venice after all was a small and narrow oligarchy and
' Now in our London National Gallery.
148 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
in Venice also the great succession dwindles down in the
seventeenth century. We are left as a rule, while recognizing
brilliant endowment and accomplishment, to be wearied by a
vague burden of hollowness. This inner emptiness on the one
hand and the undeniable skill on the other go far to explain
why the Italian art of the seventeenth century which delighted
all the " connoisseurs " and " dilettanti " of the eighteenth
has been found burdensome in the nineteenth and twentieth.
The reaction may have gone too far, but it is based on a
sound instinct. By the close of the sixteenth century in Italy
the living fountains were being choked.
Nevertheless the traditions of the last Italian painters
belonging to the great age remained vital enough to inspire
both France and Spain. Poussin in France (1594-1665) and
Velazquez in Spain (1599-1660) show the marked impress of
Italy, and in France the impulse never quite died out.
Titian's virile genius, in particular, was exactly of the kind to
delight the age, uniting as it did a command over realism with
a high poetic majesty. His two portraits of Charles V, the
dominant political figure of his day, serve well to illustrate this
double power. Both have grasped the character of the ruler,
but the one now at Munich gives us merely the human states-
man, with the dignity of a king, it is true, but also, and
obviously, with the faults of a man grown old in greed and
cunning and more than half wearied of a thankless task.
While in the Madrid picture Charles is the transfigured
monarch of romance, riding, implacable and resolute, like an
emissary of superhuman vengeance, across a lonely enchanted
forest land.
Portraiture and landscape, it may be added, with their close
clinging to the actual tend now to become the themes most
stimulating to European artists at large. The artist is to live
more by sight, and less by faith. In Flanders Rubens and
Van Dyck, in Spain Velazquez, and in Holland Rembrandt
will all show this in different ways.
In Italy the decline of painting and sculpture was paralleled
by the equally rapid decline in literature. Machiavelli
(1469-1527) is one of the last original forces, and in him we
ITALIAN ART AND THE TRANSITION 149
see at war the Imperial tradition in its most despotic form and
the RepubHcan in its freest. One part of his nature, doubt-
less the deepest, turned to the ideal of a free self-governing
community, as can be plainly felt in his " Discourses on Livy,"
but experience, especially the experience of the Italians he
saw round him, had disillusionized him as to its possibility.
Such men were not fit, he seems to have thought, for anything
but authority, and he calls for a Prince bold enough to stick
at no scruple if he can drive out the foreigner, bend the weak
and quarrelsome citizens to his will, and so save and unify
the country in its own despite. The history of Machiavelli's
thought is tragic, for it is that of a mind led largely through
its own boldness and clear-sightedness to a vicious view of a
statesman's duty. And its influence upon history has been
tragic.
]\Iachiavelli's contemporary, the courtly Ariosto (1470-1533),
shows unmistakable signs of decadence. But still there is
spirit and grace enough in his elaborate scholarly fantasias on
Europe's poetic traditions, classic and romantic alike, for us to
understand how Spenser in the English re-awakening could
take him for a model. After Machiavelli and Ariosto, however,
to whom we may add the slighter Tasso a little later (1544-
1595). Italian literature sinks into sheer weakness. Religious
despotism, fostered by the Spanish reaction from the Re-
formation, was to reinforce political despotism. The time
was not far off when Milton, early in the seventeenth
century, could note as he travelled in Italy that " Nothing has
been wTit these many years but fi.ittery and fustian." Some-
what the same is true concerning the more slowly-developing
art of music. How great was the native Italian gift for this,
the most mysterious of the arts, may be recalled from the
mere mention of Palestrina, imquestioned king, during the
sixteenth century, among those masters of the limited har-
monic sequences, the carefully-chosen concurrent notes, which
had been discovered for the enrichment of single melodies.
There are signs that Italians could have gone farther, and
expanded harmonic rules much as Germans were to do later.
But the primacy in music passes from an Italy of the Popes
150 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
to a land that kept alive, after however devastating a con-
flict, the freer, more searching spirit of the Reformation.
Yet, and here once more the history of Italy recalls that of
ancient Greece, though freedom had gone and with it a free
art, the Italian genius still showed itself for a time in science.
Not only in the sixteenth century but in the seventeenth we
shall find epoch-making work by Italians, alike in astro-
nomy, physics, mathematics, and medicine.
i
CHAPTER XXIII
THE REFORMATION AND THE GENIUS OF
GERMANY
WE have mentioned Charles V, king of Spain and
suzerain of Germany, as the dominating poHtical
figure in the first half of the sixteenth century.
Round him indeed cluster the leading threads in Continental
culture and Continental political growth, and the web they
weave is growing thick. Grandson of Mary of Burgundy
and Maximihan the Hapsburg Archduke of Austria, son of
the mad Joanna (daughter of Ferdinand of Aragon and
Isabella of Castile), he was by inheritance the ruler of
Austria, Spain, the Netherlands, Naples, and by election
Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, with distinct rights
over Germany and vaguer rights over the North of Italy.
The traditions of his house on both sides were despotic,
but his own bent towards despotism was checked by a
fine sense of what could and what could not be done with
the different nationalities throughout his vast dominions.
And among them are three who now begin to take effective
part in the joint stream of European culture : Germany, the
Netherlands, and Spain.
It is not a little remarkable and not altogether easy to
understand why Germany had till then lagged behind England,
France, and Italy in her general development. Her political
position does not seem to have been substantially worse than
theirs, though it is true that she had made far less progress
towards national unity on the one hand, or democratic govern-
ment on the other. The Emperor's lordship, for example,
151
152 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
was shadowy compared with the vigour of the monarchy at
its strongest in France ; the German free cities had been more
oHgarchical and less independent than their most advanced
contemporaries in Italy, and the commons at large had no
such representation in the Diet as they had gained in the
English Parliaments of Edward I. None the less, there had
been vigorous, if spasmodic, efforts for organization and
liberty. Towns such as Nuremberg that won the right to
manage their own affairs reflect to this day the quality of
their life in the fine architecture of their public and private
buildings. The greatest of the ]\Iinnesangers, Walther v.
der Vogelweide, was, we have already seen, at least as vitally
interested in politics and religion as in love. Still, both in art,
literature, and learning, as in politics, the Germans were
behind their neighbours, and perhaps the fundamental reason
is that the German genius was pre-eminently fitted for music,
metaphysics, and science, and these, in their full development,
seem only to appear late in any civilization and after a
laborious accumulation of facts and tools. In any case it is
to be noted that Germany's distinctive contribution to the
culture of Europe during the long period from Henry the
Fowler to the dawn of the Reformation lies in the realm of
mystical theology, the side that would appeal most to a
philosophic people in the Ages of Faith.
Thomas k Kempis was a German monk (1380-1471), and
no manual of devotion has ever appealed to the world at
large so persistently, in spite of its narrow outlook, as the
" Imitation of Christ." And this because of its unwavering
grip on the doctrine that a man's peace, his freedom from
degradation, lies in the complete surrender of his will to
a Will greater than his own or any other man's, a Kempis
is only one in a long train of devotional writers penetrated
with the monastic ideal, and that not in Germany alone,
Jan Ruysbroek, for example, before him in Flanders
(1293-1381), St. Catherine of Siena in Italy (1347-1380),
Juliana of Norwich in England, St. Teresa later in Spain,
and St. John of the Cross— but he out-distances them all
in popular estimation, and with reason. Not only is he
THE REFORMATION AND GERMANY 153
absolutely in earnest — the others are that also — but he brings
the task of self-conquest into close contact with ordinary Hfe,
while his book lies open to all men in virtue of his terse and
vivid style, the siu-eness of his touch on the weak places
of the heart, and the searching and ironic simplicity of his
thought. It is impossible while reading a Kempis not to feel
the emptiness of fine theory divorced from practice. " What
v/ill it avail thee to be engaged in profound reasonings con-
cerning the Trinity, if thou be void of humility, and art
thereby displeasing to the Trinity ? Surely great words do
not make a man holy and just." (I, i.) If the world could
follow a Kempis the root of all wars and tyrannies would be
done away with for ever, seeing that he strikes dead at the
heart of ambition.
Far less widely known, but yet with a wider range than a
Kempis, is the earlier work of the Dominican Meister Eckhard
(1260-1327), the contemporary of Dante, and a master to
many mj^stics in his day. A modem reader, moreover, is
attracted to him by his deep thirst for universal knowledge,
a thirst that was to become so marked a feature in Germany's
intellectual life, and by his never-failing sense of a fundamental
unity with other men. 4 Kempis, at times, may seem ex-
clusivel}^ concerned with the salvation of his own soul, but
Eckhard speaks of St. Paul's cry, " I would that I were cut
off from God for my friends' sake," as the highest possible
example of love, " for God's sake to give up God." Again,
he foreshadows our modern social gospel of mankind as an
" organism " in his parable of the body : "If the foot could
speak, it would confess that the eye was more to it just because
it was in the head than if it were actually in the foot " : so,
and even more profoundly, the graces in another can be more
intimately our o^^^l if we love them than if they were merely
" ours." Again Eckhard's thirst for knowledge is bound up
with a belief in the natural affinity of the soul with all things
good, " the spark in man never extinguished." " He who
has once felt the touch of Truth and Righteousness and
Goodness can never turn away from them, not for one moment,
not though all the pains of hell should hang on it." In one
154 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
place he goes so far as to say that if it were possible for God
to be separated from the Truth and the soul had to choose, it
would choose Truth. But knowledge of the Truth means
for Eckhard far more than the orderly apprehension of
" created things " : it means insight into their ultimate cause
and the ground of their unity, the source from which they
derive " as waters from the sea, and to which they return
again as rivers over the earth." The goal of life is the
apprehension of this hidden unity coupled with the sense of
a man's entire dependence on it, a goal that the individual
can attain by persistent effort and prayer.
The danger of this attitude, as of so much mediaeval
mysticism, and particularly, perhaps, of German, is that it
leads the mind away from the concrete facts of life and the
scientific handling of the " created things," with which, after
all, we have first and foremost to do. Broadly speaking, the
whole of the modern world is in revolt from that attitude,
and not without reason, but he who has never understood it
has never come in sight of the summits to which man's
thought can reach.
Nor, without understanding it and the reactions from it, can
we comprehend the passion of the fanatical wars that meet us
in the sixteenth century and the next. As a spiritual force,
it was outworn for the time in Italy, where men were turning
more and more to the interest and delight of the concrete,
but elsewhere, and especially in Germany and Spain, it blazed
out with renewed vigour and in strangely different forms.
Along with it, as a rule, though sometimes also opposed to it,
went the growing demand for liberty, liberty both of thought
and action, and the interplay makes the period intensely
complicated and intensely interesting. In Germany, perhaps,
the situation was, on the whole, clearest ; and Germany,
under the rough bold generalship of Martin Luther, is rightly
acknowledged as leader in the Reformation. There had been
earlier fore warnings, notably in England under Wycliffe at
the end of the fourteenth century, and in Bohemia through
the more daring development of the Lollard doctrines by Huss.
But Wycliffe had avoided any irreparable breach with consti-
THE REFORiMATION AND GERMANY 155
tuted authority — "God must obey the Devil, "he is said to have
declared, deprecating rebellion with a true English feeling for
the value of a settled order, however faulty. Huss had been
burnt at the stake (1415), and the revolt of his Czech followers,
anti-German and communistic as it was, put down in blood.
In these earlier men we find the same fierce attack on the
scandals among the clergy, the same championship, within
Umits, of private judgment, the same appeal to the individual
conscience and the authority of the Bible, even against the
authority of the Church. But Luther had something more,
combining two other elements important and mutually
opposed. He had in the first place, and in no slight degree,
the mystical apprehension, felt so deeply by Eckhard and
Thomas a Kempis, of personal union by " faith " with a Power
behind all the shows of this world and the deeds of men. Hence
the Lutheran insistence on " justification by faith " as some-
thing much beyond mere morality, and in this respect
Luther, the Reformer and the Protestant, is notably mediaeval,
bearing indeed marked signs of his training as an Augustinian
monk.
It is entirely in keeping with this deep element in his nature
that he should have re-discovered with rapture the fourteenth
century treatise known as the " Theologia Germanica," where
the unknown author, writing in his native German, brings
ideas such as Eckhard's home to the religious consciousness of
simple men. A union with an Absolute Goodness greater than
" this or that special good," a union of Love in which " all
Self and Me and Mine and We and Ours " have " departed,"
that for Luther, as for this early writer and his fellows, was
the living basis of the spiritual life. " I will say," wrote
Luther, " though it be boasting of myself and ' I speak as a
fool,' that next to the Bible and St. Augustine, no book hath
ever come into my hands whence I have learnt, or would wish
to learn, more of what God, and Christ, and man and all things
are." 1
So strong was Luther's sense of the need for such a union
that like many theologians of not dissimilar temper then and
1 From the preface to Susanna Winkworth's tr. of the Throl. Germ.
156 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
later — Calvin, for example, in France and Switzerland, Knox
in Scotland, and the Puritans in England — he would on
occasion scout as worthless any other goodness that could
not be shown to depend directly on this supreme experience
and on the Biblical texts that had wakened it to life. But,
on the other hand, there was a genial, even a coarse, element
in his nature that made him assert and re-assert the full
claims of the flesh. A true German, he rejoiced in music, and
linked Wein and Weib to Gesang. Hence his rejection of
Monasticism, and here he was in line with the whole Renais-
sance movement. It was exactly the union of the two forces
in his ardent and powerful temperament, the temperament,
moreover, of a defiant reformer, that made him so universal a
power.
Neither the mystical ardour nor the fighting spirit found a
response in the Dutchman Erasmus, however warm his
sympathy with the reaction from monasticism and scholas-
ticism. Cultured, witty, and somewhat weak, Erasmus, like
his nobler friends in England, the Oxford Reformers, Dean
Colet and Sir Thomas More, Erasmus desired indeed to reform
the abuses of the Church, but detested almost equally the
rough breaking down of an old-established unity and the
setting up in its place of one more theological dogmatism, one
more rigid system of unintelligible beliefs on inscrutable
matters. Why could not Christians be content with ordinary
human reason and charity ? Erasmus is in significant ways
a forerunner of the modem attitude towards theology, and to
Luther, inevitably, he seemed faint-hearted and half-hearted.
Luther, strong in " the liberty of a Christian man," a liberty
depending on the mystical marriage of the soul with the
Bridegroom Christ, felt no fear when he struck at the authority
of the Papacy or the whole monastic system. There he stood
firm and " could no other." But nevertheless, and this is
noteworthy, he did not feel himself strong enough to
depend on this mystical freedom alone, as many extremists
did in Germany itself. Passionately he insisted on the
absolute authority of Christ's words as found in the Bible
and on the vital importance of Baptism and the Eucharist,
THE REFORMATION AND GERMANY 157
opening the way for a tyranny of dogma almost as oppres-
sive as the one he did so much to overthrow. Great as was
the service he rendered by translating the Bible into his
native German and furthering the study of Latin, Greek,
and Hebrew — " a language," he wrote, " is a scabbard for
the sword of the Spirit " — this could not compensate for
the harm of helping to rivet a dead text, however sublime,
on the thoughts of living men. Yet it was only natural
that Luther should seek a support for men's consciences
in place of the one he had taken away.
His work in politics was parallel. Late in the day Germany
had her Peasants' Rising, and many of them rose in the very
name of the " Christian liberty " that Luther proclaimed.
Fanatical, ill-organized, and scarcely understanding their own
cause, the Peasants were none the less appealing not merely
to fundamental principles of right and justice, but to the
better mind of the German people as it had shown itself
earlier. Gierke has made it clear that in the earlier Middle
Ages Germany had been feeling her way confusedly towards
a far richer ideal of political organization, secular or religious,
than she ever actually attained. What she desired, hardly
comprehending her own desire, was the union, in one Great
Society, of manj^ societies, each with its own special focus of
active corporate life. But this impulse, an impulse reviving
in modern days under such varied forms as Trade Unionism,
Home Rule, Syndicalism, Internationales, was not supported
or stabilized by any adequate unifying system, although
isolated thinkers brooded on noble schemes. Gierke quotes,
among other striking instances of such, the far-reaching
projects adumbrated by Nicholas of Cues (1401-1464), a man
also to be noted as a forerunner of Germany's work in philo-
sophy and science. Deeply religious and penetrated with
the religious vision of mankind as one people, Nicholas looked
on government as in its essence both divine and popular.
" In his eyes all earthly power proceeded, like man himself,
primarily from God . . . but a God-inspired will of the
community was the organ of this divine manifestation. It
is just in the voluntary consent of the governed that a govern-
158 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
ment displays its divine origin : tunc divina censetur, quando
per concordantiimi omnium consensum a suhiectis exoritur." ^
Nicholas had definite proposals for realizing his ideal both
in Church and State, being, as regards the former, in early
days an adherent of the Conciliar movement and placing a
General Council above the Pope, precisely because he held
that in virtue of the representative character won through
election a General Council would be the clearest medium of
the General Will. But, as regards all such proposals as these,
German thought had to contend not only with particularism,
inertia, and the natural sins of man, but also by the close of
the fifteenth century with the absolutist tendencies of Roman
Law. For this there were several reasons. There was chaos,
as we have seen, in Germany's political and judicial life ;
university education came to her late, not till the latter part
of the fourteenth century ; and neither her own laws nor
Roman Law had been studied at an early period keenly and
critically as law had been studied in England. Roman Law,
on the other hand, as the fifteenth century closed, came in
with all the prestige, as Maitland points out, of the Renais-
sance, and the prestige also, we may add, of its traditional
connection with the Empire. Naturally its august, lucid,
and coherent system appealed to men weary of chaos. But it
struck hard, when adopted wholesale, at any principles of free
association. In the Roman code there was no room for
distinct organizations, no " empires within the Empire."
The individual was dealt with directly by the sovereign, and
therewith an end. And, as we saw, the idea of the sovereign
as representing the people had become even in the best days
of the Empire rather a pious wish than the expression of a
living factor permeating the whole life of the nation. Further-
more, the code had never shaken itself free from the taint of
slavery. Making all allowance, as Maitland does, for the
benefits brought to Germany both by Italian science and by the
training in systematic thought, we can still agree in his general
conclusion that it was a deplorable day for Germany when
1 Gierke, " Political Theories of the Middle Age," § vi, with other
references (tr. by Maitland).
THE REFORMATION AND GERMANY 159
she " bowed her neck to the Roman yoke." ^ She did not
even win the good of unification on this basis.
German particularism was now too strong for the Emperor
ever to become the direct and efficient sovereign. The net
result, by the end of the fifteenth century, was an advance
towards absolute power for the petty princes, a check to the
development of the free to\vns, and a definite worsening in
the position of the peasants. More and more of these were
actually classed as serfs, their rights lessened, and their
labours and burdens increased. " What did Roman Law
know of the old Germanic liberties ? " asks Henderson.
" The code of Justinian had no words for the different relations
between master and man : the term servus, or slave, was a
convenient one under which to group all peasants " (" Hist,
of Germany," Vol. I, c. x.)
On the other hand, at the opening of the sixteenth century
the peasants themselves were awakening to revolt, pricked by
their own intolerable situation, stimulated by the spread of
learning — printing, it should be remembered, was a German
invention — above all, inspired by Luther's fiery preaching of
a gospel that gave men the hope of freedom. The peasants
buttressed their twelve articles with texts from the Bible,
ending, " If we arc deceived, let Luther correct us by Scrip-
ture." And at first Luther frankly blamed the lords for their
oppressions and frankly admitted that some at least of the
new demands were " just and equitable." ^
To us indeed they seem surprisingly moderate, involving
no more than the abolition of serfdom, freedom to choose a
pastor for themselves — this, it should be noted, was the first
demand — community of water, wood, and pasture, and relief
from the crushing burdens of tithe and tax. But all the
demands were rejected, and in the fighting that followed the
excesses of the mob were countered by still more savage
reprisals. And here it is painful to record the reactionary
intolerance of Luther. His hatred of anarchy, which had
already made him reject every Protestant who went farther
^ Introduction to his tr. of Gierke, op. cit.
* d'Aubigne, " History of the Reformation."
160 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
than himself made him brutal towards the peasants. Just
as Roman law could satisfy itself with a lip-homage to the
general principle of human freedom while making definite
arrangements for the torture of slaves, so Luther, while
defying Pope and Church on behalf of individual Christian
men, saw no reason to protest against selling those very men,
if they were " servants," " at will, like other animals."
On those who dared to protest he turned with fury, and it
is idle to attempt excuse for his share in the ferocity with
which the Peasants' Rising was suppressed. Once they
had risen in arms and plundered " convents and castles," he
held them to deserve " the death of body and soul."
They were to be killed " like mad dogs."
We can only admit that Luther was essentially an assailant,
not a constructive genius. Time after time he had to fall
back on systems outworn or makeshift. Just as he had
nothing to put in the place of Papal infallibility but Biblical
infallibility, so he had nothing to offer the peasants but
renewed submission to their lords. Again, in every " Re-
formed " principality, the headship of the believers which he
had taken from the Papacy he transferred simply to the
secular ruler. " The Papal order being abolished," he wrote
to the Elector of Saxony, "it is your duty to regulate these
things : no other person cares about them, no other can, and
no other ought to do so."
Luther's action here helped towards the compromise of
" aijiis regio, ejus religio," agreed to shortly after his own
death in 1546, and closing the first stage of the religious
struggle (Peace of Augsburg, 1554). Every prince was
allowed to decide on the form of faith for his own province,
and, the number of principalities being large, the provision
allowed after all a substantial modicum of religious liberty,
since a Lutheran could leave a Roman Catholic district or a
Catholic a Lutheran without exiling himself from Germany.
But, obviously, it was a compromise that could scarcely be
expected to last. It gave but a breathing-space before the
Thirty Years' War.
The mingled hope and gloom of this time is concentrated
THE REFORMATION AND GERMANY 161
in the mysterious " Melencolia " engraved by Albrecht
Durer, one of the few great painters Germany ever produced,
faultier far, it is true, than his dehghtful contemporary
Holbein, but with access to strange regions of the imagination
where Holbein could never have ventured. A massive
womanly figure, plunged in thought, sits brooding among a
litter of books, instruments, and symbols, beyond her own
power to interpret or put to use. She has wings, but they
are not strong enough to hft her ; and the rainbow-lit sky
is stormy. For once at least Diirer's tendency to over-
elaboration of detail, a fault common to so much German art,
is dominated by a superb design in which form and significance
are fused.
For the fact that the rehgious ferment did not lead at once
into the chaos of the Thirty Years' War we have, in the main,
three elements to thank : German particularism itself, which
left the Emperor faced with a number of sturdy cities and
provinces, many of whom were in avowed sympathy with
Reformist doctrines, Luther's courageous common sense and
tolerance — " I can by no means admit that false teachers
should be put to death "—and lastly, Charles V's owti wily
statecraft which told him that he could not afford to
alienate a virile people by insisting on extreme measures
against the Protestant leaders.
11
CHAPTER XXIV
THE DOMINANCE OF SPAIN
SIMILAR caution marked the dealings of Charles with
the Netherlands, where he was born. He saw well
enough that Calvinism was making headway there,
and his heart's desire was to " cut out the root of heresy,"
but, though he set up an Inquisition and executed sanguinary
edicts, he was prudent enough to leave the administration of
them to the natives, always on his guard, as he warned his
son to be, against friction between Spaniard and Fleming.
In Spain, where, after aU, he came to feel most at home,
full rein could be given to his despotic tendencies both in
Church and State.
That strange country had been unified po itically by the
marriage of his grandparents, Ferdinand of Aragon and
Isabeha of Castile, and they had employed religious bigotry
to cement their work, Isabella at least \^ith a genuine con-
viction that made her influence both more inspiring and more
dangerous. It was she who revived the Inquisition under
Torquemada ; she who was foremost in completing the
reconquest of Spain by the capture of Granada with its
jewelled Alhambra, the last monument of Moorish art in its
decline ; it was at the height of her triumph that the harsh
edict went out for the expulsion of the Jews.
The policy of the two " Catholic Kings " was, it is generally
admitted, only the culmination of a long process. For seven
centuries the Christian had struggled to reconquer Spain ; he
had succeeded inch by inch, and with the struggle the bitterness
had grown ever more bitter. We have mentioned already
162
THE DOMINANCE OF SPAIN 163
St. Dominic's gospel of persecution, and the Moslem reaction
towards narrow orthodoxy after Averroes. The age-long
conflict and the ultimate triumph acting on a people naturally
proud, fierce, and visionary, produced only too easily a nation
of relentless warriors, bigoted and aggressive, confident that
they were commissioned by God to rule the world in the
interests of the orthodox Faith. Ignatius Loyola, the founder
of the Jesuits, is a characteristic type. Curiously similar,
through all differences, in point of theological passion to his
antagonist and contemporary Luther, he is furthermore, and
above everything, a soldier : the vow of obedience in his
devoted world-wide Society of Jesus rings out like a military
oath and the threats of hell recur like the penalties of a
drum-head court-martial. The unmistakable menace to
freedom of thought was the more ominous because it chimed
in with the dominant spirit of the Spanish people. Their
mystics (St. John of the Cross, St. Teresa, and many of lesser
note) were all devoted Romanists. The people at large had
regained their country for themselves by fighting the infidel
like soldiers, and like soldiers they were prepared to think,
to act, and to die. An engrained contempt for ordinary
craftsmanship and trade had been further stimulated by the
racial and religious hostility against the Arabs, the Moors,
and the Jews, who, on their side, never lost the commercial
lead that they won in the early days of the invasion. A
blundering policy in economics made matters worse : prohi-
bition of valuable exports and heavy dues on all sales even
within the country could not make up for the exemption of
nobles and clergy from taxation : they could only choke, and
they did choke, the natural channels of trade.
For a time Spain was spared the full consequences of this
strangling system by the discovery of the New World. The
enterprise of her sister Portugal opened the way Eastwards,
Prince Henry the Navigator sending an expedition to the
Azores in 1460, Bartolommeo Diaz rounding the Cape of Good
Hope in i486, and Vasco da Gama reaching India in 1498.
Westwards, the genius of the Italian Columbus, recognized
and employed by Isabella, sought another route to the Indian
164 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
regions and found instead the way to the Americas (1492).
Add to this the accession of power, apparently immense,
given by the vast European possessions of Charles V, and
it is not surprising that Spain in the sixteenth century
felt herself at the top of golden opportunities and ready
to welcome a despotism that promised her both this world
and the next. There were, it is true, certain struggles
for freedom, just as there were leanings towards Pro-
testantism, for all such movements were international,
but heresy was stamped out by an Inquisition that the
majority of the people approved, and the hopes of popular
representation were destroyed by the animosity between the
nobles and the non-privileged orders. Both classes were left
too weak to make head against the quiet, steady autocracy
of Charles V. Even the example of Aragon with its more
truly representative Cortes — that Aragon which Isabella had
declared (because of its relative freedom) must be " con-
quered " by her husband and herself — could not achieve any
political liberty for the rest of Spain. The Emperor could
leave to his son Philip II a submissive country, the ready
tool for his fanatical ambition.
But while we note these dangers to liberty it is important
to recognize the force that the people gained by the active
sense of a common mission and that mission divine. In the
work of a sensitive Greek, the painter still known as El
Greco (1548-1625), the modern world can trace as in a magical
mirror the intensity and strange, fierce dignity of the period,
and the grim apocalyptic visions that must have floated before
many a Spanish mind, even if we see also in lower moods
signs of an exaggerated religiosity cloaking sheer pride and
lust. The readiness of a Greek to accept a visionary, even
an extravagant, outlook recalls the mood of the Byzantine
artists, and is in curious contrast with the spirit of classic
Hellenism, poised, exquisite and strong, on what was strongest
and fairest in this world. Equally curious is the marked
effect El Greco has produced to-day on artists and critics of
the most modern sympathies, utterly out of sympathy as
they are with his theology. He attracts an age, wear}' of
THE DOMINANCE OF SPAIN 165
photographic verisimihtude, by the sharp strength of his
design, gaunt flaming forms knit together by their own
rhj-thm, and cahing up from realms beyond appearance new
and indescribable impressions.
Among native Spaniards his nearest analogue is perhaps
the dramatist Calderon (1601-1687), in whose work the Devil
enters as an actual and terrible dramatis persona, and human
beings live a fantastic life, high-strained, often over-strained, but
still of a dignity and beauty that explains his appeal to Shelley.
What Spanish life and Spanish art lacked in general were
the qualities of sobriety, tenderness, and humour. And yet
Spain brought forth in these two centuries, the sixteenth and
seventeenth, two men to show her power exactly here,
Cerv^antes for humour and tenderness, Velazquez for tender-
ness and gravity, both men for a sober facing of the world,
and both also with a native understanding of that lofty dis-
tinction and proud sense of honour that is peculiar to Spain.
Cervantes was Shakespeare's contemporary, died indeed in
the very same year, 1616, and it is no idle fancy to compare
the two. Without attempting to put the Spaniard on a level
with the Englishman, we can recognize in Cervantes the
Shakespearian sympath}'-, intimate and critical, that made
him at once appreciate romance and caricature it, the broad
fun and gentle ironic laughter that could embrace both
Sancho and the Don, give Sancho the precedence in all matters
of mother- wit and common sense, and yet show his master far
the greater man, a devotedness in every ludicrous energy of
his that wins the devotion of his shrewder servant and the
love of every intelligent reader. The sweet wdnd of laughter
that blows through " Don Quixote," how was it that it did
not blow all t;yTanny and self-deceit away ?
The same sort of question rises as we study the portraits
Velazquez painted (1599-1660). He stands, it is admitted,
among the kings of painting for the sheer beauty of his crafts-
manship, (he had entered into the Italian inheritance and
used its lessons to develop his own gifts), his power of lovely
brushwork, his feeling for subtle gradations of quiet tone, for
space and atmosphere, for dignity and unity of impression, and
166 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
for that sense of reality which is quite other than vulgar illusion.
So much is admitted, but it is often said that he had no inner
vision, gives no sign of heart in his work, could only paint
what he " saw." Yet probably it is only his soberness and
self-restraint both in conception and design that hide from
the impatient observer his powers of penetration and pity.
He will not over-emphasize for any obtuseness of the critic.
He paints men and women in their weakness as a Recording
Angel might : without anger, but without extenuation. If
it were not for the blind fatuity of mortals we could ask in
wonder how Philip IV, unmasked in his sodden old age, or
Innocent X in his grasping cupidity and impotent ferocity,
could possibly have accepted with complacency these damn-
ing statements of themselves. But, moreover, among such
creatures, debased and menacing, Velazquez will paint us
children, with a sense of their freshness, their naturalness,
their morning joyfulness that has never been surpassed.
Most appealing of all his works are the pictures of those dwarfs
whom the cruel Court of Spain bred up for its own amuse-
ment. The painter, it is plain to see, understood them all,
as they endured the humiliations they were brave enough to
hide from others — the defiant alert " Inglese," scarcely taller
than the splendid full-grown hound he is set to hold, but ready
to run a man through the body who dared openly to pity
him ; the tiny crippled scholar, brooding wistfully over
the book almost larger than himself ; the deformed heroic
little figure seated on the ground, gazing out of the picture
into the eyes, one fancies, that had taken him off his guard
by their quiet sympathy, the stern eyes of Velazquez softened
by an infinite compassion.
But two men, even such men as Cervantes and Velazquez,
cannot save a nation. Scarcely another name can be found
among the great men of Renaissahce Spain as working for
free criticism. The Inquisition did its work too well. After
Phihp II the whole trend of Spain, speaking broadly, is
towards dominion and persecution. And so, without liberty,
the stimulating effect of unity dies away and Spain at the
close of the seventeenth century sinks down into stagnation.
A UW'AKF
(From the Painting by Velazquez, Madrid)
CHAPTER XXV
THE RISE OF THE DUTCH REPUBLIC AND THE
DECLINE OF SPAIN
FOR the Netherlands, for France, and for England
Philip II had planned either persecution or conquest
or both. Everywhere, more or less completely, he failed.
In France, his attempt at a universal league against heretics
was countered by the Huguenot resistance, and the dream of
the French crown for himself died in the face of the national
distaste for a foreigner. The sharpest single stroke against
his designs was dealt by the defeat of the Armada (1588) at
the hands of an England roused in defence of herself and the
Reformers, a defeat the more galling after his position as Mary
Tudor's husband. But the most dramatic struggle was in
the Netherlands, where the tenacity of a stubborn people
joined forces with the genius of a born ruler, William the
Silent, to defy and defeat a tyranny that seemed all but
invincible. William of Orange, born in Germany and of
German blood crossed with Dutch, had thrown in his lot with
the Netherlands from youth. He had been singled out for
special favour when only a lad by Charles V, who prided
himself with some reason on an eye for men, and it was on
his shoulder that the Emperor leaned when he came into the
great Hall at Brussels to abdicate in favour of Philip his son
(1555)- Trained in statecraft under a despot, and bred a
Catholic though born of Lutheran parents, it was only
gradually, and by the shock of persecution on a generous and
resolute nature, that William grew into the rebel leader of a
Protestant Republic. The most brilliant and eloquent of
167
168 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
men, with a tongue that could " turn all the gentlemen at
court any way he liked," he won his paradoxical name of
" the Silent " by his reticence on an occasion crucial both for
himself and Europe. Riding alone with Henri H of France
in the Bois de Vincennes, he listened, without betraying his
horror by a word, while Henri expounded as to a sympa-
thetic hearer " all the details of the plan arranged between
the King of Spain and himself for the rooting out and rigorous
punishment of the heretics." Years afterwards, in the
" Apology " that Orange published when banned as a traitor by
Philip, he spoke of the deep effect the revelation had made
on him. For the time he acted cautiously but swiftly.
He had learnt that the Spanish forces in the Netherlands were
to be the tools for massacre ; he warned his country of the
danger, and henceforward their removal became one of his
cardinal demands. But this, like the ending of the
Inquisition and the restoration of the old liberties, Philip
would never grant, and step by step the fearful cruelties of
the persecution drove Orange into definite revolt. Once the
breach was made he never faltered, not even when the friends
of freedom were driven back on a strip of territory barely
two miles broad with no help but from the wild " Beggars
of the Sea," half pirates, half patriots, and from the sea itself
in which they were ready, if need were, to drown what was
left to them of the land.
Spenser, exaggerating as usual the part played by England
under the " Faery Queene " in succouring the distressed, does
not exaggerate the desolation of Beige in her dark hour :
" ' Ay me ' (said she) ' and whither shall I go ?
Are not all places full of forraine powres ?
My pallaces possessed of my foe,
My cities sackt, and their skj'-threating towres
Razed and made smooth fields now full of flowres ?
Only those marishes and myrie bogs
In which the fearefuU ewftes do build their bowres
Yeild me an hostry 'mongst the croking frogs.
And harbour here in safety from those ravenous dogs.'" ^
1 " Faery Queene." Bk. V. Canto 5, Stanza 23.
THE DUTCH REPUBLIC AND SPAIN 169
Orange had, as a fact, little to look for from any helper
beyond those marishes and bogs. It was on them and their
people he had to rely. And all the while, far in advance of
his age, he toiled to bring about mutual tolerance among his
countrymen. Catholics and Protestants alike. (" The differ-
ence," he kept on repeating in his large way, " the difference
is not enough to keep you apart." ^) If he could have had his
heart's desire, the ten Flemish provinces, mainly Catholic,
would have been united permanently Avith the seven of the
North, Dutch and fiercely Calvinist. But the Union broke up,
even before his death, under the stress of religious bigotry, the
difference of race and tradition, and the desperate conflict
against Spain, a conflict that lasted for more than a generation
with heart-breaking alternations of success and defeat. It
ended finally early in the seventeenth century with the full
triumph of Holland. But that triumph William never lived to
see. In 1584 he was struck dowTi by a fanatical assassin, who
held to the last, through all the torments of his savage punish-
ment, that he had done God service. William would not have
sanctioned the torture. He had already forbidden it in the
case of men who had tried to murder him before, men whose
lives he sought to spare. His dying cry sums up the temper
of his life at the close : " ]\Ion Dieu, ayez pitie de mon ame,
mon Dieu, ayez pitie de ce pauvre peuple " — words written
round his noble portrait at the Hague.
A greater statesman never lived, nor a more lovable charac-
ter. Under him the independent nation of Holland rose to
become a rallying-ground and refuge for liberty and for all
that liberty could nurture. In the seventeenth century, while
Spain was sinking under the weight of her own tyrannical
system, her enemies defying her, her population crushed and
impoverished, Holland could be a home ahke for citizens and
foreigners. The French Descartes found refuge there, and
the forbears of the Jew Spinoza : there the fathers of New
England halted before they made their way to America :
from there Grotius put forward his plea for International
Law ; and there a broad and valiant humanity sustained
1 From "William the Silent," by F. Harrison
170 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
the heart of the painter Rembrandt (1607-1699). Dutch
painting before Rembrandt shows a high degree of academic
accomplishment and but little else. In Rembrandt we have
a master in dramatic power and the understanding of
expressive tone and form, lord in particular over the
emotional effects of shadow and light. It is possible to trace
in his work two distinct tendencies which in his large nature
balance and develop one another until in his last and finest
period they coalesce and find their fit expression in a grave
and deep simplicity of design. Like his compatriots, he
was keenly interested in ordinary everyday objects, their
shapes and surprises, but, unlike them, he was also keenly
alive to the charm of the mysterious, remote, and unexplored.
The two interests became fused, and in the end we gaze with
equal wonder at the sheer beauty and mystery that he saw in
the light on the walls of a cellar and in the dust of a bare
studio, at his gallant Polish horseman riding out alone in the
autumn evening alert on a desperate quest, at the dreadful
majesty of his final Anatomy Lesson or of his Flayed Ox
hanging in the common slaughter-house, at the tenderness of
his worn Christ suddenly recognized in the shadows of the inn
at Emmaus, or at the superhuman dignity of his own figure,
an old and ruined man, bankrupt, and seated as on a throne
with the right to judge the world.
There is a curious and very interesting likeness, among
many obvious differences, between himself and his contem-
porary Velazquez — each of them nurtured in a strong and
self-confident community, but the one among aristocrats,
the other among plebeians, each of them outstripping his
limitations by his sincerity and intensity of vision, a double
vision embracing both the outer world of space and light and
the inner world of human character. Rembrandt's is the
wider nature and the richer, but he and Velazquez would have
understood one another. The proud Spaniard had really
more in common with the Dutch peasant than with the
Flemish courtier Rubens (1577-1640), whom he actually
met as ambassador in Spain. The gifts of Rubens, certainly,
a lusty Northerner of genius delighting in the plenitude of the
FAUST AND THE MAGIC DISK
(From an Etching by Rembrandt, British Museum)
«
THE DUTCH REPUBLIC AND SPAIN 171
Renaissance, are not fit subjects for contempt. His sumptu-
ous colour, his buoyant and intricate rhythms, his exultant
expression of the joie de vivre, have won, and deserve to win,
enlightened admiration. But the thinness of his sentiment
and the grossness of his taste leave something repellent and
superficial in all but the very finest of his work where his
sympathy for some exuberant expression of life, the beauty,
say, of a young strong woman, or of a tiger-cub, or of a
glowing autumn landscape where the clouds chase the light,
or of a rollicking Flemish dance in the open air, kindle him
to a more than common eagerness. Of the inner world
Rubens knew and cared little or nothing.
CHAPTER XXVI
THE RENAISSANCE IN FRANCE: RABELAIS,
MONTAIGNE, AND THE HUGUENOTS
THE sixteenth century that meant so much for Italy,
Spain, Holland, and Germany, was at least as fruitful
for France and England. After the Hundred Years'
War, which had checked French culture almost as much as
English, France was gradually restored through the statecraft
of Louis XI and prepared for the learning and the exuberance
of the Renaissance. Even during the war the brilliant
picturesqueness of Froissart, friend both of England and
France, the quiet incisiveness of Commines, biographer of
Louis XI, and the wild, wistful poetry of Villon, are enough to
show the powers latent in the people. In Villon we hear a
sharp-sweet note of poetry rare indeed in France. But, though
rare, it is not without significant parallel. Verlaine, for
example, is blood-brother to the mediseval scamp. They
both draw a peculiar charm out of vice and shame and the
fear of death and the biting regret for wasted youth.
" Qu'as-tu fait, O toi que voila,
Pleurant sans cesse,
Dis, qu'as tu fait, toi que voila,
De ta jeunesse ? "
It is the same haunting cry as in Villon's futile self-reproach,
the same plaintive melody as in the never-hackneyed ballad
where the vanished lovely ladies of the past drift through the
poet's fancy like the ghosts of falling snowflakes. Death
has taken them as he takes all lovely things :
173
THE RENAISSANCE IN FRANCE 178
'■ OOl sont les gracieux gallans
Que je suivoye an temps jadis
Si bien chantans, si bien parlans.
Si plaisans en faiz et en diz ? "
" \^^lere are they now, the gallant lads
Whom I followed in bygone days,
Lords of song, and speech, and jest,
Gracious in all their words and ways ? "
Death has made them a loathing and a horror.
But at the opening of the sixteenth century we swing out
from mediaeval thoughts of death into a sunlit burst of activity,
a zest both for learning and life. And here the dominating
figure is without question Rabelais (1490-1553). It has been
said that he incarnates the very spirit of the full Renaissance,
its boundless vitality and freedom, its contempt of outworn
formiilas, its confident appeal to reason, its unquenchable
laughter, its hatred of restraint, its rohicking obscenity.
So stimulating in Rabelais is the torrent of this Aristophanic
compound that at moments the reader feels as though Falstaff
were with him transfigured into a scholar, a generous moralist,
a statesman, and a religious reformer, without ever ceasing to be
Falstaff. But there are other moments, many of them, when
the same reader wearies intolerably of the Gallic cock on the
Gallic dunghill and would welcome Mrs. Grundy herself as a
relief from the obsession of indecency. Yet that obsession is
bound up for Rabelais with a belief vital to him, and most
inspiring to Europe, the belief in human nature and all its
functions. Meredith has said of St. Anthony that seeing
the Hog in Nature he took Nature for the Hog and turned
from the sight in disgust. Rabelais, we might add, also saw
the Hog, but worshipping Nature, delighted to worship it.
The confusion is the cause of infinite mischief in both directions,
and yet Rabelais himself at his best indicates the way out.
The huge force of lusty life in Gargantua and Pantagruel,
horrible if merely thwarted or merely starved, equally horrible
if left to run wild, can come to its own when nurtured on
sound knowledge and disciplined by the training of body and
mhid. In this sense Rabelais revives the noblest pagan
174 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
ideals for education and anticipates the modern. Ponocrates,
the " Master of Toil," whose scholar is called Gladheart
(Eudemon), rescues the lubberly Gargantua from his lounging
and guzzling under his old schoolmasters, the lazy mediaeval
" Sophisters," makes an athlete of him and puts him " into
such a road and way of studying that he lost not one hour in
the day."i
Rabelais' appetite is not more giant for carnal food than for
knowledge. His demands for his scholars are insatiable : they
must be given all the wisdom of the ancients, history,
cosmography, " the liberal arts of geometry, arithmetic,
and music," Greek, " without which a man may be
ashamed to account himself a scholar," and all other
learned languages, and then the full knowledge by direct
observation of " the works of Nature," those vast sciences,
as yet unknown how vast, now beginning to open before
men's eyes. And to crown all, the conclusion, since " knowledge
without conscience is but the ruin of the soul, it behoveth
thee to serve, to love and to fear God, and on Him to cast all
thy thoughts and all thy hope and by faith formed in charity
to cleave unto Him, so that thou mayest never be separated
from Him by thy sins." So trained, the scholar is free to enter
Gargantua's Abbey of Theleme {OeXr}f.ia), the Monastery of
Man's Will,- over the entrance to which is engraved the motto
" Fay ce que voudras,"
" Do what thou wilt,"
" because men that are free, well-born, well-bred and con-
versant in honest companies, have naturally an instinct and
spur that prompteth them unto virtuous actions and with-
draws them from vice, which is called Honour." The words
ring with the love of liberty, a force sufficient in Rabelais'
view, if sustained by reason, to fill the place of all authority.
The ring of it is heard even more strongly in the next sonorous
period : " Those same men, when by base subjection and
constraint they are brought under and kept down, turn aside
1 Bk. i. cc. 15-24, Urquhart's translation.
* See above on Dante, p. no.
THE RENAISSANCE IN FRANCE 175
from that noble disposition by which they formerly were
inclined to virtue to shake off and break that bond of servitude
wherein they are so tyrannously enslaved ; for it is agreeable
with the nature of man to long after things forbidden and to
desire what is denied."
The old order of unity under the Church was passing away,
the dream of unity based on a rigid acceptance of the Bible
was doomed at its birth, the hope of the future was to lie in a
unity found in science and freedom, and Rabelais is one of the
first and most remarkable of its gospellers, if we may use so
serious a term of a humorist so outrageous. It says much for
the richness of the French temperament that the age of
Rabelais was also the age of Calvin, the most doctrinaire of
thinkers, fast-bound in the sternest of theologies and the
narrowest of moralities. Yet with Calvin also the appeal to
the intellect was incessant, and once he had formed his com-
munity of believers he too was prepared to trust them with
their own self-direction. Thus it came about that, self-exiled
from France to Geneva, he strengthened the foundations of
that self-governing community which was to inspire Rousseau
with the most remarkable political gospel of the eighteenth
century.
Prognostics of the coming religious struggle meet us in
Rabelais. As might be expected, he mocks at superstition,
gibes at the monks, tends obviously to the Reformed doctrines,
notably in his dignified account of the old free-thinker's
death — a beautiful passage set in a sea of filth — but he is
always careful to guard himself against theological controversy.
Of that he has a distrust as shrewd as he has of war. In his
attack on what we should now call " aggressive Imperialism "
he reminds us vividly of More and Erasmus. More's " Utopia,"
by the way, he appears to have read and admired, since he
uses the name for Gargantua's kingdom. " The time is not
now as formerly to conquer the kingdoms of our neighbour
princes, and to build up our own greatness upon the loss of our
nearest Christian brother. This imitation of the ancient
Herculeses, Alexanders, Hannibals, Scipios, Caesars, and other
such heroes is quite contrary to the profession of the gospel of
176 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
Christ, by which we are commanded to preserve, keep, rule and
govern every man his own country and lands, and not in a
hostile manner invade others ; and that which heretofore the
Barbars and Saracens called prowess and valour, we do now
call robbery, thievery, and wickedness."
So have Europe's great men spoken to her again and again,
but Europe has seldom listened.
What we miss in Rabelais, amid all his wealth of humanity,
wit, thought and humour, is the peculiar quality of poetry,
and if he had had this, maybe he would never have choked
us with foulness. That quality is perhaps indefinable,
certainly by the present writer, but it can be recognized, and
it is a quality that we miss perpetually in the literature of
France and in her art, always excepting her great cathedrals.
It is not to be identified with imagination. The French have
abundance of imagination, nothing indeed is more distinctive
in their masterpieces than their formidable power of combining
a close grip on the actual with the impression of huge uncom-
prehended forces looming up behind and beyond appearances.
Balzac is a supreme example, but we can feel the same thing
in writers as far apart as Moliere, Pascal, Flaubert, or painters
such as Degas, Manet, Cezanne. All artists, doubtless,
combine the actual with the imagined, but the French are
distinguished by the sharpness of the clash with which they
bring the two together. And they do this, as a rule, not in the
way that we may call, for want of another word, the way of
" poetry," the way of Botticelli, for example, in painting, or
Keats and Shelley in verse, or Mozart in music, the way that
leads to the apprehension " under the form of Beauty " of the
whole universe. And to say this is nowise to discredit French
art. On the contrary, it helps us to recognize a stark and
tonic quality in their work, by comparison with which many of
our English treasures seem swathed in a mere golden mist of
sentiment.
To each method its own triumphs and its own limita-
tions. Certainly the typical genius of French literature,
speaking broadly, seems less suited to poetry in the technical
sense, with its rapturous ecstasies of rhythm, than to the more
THE RENAISSANCE IN FRANCE 177
scientific, cool, and precise language of prose. In any case
there can be no question that the French poets of the sixteenth
century, IVIarot, Ronsard, and his followers in the Pleiade,
are not men of Rabelais' calibre. Perhaps their chief signifi-
cance lies in their enthusiasm for learning and their insistence
that poetry, hke other branches of art, needed a man's whole-
hearted service throughout his hfe, an insistence that has done
much to foster the devotion paid ever since to literature in
France. But also it had its drawbacks, perhaps because, as
we have suggested, the poetic spirit proper was not strong
enough in the French genius. The real, if slender stream of
inspiration in Ronsard and his fellows seems often clogged by
ahen growths. And often too the writers chose the wrong
models : Horace, for example, the least poetic among poets,
instead of Simonides, as later on the dramatists chose Seneca
instead of Sophocles.
The name of Marot, himself attacked and exiled for heresy,
anticipates, like the name of Rabelais, the wars of religion
— ^Marot, whose metrical version of the Psalms was sung by
Huguenots in France and Calvinists in the Netherlands at the
most stirring crises of their fate ; Marot whose charming fables,
models for La Fontaine later on, have more than a touch of
wistfulness in their gaiety :
" and all the while,
Tears in my eyes, I sing to make you smile."
There was cause enough for tears when the wars broke out
finally after the death of Henri H at the turn of the century
(1562), and rolled on through the horrors of Catherine de
Medici's ascendency and the massacre of the St. Bartholomew
(1572), complicated by struggles for political liberty and
intrigues of sheer ambition, until the pacification a whole
generation later (1593), under Henri IV, the quondam
Huguenot leader. King of Navarre. Accepting the Mass with
a grin for the sake of Paris and peace, Henri had at least the
qualities of his defects and refused to persecute the opinions
he had tossed aside. The Edict of Nantes (1598) gave indeed
" to the Protestants of France a far better position than was
12
178 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
accorded to religious dissidents in any other European state."
(Grant, op. cit.) They could practise their rites freely,
public careers were open to them, and certain towns, notably
La Rochelle, were practically handed over to their control.
Such freedom was a counterpoise to the still growing power
of the monarchy, growing largely as ar esult of the long civil
war. But the equilibrium was not destined to last. As in
Germany and England, so in France, the latter part of the
sixteenth century saw a truce, grateful indeed and valuable,
but unstable.
During the long struggle Montaigne, one of the first
and most famous of essayists, stood aloof. " Toute ma
petite prudence, en ces guerres civiles ou nous sommes,
s'employe k ce qu'elles n'interrompent ma liberte d'aUer et
venir." (Bk. iii. c. 13.) Nevertheless, in the very coolness of
that detached sentence runs a love of personal freedom that
makes us recognize the compatriot of Rabelais. Equally
marked is Montaigne's dislike of bigotry. " Apres tout, c'est
mettre ses conjectures k bien haut prix que d'en faire cuire
un homme tout vif " (Bk. iii. c. 11). (" After all, we rate our
guesses uncommonly high if we roast a man alive because
of them.") A century before Descartes, he is the first in the
new Europe to advocate the claims of philosophic doubt,
and here his study of Socrates stood him in good stead.
Man, he says, recalling Aristotle, has " a natural desire of
knowledge." But he insists on putting all so-called knowledge
to the test. He would infinitely prefer agnosticism to parrot
formulas. " Sgavoir par coeur, ce n'est pas s5avoir,"he says
in his admirable brooding on education. The fallacy of literal
inspiration could never have entangled him ; men, he foresaw,
would quarrel as acrimoniously over interpretation as over
anything else. " Ceux-la se moquent, qui pensent appetisser
nos debats, et les arrester, en nous r'appellant a I'expresse
parole de la Bible." Not that he wanted an end put to dis-
cussion. In words kindling to a warmth surprising in him
— never found elsewhere except in the passage on friendship
or the praise of Socrates — he cries out that there is room,
endless room for progress in thought, "II y a toujours
THE RENAISSANCE IN FRANCE 179
place pour un suivant, oiii, et pour nous-mesmes, et route par
ailleurs. II n'y a point de fin en nos inquisitions. Nostre fin
est en I'autre monde. C'est signe de racourcissement
d'esprit quand il se contente : ou signe de lasset^. Nul esprit
genereux ne s'arreste en soy." (" There is always room for a
successor, yes, and for ourselves, and other paths to travel.
There can be no end to our search. Our end is in the other
world. Contentment is a sign that our spirit has shrunk or
that it is tired. No generous spirit can rest in itself.")
There is much that is repellent in Montaigne, not least his
cold play with sensuality, but apart from the charm of his
polished wit and candour, his clear and arrowy stjde, this
passion for Reason helps to explain the attraction he has had
for those he would himself have called " des ames bien nees."
And we must add his one experience of friendship, deep and
warm enough to endear him to Shakespeare, and his urbane
humanity. DisHking all tyranny, a dislike fostered by his
love of Roman hterature in its greatest period, this self-
possessed Epicurean, though without the energy to fight
oppression in the open field, shoots his light, keen shafts from
under the shield of irony against its absurdities and cruelties.
" Ce que j 'adore moy-mesme aux Roys, c'est la foule de
leurs adorateurs. Toute inclination et soubmission leur est
deue, sauf celle de I'entendement. Ma raison n'est pas
duite a se courber et fleschir, ce sont mes genoux." (" What
I myself really adore in Kings is the crowd of their adorers.
We owe them every respect and all submission, save the
submission of the understanding. My reason is not bound to
yield and bend, only my knees.")
His bland contempt for the injustice of the law-courts sup-
ports in its own way the rushing invectives of Rabelais. " Or
les loix se maintiennent en credit non par ce qu'elles sont justes,
mais par ce qu'elles sont loix. C'est le fondement mystique
de leur authority ; elles n'en ont point d'autre. Qui bien
leur sert. Elles sont souvent faites par des sots. Plus
souvent par des gens qui en haine d'equaht^ ont faute d'^quit6.
Mais toujours par des hommes, autheurs vains et irresolus."
(" The laws hold their high position not because they are just
180 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
but because they are laws. That is the mystical basis of their
authority. They have no other. And it stands them in good
stead. They are often made by fools. Still more often by
those who, because they hate equality, fail in equity. But
always by men, that is to say, by makers who are vain and
weak.")
It is the note repeated in various tones by Voltaire, Renan,
Anatole France. Anatole France must envy the page full of
pity and laughter concerning " the poor devils " who were
hanged through a miscarriage of justice. The mistake was
known in time, and might have been repaired, only that
precedent had to be considered and prestige upheld. Other
men, whose fate did not touch the majesty of the law, might
have been saved : " les miens furent pendus irreparablement."
We cannot take leave of the sixteenth century in France
without noting the impetus given to political thought by the
wars of religion. Their debit account is heavy, and this at
least may be put to their credit. The Huguenots, on the one
hand, appealing to a law higher than any human authority,
stimulated to fresh purpose old speculations on the nature and
limits of government and sovereignty. Agrippa d'Aubigne,
for example, speaks with admiration of the pamphlet,
" Vindicise contra tyrannos," the work in fact of a co-religionist,
Hubert Languet : "La estoit amplement traite j usque ou
s'estend I'obeissance aux Rois, k quelles causes et par quels
moyenson pent prendre les amies" (" Histoire Universelle,"
ii. c. xvii.). On the other hand, and of almost equal
importance, should be placed the projects of the pacificators.
The name of Henri Quatre was associated after his death
— though probably without authority and simply as a pious
fraud — by his able Finance Minister, the Huguenot Sully,
with the scheme of a Grand Design for stabilizing Europe by
an alliance between her leading nations. A shattering end had
been put to the old dream of uniting Christendom under one
head and with one faith, the dream of Dante's " De
Monarchia." But here we find at least adumbrated a fresh
policy of union that might conceivably take its place, a policy
of something not unlike federation. Sully's scheme, with all
THE RENAISSANCE IN FRANCE 181
its defects, is memorable as inaugurating modern attempts to
think out — and in our own days, maybe, to work out — a
practicable plan " by which all Europe might be regulated and
governed as one great family." ^
The more visionary brooding over Utopias, felt in Rabelais,
More, Erasmus, even ]\Iontaigne, points in the same direction.
lien were looking for a fresh principle of harmony and peace
on which to reconstruct society. In the next century Grotius
in Holland (1583-1645), horrified .at war persisting and
the cruelty of war increasing, took the step — small in itself,
but big, it may be, with consequence — of urging nations to
agree deliberately on laws hmiting the nature of their attacks.
The controversies Grotius raised are not yet solved, and he
himself, it may be granted, was not a man of first-rate intellect.
But he is noteworthy for stating, bravely and forcibly and with
his own preference clear, the two opposing views on the choice
between which the progress of the world may prove to hang :
one, that everything was permissible to the soldier, since laws
were silent when weapons spoke ; and the other, that war,
though a recourse to force, need not, and should not be a
recourse to unlimited force, but that always and everywhere
the voices of reason, humanitj^ and moderation should be
heard. Hence, and with good cause, our system of inter-
national law, inchoate and faulty though it is, looks to Grotius
with gratitude as one of its founders.
^ From the eighteenth-century translation now reprinted in the
Grotius Society PubUcations.
CHAPTER XXVII
THE RENAISSANCE IN ENGLAND:
ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE
IT is strange to turn from Montaigne's French wit, cool,
disillusioned, kindly, and mordant, to the joy and excite-
ment that mark the Renaissance in England. Rabelais,
writing before the tragedy of the Huguenot wars, is perhaps
nearest to the temper of the Elizabethans, just as it was an
Englishman with the Elizabethan tradition, Urquhart, who
helped to translate him with such surprising success. But
Rabelais, as we have insisted, had nothing of the poet in him,
and the Elizabethans are pre-eminently poets. Signs of the
coming exuberance had already appeared. Even during the
desolating Wars of the Roses Malory's work on the old
romances shows that the appetite for chivalrous and heroic
literature was still somewhere alive. And the ballads of
Scotland and the Border point in the same direction. We
have scarcely sufficient knowledge to enable us to answer
all the questions about the date and origin of ballad poetry,
but it seems clear that good ballads were written in the
fifteenth century, and a good ballad must not only tell its
story tersely and with spirit, it must also carry in it some-
thing that thrills and warms the heart. A people may not
follow up the promise of its ballads, but the promise is the
promise of a rich humanity.
When the civil strife was at last closed by the Tudor
monarchy and the two Roses were made one, the nation,
released, sprang forward with a bound towards other and
finer activities. England, under Henry VIII, began to take
182
THE RENAISSANCE IN ENGLAND 183
her full share in the general revival of Greek letters and the
ferment of religious reform. Characteristically, the majority
of the English reformers eschewed too violent a breach with
the old forms, and religious animosity in England never,
except during the brief reign of Mary Tudor, reached anything
like the violence that ruled in France or Germany or Spain.
Sir Thomas More's " Utopia" holds an enlightened plea for
tolerance, though his own practice, hampered perhaps by his
devotion to the general principles of the Catholic system,
was not always on the level of his most daring thought. The
" Utopia " is remarkable in other ways as among the first of
all Utopias in Western Europe : the reasoned effort to think
out — much as Plato had done centuries ago — an ideal Common-
wealth where to all men of goodwill might be secured the
means of living and the incentive to live well. The old
economic problems at the back of the Peasants' Revolt and
behind the words of Langland and Wyclif recur in More —
" sheep are eating men " — but there is something new and
significantly modern in his application of the intellect to their
solution and in his forward-looking view. But just as IMore's
own development was cramped by his conservative sym-
pathies, so there was no attempt, for the time, to follow
up in practice any of his bold speculations. The Marian
persecution and the ensuing struggle against Spain and
Rome made the nation reluctant to imperil by any sub-
versive theories the unity it had gained under the rule
of Elizabeth, a rule that owing to her statesmanlike tact
did not hamper what freedom had, so far, been achieved.
The ardour, the readiness to experiment, that we can
feel in More did not disappear. Rather they increased,
but they passed for the time into other channels, and the
chief of these was poetry.
Spenser, the first of the great names, though all come thick
together, has always been claimed as the " poet's poet," but
he is also, and markedly, a national poet. He is no dramatist,
no born story-teUer, he has httle constructive power, he is
often over-sweet and over-long, he cannot touch the springs
of tears and of laughter, but he can open the magic casements
184 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
into faery lands, and charm us with the song of his own heart,
or again with the enthusiasm of patriotic service and, we
must add, of patriotic illusion. Montaigne wrote of himself,
no man more fully, but his fitting medium was prose, and his
attitude to the struggles of his nation was throughout detached.
Spenser sings both of his private love and his public hopes.
His own wedding-song remains his most perfect achievement,
the Epithalamium of revelry and prayer, where the Bacchanal
day is holy, and the stars look down on the marriage-night
like spirits in Paradise. His Platonic " Hymn to Beauty " is
almost as exquisite. But the long rambling unfinished ' ' Faery
Queene," though nothing like so perfect, is more distinctive
both of the man and of his time. Like his idolized Chaucer he
loved scholarship and learnt eagerly from foreigners — the
mere form of his chief work shows the stamp of Ariosto, from
whom he learnt most, while his early translations prove his
study of the French Pleiade — but he has given an unmistak-
ably English character to his rich medley of romantic echoes
and classical learning. It is all wrapt in the sunlight and
the mist of enthusiasm for gallant adventure, for the glory of
the Virgin Queen, for the defence of what seemed a purer
religion. The response of his public was ardent and instan-
taneous. Spenser's qualities at once appealed to what was
generous and flattered what was vain in the Elizabethan
temper. Half-way between old and new, looking back
lovingly to the image of the antique world,
" When as man's age was in its freshest prime
And the first blossom of faire virtue bore,"
(Prol. to Bk. V.)
thrilling with the new-found sense,
" That of the world least part to us is read ;
And daily now through hardy enterprise
Many great Regions are discovered,"
(Prol. to Bk. II.)
alive to courtesy and courage everywhere, yet by temperament
aristocratic, dismissing the new claim to equality as a mere
aping of justice, exulting over the brilliance, the endurance,
THE RENAISSANCE IN ENGLAND 185
and the victory of England's queen till he could see no fault
in her at all, he captivated outright the leaders of a nation
united once more under an adored descendant of mighty
kings, a nation overflowing with vitality, its mettle tested by
a struggle for life and death, its imagination fired by new
discoveries, its intellect stimulated by a new learning that
greedily absorbed the old. What more welcome than the
enchantment that showed them so much of their own ambitions
transfigured " in lond of Faery " ?
Allegory came naturally to Spenser, and allegory is a form
of art capable, whatever its dangers, and they are many, of
singular successes. It is, moreover, undeniably, a form well
suited to the EngHsh genius. Spenserian allegory has been
potent with men so diverse as Bunyan and Milton, Keats
and Shelley. But Spenser's dreamy fantastic chronicle
wherein, with Shakespeare, we read
" descriptions of the fairest wights,
And beauty making beautiful old rhyme
In praise of ladies dead and lovely knights,"
knights and ladies succouring distress and achieving self-
control — all of it reflects after all only one aspect of the
Elizabethan age. It was a passionate age also, very ill to
bridle. Spenser's own letter from Ireland furnishes a sardonic
commentary on the poet's legends of justice and courtesy.
It was the time of the " Plantations," when England first
made a determined effort to subdue Ireland to her own laws
and customs. Ireland had never united herself and was thus
the less able effectively to resist. The disunion gave some
real pretext for interference, but nothing can palliate the
tyranny with which lands were taken from the Irish people
and given over to the clutches of needy Englishmen, mostly
younger sons of dominant families and eager themselves to
dominate. Soon the country was in a flame of revolt and
the cruel oppression did not put out the fire. Yet in the eyes
of the chivalrous Spenser the only remedy was that the
oppression should be made still more severe. His picture of
the starved peasantry, starved with callous indifference
186 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
through English policy, is drawn with the vividness of a poet,
more vividly indeed than any of his tapestried horrors in the
" Faery Queene " :
" Out of every corner of the woods and glinnes they came creeping
forthe upon theyr handes, for theyr legges could not beare them ; they
looked like anatomyes of death, they spoke like ghosts crying out of
theyr graves ; they did eate of the dead carrion, happy were they if
they could finde them, yea, and one another soon after, in so much as
the very carcasses they spared not to scrape out of the graves."
The picture is often referred to, but it is sometimes for-
gotten that, although Spenser knew it was of " such wretched-
ness as any stonye harte would have rued the same," it was
not drawn to make his readers shrink from the policy. On
the contrary it is the deliberate advice of his Irenseus, " the
man of peace," that the system should be extended. The
harsh reahties of a conqueror's career are seen here naked,
stripped of Gloriana's golden trappings.
It is a glimpse of the actual world, but it is only a ghmpse.
Much more of the typical Elizabethan quality, the " form and
pressure " of its eagerness for all experience, good or evil, its
delight in free and forceful individuahties, often careless of
others' freedom, is reflected, as all men know, in its drama,
that one achievement of European literature, after the " Divina
Commedia," that can compare with the poetry of Greece. The
sudden rise of it is to the full as startling as the sudden birth
of Spenser's supple and elaborate diction (nurtured on the
golden numbers of Ariosto), with which indeed it nearly
coincided. English dramatists or would-be dramatists, long
limited to a narrow round of conventional miracle-plays and
moralities, or clownish farces, had begun by the middle of
the century to feel after a style at once grander, wider,
and more orderly. But the efforts had been poor, and the
models chosen were from the dull Seneca, either direct or
derived through the Italians. In less than a generation we
find ourselves borne up by Marlowe's flight. It is very suit-
able that Marlowe's most famous work should be the drama
of " Doctor Faustus." The legend of the man who gave his
immortal soul for knowledge and beauty and power, to repent
THE RENAISSANCE IN ENGLAND 187
bitterly and in vain, was a fit theme, not only for that wild
genius who plunged into vile and glorious excesses and died
in a tavern brawl, but also for the age that included the
Renaissance and the Reformation.
Marlowe, more perhaps than any poet, has given undying
expression to the multiform cravings of the soul,
" Still climbing after knowledge infinite
And always moving as the restless spheres,"
thirsting for the beauty that drops from the " immortal
flowers of poesy," and not for it only, but for a beauty " which
into words no virtue can digest," demanding the whole of the
earth for its field of conquest as Tamberlaine demands it.
In words and cadences he has all Spenser's sweetness, but he
is immeasurably stronger. An iron quality can be felt in his
" mighty line," and with it a superb, if fluctuating, dramatic
force, to be felt, for example, in the end of his " Faustus "
where the great cry of unavailing agony serves only to
infuriate the fiends :
" See where Christ's blood streams in the firmament !
One drop would save my soul — half a drop : ah, my Christ !
Ah, rend not my heart for naming of my Christ ! "
Born in the same year as Shakespeare, but more precocious
in development, Marlowe is the right herald for our supreme
poet, and it is good to remember Shakespeare's generous
admiration for the " Dead Shepherd." As to Shakespeare
himself, the attempt to reach the man behind the pageant of
his work is always fascinating and far from impossible. For
obviously his nature was as free and generous as it was broad,
and his mind, as much a poet's mind as Marlowe's or Spenser's,
had not only the imagination of a dramatist, but a steadiness
and veracity that prevented it from being hoodwinked by
shows or paralysed by dreams. There was never a better
example of Plato's dictum that it belongs to the same man to
write tragedy and comedy. Sensitiveness and strength are
seldom divided in him ; sympathy and insight never. That
is one reason why we can endure the most heart-breaking of his
tragedies. At the worst he makes us feel that man is great.
188 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
For he could not and would not, as Dante could and did,
separate the Heaven in the cosmos of humanity from the Hell.
Chaucer's all-embracing charity revives in him, raised to an
incredible power. Even when he draws an lago, we are
surprised at the last into a throb of admiration for the courage
in the demi-devil who, we know, will never speak again under
whatever torture. So with Shylock. So with Richard HI.
So with Edmund in " Lear." Even when the whole play, like
" Troilus and Cressida," is permeated — I had almost written
poisoned — by a sick loathing for the lust and cruelty which
masquerade as love and patriotism, he can sustain us by the
vision of such lovable characters as Hector and Troilus. They
are doomed, but because they have lived we cannot despair.
How this effect is gained we cannot say, but certainly never bj^
cloaking the terror in life. A substantial part of the over-
whelming impression made by Hamlet comes through showing
us how a nature nobly born and unblemished can be shaken to
its foundations by the discovery of foulness and treachery and
by the demand for ruthless punishment. To other men horrors
may be mere names : never to Shakespeare. Yet he can face
them with a smile. The over-word of " King Lear " is " Bear
free and patient thoughts." Lesser evils he notes with the
same unwavering swiftness, the same all-enduring kindliness.
He knows quite well the hardness, the craft and the self-decep-
tion that go too often with an empire-maker's gallantry and
resource : none the less he not only admires Harry the King
for his leader's gifts : he can laugh with him delightedly.
But he would have laughed also if he had been told that
Henry V was his " Ideal Man." And in the end he who faced
the spectre of world-destruction in his most tragic play :
" It will come : humanity must prey on itself
Like monsters of the deep,"
he who still faced it when he drew Caliban and Trinculo, brute
and degenerate, came more and more to find his comfort in
the mercy he had loved when he wrote his early comedies.
And it is in full accord with this tenderness of nature that from
first to last he should be the greatest of all those dramatists
THE RENAISSANCE IN ENGLAND 189
who ever took for theme the sweetness of true love. The last
thing Shakespeare could be called is puritanical, but no man
ever had a more intense realization than he of love's need for
purity and faithfulness.
The best of Shakespeare's contemporaries and immediate
successors, though obviously below him, are not unworthy of
his companionship. They cannot claim that profound union
of the richest poetry woven into the actual stuff of life that
puts William in a place apart. But the contagion of genius
was alive among the Elizabethans, and starry names come
crowding in upon us. Terror and pity perform their purifying
work in Webster's " Duchess of Malfi " because they are
blent in the right tragic mould with wonder and admiration.
Beaumont and Fletcher enhance each other's gifts, of sober
strength and warm sensuous imagining. John Ford knows
the springs of tenderness. There is a simplicity and a dignity
in the death of his Calantha, mistress of herself, her love and
her sorrows, that recalls Antigone and Iphigenia :
" O, my lords, I but deceived your eyes with antic gesture,
WTien straight one news came huddling on another
Of death, and death, and death — still I danced forward.
They are the silent griefs that crack the heartstrings ;
Let me die smiling."
The likeness, through difference, of the Elizabethan drama to
the Athenian, is indeed incessant and notable. A modern
scholar ^ has pointed out how the long descriptive passages
in Shakespeare, of the Dover Cliff, for example, or the bees
working at their honey, serve the same purpose as the lyrics
of the classical chorus, at once relieving and broadening the
tragic effect by recalHng its setting in the larger world. Had
the Elizabethans only studied the Greek drama at its best !
It is hard to understand why both they, and later on the
French, neglected so much of the finest material, and it is
impossible not to deplore it. The English might have learnt
from the Greeks order, reticence, and the secret of structure,
* T. G. Tucker in " Shakspere and ^schylus," a paper read to the
Classical Association of Victoria.
190 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
and the French might have learnt not to be afraid of homehness
and naturalness in the highest reaches of the " style noble."
Yet after all the best scholar among the Elizabethan drama-
tists remains the least poetical. Ben Jonson has poetry, it
is true, but his real power is to be felt in his seizure of grim j
prosaic types, only lifted into tragedy by the force of will that "
dignifies their commonplace desires. If it were not for his
prodigal barbarity of structure Ben Jonson would suggest
a French dramatist of genius rather than an Elizabethan.
The cunning, terrible Volpone, fiercely contemptuous of the
sycophants who crowd about him for his money, appals us by
his unsleeping malignity, his cruel laughter, his more cruel lust,
extorts our admiration by his indomitable grin at his own
hideous doom, but can never unlock the secret fountains as
Timon of Athens docs for us when he tells the world that he
has built
" his everlasting mansion
On the salt verge of the embossed flood."
The comedy of " Bartholomew Fair," while it abounds in
real laughter and vivid portraiture, cannot escape wearying
the reader in the end just because it has not a hint of the I
marvellous to relieve its squalid riot. Ben, in his own preface,
seems to allow himself a side-thrust at the element in Shakes-
peare's " Tempest " which he chose to consider mere monster-
making to please the groundlings. But a touch of the magic
which can "make Nature afraid" would have made all the
difference to his own work.
CHAPTER XXVI I I
THE NEW LEARNING IN ENGLAND : FRANCIS BACON
AS Elizabethan England passed into Jacobean, and
the sixteenth century led on to the seventeenth, two
other achievements claim our attention : the splen-
did development of English prose and the birth of modem
science in Europe.
The range of the prose writers is enormous. Their power is
shown alike in comedies, narratives, sermons, essays, trans-
lations, above all in the translation of the Bible. Here they
attain their loftiest, and the sustained nobility of the language
is a marvellous instance of what may be accomplished by a
number of minds, sensitive and able, working together without
envy or private ambition on a book known and reverenced as
beautiful and divine. The Authorized Version was long in
the making and there were many makers : Purvey and
Wycliffe in the fourteenth century, Tyndale and Miles Coverdale
in the sixteenth, and the group that completed the Authorized
Version under James I. Its influence on the literature and
imagination of England has been at least as great as on her
religion, and it will be an evil day for English prose if the Bible
ceases, and some think it has already ceased, to be a household
book for the common people.
The name of Francis Bacon used to be cited as pre-eminent
in the advance towards modern science. But it is now
generally recognized that his mind, though sagacious, was far
from being in the first rank. He felt, it was true, the enthu-
siasm for knowledge and discovery that stirred his age, and also
the impulse to free criticism ; he gave them pungent and
glowing expression, he was keenly aware of the need for steady
191
192 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
experimental labour, " slow-paced practice and trial," free from
those idols of the tribe, the cave, the market, and the theatre,
prejudices common to the race, or peculiar to the person, or
bred of talk and haphazard theory.
He quotes with zest the ancient apologue of the wise man
who was shown by a miracle-monger the votive tablets of
those who had prayed to Neptune and been preserved from
shipwreck. " Yea," said the sage, " but where are they
painted that were drowned? " ^ In more formal language : " The
first work of true induction," Bacon writes, " is the rejection or
exclusion of the several natures which are not found in some
instance where the given nature is present, or are found in some
instance where the given nature is absent ."^ It is, in essentials.
Mill's " Method of Agreement and Difference." Moreover,
while insisting on the test of thorough observation. Bacon
insisted also that science is more than observation ; experi-
ment and theory must go hand-in-hand if causes are ever to
be discovered. " Philosophy neither relies solely or chiefly
on the powers of the mind, nor does it take the matter which
it gathers from natural history and mechanical experiments
and lay it up in the memory whole, as it finds it ; but lays it
up in the understanding altered and digested. Therefore from
a closer and purer league between these two faculties, the
experimental and the rational (such as has never yet been
made) much may be hoped."
At the same time we must admit that Bacon's own detailed
suggestions for research, of which he was so proud, were of
scant value, while he himself never contributed to a single
great discovery nor conducted a single fruitful experiment,
and this too at a time when momentous advances were
being made in physiology, astronomy, physics, and mathe-
matics. He scouted the Copernican theory, and we can
easily understand Harvey's curt summing up of his
high pretensions : "He writes on philosophy like a Lord
Chancellor." Or, we might add, a journalist of genius,
just enough ahead of public opinion to lead it forward amid
^ " De Augmentis," Bk. V., tr. by Ellis and Spedding.
^ " Novum Organon," Bk. 2, S xvi.
THE NEW LEARNING IN ENGLAND 193
universal applause. But let us add in fairness that such a
power is never to be despised. And Bacon is never so truly
eloquent as when urging the nobleness of knowledge in itself
and in its uses.
" The empire of man over things depends wholly on the
arts and sciences. For we cannot command Nature except
by obej'ing her. . . .
" And yet (to speak the whole truth) as the uses of light are
infinite, enabling us to walk, to ply our arts, to read, to
recognize one another ; and nevertheless the very beholding of
the light is itself a more excellent and a fairer thing than all
the uses of it ; so assuredly the very contemplation of things,
as they are, without superstition or imposture, error or con-
fusion, is in itself more worthy than all the fruit of inventions."
(Nov. Org. Aphorism 129.)
Bacon's attack on Aristotle was often ignorant, but his
assault on the lazy subservience to Aristotle was always
stimulating. The schoolmen had been content to take
words for things, had satisfied themselves with false
traditions and hasty generalizations, looking idly into the
shop-window of Nature instead of going boldly into her
warehouse and searching for themselves. " Let men be
assured that the fond opinion that they have already
acquired enough, is a principal reason that they have
acquired so httle." (" Advancement of Learning.") He
dangles, it is true, rather too often the bait of a low
utilitarianism : his " New Atlantis," charming as it is, suggests
a Utopia of shopkeepers ; and his conception of purpose in
the universe is on no higher level. " The vegetables and
animals of all kinds either afford us matter for houses, habita-
tions, clothing, food, physic, or tend to ease, or delight, or
support, or refresh us ; so that everything in nature seems
made not for itself, but for man."
Yet, with whatever drawbacks. Bacon did spread and
clarify the desire for research and experiment, although it was
other men who had begun and who continued the actual
work of discovery and marked out the most hopeful paths
to follow.
13
CHAPTER XXIX
THE AWAKENING IN SCIENCE
(F. S. Marvin)
IT has been recently pointed out by a writer ^ on the
history of science that 1543 is a notable year. It saw the
publication both of the " De Revolutionibus Orbium
Celestium " by Copernicus the Pole, and of the " De Corporis
Humani Fabrica " by Vesalius the Belgian. It is useful to
note such epoch-marking dates and especially convenient
when two great men publish their " Opera Magna " in the
same year. But when we come to look into the details we
always find that some one has anticipated them, somewhere
and in part, and that the greatest merit of the great man is
seeing some old half-apprehended truth in fuller hght and
with new connections, making, in fact, a fresh synthesis.
So it is with the re-founders of science in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries. They proclaimed — and rightly — the
need of an experimental method. It was experiment which
decided Galileo and laid the foundation of modern mechanics.
Yet the appeal to experiment was no new thing. Dante has
a famous passage ^ in its praise. Roger Bacon extols it, and
Aristotle, against whom Bacon invoked it, himself made
experiments.
How does it happen, then, that sometimes the experiment
or the brilliant idea remains for a long time fruitless, while
1 Dr. Singer, " Studies in the History and Method of Science "
(Clarendon Press), Vols. I and II. See also " The Legacy of Greece "
(Clarendon Press). 2 Paradiso, II. 95.
194
THE AWAKENING IN SCIENCE 195
sometimes, as with the circle and successors of Gahleo, the
seed falls on good ground and springs up and bears fruit
immediately and abundantly ? The reason is much the same
as in the parable. The ground is fit in one case and not in
the other. For the springing-up of modern science the soil
began to be prepared by the Arabs ; it was stirred again by
the Crusaders and became ready in the thirteenth century ;
it was delayed by the feudal disorders of the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries and by the distrust of the clerical leaders ;
it began to bear its crop in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries.
In other words, science is a social thing and its advance
depends even more upon the whole state of society than upon
the individuals in whose minds the new ideas first appear.
In the ancient world the birth of science took place, six
centuries before the Christian era, among the Ionian Greeks
on the west coast of Asia Minor. They had established there
flourishing cities and had grown rich by commerce. Quick
wits and a habit of travel had enabled them to extract hints
from the priesthoods of Babylon and Egypt, who had stored
up astronomical and other observations. The Greeks trans-
muted these into science, and are the first of mankind about
whom we can predicate scientific thought. It related in the
first place to mathematics, and especially geometry, with
certain references to astronomy. Then a little later came the
beginnings of scientific medicine and biology.
Now for some little time before the thirteenth century a.d.
and the appeal of Roger Bacon events had been happening
in the West which recalled these ancient times and promised
a similar sequel. East and West had again come into con-
tact. This time the Arabs played the part of Eastern sages
and the Italians represented the Greeks. And the circum-
stances of the time were in many respects alike. In each
case a new spirit of inquiry was beginning to stir in a world
still largely dominated by theological beliefs and organization.
In each case the area of free inquiry was extended by com-
merce and travel. And the rise of self-governing political
communities hastened the process. As in Greece, so in Italy,
196 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
thought flourished in cities hke Florence and Venice, Pisa
and Genoa, Padua and Bologna, which had an intense political
life of their own. The physical world was being enlarged by
the Eastern journeys of men like Marco Polo, who explored the
high and distant lands of Central Asia. The world of thought
was extended by the renewed study of ancient authors —
classics of Greece and Rome — who had thought and written
and thrived outside the limits of the cloister, before, in fact,
the ideal of the cloister had arisen in men's minds.
It is clear that when we thus envisage scientific thought as
one function of a developing social life, we cannot sharply
define its advent and say, " Here science begins : before
it there was no science." But we can see how, just before
the thirteenth century, there was so much movement in the
air that the appearance of an anticipating genius such as
Roger Bacon was not quite miraculous. It has been already
stated that just before his day the scientific works of Aristotle
had begun to reach the West, and the " Almagest " of
Ptolemy, the storehouse of ancient astronomy, had been
translated into Latin. Side by side with the revival of
mathematical and astronomical science appeared the science
of medicine, which had its first Western home at the Univer-
sity of Salerno.
In each case the new school of thinkers first turned to what
had been done by the earlier founders. In astronomy
Ptolemy and his predecessors lived again, and in philosophy
Aristotle ; while in biology and medicine Galen, who had
enjoyed a more unbroken sway than any other Greek, was
re-examined with more impartial eyes.
But, as already noticed, feudal conflicts and clerical
timidity hampered the free growth of thought. The Church,
though far from wholly impervious to the new influences,
clung to the enforcement of belief on grounds of supernatural
truth, not to be discovered by observation of the world
around and the use of the individual reason, nor advancing,
as the Greeks had taught, whither the argument led the mind.
It is not till well after the Reformation that we meet the full
dawn of modern experiment. Yet the two centuries and a half
THE AWAKENING IN SCIENCE 197
which passed between the death of Roger Bacon and the date
1543, which we have suggested for the birth-year of modern
science, are marked by a real, if intermittent, approach
towards scientific hght. The Renaissance was not, as it has
sometimes been represented, a sudden revelation.
It was a gradual rediscovery of the work of ancient thinkers
and writers, especially of Greek writers, coupled with the
gradual free use of the intellect in criticizing traditional ideas
and opening itself to the real world. We cannot sharply
distinguish the dates nor the different aspects of this
awakening.
Of these humanists, who had both interest in and influence on
science, Toscanelli, the Italian, and the German Nicolas of
Cues, deserve high praise. Toscanelli had set up a gnomon
in the cathedral at Florence which measured the height of
the sun to a second. He also made a famous map, probably
used by Columbus, and was the first to engrave maps on
copper. Early in the fifteenth century his friend and pupil,
Nicolas, went farther, and by his study of the ancient authors
became a living link between old and new. Mathematics
took a considerable place in his thought and he anticipated
Galileo as well as Copernicus in many of his views, especially
on the movement of the earth. By the end of the century
we meet the amazing achievements of Leonardo da Vinci,
perhaps the most gifted man of the whole Renaissance. If
any one person were to be studied as exhibiting in all its
richness and versatility the new spirit of free inquiry, eager-
ness and enjoyment of nature which mark that age, it might
well be he. Ingenious inventor, unwearied questioner and
observer, accomplished artist, he strewed the ground with
such a profusion of pearls that many of them escaped notice
till a later age. He anticipated modern mechanics with his
instruments, modern geology with his views on fossils, modern
anatomy with his exquisite drawings of human and animal
forms, and he showed throughout the true scientific spirit by
carefully testing and measuring every phenomenon which
occurred to him and was capable of measurement.
But, like many universal geniuses, he did not become a
198 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
founder. He was too many-sided to create a school in any
one branch and attained an isolated and shining eminence
rather than a step in the ascending scale of knowledge.
That position is held by his younger contemporary,
Copernicus the Pole, whose work on the movement of the
heavenly bodies, though composed many years before, was
only published after his death, in 1543, just under a century
since the birth of Leonardo. His story is typical of the
science of the Renaissance. He began with the Ptolemaic
system of celestial spheres revolving round the central earth.
He found this open to many difficulties and encumbered with
many complexities. He went farther among the Greeks
themselves and found that other hypotheses had been put
forward by earlier thinkers than Ptolemy. The Pytha-
goreans had taught the doctrine of a central fire which warmed
and enlightened all the heavenly bodies. Aristarchus of
Samos, one of the Alexandrian School in the third century
B.C., had advanced to a more accurate conception of the
celestial order and made, by a strictly scientific method, the
first approximation to the relative size and distance of the
sun and moon. He also held the view that the earth revolves
and that the sun and the fixed stars are motionless. It was
on this hypothesis that Copernicus fixed and he saw its
advantage in simplicity over the Ptolemaic system. He
found, so he tells us, a first suggestion of the theory in the
work of Martianus Capella, who wrote a sort of encyclopaedia
of knowledge in the sixth century a.d. Martianus taught
that Venus and Mercury revolve round the sun. Copernicus
extended this doctrine to the other planets and drew in his
book a diagram of all the planets then known, revolving in
circles, at increasing distances round the sun, which is the
centre of the universe.
The whole story of the filiation of the doctrine, which
includes more steps than we have space to mention, is of high
value and interest as an example of the continuity of scientific
thought. But there seems to be no intermediate stage
between Martianus Capella and Copernicus, and Martianus,
though right in the case of Mercury and Venus, does not
THE AWAI^NING IN SCIENCE 199
apply his truth generally, and says explicitly that the earth
is the centre of the universe.
Copernicus, though rightly regarded as the pioneer of
modem astronomy, had not the knowledge or the power,
which Kepler was able to wield seventy years later with the
aid of the telescope, to calculate the correct orbits and motions
of the planets. He tried to simplify, and he tried to make
the " scientific law " fit better to, or better express, the
observed facts. This is the constant aim of the scientific
inquirer, and Copernicus gives us one of the two most influ-
ential examples of it ; Darwin three hundred years later
gives the other. In each case the first hypothesis was subject
to a long and searching examination by other workers, and in
each case large corrections were subsequently made which
did not, however, invalidate the general truth of the original
assumption.
It was an obvious simplification to assume that the earth
revolved on its axis once in every twenty-four hours rather
than that the whole multitude of heavenly bodies revolved
round it, with an additional movement of the opposite kind
to account for the precession of the equinoxes. The gravest
error of Copernicus lay in representing the orbits of the
planets as circles, because the circle is the simplest and most
perfect figure. Herein lay a " metaphysical " preconception,
or idee fixe, which the want of adequate instruments prevented
him from correcting.
His modest avowal of a mere hypothesis prevented the
immediate outbreak of the storm which raged round the head
of Galileo. More than seventy years passed before his work
was put on the Index in 1616, when Galileo had made the
question burning and crucial.
Luther expressed the prejudice of the popular, and still
more of the traditionally religious mind, when he said, " The
fool would turn Astronomy upside down. Holy Writ tells
us that Joshua bade the sun stand still and not the earth."
There was the hitch, an unreasoning attachment to an
accepted text, and, though we may pardon Luther as in this
matter an ordinary member of the unthinking public, we may
200 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
question whether the revolution in scientific thought which
he opposed and despised was not really greater than that
which he carried out in the domain of religious doctrine.
Melanchthon, who had a mind more cultivated for the appre-
hension of such discussions, saw the importance of the new
teaching more clearly, and was still more active in his opposi-
tion. He held the Copernican heliocentric view to be so
godless that it ought to be suppressed. The Bible was to be
the final authority in questions of science as well as of conduct.
But for the Protestants the bulwark against innovation was
far less easy to defend than for the Catholics. If a book, or
rather a collection of books, of various dates and different
authorship, were to be the standard, who was to interpret the
standard itself ? Every man who read it might interpret it
differently. For the Catholic there was only the one authori-
tative interpretation, the whole body of the Church, speaking
for fifteen hundred years through the mouth of its chief.
But in the case of the Copernican doctrine even the un-
broken tradition of the Church at last gave way. The decree
of 1616 condemning his work fell gradually into disuse and
oblivion, and was in 1822 finally withdrawn.
We noticed the year 1543 as a critical date both for cosmical
and biological science, the year of Copernicus' book and of
Vesalius' " De Corporis Humani Fabrica." It was a birth-
year of new interest and new mental activity. But for the
maturity of both branches of science we have to wait for
some time longer, and in biology until nearly our own day.
It is important to master this fact because, though the growth
of scientific knowledge is similar throughout and due through-
out to the operation of an active mind upon its surrounding
phenomena, yet the different branches of science have come
to maturity in a different order, and by that very order have
revealed their interconnection and a great deal of their nature.
The crisis in cosmical science, of which the work of Copernicus
was a leading step, came in the seventeenth century, and we
shall study it in a later chapter. By that time a mechanically
coherent scheme of the physical order of the universe was
reached to which later thought has constantly added amplifi-
THE AWAKENING IN SCIENCE 201
cations and corrections, but not revolution. But the corre-
sponding crisis in the sciences of Hfe does not come till the
nineteenth century, when the doctrine of evolution plays
somewhat the same part in transforming our outlook which
the Copernican theory, elaborated by Galileo and Newton,
played in the physical world in the seventeenth.
In the four centuries from the end of the twelfth to the end
of the sixteenth, from the crusades and the rise of the univer-
sities to the work of Galileo, seeds of all kinds were being sown,
new observations of all sorts were being made, hitherto un-
known facts from all quarters were coming into ken, which
bore their fruits gradually and built up a new order of life
and thought of which we are even yet only beginning to
discern the clear outlines. Art played its part in this awaken-
ing life as well as scientific observation ; travel was as fruitful
as experiment. During the years in which Copernicus was
developing his theory, explorers East and West were adding
to European knowledge new lands, new plants, new animals.
Cabot first landed on the North American continent in 1497,
when Copernicus was twenty-four years old. In 1500, when
Cabral landed on the shores of Brazil, Copernicus began teaching
mathematics and making astronomical observations at Bologna
and at Rome. The explorations of Central and Southern
America by Cortez and Pizarro were going on while Copernicus
was exploring the heavens for new truth there. And the
widening of the world to the East which accompanied
this was as extensive and of very similar import. The
Mediterranean Sea, which had been the centre of the earlier
culture and the first world-organization of the Greeks and
Romans, now became the centre of a far wider influence
destined in the nineteenth century to encircle the globe.
In the early stages of the sciences of life, just coming to the
birth from an unfettered study of the Greek pioneers. Art
played at first a considerable part in aiding strictly scientific
observation and experiment. Men began to take delight in
picturing truly not only the plants and other objects described
by the ancients, but what they could see and handle them-
selves, and the explorers were daily adding to their wealth.
202 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
Albrecht Diirer, whose life falls within that of Copernicus,
represents altogether i8o different plants and animals in his
pictures, and he took particular pleasure in adding them as
subsidiary to the main subject. Others did the same on a
larger scale. Gesner, born at Zurich in 15 16, who studied in
Strasbourg and Paris, gives us 1,500 drawings of plants, the
first with accurate detail of flower and fruit. This first
descriptive stage was essential before classification could be
attempted, a'nd classification had to precede the scientific
study of the law of growth.
Anatomy, the foundation of biology, was at the same time
passing through a similar stage. Leonardo's anatomical
drawings we have already mentioned. Vesalius' own book,
" De Corporis Humani Fabrica," is splendidly illustrated and
the drawings are attributed to a pupil of Titian's. But more
than draughtsmanship was needed : dissection was impera-
tive, dissection, moreover, aided by the microscope, which
was being developed, side by side with the telescope, in the
early seventeenth century.
The religious prejudice of the time against mutilating a
dead body was still so strong that the dissectors had to be
prepared for adventure, contrivance and perseverance not
inferior to that of the travellers who explored the Spanish
main. Vesalius, as a young man, in order to secure a human
subject for dissection, was driven, at the risk of his own
life, to carry off the body of a criminal hung on the
gallows.
It will be noticed that the work on biology at this stage,
being of the descriptive and classificatory kind, is preliminary
to scientific law in the stricter sense. Physical science at the
hands of Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler attained a degree of
rational co-ordination which the science of life did not reach
till our own time, if indeed it has reached it now. But there
is one link between the two main branches of science at this
time which is full of interest, and should be mentioned before
we turn to Galileo, the greatest of the forerunners. Galileo's
birth followed the death of Copernicus after nineteen years.
He was teaching mathematics and physics in Padua from
THE AWAKENING IN SCIENCE 203
1592 to 1610 and attracting thousands from every part
of Europe. Among these was an EngUshman called
Harvey, who studied in Padua from 1598 to 1602. Harvey
had gone to Padua to study the science of medicine,
which had made great strides in Italy and was in advance
there over the rest of the world, thanks to Vesalius and his
school. Vesalius himself had worked and taught in Padua.
There, between the two converging influences — a true anatomy
which studied the actual build and functioning of the body
and a new mechanical conception of motion and force —
Harvey first conceived the first mechanical law introduced
into biology. He began to expound it at the College of
Physicians after 1616 and it was published as " The Circula-
tion of the Blood " in 1628.
The coincidence of Galileo and Harvey is as noteworthy as
that of Copernicus and Vesalius and more significant. There
was real connection between the former, but while Harvey's
discovery had to wait for the development of chemistry to
unfold its full meaning, Galileo's at once became the starting
point of the mechanical ideal of the material universe which
is the leading feature of seventeenth century science. His
mind v/as the strongest influence in the awakening. It should
be remembered that Galileo himself had begun by the study of
medicine and that he was of the Renaissance giants, a man
versed like Leonardo in art and study of all kinds, mechanician,
painter, musician, as well as a scientific mind of unexampled
subtlety and persistence. He surpassed Leonardo, however,
and succeeded greatly in one direction by having the wisdom
early to discern where his proper work lay and where the
most needed advance in science was to be made. He was
eighteen when he began to attend lectures on medicine at
Pisa. At twenty-two he received his first lesson in Euclid
and soon passed on, burning with interest and enthusiasm,
to Archimedes. The ancient thinkers, in his as in so many
other cases, supplied the stimulus which set his mind to work
on its own lines. They revealed to him the first fresh appre-
ciation of the fundamental laws of geometry which underlie
all our accurate thinking. He quickly grasped the conclusions
204 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
of the pioneers and went on to conquer along the road which
they had opened.
His first advance on Archimedes was the construction of a
balance to solve more simply the problem of the Crown of gold
alloyed with silver. In this, as later in the construction of
the telescope and the microscope, he showed the value of great
manual dexterity wedded to a powerful mind. Like so many
of the greatest men of science, he had wonderful hands,
Archimedes had discovered the principles of the lever and of
specific gravity — the foundations of Statics. Galileo went
on immediately to lay the foundations of dynamics. In 1588
he wrote, inspired by Archimedes, a treatise on " The Centre
of Gravity in Sohds." The next year he was appointed
Professor of Mathematics in Pisa and began his series of
researches on motion.
The " book philosophers " who blindly followed the
traditional interpretation of certain stray and rather obscure
passages in Aristotle maintained that bodies fall to the earth
in times inversely proportional to their weight. A weight of
ten pounds would fah in a tenth of the time that one pound
would take. Galileo put the matter to a simple test. He let
fall the two weights from the top of the leaning Tower of Pisa
and settled the question in his sense. This experiment,
however, the best known and most easily intelligible of all
he tried, was but a small part of the mass of ingenious tests
he applied to ascertain the simple fundamental laws of force
and motion. He succeeded in establishing them. He showed
that the spaces traversed by bodies uniformly accelerated,
e.g. in falling, are to one another as the squares of the time ;
that the time occupied in any portion of the fall is equal to
that which would be taken by a body moving throughout
that space with half its velocity at the end ; that the spaces
in each successive interval are to one another as the series of
odd numbers. He thus founded the science of dynamics
which, after Kepler's work on the planets, was used within a
hundred years by Newton to bring into one synthesis the
motion of the earth and all the heavenly bodies. Later
researches, connected with the name of Einstein, carry the
THE AWAKENING IN SCIENCE 205
synthesis even farther, linking up inertia with gravitation.
GaUleo himself suspected the analogy which Newton
demonstrated, between the power holding the moon near the
earth and the attractive power of the earth over bodies at its
surface. What he observed, through his newly invented
telescope, of the motions of Jupiter's satellites confirmed him
in the belief that there was a common law throughout. But
he did not attain to its statement. To his mind the motions
which he detected in Jupiter's system, in the phases of Venus,
in Saturn and his rings were chiefly and insistently interesting
as confirmations of the Copernican theory. The earth and
all the planets moved round the sun.
In 1592 he had left Pisa for Padua, where most of his
astronomical work was done. In 1610 he went to Florence,
full of his new conviction, and in 161 1 he visited Rome, where
he freely advocated the new conception of the universe.
Giordano Bruno had been burnt there ten years before, for
boldly following out a similar line of thought. From that
time till his death he knew no peace. The fear and opposition
which had been slumbering since the new truth was first
suggested by Copernicus long before, now broke out
in full force. In spite of his personal friendship with the
Pope, he was finally condemned in 1633 and forced to read
and sign a written abjuration of the Copernican doctrines.
Thereafter he lived in retirement near Florence till his death
in 1642, active in mind though in his last few years blind.
Visitors sought him out from all parts of Europe, among them
our own Milton, one day himself to be blind, famous, and set
aside.
His closing years were illumined by his greatest book, the
" Dialogues on the Two Sciences of Mechanics and j\Iotion,"
published four years before his death in Holland, the home of
freedom to many bold thinkers in this and later years. But
his golden age was in Padua, where in the first decade of the
seventeenth century " his house was not only a school to
which flocked students, Italians, and foreigners from every
country, but, more than this, a laboratory where his mar-
vellous mechanical talent knew how to devise ever new
206 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
expedients. It was an academy in the true sense of the word
where the gravest problems in physics, in mechanics, in
astronomy, and in mathematics, were discussed with perfect
freedom, and where it was possible to submit the deductions
of reason to the salutary test of experiment, and the results
of experiments, in their turn, to reasoning and calculation." i
One's mind goes back to the old debates of the Greek
philosophers in Ionia, in Magna Graecia and in Athens. There
had been nothing like this in the western world since, and
now, when the free-inquiring mind began to work again, we
see it aided by a new spirit and a new apparatus of experiment.
An active and subtle mind, questioning every received
opinion, following out any suggested harmonious explanation
of the facts, a constant readiness to fight and demonstrate
the truth to ignorant and often prejudiced opponents, a
steadfast adherence to great conclusions once grasped and
the adding to them of fresh illuminating and relevant observa-
tions ; these were the leading features of the most influential
founder of modern science, a master of re-awakening thought
in Europe. He describes his own gifts when he tells us that,
" Ignorance has been the best teacher I have ever had, since,
in order to be able to demonstrate to my opponents the truths
of my conclusions, I have been forced to prove them by a
variety of experiments, though to satisfy myself alone I have
never felt it necessary to make many."
Looking back upon him now, as the great founder and
intermediary between the mathematical science of the ancient
world and the physics of the modern, we shall admire him
more the more we study him. He is true to the best in both
worlds. He bent himself from the first to trace the mathema-
tical truths involved in the facts of motion, and by a true
intuition he turned first to those of which the laws could be most
easily approached and most surely established. But though
convinced that the language of the physical universe is mathe-
matics, and that we must first understand the language before
we can read the book, he yet never aUows a pre-conception
of the meaning to divert his mind from the accurate observa-
1 Favaro, " Galileo e lo studio di Padova."
THE AWAKENING IN SCIENCE 207
tion of the fact. He believed that the key of physical science
was mathematics, but mathematical research must be itself
controlled by observation of Nature. In this attitude he
stands more perfectly than any other man as the representa-
tive of modern science, strained later, as we shall see, in one
direction by Descartes and his school, brought back in our
own day nearer to its true balance by the doctrine of relativity.
CHAPTER XXX
THE STRUGGLES FOR LIBERTY IN GERMANY
AND ENGLAND:
ENGLISH THOUGHT IN RELIGION AND POLITICS
IT is to be noted that in the work just described, the in-
valuable pioneer work of modern science, Germany, with
the significant exception of Kepler (1571-1630), plays but a
negligible part. The reason is not far to seek. During the first
half of the seventeenth century unity, the second factor, after
liberty, requisite for advanced culture, was scarcely to be
found on German soil. The terrible Thirty Years' War (1618-
1648), waged not only with the fury of partisan bigotry and
sheer selfishness, but also, and largely, by foreign and greedy
mercenaries, crippled the unfortunate land for nearly three
generations. The seventeenth century is a barren time for
German culture. And obviously this was not due to lack of
ability in the people. Before and after that devastating
strife Germany has shown her creative power, and there is no
change of race or creed to account for the contrast. It is a
tragic instance of the truth in Bacon's warning that under the
din of arms " first the laws are silent and not heard, and then
men return to their own depraved natures, whence cultivated
lands and cities soon become desolate and waste. And if the
disorder continues, learning and philosophy is infallibly torn
to pieces : so that only some scattered fragments thereof can
afterwards be found, up and down in a few places, like planks
after a shipwreck." (" On the Interpretation of Fables.")
The sixteenth century had seen in Germany, as elsewhere,
the setting-up of an unstable equilibrium in religion and
208
STRUGGLES IN GERMANY AND ENGLAND 209
politics. This now broke down altogether. The fervour of
Luther, broad and genial however rough, was replaced among
those who should have been the leaders either by indifference
or by doctrinaire fanaticism, while the Catholic League, led
by the Jesuits, sharpened the opposition from the side of the
Old Faith. Moreover, the ancient struggle revived between
the semi-independent princedoms and the Imperial ambition,
now embodied in the Austrian House of Hapsburg. Finally
the turmoil was complicated by racial antipathy and foreign
intervention.
The German Hapsburgs were Catholic, and the outbreak
was precipitated by a revolt in Bohemian Prague against the
destruction of Protestant Churches at which the Emperor was
thought to have connived. The Imperial Representatives
were hurled from the windows of the Castle by the infuriated
Bohemians, a fitting signal for the savage campaign.
Frederick, the Calvinist elector of the Palatinate (son-in-law
of James I), accepted the crown of Bohemia, only to be
signally overthrown. Tilly, the Emperor's able general,
trampled on the country, and as the war spread Wallenstein,
himself a Bohemian and once a Protestant, added his genius
to the devastating power of the Imperial mercenaries. The
cause of Protestantism seemed well-nigh lost. But the
Catholic princes were jealous of imperial dominance ; Wallen-
stein was suspected, not it seems unjustly, of grasping at
supreme power ; the wily Richelieu, minister of Louis XIII,
fomented the suspicion in order to check the power of Austria ;
and suddenly from Sweden across the Baltic appeared the
" Lion of the North," the chivalrous Gustavus Adolphus,
the one champion of religion to take arms, who, in the chaotic
struggle, was unquestionably sincere. He met and defeated
both Tilly and Wallenstein, but was killed himself in the
battle with Wallenstein.
Once more German Protestantism ran the utmost risk, but
again Richelieu intervened, always alert to prevent a strong
mihtary empire threatening the French frontier. He sup-
ported the stricken Protestants, professed Catholic though he
was, against Austria's ally, Spain, and so came definitely
14
210 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
into the field. Turenne and Conde won renown and terror
for the French arms, and when the war finally ended with the
Peace of Westphalia in 1648, France acquired almost the
whole of Alsace and had her claim recognized to the border
bishoprics of Metz, Toul, and Verdun.
It was an important stage in the secular duel between
France and Germany, and led directly to the aggressive
designs of Louis XIV. Prostrate Germany was a tempting
prey.
In religion, so far as treaties could go, matters went back
to the Peace of Augsburg. The citizen had to comply with
the creed of his State. But he could leave his State, and
Germany was now more than ever divided into little States.
Moreover, by the end of the seventeenth century, Europe in
general was beginning to see the cruelty and folly of religious
persecution. The Utopian conviction " that it is in no man's
power to beUeve what he list " was gradually sinking into
men's minds.
While the Thirty Years' War was ravaging Germany,
England was entering on her own internal struggle. The
Tudor equilibrium was shattered under Charles I, and the
eleven years of the great experiment in a Commonwealth (1649-
1660) follow immediately on the Peace of Westphalia. As
in Germany, religion and poHtics interlock in the struggle.
But, except in Ireland, where intolerance, oppression and
race hatred worked fatal havoc, the English leaders never
entirely lost sight of reason and humanity, and certain solid
gains were in the end achieved, and, after the interlude of the
Restoration, consolidated. It is best, perhaps, to begin with
the poUtical side. The principle of responsible government,
by which the head of the State is bound to consult the nation
through its chosen representatives, was in essence vindicated.
It was a notable triumph, and England alone, with the
exception of Holland, from whom she was later to receive a
constitutional king, stood victoriously for the idea at a time
when the other great countries of Europe were threatened
either with despotism or anarchy. The struggle was at bottom
another form of the inveterate conflict between Liberty and
STRUGGLES IN GERMANY AND ENGLAND 211
Order. And the difficulties can be gauged by the perplexities
that dogged the ablest of our leaders. It was the tragedy of
Cromwell's life that he, a true lover of liberty, was driven
further and further to work against it because he foresaw
that if the nation was allowed to have its way it would both
reject the Puritanism that to him was the gospel of God, and
surrender to Stuart absolutism. Historians have long ago
given up the vulgar misconception that personal ambition
drove him forward. As he said himself, it was his dearest
wish that all the Lord's people could be prophets. But if
they refused, if the bulk of them went a-whoring after
strange gods, it was for him and his army behind him to
succour the remnant of the Lord's people. The nation,
however, had only raised an army to avoid being governed
by a ruler who would not submit to its control. It was nowise
prepared to allow Cromwell what it had refused Charles, and
Cromwell had no right to demand it. His was the tragic
mistake of forcing a nation to be free before it desired freedom,
and the freedom was destroyed by the force.
In Ireland he went further still, and it is impossible to read
without a shudder his pitiless account of how priests were
" knocked on the head " and the inhabitants of Drogheda
and Wexford put to the sword. The evil tradition of
" conquering " the Irish, " these murderous Irish," as Milton,
his admirer, calls them, " the enemies of God and mankind,"
it was this that appears to have darkened his insight, for in
England he never dreamed of such excesses, and Milton could
confidently appeal to him to save " free conscience " from
the tyranny of the new Presbyter who was but old Priest
writ large.
As far as England is concerned, it may well be pleaded in
Cromwell's defence that the nation had not yet worked
out any scheme to combine a clear expression of the
people's will with the swift coherent execution only possible
to a single man or a small group of like-minded men.
Doubtless this goal has never yet been reached, but there
have been closer approximations than seemed possible then.
Cromwell's own high-souled failure led to fruitful searchings
212 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
of heart among friends and opponents alike. It is significant
that Harrington's " Oceana," one of the most practical
Utopias ever penned, was written by a man who had deep
and warm sympathies for both sides. The book had a lasting
influence on the best thought of the period and later was
appreciated to good purpose in America, especially as regards
the famous separation of the executive and deliberative
functions, government in Harrington's view having three
parts, " the senate proposing, the people resolving, the
magistracy executing." ^ Harrington is indeed sympathetic
enough to have glimpses of a truth not yet generally accepted,
namely, that sovereignty is not after all a thing essentially one
and indivisible but a structure achieved and supported by co-
operation. And if his book, like every other, does not solve
its problems, at least it shows the English political genius in
travail of a great idea. In fact the idea carried him beyond
the bounds of politics in the narrow sense. He revived More's
attack on excessive wealth and pressed it with greater serious-
ness than More, suggesting instead of an impossible communism
the eminently practical plan of limiting estates in land. He
stands half-way here between Cromwell and the Levellers.
Milton, without going into such detail as Harrington,
scrupled, it is clear, at Cromwell's despotic rule. And yet
Milton also could be driven counter to his own love of liberty.
No one is more outspoken than he in attacking the extrava-
gances of divine right. Here the best of the classic tradition
lives again in the scholar and patriot. He appeals to the
proud humility of Euripides' monarch, " I rule not my people
by tyranny as if they were barbarians but am myself liable,
if I do unjustly, to suffer justly." He cites the dictum we
have already quoted from Theodosius the Younger that " on
the authority of law the authority of a prince depends."
" How can any king in Europe maintain and write himself
accountable to none but God, when emperors in their own
imperial statutes have written and decreed themselves
accountable to law ? " (" Tenure of Kings and Magistrates. ")
" And surely they that shall boast, as we do, to be a free
1 G. P. Gooch, " English Political Tiiought from Bacon to Halifax."
STRUGGLES IN GERMANY AND ENGLAND 213
nation, and not have in themselves the power to remove or
to abohsh any governor supreme, or subordinate, with the
government itself upon urgent cause, may please their fancy
with a ridiculous and painted freedom, fit to cozen babies ;
but we are indeed under tyranny and servitude in wanting
that power, which is the root and source of all liberty, to
dispose and economize in the land which God hath given them,
as masters of family in their own house and free inheritance."
(ibid.)
Yet the same Milton, when faced with the bitter fact that
the nation was hankering for the Stuarts, ready " to fall back,
or rather creep back so poorly, as it seems the multitude
would, to their once abjured and detested thraldom of King-
ship," could urge with equal fervour that they should be
placed by force, " the less number " having the right for
liberty's sake to compel the greater, under the control of a
Grand Council, elected indeed, but practically irremovable.
There was another alternative that ^lilton himself had all but
indicated ; to let the people have their way, trusting in the
power of truth at last to bring them round. " Though all
the winds of doctrine were let loose to pla^^ upon the earth, so
truth be in the field, we do injuriously by licensing and pro-
hibiting to misdoubt her strength. Let her and falsehood
grapple : who ever knew truth put to the worse in a fair and
open encounter?" (" Areopagitica.")
There lies the hope for any solution of the conflict between
liberty and law. But the conflict may go deep, and no one
was better calculated to feel the depth of it than a Puritan
who was also a poet. Puritanism at once appealed to the
individual conscience, bidding it judge freely for itself beyond
all visible signs, ceremonies, or rulers, and stood for the
conviction that there was an absolute law beyond the
individual's caprice. That law it conceived as laid down fully
by the Hebrew Scriptures, and in the last resort inscrutable
to Man. The impress of this faith can be felt all through
" Paradise Lost," the theme of which is precisely the battle of
unchartered Liberty and supreme Law, a battle conceived
with indescribable grandeur as the cosmic struggle which it is.
214 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
The dramatic power in the character of Satan would alone be
proof enough of Milton's sympathy with the principle of
personal freedom, a Spirit, however degraded, once " In-
habitant of Heaven and heavenly-born," though plunged
because of sheer pride, envy, " deep malice and disdain,"
" into the gloom of Tartarus profound," forced to seek the
help of Chaos and say with him :
" Havoc, and spoil, and ruin, are my gain."
(Par. Lost, v.)
The fall of Lucifer and following that the fall of Man are
conceived as essentially tragic because they mean the waste
of a thing essentially glorious. " Will and Reason (Reason
also is Choice) " are " useless and vain " without freedom.
(Bk. iii.) And yet freedom implies the power of choosing
wrong and hence the possibility of all " vice and obliquity
against the rule of law."
Milton saw in that misuse the central tragedy of the universe,
working in " Thrones, Dominations, Princedoms, Virtues,
Powers," drawing men from the unashamed delights of
innocence into insensate passion disguised as a " dauntless
virtue "
" Deterred not from achieving what might lead
To happier life, knowledge of good and evil."
(ix. 690).
It is a profound conception, the richer through the poet's
understanding (that we can see for example in " Comus ") of
the strong lure in many-sided and unrestrained experience.
And it flowered into the most majestic of English poetries.
But the sublime effect can be marred and the poetry frozen
by the stiff conception of arbitrary decrees, the fiats of an
irresponsible God whom all created beings must obey without
question, though again even there the greatness in Milton's
religious and poetic passion can dignify the argument.
" Shalt thou give law to God ? shalt thou dispute
With Him the points of liberty, who made
Thee what thou art, and formed the Powers of Heaven
Such as He pleased and circumscribed their being ? "
(v. 822).
STRUGGLES IN GERMANY AND ENGLAND 215
Yet, after all, exactly what Milton needed to fulfil his
genius, touch us to tears, and swing us up to heights that are
truly tragic was some vast thought that would exhibit
Jehovah's Law as the deepest fulfilment of what Lucifer him-
self approved. But that is asking much — and of a kind that
could scarcely be expected of Milton's temperament. With
all his nobility there was a strain of hardness in him that
checked his range. He had not that catholic hope in the
basis of man's thought and man's desire that could make
Goethe, an inferior poet but a broader nature, conceive his
Mephistopheles, the asserter of the Self, as great enough to
goad Man forward, even while he tempts him to sin.
If Milton suggests despair of humanity unless rescued from
without, much more does Hobbes, and the Saviour for Hobbes
is nothing better than the State. To Hobbes the sole remedy
for the " natural " war of all men against alllies in absolute
obedience to that mighty " Leviathan," that " artificial man, of
greater stature and strength than the natural," the State that is
endowed with an authority overwhelming enough to enforce
all its decrees. Hobbes' distrust of human nature dominates
his entire thought, although, following classic tradition, he
will on occasion use the term " natural law " for the highest
dictates of conscience. But it is almost always with the
conviction that such " law " can never be strong enough by
itself to control our " natural " selfishness. " For the laws
of Nature," he writes, " as ' justice,' ' equity,' and in sum
' doing to others as we would be done to,' of themselves,
without the terror of some power to cause them to be observed,
are contrary to our natural passions that carry us to partiality,
to pride, revenge and the like. And covenants, without the
sword, are but words and of no strength to secure a man at
all." Hobbes' dread of anarchy easily outweighs any misgiving
about tjTanny. " The sovereign power whether placed in
one man, as in monarchy, or in one assembly of men, as in
popular and aristocratical commonwealths," is to be " as
great as possibly men can be imagined to make it." " And,
though of so unlimited a power men may fancy many evil
consequences, yet the consequences of the want of it, which
216 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
is perpetual war of every man against his neighbour, are
much worse." (" Leviathan," chap. 20.)
Hobbes accepts the traditional idea of a covenant between
the citizens lying at the base of all civil society, an idea that
goes back to Plato and Aristotle and that was later to be
revived with extraordinary effect by Rousseau. But his
conception of it is meagre, the " fundamental law of Nature "
on which it rests being no more than a man's willingness to
give up part of his liberty " only so far forth as for peace and
defence of himself he shall think it necessary," and only if
other men will do the like.
Further, the sovereign authority which is to secure that
covenant once constituted, Hobbes would suffer any oppression
rather than risk its overthrow. " Private judgment " is
" a poison " to the commonwealth. In action conscience
must submit to the State. The supreme object of the
covenant being to guard against civil war, it is absurd to
invoke civil war in its name. Yet if in fact one sovereign
should be overthrown and another set up effectively Hobbes
would transfer his allegiance without scruple. He has no
particular preference for hereditary monarchy. The power
to keep order is the real claim on loyalty. De facto is for him
de jure. Hence, while the vigour of his thought, his shrewd
insight into human weakness, and his sense of civil order
attracted attention everywhere, he aroused violent opposition
both from the partisans of divine right and from those who
held that the citizens could never part with their own ultimate
authority, and would be morally justified in deposing by
force any unworthy sovereign.
CHAPTER XXXI
DESPOTISM IN FRANCE: LITERATURE AND THE
FORCES OF CRITICISM
HOBBES on utilitarian grounds goes as far in support
of despotic power as any English writer has ever gone,
and it is significant that during his lifetime Richelieu
had been strengthening the bases of despotism in France.
Here again the poHtical threads had intertwined with the
religious. The Edict of Nantes under Henri IV had, it will be
remembered, granted great rehgious freedom to the Huguenots ;
it had opened to them all offices of State — in this respect far
more liberal than English practice towards Roman Catholic
and Nonconformist — and it had secured them in their control
of certain fortresses, a concession that had made it possible
for them to build up centres of what was practically self-
government. And this precisely was what Richelieu would
not tolerate. His ideal, like that of Hobbes, was a strong
government under one sovereign, although he had no horror
of free thought as such. The siege and fall of La Rochelle
(1627-1628) soon after his accession to office, marked the end
of the Huguenot military power, but their religious liberty was
not curtailed, neither then, nor for more than two generations.
The political independence that Richelieu denied to the
Huguenots he denied to others. The States-General were
never summoned : the Parlements were kept strictly to
narrow legal functions. The powers of the nobles in governing
their provinces were cut down so as to make them incapable
of active resistance to the Crown. Royal officials took their
place. Taxation for public purposes and the power to raise
217
218 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
troops was left wholly in the hands of the king. But the
nobles and the great clergy were allowed, for their own undoing,
to keep their personal privileges. They were practically
exempt from taxation, and they enjoyed many, and those
among the most odious, of the ancient feudal claims on the
lives and services of their tenants.
Serfage lingered in France until the Revolution itself. And
with it and sheltering it stood for a century and a half
the system inaugurated by Richelieu, though menaced at
first by spasmodic revolt, as in the days of the Fronde, and
undermined later by its own corruption and the insight of its
critics. It was, as first set-up, the strongest and most coherent
system of bureaucracy under one ruler that Europe had seen
since the Roman Empire, and capable, in the hands of upright
officials, of remarkable vigour, especially for aggressive war.
A supreme Council appointed by the King directed and held
together the different departments. The Huguenots were
consoled for the loss of political power by the wide tolerance
of their religion, the nobles and the priests by the endorsement
of their privileges. And the nation at large accepted the
despotism partly, as in the days of Louis XI, for the sake of
peace and order after the long strain of war at home, partly
because the main drift since Louis XI had in fact accustomed
them to a centralized monarchy, and partly again because
they were bewitched by the glamour of foreign conquest. It
was under Richeheu that France began to succeed against
Germany in the coveted border provinces, it was under
Mazarin, his successor and the inheritor of his ideas, that her
gains were confirmed, and a decade later, (1658), through the
strange alliance with OHver, the leader of Puritan England,
she secured a notable triumph against Spain.
Despotism in France might have led the country to the
condition of Spain, had it not been that Frenchmen never
lost the spirit of criticism. The impulse shown in Rabelais,
Montaigne, and the Huguenots remained strong. Even
supporters of Richelieu could keep their private judgment in
play. The forceful, intellectual genius of Corneille throws
a singularly interesting Ught on the spirit of the more liberal
DESPOTISM IN FRANCE 219
among those who, in spite of misgivings, made their peace
with absolutism. Corneille is the first of the great French
dramatists, bom at the opening of the century, (b. 1606,
d. 1684), and his most striking plays, written at the time of
the Cardinal's dominance, show his pre-occupation with
politics. And it is in his political dramas that his strength is
manifest. Elsewhere, perhaps influenced by his Spanish
models, he is apt to lose himself in over-strained and even
false conceptions of honour and delicacy. But no writer has
a loftier sense of the tragic clash between ideals, or a stronger
rhetoric. There is some truth in calling him a rhetorician
rather than a poet, but sincere and splendid rhetoric may
produce magnificent art. His characters are rather types
than individual persons, but they are types corresponding to
momentous realities, especially in the world of action. Over
his first play of this kind, Le Cid, he almost quarrelled with
his domineering patron. Richelieu was struggling to put
down duelling among the nobles and could have little taste for
a drama where a duel was defiantly made into a leading
incident, one too in which the hero was a nobleman
" plus grand que les rois."
A year later, however, Corneille dedicated to Richelieu one of
his finest efforts, Les Horaces, the note of which is the conflict
between private affection and public duty. Still more
significantly, Cinna ou La Clemence d'Auguste turns on the
choice between chaotic liberty and orderly despotism. The
final decision is for such a despotism, but only if it is also
generous, and only after long and serious doubt.
The sympathy of understanding is to be felt in the portrayal
of Cinna's passion for liberty, though it drives him to the edge
of political murder, and in the fiery denunciation of those
suicidal combats where the leaders massacre their countrymen
for the sake of mastery and the soldiers die, not for freedom
but for servitude, hiding their treachery to a nobler cause in
the world-wide throng of their fellow slaves :
" ces tristes batailles
Oii Rome, par ses mains, d^chirait ses entraillcs,
220 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
Oil I'aigle abattait I'aigle, et de chaque c6t6
Nos legions s'armaient centre leur liberte ;
Oii les meilleurs soldats et les chefs les plus braves
Mettaient toute leur gloire k devenir esclaves ;
Ou, pour mieux assurer la honte de leurs fers,
Tous voulaient a leur chaine attacher I'univers ;
Et I'ex^crable honneur de lui donner un maitre
Faisait aimer a tous Tinfame nom de traitre.
Romains contre Romains, parents contre parents
Combattaient seulement pour le choix des tyrans."
Augustus himself, against whom Cinna conspires, meditates
whether he ought not to surrender his autocracy, and only
decides to hold it for the sake of Rome's unity. He is drawn
as no hypocrite ; his singleness of mind is proved by his
complete mastery of himself and his complete forgiveness of
the conspiracy he discovers. He puts aside personal resent-
ment from a deeper personal pride :
" Je suis maitre de moi comme de I'univers :
Je le suis, je veux I'etre."
The immediate climax (inspired ultimately by a passage in
Seneca already familiar to Frenchmen through Montaigne's
most happy rendering) was at once acclaimed throughout
France. The clemency of Augustus drew tears, so Voltaire
tells us, from the impetuous Conde when an eager lad of
twenty, the Conde who was to be, later on, both rebel and
penitent. " Le grand Corneille faisant pleurer le grand
Conde d'admiration est une epoque bien celebre dans I'histoire
de I'esprit humain." [Steele de Louis XIV, c. 32.)
Augustus offers Cinna not pardon only, but friendship :
" Soyons amis, Cinna ; c'est moi qui t'en convie."
Equal renown was won by the lines that close the drama
when Augustus bids the rebel leaders let their accomplices
know
" Qu' Auguste a tout appris et veut tout oublier."
Such was the model that Corneille, like Seneca long before him,
set up for the despots of his country, such the lesson he read
them, " un grand le9on de moeurs," as Voltaire truly called
DESPOTISM IN FRANCE 221
it. And Talle5Tand's brilliant epigram two centuries later
when the Bourbons of his day returned after the Revolution,
" having learnt nothing and forgotten nothing," loses half
its sting and sparkle unless we remember Cinna.
A nation that produced such WTiters as Corneille was not
likely to endure despotism for ever. But for long years, and
on the surface, despotism was triumphant. It leaves many a
mark of fulsome flattery on the literature of the time, and
might have been disastrous except for the all-important fact
that Frenchmen, including the French king, were prepared
to pay a high price for intellect and wit. It was the policy of
Louis XIV to gather round him not courtiers only but brilliant
authors. And his taste in authorship, allowing for his personal
prejudices, was sound enough. If we resent a certain vulgarity
in the grandiose and arrogant display of Versailles, we must
admit also that the Sun-King could shed his light on authors
who were not vulgar. It was his laughter that rescued
Les Plaideurs of Racine and his patronage that protected
Moliere. But once admit such laughter and a way is opened
for the solvent of criticism. The aristocratic age of Louis XIV
was an age of incisive wit as well as of ease, polish, stately
rhetoric. And in this it was nursing a possible corrective for
itself.
The deeper emotions, indeed, w^ere seldom touched. Almost
alone among his contemporaries Racine could express genuine
]-)assion, and to this he owes his high place among French
tragedians. Again and again through the pellucid flow of his
verse and within the narrow limits he had chosen, the limits of
" classicism " and the hienseance of a luxurious society, we
can feel the flash of its power. The tragic part of his " Phedre,"
written when Euripides inspired him, has alwaj^s been coveted
by the great French actresses, the queen, as Sarah Bernhardt
played her, most royal, most seductive, swept through and
through by desire, tenderness, shame, jealousy, and remorse,
capable of treachery in her despair, and capable of redeeming
it by a last controlled dismissal of herself from life.
But Racine is not often at this height and there seems a
thinness in his genius when we contrast him with Moliere.
222 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
It is scarcely paradoxical to say that there is something more
tragic in Moliere's comedy than in Racine's tragedy. Moliere
is so human and sees so deep ; right through the pretences of
the actual life all round him, laughing, no doubt, at its
absurdities, but sore at heart, for all his laughter, at its
meanness and deceit. It would narrow Moliere ridiculously
to think of him merely as a critical moralist ; he is too richly
tolerant, too full of the gusto of life for that. The artist in
him delights in men as they are :
" Je prends tout doucement les hommes comme ils sont,
J'accoutume mon ame k souffrir ce qu'ils font."
{Le Misanthrope.)
Still such lines in themselves indicate that he did suffer and had
to train himself to endure. In his " Tartuffe," the powerful
hypocrite, stronger than any of the slighter virtuous characters
about him, stands out as so menacing a portent that we are
not surprised to learn the play was twice forbidden through
the influence of the clergy, although we smile at the eagerness
with which they fitted the cap to themselves.
The time abounds in graceful essajdsts, epigrammatists,
fabulists, letter writers, memoir writers. But these are
noteworthy not only for polish, freshness, sparkle, as in Mme.
de Sevign^ and La Fontaine. There are men among them of
sterner stuff. And La Fontaine himself has a keen eye for
the outrageous arrogance of the privileged classes. Oppression
may not grieve him, but it certainly rouses his wit :
" Vous les faites en leur croquant, Seigneur, beaucoup d'honneur."
There is much truth and shrewdness in the old saying that the
ancien regime was a system of " despotism tempered by
epigrams."
La Rochefoucauld, La Bruyere, Saint-Simon command a
deadly criticism, the more telling because of its studied
restraint, levelled at a system of which all the same they were
proud to feel themselves a part. If they were not men to make
a Revolution, their mordant wit did a good deal to prepare the
way for it. When they cut into the human heart they were
DESPOTISM IN FRANCE 223
not careful to spare the great. La Rochefoucauld struck
at all men when he wrote, " Nous avons tous assez de force
pour supporter les maux d'autnii." The old frondeur has a
special fling at the tricks of monarchs and their advisers.
" La clemence des princes n'est souvent qu'une politique pour
gagner I'affection des peuples." La Bruyere, pillorying the
tax-farmer who ground the faces of the poor, has no mind to
let off the nobleman who profited by his wealth : " Si le
financier manque son coup, les courtisans disent de lui ; c'est
un bourgeois, un homme de rien, un malotru ; s'il reussit, ils
lui demandent sa fille."
Saint-Simon takes a malicious delight in uncovering the net-
work of intrigue, the self-seeking, even the gross physical
foulness, beneath the dazzling elegance of Versailles ; and his
careful portraiture of Louis XIV does not hesitate to emphasize
the pettiness in the royal character or the mistakes in the
royal despotism. It is remarkable that this French nobleman
of the hatde noblesse, Catholic by belief, tradition, and pride
of race, should have chosen for especial blame Louis' Revo-
cation of the Edict of Nantes (1685). The Huguenots, Saint-
Simon recognizes, had been inoffensive citizens for many years.
But now — and he writes with a sneer as solemn as Gibbon's —
" The King had become pious, while remaining profoundly
ignorant. His policy reinforced his piety. His councillors
played on his most sensitive points, his religion and his passion
for power. They painted the Huguenots in the blackest
colours : — a State within the State, that had won its licence
through riot, revolt, civil war, foreign intrigue, open rebellion
against his royal ancestors. But they were extremely careful
not to touch on the cause of all those ancient evils. . . . They
inspired their fervent disciple with the longing for a signal
act of penitence, perfectly easy, performed at the expense of
others, and ensuring his own salvation. They captivated his
kingly pride by the thought of an achievement surpassing the
power of all his predecessors. . . . Thus they led him, the
man who piqued himself on governing alone, to strike a
masterstroke at once for Church and State, securing the
triumph of the true religion by destroying all the rest, and
224 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
making the monarch absolute for good by breaking everj'
link with the Huguenot rebels and rooting them out for ever."
Then follows a thunderous roll of indignation. " The
Revocation of the Edict, without the least reason, without
even the shadow of an excuse, and the proscriptions which
followed it were the fruit of this shameful plot. It depopu-
lated a quarter of the kingdom, ruined its trade, weakened it
through and through, plundered it, openly and admittedly,
by the dragonnades, authorized tortures and punishments
that involved the death of thousands, innocent men and
women ; it brought destruction to a whole people, tore families
asunder, incited brothers to rob brothers and let them starve ;
it drove our manufacturers abroad, bringing prosperity and
opulence at our expense to foreign States, giving them new
cities, peopled, to the wonder of the world, by these amazing
exiles who had been driven out naked and desolate, for no
fault of their own, to seek shelter in banishment ; it doomed
men of birth, men of wealth, old men, men often reverenced
for their piety, their knowledge, their goodness, men accus-
tomed to comfort, infirm and frail : — it doomed them to the
galleys and the slave whip, for the sole crime of their religion."
Saint-Simon's picture may be overdrawn, influenced by his
personal hatred of Madame de Maintenon and the Jesuits, but
it is one of the many instances tending to show how cultured
circles in France were far more ready to protest against religious
oppression than against political absolutism. The nobles
received privileges from the political autocrat, but the St.
Bartholomew, not, after all, so long ago, had struck impartially
at gentle and simple, and the philosopher Descartes, more
recently, had found it prudent to live in exile.
Saint -Simon, with equal prudence, never dared to publish
any of his scathing comments during his own lifetime. A more
redoubtable attack had been delivered by the open " Lettres
Provinciales " of Pascal (b. 1623, d. 1662), a delicate and
fierce unmasking of the incredible sophistry into which the
lust for dominance had led the Jesuit leaders. The " Letters "
are a known landmark in the development of French prose.
As Voltaire said of them later, " they contain every kind of
DESPOTISM IN FRANCE 225
eloquence " ; quiet fatal incisiveness as of a great gentleman
who does not need to raise his voice, brilliant mockery, grave
irony, direct fearless invective, impassioned rhetoric.
One speculates whither Pascal's critical faculty would have
led him if he had gone on with his life. But the critical
faculty was only one side of his strange and highly-dowered
temperament. He stands between two worlds. A mathe-
matical genius, an acute researcher in physics, he was power-
fully attracted to the opening world of modern science. But
more powerful still was the attraction of the old mystical
religion that offered the soul a shelter from the desolate spaces
of an inlinite lonely universe : " Le silence eternel de ces
espaces infinis m'effraie." With a fervour recalling Loyola's,
intense and terrible through its fear, Pascal flung himself
back into the inward life of a mediaeval saint. " Le coeur a
ses raisons que la raison ne connait pas." But the Age of
Reason was advancing inevitably and Descartes had already
been brooding over its foundations. A new principle of unity
was beginning to appear, the unity in a type of thought
where the appeal should be not to authority but to argument
supported by a verifiable correspondence with facts.
15
PART IV.— MODERN
CHAPTER XXXII
THE TRIUMPHS OF MATHEMATICS
(F. S. Marvin)
THE second phase in the growth of modern science
though following closely on and intimately connected
with the first, is yet different in spirit and more
ambitious in scope. Galileo is obviously the master-mind
of the first ; Descartes and Leibnitz are the leaders in the
second. In the first phase the mind of Europe was awaken-
ing ; it was shaking off the fetters of ecclesiastical control and
unreasoning tradition ; it was putting itself in contact with
the world of nature, testing theory by careful observation and
experiment and forming truer ideas of the process of events.
In the second phase, encouraged by success, it went on to
formulate schemes of the whole and attempted to sec the
universe as one harmonious set of laws, all dependent on a
few simple principles. The attempt involved an extension of
the mathematical method and found its chief exponent in
Descartes. It corresponds in philosophy with the develop-
ment of physical and astronomical science, and a later phase
still, in which we now live, comes to the front in the nineteenth
century with the growth of biology. Kant represents the
turning-point here, the pioneer of the modern and relative
spirit. Chemistry, as we shall see, is the linking science
taking us beyond the laws of matter immediately susceptible
to mathematical treatment and opening the way to the view
of matter as the home of life. And chemistry is constituted
as a science towards the end of the eighteenth century.
227
228 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
There was probably no period in history when so great
strides were made in knowledge and the formation of know-
ledge as between the beginning of Galileo's work in 1590 and
the Acta Eruditontm of Leibnitz in 1684. In less than a
hundred years Galileo had laid down the main lines of the
science of mechanics, Kepler had revealed the laws of the
movements of the planets, Newton had linked up the two by
the greatest of all physical generalizations, Pascal, Boyle and
Mariotte had measured the pressure of the atmosphere, Harvey
had discovered the circulation of the blood ; the telescope,
the microscope, the thermometer and the barometer were all
brought into use, and, most important of intellectual facts, the
new mathematical calculus had been invented, which was to
give man the power of measuring all kinds of movement and
change, as well as describing every form of geometrical shape.
The German Kepler, who must rank with the foremost
builders of the ne wsynthesis, was a contemporary of Galileo.
His life falls entirely within that of the great Italian, for he was
born seven years after him in 1571, and being of a weaker
constitution, died twelve years earlier, in 1630. Both of them
accepted the Copernican hypothesis as young men, but while
Galileo's more versatile mind was exploring physical phenomena
of many kinds, Kepler's was devoted to investigating the laws
that hold together the different members of the solar system.
Unhke Newton, who was as sparing as possible of hypotheses,
Kepler threw out one after another, ingenious, daring, and
sometimes extravagant. He was brought into close contact
with the facts by serving for two years as assistant to Tycho
Brahe, a Danish astronomer, who was working in Bohemia
for the Emperor Rudolf. Tycho was an untiring and accurate
observer, and Kepler inherited his store of facts after his
death in 160 1. He went on to extend these observations in
the case of the planet Mars and arrived at last at his first two
laws of planetary motion : — (i) That a line drawn from the
sun to the planet — a radius vector — marks out on the plane
of its orbit equal areas in equal times. (2) That the planets
move, not in circles as had been always previously assumed,
but in ellipses with the sun at one of the foci. This was in
THE TRHBIPHS OF MATHEMATICS 229
1609. Ten years later he discovered his third law. He had
long known that the period of revolution increased with the
distance of the planet from the sun. He found after long
calculation that the law of the universe was that the squares
of the periodic times are proportional to the cubes of the mean
distances. Thus if the mean distance of the Earth from the
sun and its period of revolution be taken as unity, and in the
case of any other planet the distance be four or nine times
greater, the period will be eight or twenty-seven times longer.
This law has been since applied to predicting the period of a new
planet, such as Uranus, when its distance had been ascertained.
These, with Galileo's law of falling bodies, are perhaps the
simplest, best known and most illustrative examples of what
is meant by a " law of nature." They show how, in the
seventeenth century, more accurate observations were taken
hold of by developing mathematics and formed into a solid
structure of thought.
Such thought is clearly both objective and subjective in
origin. It derives from the actual phenomena of motion which
man does not originate, but, as an ideal construction, it belongs
to man's collective mind developing progressively in time.
Kepler reached his laws by induction from observed facts,
Newton, with a more powerful synthetic mind and a better
calculus, was able to deduce them mathematically from the
laws of motion. Although a generation, including the work
of Descartes, intervened between Kepler and Newton, it will
be more convenient to consider Newton's work in this con-
nection as completing Kepler's. Kepler had shown reason
for thinking that the force which explained his laws must
proceed from the sun, but he beheved that this force varied
inversely as the distance. GaUleo, on his part, had contri-
buted the law of falling bodies which we gave in a preceding
chapter. In 1665 Newton, reflecting on this, thought of
investigating the space through which the moon in a given
time was deflected from a straight path, i.e. the amount of
her fall towards the earth. He found that this was thirteen
feet in a minute. He took the best estimate of the earth's
magnitude which he knew and assuming that gravitation
230 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
acted inversely as the square of the distance, he calculated
that the moon would fall in a minute not thirteen but fifteen
feet. He therefore put the hypothesis aside for seven years
when a more accurate measurement of the earth's magnitude
had been made by the Abbe Picard in Paris.
He then took up the calculations again and had them
completed for greater certainty by another person, not
interested in his results. He now found his hypothesis
confirmed. But even so, the great work remained of show-
ing how Kepler's Third Law followed mathematically from
Newton's hypothesis of a force of gravitation, acting inversely
as the square of the distance. For this he needed the help
of the work of Huj^gens, a Dutch astronomer and mathema-
tician, on the composition of forces in circular motion. With
this, and the aid of his own new Calculus, the work was done
and the first two books of the " Principia " communicated to
the Royal Society in 1686.
That we now have reason for thinking, through the labours
of Einstein and his immediate predecessors, that the Newtonian
laws may be regarded as part of a still larger generalization
and are subject to correction in certain cases does not destroy
their value nor prevent us regarding them as the greatest
achievement of the human mind up to that time. And we
note how men of all the leading civilized nations contributed
their share to the result. Galileo, the Italian, was the prime
mover in the train of thought ; Kepler was a German, Picard
a Frenchman, and Huygens Dutch.
But the same age was fruitful of many other advances in
science, especially in physics, for it was to physics that the
new mathematics gave most aid. Perhaps of all lines of
physical research — next to that of falling bodies — the most
fruitful in its ultimate results was that into the pressure of
gases. It gave us within 150 years the steam engine, most
potent transformer of human society since the Stone Age.
Galileo had turned his attention to the question of atmos-
pheric pressure but had not pursued it. A pump had been
submitted to him in which it was desired to raise the water
under the bucket to a greater height than ^2 feet. He did
THE TRIUMPHS OF MATHEMATICS 231
not understand at first why it was impossible to do this, but
soon began to suspect that the atmosphere's weight was the
true explanation. His pupil Torricelli, an accomplished
mathematician, following out his lead, succeeded in 1643, the
year after Galileo's death, in proving the hypothesis, and in
measuring the weight of the atmosphere against first a column
of water (32 feet high) and then a column of mercury (28
inches high). Mercury being about fourteen times the weight
of water, the theory was corroborated in a striking way. ^
Four years later Pascal, then in his twenty-fourth year,
carried the inquiry further. He had different mercurial
barometers measured at different heights and showed, by an
experiment on the Puy de Dome in Auvergne, that the
pressure of the atmosphere diminished as you ascended the
mountain and had a less weight of air to sustain the mercury.
The same line of thought was pursued by Robert Boyle, son
of the Earl of Cork, who had spent the last winter of Galileo's
Ufe (1641-2) near him in Florence and had come under the
great man's influence. Boyle, after his return to Oxford,
invented in 1659 ^^ ^i^ pump and studied systematically the
laws of atmospheric pressure. This enabled him to discover,
simultaneously with Mariotte in France, the law that the
condensation of air is in proportion to the weight pressing
upon it, the law afterwards extended to all gases.
We notice, on the one hand, the continued extension of
mathematical methods to the simpler phenomena of nature ;
and, on the other, the swift application of these results to
practical purposes. Within twenty years after these experi-
ments on the pressure of the air, several machines had been
invented, both in France and England, for utilizing atmos-
pheric pressure for the raising of water. These were the direct
ancestors of Newcomen's and Watt's steam engines by various
stages which we have not space to explain here.
Sound and light also began to be measured in this fertile
century, in the lifetime of Newton, who himself devoted much
thought to the problems of optics. The part which light has
played in recent theories and the supreme position which has
* Galloway, " The Steam Engine and its Inventors."
232 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
been assigned to its velocity, give all these earlier steps a
special interest. Newton began his researches into the nature
of light, as soon as he became Professor of Mathematics at
Cambridge in 1669. He continued them for thirty-five years.
He followed up the analysis of white light into its prismatic
colours, which had been made by Descartes, and measured
the different refrangibility of the different colours. He
started the theory that light consisted of small particles,
emitted with great velocity on direct lines from the light-
giving object, and this theory disputed the ground for many
years with that originated by Descartes and Huygens, that
it was really caused by vibrations propagated in the ether.
But the most striking discovery in connection with light —
next to that of the spectrum — which was made at this time
was due to a Dane called Roemer, who had worked in Paris
under Picard. He found (1695) in observing the immersions
and emersions of Jupiter's moons that they took place with a
difference of sixteen minutes according to the relative positions
of the Earth and Jupiter, on the same or opposite sides of the
Sun. This meant that the light coming from Jupiter took
sixteen minutes to traverse the diameter of the earth's orbit.
His conclusions were confirmed and extended by Bradley in
his observatory at Wanstead early in the next century.
Mathematics had made another and far-reaching conquest.
Light, the most intangible of external phenomena, about the
nature of which the greatest minds of the day were at that
moment in dispute, was found to be measurable. Later
researches, near to our own day, have brought the measure-
ment of light into close relation with the measurement of the
kindred phenomena of heat and electricity, by means of the
new mathematical calculus,which, if we measure by results, was
the greatest advance made in the seventeenth century by man's
collective and constructing mind. To appreciate the genesis
and nature of this, we need to return a few decades to Descartes'
work in Amsterdam during the thirties of that century.
Born in 1596, Descartes was trained for eight years by the
Jesuits, but found no satisfaction in the literary culture which
he received. He turned to an active life for guidance in thought,
THE TRIUMPHS OF IMATHEMATICS 283
and sensed in the army and travelled from 1617 till 1628.
Then, settling at last in Holland, he gave himself to philosophy
in an atmosphere of greater freedom than he could find at that
time in his own country of France. The next twenty years were
his productive period. In 1649 ^^ accepted an invitation
from Queen Christina of Sweden, but died at Stockholm the
following year from the effects of a Scandinavian winter.
From the first he sought some basis of thought not open to
the attacks and questioning which assailed every conclusion
in the traditional philosophy in which he had been trained.
Literature did not give this, nor science as he then found
it ; it needed the mathematical discipline which he and his
immediate successors were to pro\dde. To mathematics, then,
he betook himself, and influenced by mathematical thinking
he evolved the most complete and coherent system which
intervened between the scholastic philosophy of the middle
ages and the encyclopaedic systems that followed his own.
We must start afresh, he said, from the simplest and most
indubitable truths which every man's consciousness must
admit. From these by mathematical methods he went on
to explain the whole visible world in accordance with fixed
laws derived from the facts of form and motion. The Cartesian
system in its entirety has only a historical interest. It out-
ran the conclusions of the many necessary sciences involved.
But in so far as Descartes invented, in the course of his
synthetic work, a new mathematical instrument, and insisted
on the need of clear and consistent thinking, in so far as he
laid the foundation of all future synthesis in the mind itself,
he became one of the greatest builders of modern thought.
His theory of matter is based on the application of clear
thinking to the problems of space ; it starts from geometry.
He complained that the ancients confined themselves too
much to the consideration of figures ; he turned his attention
to lines and, bringing together the methods of algebra and
geometry, he showed that any straight line can, by using co-
ordinates or perpendiculars drawn from each point to two
given axes, be expressed as an equation of the first degree,
and all conic sections, including the circle, as equations of the
234 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
second degree. It was an invention of the utmost importance,
not only in itself as giving a fresh and incomparable instru-
ment for exploring the properties of geometrical figures, but
as a step leading immediately to an instrument of still wider
scope — the differential calculus of Newton and Leibnitz.
It is interesting to note that almost at the same moment
at M^hich Descartes published his Geometry, another French
mathematician, Fermat, published a work containing the
same idea. As usual, great ideas were stirring in many minds
at the same moment. We shall see the same thing with
Newton and Leibnitz. But whereas Fermat's work was of
limited scope, technical and practical, Descartes' was part of
a far-reaching philosophy which led on to further discoveries
and the unification of knowledge.
Man's mind was at last approaching a practical method of
dealing with the infinitesimal quantities which at once beset
us as soon as we attempt either to carry a process of division
to its utmost limits or to consider what is involved in any
process of physical growth. The early Greek thinkers were
conscious of the difficulty. Zeno's famous problem of the
hare and the tortoise presented it in the form of an dnoqia or
unsolved puzzle. The later Greek geometers, especially
Archimedes, approached the problem more nearly from
another point of view, in their Method of Exhaustions by
which they measured a figure like a circle by summing up an
infinite number of measurable sections into which it might
be divided. But it was not until Descartes had invented
his method of expressing geometrical relations in algebraical
equations that it was possible to deal concisely and effectively
with the infinitesimal ; and the mathematical treatment of
all questions of growth involves the infinitesimal. The
Greeks were geometers. In the interval between Archimedes
and Gaineo algebra had grown up. A Greek, Diophantus,
had given the first European examples of the method. The
Arabs developed it, and in the sixteenth century Europeans
resumed the study. Galileo founded the science of motion,
Descartes brought geometry and algebra together, and within
thirty years after his method was invented Newton and
THE TRIUMPHS OF MATHEMATICS 235
Leibnitz had applied it to the calculation of the infinitesimal.
It was the crowning discovery of the first age of modern
physics. It brought together the various lines of mechanical
inquiry already pursued, and made possible their extension
within the next two hundred years to all measurable
phenomena. The equations of Lagrange in the time of
Napoleon, of Clerk Maxwell in the seventies of the nineteenth
century, are merely extensions of the methods of the men of
the seventeenth. Light, heat, magnetism, and electricity were
in this way all measured and brought into the unified world
of mathematics. The practical results were in their way
equally great. The whole of modern engineering, with its
giant structures and its complex calculation of forces, depends
as entirely on the calculus of Newton and Leibnitz as the
steam-engine on the law of the pressure of gases.
Yet — and it is one of the most amazing gaps in our general
education — not one person in a hundred, even in our higher
schools, is taught the simple principles of the calculus. It is
still regarded as an advanced and abstruse subject, only fit
to be attempted by the very few who have shown marked
ability in mastering the earlier branches of mathematics,
instead of being, as it is, the unifying aspect of mathematics
which subsumes all the other methods of calculation and
applies them to the problems of the moving world. That the
right view is now gaining ground is shown by the increasing
number of works in which it is intelligently presented. To
do this generally in education, with the due historical pre-
paration, would induce more than any other single reform
the synthetic spirit, the need of which we shall note in our
closing chapter.
It would be a fascinating subject, and important too from
the philosophical standpoint, to trace the conquests of
mathematics in the sphere of chemistry. Less obvious to
calculation than the masses studied by the early ph3^sicists,
the molecule and the atom of the chemist have also within
the last three hundred years come within the range of quanti-
tative analysis, though we cannot include chemistry within
the scope of mathematics to the same extent as we can
236 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
physics. Three steps, however, may be noted which show
the advance of the mathematical spirit into the realm of the
" kinds and qualities of matter." It was by the use of the
balance that Priestley and Lavoisier, following Mayo, dis-
covered the true nature of combustion, the crucial point in
the creation of a scientific chemistry. The atomic theory
at the beginning of the nineteenth century arises from
Dalton's discovery of a mathematical rule governing the
combination of atoms in chemical union, while in the latter
part of the century Mendeleeff advances the atomic theory
by his Periodic Law which exhibits the elements ranged in a
mathematical order according to their atomic weight. And
this mathematical aspect of the elements seems also to be
related with their other qualities and their diffusion in nature.
The story might be extended. We might show the recent
appearance of similar laws in biology. But for our present
purpose it is better to conclude here with the work of the
great man of the seventeenth century who, while showing to
the full the mathematical development of his time, already
points the way to the relativity of our own day.
Leibnitz, of whom more hereafter, came much nearer to the
conception that the truths of mechanical theory may be only
relatively true, that we have no reason for inferring they exist
as such elsewhere than in our own mind. The truth which
the calculus serves, disregarding problems irrelevant for its
purpose, may be merely the truth by which man has mastered
for his own ends certain laws of movement and growth.
Leibnitz, by laying stress on the difficulties in regarding
Time, Space, and Motion as absolute, prepared the way not
only for modern attempts at more coherent mechanics than
were then matured, but also for the further analysis of Kant.
Since his time the progress in both branches of science,
physics and psychology, has done much to confirm the
principle that all our knowledge is relative to, dependent on,
and partly created by, the thinking mind, and that the
synthesis we hope for, must be, not an absolute, but a human
one, including in that term all the sentience of which our
mind is the highest manifestation as yet known to us,
CHAPTER XXXIII
THE RISE OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY : DESCARTES.
SPINOZA, LEIBNITZ
THE considerations in the last pages may become
clearer if we go back a little and take up the work of
Descartes in philosophy proper as distinct from science.
Certainty as to the nature of actual existence was, he himself
would have us know, the thing he sought above all else, and
even mathematics could not of itself give him that. Therefore
he set himself deliberately to doubt everything, not idly, but
as a sif ting-test for truth, " non que j'imitasse pour cela les
sceptiques qui ne doutent que pour douter et affectent d'etre
toujours irresolus ; car au contraire, tout mon dessein ne
tendait qu'a m'assurer et a rejeter la terre mouvante et le
sable pour trouver le roc ou I'argile." (" Discours sur la
Methode.")
Pushing doubt to its furthest reach, he found there was one
thing at least he could not doubt, namely, the existence of
himself while he doubted. Here, then, was something he was
compelled to affirm as existing even while he attempted to
deny it. He felt he had gained a sure hold on existence at
last, possibly a point from which to move the whole world
of thought through a principle on which the mind could rest.
And in all soberness his famous inference, " Je pense, done
je suis," " I think, therefore I am," did give a new starting-
point to philosophy and suggest a method at least relatively
new, the method, namely, of showing by critical analysis that
certain principles are implicit in all thought, seeing that the
very attempt to deny them involves their affirmation.
237
238 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
The procedure of Descartes, so far, is clear and cogent, but it
must be admitted that there is confusion as well as profundity
in his next philosophical doctrine. His " proof " of God's
existence, derived as it is in part from mediaeval thinkers,
can be put, and is often put by himself, in a form that is
fallacious. None the less, it contains ideas of high value. In
the first place, it must be remembered that to Descartes
" God " could mean the sum of all positive reality. Now, is
it not impossible to deny that such Reality exists ? Surely
it is, whatever that Reality may turn out to be. This bare
admission, indeed, takes us at first only a very little way.
This " God " is far enough from the Christian " God " the
existence of whom Descartes desired to prove. But even
this step leads at once to the question : Is this Reality, this
total sum of things that I am forced to admit, the same as the
thinking Self I was also forced to admit ? It is conceivable
at first blush that the answer should be Yes, and the position
taken that I alone am the one being in the universe. But,
critically examined, the answer itself breaks down. So far
from there being any reason to maintain it rather than to
doubt it in its turn, a man's consciousness, so Descartes held,
referred him continually to something beyond. In the first
place he is aware of himself not only as a thinking being, but
as an imperfect thinking being. And how could he be aware
of his imperfection at all if in some way he was not also aware
of a Perfection, not his but desired by him ?
" Faisant reflexion sur ce que je doutais, et que, par
consequent, mon etre n'etait pas tout parfait, car je voyais
clairement que c'etait une plus grande perfection de connaitre
que de douter, je m'avisai de chercher d'ou j 'avals appris a
penser a quelque chose de plus parfait que je n'etais, et je
connus evidemment que ce devait etre de quelque nature qui
fut en effet plus parfaite." (" Discours sur la Methode.")
Thus he reaches the idea of a God who is the strength of
man's weakness, known to him in the effort of his human
consciousness. It is a line of thought with close affinities
not only to the past, recalling many of Plato's arguments
about the Eternal and Perfect Ideas, but also to all those
THE RISE OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY 239
vigorous faiths of the future which, hke the belief in genmne
progress, recognize a universal standard of values discoverable
by the reason of man. In the hands of Leibnitz, a similar
doctrine becomes central, as we shall see.
Starting with the self and God, Descartes next turned to
the " material " world. And here his recognition of self-
consciousness on the one hand and his interest in mathematics
on the other led him to hold, first, that Thought is in no sense
to be identified with the " matter " that exists in Space, the
thing that has length and breadth and thickness and is, in
metaphysical phrase, " extended." There is no sense in
speaking, except metaphorically, of " a square thought."
On the other hand, Descartes could not bring himself to give
up the conviction that something existed that was extended :
his geometrical discoveries brought too vividly before him
what seemed self-evident truths concerning space, offering a
coherent explanation of all the phenomena forcing themselves
on our senses. God would surely not delude us, he pleads,
to the degree that would be involved if there were no reahty
in that explanation. The argument, so put, is lame, but it
indicates clearly enough Descartes' line of thought. The
extended world of Matter was therefore taken as real, but the
apparent interaction between it and the wholly different world
of Mind remained an enigma. With the Cartesian attempt at
a solution we cannot deal here. But it is necessary to state
that he did not conceive this ]\Iatter, though real, as forming
part of God's reahty. It was created by Him : it was not of
His essence. Yet this separation of anything real from God
runs counter to the argument for God's existence as the sum
of positive reahty.
It is here that Baruch Spinoza (b. 1632, d. 1677), " ^^e
descendant of Jews driven out from Portugal by the Inquisi-
tion," one of the noblest men and perhaps the most impressive
philosopher who ever hved, parts company with Descartes.
Spinoza's fundamental idea is that Real Being must form a
rational whole, that one eternal and infinite self-complete
Reality exists, called by him Substance or God, that of this
Substance there are an endless number of essential qualities
240 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
or " Attributes," each of which expresses Its total nature, but
that of these Attributes two only are known to us, the
spiritual and the spatial, Mind and Matter, each of them
articulated into an endless number of particulars all of which
are linked together by definite connexions. Even these
Attributes are only known to us in an imperfect fashion,
through those fragmentary manifestations of their particulars
that Spinoza calls the Finite Modes, borrowing the term
" Mode " from Descartes to mean an appearance that flows
from a deeper reality but does not adequately express It.
We ourselves are among these finite modes.
He would be a bold man who claimed to understand Spinoza
fully ; perhaps he did not fully understand himself. Yet no
philosopher has been more inspiring, not only to trained
metaphysicians, but to the plain man. There is a story of
Madame de Stael finding Balzac as a little boy reading the
Ethics. She asked him if he understood what he read. He
looked up. " You pray to God ? " he asked her in his turn.
And she nodded. " Does that mean you understand Him ? "
And she had nothing to say. A spirit goes out from Spinoza's
writing that fortifies the student even where he fails to
comprehend the master or feels compelled to call him incon-
sistent. The genius of the man and the unselfishness of his
character have stamped themselves on his style.
Moreover, Spinoza's large scheme promises to combine at
their root the spiritual and the spatial. The plain man cannot
bring himself to believe that the mathematical construction
of things to which we seem forced by physical science does
not correspond in the last resort to some reahty beyond his own
thinking. But neither can he beheve that the thought which
thinks out this construction is itself a mere by-product of
shapes in motion. Hence the appeal of Spinoza's daring and
complex doctrine, asserting, (i) that Space (Extension) and its
quahties in their totahty really do form an Attribute of the
Infinite Substance which thinks, (2) that we ourselves are
fragments of that same Thinking Substance, but (3) that
the Thinking of that Substance, when It thinks as a whole,
is incomprehensibly beyond ours, inasmuch as It is able
THE RISE OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY 241
to combine Its thoughts completely with Reality and is
creative in a sense that we are not. A man is not the whole
cause of another man's nature, but " the Thought of God
is the cause both of our nature and of our existence "
("Ethics." Part I., Prop. 17, Schol.). With God Perception
and the Thing Perceived are absolutely united. " The circle
existing in Nature and the idea in God of the existing circle
are one thing and the same, made manifest by different attri-
butes " (ib., P. II., Prop. 7, Schol.). This is a truth, adds
Spinoza, seen dimly by the Hebrews who taught the unity of
God, His thought, and what He thinks of. But all this is far
above our human thought, as far as the heavens are above the
earth : " toto cselo differre deberent." For us the conception
of a thing and the actual existence of the thing do not combine
in this complete way ; we can only conceive a circle by
thinking of something else outside that circle and so on for
ever, never holding within us fully articulated the whole sum
of Reahty. There is thus, it may be confessed, something
" mystical " in Spinoza's idea of God as the absolute union of
Thought and Being, something that we apprehend but do not
comprehend, by which I mean something that appears necessary
to the logical completion of our thought, but which our thought
does not fully grasp. But man, although he can only go
from step to step among the infinite details of the two Divine
Attributes alone accessible to him, can at least do this much,
and in the doing of it lies his link of union with God and his
liberation from servitude. In so far as he learns to see both
" material " things and " mental " in their true connexion
with each other, he sees more of God. " Quo magis res singu-
lares intelhgimus, eo magis Deum intelligimus " (V., Prop. 24).
The work of science is thus in its essence religious, and the
desire for knowledge part of that " intellectual love of God "
which is the crown of man. The more we see things so, the
more we see them " under the form of eternity," " sub specie
aeternitatis," since we see them more and more connected
with everything else in the whole universe. At times, indeed
very often, Spinoza wrote as though this power in man lifted
the most essential part of him into eternity: " We feel and
16
242 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
know by experience that we are eternal " (V., Prop. 23, Schol.).
What precisely he meant by this it is hard to say, but pos-
sibly that a man's power of thought passed after the dissolution
of his body into the eternal life of God, though the man as a
separate individual ceased to exist. It is obvious at least
that he conceived of man's mind as on a different footing
from his body. " The mind of man cannot absolutely be
destroyed with the destruction of the body ; something of it
remains which is eternal."
Further, we should not only see things " under the form of
eternity," we should also feel them so. Our wills and our
emotions should be brought into harmony with this funda-
mental truth. It is not for nothing that Spinoza called his
great work " Ethics." He was stimulated by Hobbes as well
as by Descartes, and he was led to his system largely by his
instinct that there must be some way to deliver man from
that war of all against all which Hobbes found in the state
of nature. Hobbes, as we pointed out, saw no escape but
by the external defences of Government, a man giving up
part of his liberty in order to be protected in the rest of
his efforts towards self-preservation. Spinoza, while almost
as great a pohtical absolutist as Hobbes, cuts far deeper.
A man, he holds with Hobbes, must necessarily desire his
own preservation. The conatus in suo esse perseverari is
a vital part of him. But when he comes to understand
himself at all he sees that his real self, the only part of
him that is not based on delusion, is made up by his
connexion with other men and other things. They are the
completion of himself, and the more harmony between them
and him the more harmony in himself. In this way man is
set free from his bondage of illusion and hatred and cowardice.
He welcomes the life of the city not simply because it is safer,
but because he finds in it more links with other men and
therefore more of that larger Self, that free and brave self,
which, could it grow large enough, would be God. " A man
who is led by Reason attains more hberty in a City where he
lives in accordance with the laws than in a solitude where he
only considers himself " (IV., Prop. 73).
THE RISE OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY 243
" A man wbo is led by Reason will not be led by Fear."
" It is scarcely worth proving in detail," Spinoza adds, " that
a brave man can hate no one, be angry with no one, nor
envious, nor reproachful, can despise no one, and can never
be arrogant." Moreover, " a brave man will bear in mind
that all things follow from the nature of the Divine Being
and therefore whatever he considers hurtful or evil, whatever
seems impious, horrible, unjust, or foul, springs from the fact
that he sees things disorderedly, confusedly, and by fragments ;
and therefore he will strive first and foremost to conceive things
as they really are and sweep aside all that hinders true know-
ledge, such as Hatred, Anger, Jealousy, Contempt, Pride . . .
and finally struggle to the best of his power, as we said before,
to do good and to rejoice."
The last quotation brings us face to face with the question.
How, if all things are derived from a Perfect Substance, can
there be even the delusion of Imperfection ? The student
asks if the question of evil and error has not rather been
shelved than solved ? In general the criticisms on Spinoza
all centre on the question exactly how does he derive this
world of finite particulars from the God who is infinite ?
Spinoza, condemned by his brother Jews as an a-theist and
excommunicated from their fellowship, was rather to be
blamed, as Hegel says, for being an a-kosmist, one in whose
system there was no clear place for the faulty cosmos in which
at least we appear to live. It is not God who is conceivably
denied in Spinoza's system but rather the Individual Man.
Spinoza was indeed " drunk with God," and perhaps after all
the greatest service he does for us is that at moments he
enables us to share his intoxication.
Less striking than Spinoza and far less fine in character, but
of astonishing endowment, the German Leibnitz approached
the problem from the opposite standpoint, that of the
individuahst. Dominant throughout his system is the
thought of individual living centres, conscious, or sub-
conscious— not w^zconscious — as the sole realities in the world.
To these he gives the name of monads, as the only things that
can claim to be real unities, and he conceives them after the
244 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
fashion of selves, human selves, or selves lower and higher
than human. The highest Monad, on which in some fashion
all the rest depend, he caUs God, The nature of all the lower
monads consists in varying degrees of effort and knowledge.
" In a confused way they all strive after the infinite, the
whole ; but they are hmited and differentiated through the
degrees of their distinct perception " (" Monadology," § 60,
Latta's tr.). It is of their essence to be aware, each of them,
of the whole universe, however obscurely, from an individual
point of view. Against Locke the EngUshman Leibnitz
stressed the power of thought in the self as distinct from mere
sensation. To the traditional dictum, " There is nothing in
the intellect that has not already been in sensation," he made
the pregnant addition, " except the intellect itself." ^
Leibnitz seems led to his system by three main threads,
(i) Following Descartes, he accepts the view that our selves
and our efforts are known to us more directly than the exist-
ence of material things. But Descartes had, after all, accepted
the existence of the material world on the ground, meta-
physically weak, that God would not delude us. Leibnitz
mocked at this argument and insisted that there was no
reason for thinking that such concepts as those of shape and
movement, any more than such percepts as those of colour and
sound, could exist just so apart altogether from any per-
ceiving or conceiving subject. On the contrary. Something
other than ourselves, indeed, may correspond to them, and
truth depend on this correspondence, but Leibnitz considers
it obvious, as Berkeley was to expound to English readers a
little later, that sensations cannot exist without something to
feel them, nor relations in space and time— movement
as such, for example — without the possibility of being
observed.
(2) The possibility of being observed, we should note, does
not mean actual observation. Leibnitz is quite definite here.
Confronted by the Englishman Clarke with the question
1 " Die philosophischen Schriften von G. W. Leibnitz," edited by
C. J. Gerhardt, Berlin, 1875-90. (Referred to in text as G.) Vol. 7,
p. 488.
THE RISE OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY 245
whether a ship could not move without every cabin-passenger
remarking it, he wrote, " Je r^ponds que le mouvement est
independent dc I'observation, mais qu'il n'est point indepen-
dent de I'observabiUte. II n'y a point de mouvement quand
il n'y a point de changement observable. Et mdme quand
il n'y a point de changement observable, il n'y a point de
changement du tout " (G., 7, p. 403).
Following this train of thought he stoutly maintained, in
opposition to Newton, most brilliant of mathematicians and
astronomers, but no metaphysician, that space could not be
conceived as absolute, that is, as anything apart from the
relation of the " matter " that occupied it, and that all
motion, from the physical and mathematical point of view,
could only be conceived as relative (" New System," § 18,
Latta's). As a mathematician Leibnitz could hold his own
against Newton, and recent researches, notably Einstein's,
appear to support him in a remarkable way. But Leibnitz
went further. He pressed the consequences of his theory.
If absolute motion can never be detected by the methods of
mechanics (since nothing can be observed except change of
position relative to other apparent bodies), what follows ?
First, so it would appear, that mechanics, and mathematics
generally, are incomplete, and can give us no ultimate
explanation, since we can never know by their means
which bodies in the last resort are actively in motion and
which are not, any more than a railway passenger whose
vision is confined to his own train and another passing it
can tell which of the two is travelling. Yet one of them
it must be. Must we, then, be content to admit our ignorance
and hope for no further success by any other method ? Leib-
nitz, certainly, was not content with this conclusion, though
many thinkers since his day have been. Admitting inade-
quacy in mechanics, he still sought for an ultimate distinction
and urged that it must lie in some non-mechanical, non-
material principle, and this he thought he found in his centres
of living energy, the activities of which may be represented,
btit only inadequately, by the appearances of motion according
to uniform laws. Movement, in short, is for him ultimately
246 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
a sign of life, and to conceive the universe as " dead " matter
is to leave mechanism itself incomplete.
Again the problem of infinite divisibility led him to the
same results. Multitude must involve units, but where can
an ultimate unit be found in a " matter " which, however small
it be, can always be conceived as once again divisible ? If we
are to find real units at all, they must be units of vital force
which, being themselves non-spatial, may also be non-divisible,
which may lie at the base of the physical universe, and from
which may proceed, in some way not yet clear to us, its
coherent and multiform appearances. Such coherent appear-
ances Leibnitz called " well-founded phenomena," capable of
explanation up to a certain point by mathematics, but always
implying something over and above : " ne donnant jamais
un dementi aux regies des pures mathematiques, mais conte-
nant toujours quelque chose au dela " (G., 7, p. 564). " Every-
thing in physical nature," he writes elsewhere, " proceeds by
mechanical laws, but the principles of mechanism itself do
not depend on mere matter " (G., 7, p. 489).
(3) From another standpoint Leibnitz, deeply influenced, as
he tells us himself, by Plato, seeking an answer to the question
why, after all, the world exists, could be satisfied with none
that did not conceive it as a constant striving for perfec-
tion. After all, as Plato said, the only reason that seems
sufficient to us for a thing existing is that it is good that it
should exist. Thus Leibnitz deliberately revived Plato's
audacious thought, so fascinating to the mediaevalists, of the
Perfect Good as something that was the source both of Being
and Knowledge, " beyond existence, and greater in majesty
and power " (Rep. 509), or, to translate Leibnitz' own Latin,
" the fountain of the nature and existence of all other things "
(G., 7, p. 305). If once we admit that it is better for a good
thing to exist than not (and the admission is so instinctive
we scarcely notice how fundamental it is), the conclusion must
follow, so Leibnitz felt, that in the very idea of a good thing
there is a need, as it were, to become actual (cp. in ipsapossi-
hilitate vel essentia esse exigentiam existenticB, G., 7, p. 303). If
it can be shown that there is no impossibility in the conception
THE RISE OF MODERN PHILOSOPHY 247
of a boundless, self -complete Perfection — and Leibnitz thought
this had been shown — he felt we must needs conceive it as
pressing to actualize itself in time, and hence he looked on
the temporal world as a continual progress of conscious or
semi-conscious units to a reahzation and apprehension of It.
Leibnitz, perhaps, is the first philosopher of note in whom the
idea of progress is dominant, and the boldness and buoyancy
of his thought form a fit prelude to the series of towering
German systems. It is worth while remarking, by the way,
that he was bom just two years before the end of the Thirty
Years' War. Germany, peaceful at last, had a chance of
taking her rightful place in the culture of the West.
Leibnitz learnt from every philosopher of his time and
of the times before him, and it is safe to say that no thinker
after him but owes him a debt of some kind. It is easy,
however, to pick holes in his system, and if his ideas were
profound his emotions were shallow. There is something
exasperating in the complacency with which he brushes aside
the evils of the world as mere temporary set-backs in the " free
and unending progress of the whole universe " towards perfec-
tion. Spinoza also, it may be said, swept evil aside, but
the reader never feels exasperated with Spinoza : he divines
that the Jew had bought his certainty with a great price.
CHAPTER XXXIV
THE STRENGTHENING OF CRITICISM IN FRANCE:
VOLTAIRE
LEIBNITZ, the darling and the flatterer of princes and
princesses, roused the scintillating wrath of Voltaire,
that sworn foe of religious humbug in every form.
" Candide," with its unsparing tales of human vice and
natural calamity, is a memorable retort to the doctrine that
this was the best of all possible worlds, and though Voltaire
is not for a moment to be compared with Leibnitz in meta-
physical power, the reader takes a grim pleasure in setting
his witty indecent truth against the German's suave assurances.
Always Voltaire is returning to the charge. He will picture
himself lying, tortured by the stone, in a hospital filled to
overflowing with the mutilated victims of " the last war, the
hundred-thousandth war since wars were known. . . ." "I
spoke to them of the countless crimes and disasters in this
admirable world. The boldest among them, a German,
explained that all this was a mere trifle. For example, he
said, we should consider it a merciful dispensation of Provi-
dence that Tarquin violated Lucretia and Lucretia stabbed
herself, because this led to the expulsion of the tyrants, and
thus rape, suicide, and war laid the foundation of a RepubHc
that brought happiness to the nations it conquered. I found
it difficult to agree about the happiness. I did not see at first
wherein lay the feUcity for the Gauls and Spaniards, three
million of whom, we are told, were slaughtered by Caesar.
Rapine and devastation I also thought exceedingly unpleasant,
but my optimist would not budge ; he kept on repeating, as
248
VOLTAIRE AND CRITICISM IN FRANCE 249
the jailer did to Don Carlos, ' Peace, peace, it is all for your
good.'" (" Le Philosophe Ignorant.")
More fiercely, under the heading " Guerre " in the first short
edition of his " Dictionnaire Philosophique," and with a
fling at monarchy, " Famine, disease, and war are the three
elements best known in this hfe of ours below. The first two
are the gifts of Providence. But war, that unites all their
benefits, comes to us from the active imagination of three or
four hundred men scattered over the globe under the names of
Kings and Ministers. Perhaps that is why in dedicatory
epistles they are spoken of as the vicegerents of God."
Yet it would be a serious mistake to conceive Voltaire as
consistently atheist, or anti-monarchist, or pacifist. He is not,
one is tempted to say, consistently anything. Most stimulat-
ing of critics, we have him at his best when we take his irresist-
ible attacks for what they are worth without forgetting that
at another moment, provoked in another way, he will change
front to lunge at an opposite danger. Against thorough-going
scepticism, for example, he shows a genuine religious feehng
of his own. He speaks for himself when he writes, " There is
no need of portents for the belief in a righteous God to whom
the heart of man lies open. The conviction lies deep enough
in our nature." (" Dictionnaire Philosophique " under
" Fraude.")
More consistent in his hatred of oppression and superstition
than in anything else, he detested the Church because he saw
in it the worst engine of tyranny, far worse than any political
autocracy. " The most absurd of all despotisms," he writes,
" the most insulting to human nature, the most illogical, the
most disastrous, is the despotism of a priesthood ; and of all
sacerdotal empires the Christian without doubt has been the
most criminal." (" Idees Rcpublicaines," Par un Citoyen de
Geneve, 1765.) It was against religious cruelty that he
fought in his efforts, famous and triumphant, to save the
family of the Huguenot Calas from further torture. Very
characteristic of him is the pointed aside when admitting
that the revolts of the Fronde were not marked by excessive
cruelty, " They were not wars for religion."
250 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
When he pleads in the name of the peasants ground down
by the forced labour and the endless taxes, " taille, taillon,
capitation, double vingtieme, ustensiles, droits de tout espece,
impots sur tout ce qui sert a nos chetifs habillemens, et
enfin la dime a nos cures de tout ce qui la terre accorde a
nos travaux," he does not proceed, as we should expect, to
ask for any political reform, merely to secure for the pea-
sants the right to work for themselves on Sundays and
Saints' days and to be relieved from arbitrary rules about
fasting.
His pages may flash with thrusts at the selfishness of kings :
" Nations in Christian Monarchies have scarcely ever any
interest in the wars of their Sovereigns. . . . The conquering
people never gain from the booty of the conquered ; they pay
for everything." (" Siecle de Louis XIV.") He may frankly
admire republican uprightness, " des vertus qu'on ne voit guere
que dans les Republiques " (ib.). He may declare outright that
" il n'y a que les rois qui preferent la royaute " (" Patrie,"
Diet. Ph.). But he draws back invariably when it comes to the
question of actually changing the government. France, he
admits openly, was under a despotism, and here he differs
sharply from his predecessor Montesquieu, who had tried to
insinuate a change by classing ostensibly her systems among
monarchies that were, in fact, limited, and then taking every
opportunity for praising such. Voltaire is franker. Why is
he not more vigorous in assault ? Why does he actually defend
aristocrats and monarchs against the guarded criticism of
Montesquieu ? (" Commentaire sur 1' Esprit des Lois.") Partly
because he was dazzled, even he, one of the clearest-sighted
men, within his range, who ever lived. Tradition and Prestige
were potent even with him, and he weakens at the thought
of la gloire under Louis XIV at the height of his power.
" Victorieux depuis qu'il regnait, n'aiant assiege aucune place
qu'il n'eut prise, superieur en tout genre a ses ennemis reunis,
la terreur de I'Europe pendant six annees de suite, enfin son
Arbitre et son Pacificateur, ajoutant a ses Etats la Franche-
Comte, Dunkerque et la moitie de la Flandre ; et, ce qu'il
devait compter pour le plus grand de ses avantages, Roi d'une
VOLTAIRE AND CRITICISM IN FRANCE 251
nation alors heureuse, et alors le modele des autres nations."
("Siecle de Louis XIV.")
Not even the failure of Louis in the end, unable in the teeth
of Enghshmen, Dutchmen, and Germans to dominate Europe,
could shake Voltaire's confidence. Writing his history of the
reign, he writes of him, " II fit voir qu'un Roi absolu qui veut
le bien vient a bout de tout sans peine." We must remember
that after all Louis had united the majority of Frenchmen,
and that his patronage of art and literature was of a kind to
enchant Voltaire. Voltaire's o^\^l taste was far from impec-
cable, as indeed we might guess from his own efforts at poetry.
It was his considered opinion that in Uterature the Age of Louis
rivalled the Age of Pericles, and the imposing s^nnmetries of
Versailles and the Louvre were far more to his mind than
the grave appeal of Notre-Dame, a barbaric structure, he
thought, for which Paris had to blush, when compared with
Renaissance buildings.
In the second place, he had the vaguest ideas of economic
laws, a defect he shared with most men of his time, though
the bases of Economics were even then being discovered in
England by Adam Smith. He conceives the fooUsh luxury of
the rich as a real source of the poor man's wealth : " le pauvre
y vit de svanites des grands." (" Defence du Mondain.")
Finally, and af most importance, Voltaire's keen insight
into the follies and weaknesses of men checked any nascent
faith in democracy. Although, especially when irritated by
priestly groans over original sin, he could insist that men in
the mass are not naturally bad (art. " Mechant "), but are only
corrupted by evil example, he never gets away from the
conviction that " they are very seldom fit to govern them-
selves " (art. " Patrie "), Similarly he sees no chance of
securing wealth, or even subsistence, for the human race
" unless there are an endless number of capable men who
possess nothing whatever," " car certainement un homme k
son aise ne quittera pas sa terre pour venir labourer la votre "
(art. " Egahte "). A man of this temper could never give
men a lead towards a new pohtical system, however much his
criticism might undermine the old. Voltaire's position was
252 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
rather to stimulate in detail the intellectual conscience of
Europe, to send, as it were, electric thrills and shocks from one
end of the intelligent world to the other.
And devotedly, unremittingly, he toiled at his task. He
worked with the best minds of France at the " Encyclopedic "
to popularize knowledge and rationalism. Early in his life he
crossed to England, making friends everywhere in that land
of age-long enemies, explaining to his countrymen Newton's
discoveries, exalting Wren's architecture, delighting in, while
smiling at, the Quaker simplicity with its marked contrast to
the elaborate code of Parisian manners, lauding Penn's experi-
ment of peaceful and fair dealing with the Red Indians in
America. He wrote in friendship and grateful admiration to
the Itahan Beccaria then pleading earnestly for a more humane
code of punishment. He reinforced with fervour Montesquieu's
noble attack on the European crime of enslaving the negroes.
(" Commentaire sur I'Esprit des Lois.") He went beyond
Europe, turning the eyes of Europeans in reverence towards
the wisdom of China and the East. He watched with real
interest Russia's attempt, after centuries of slavery and
stagnation under the Tartars and their sucesssors, at last to
open her doors and learn from her kindred in the West.
That the greater part of these efforts were only incited under
the despotic rule of Peter the Great and Catherine did not
disturb Voltaire. As we saw, he was ready enough to put up
with despotism as a necessary evil. Much in the same spirit
he maintained a friendship for years with Frederick the Great,
then struggling, by fair means or foul, to raise his little
kingdom from an ignorant ill-situated province into a strong,
united, and cultured Power. There is no cause for surprise
that the two men quarrelled in the end, both of them irritable
and vain beyond the common. What is surprising and
significant is their long co-operation.
CHAPTER XXXV
THE NEW CREED OF REFORM : ROUSSEAU
FOR the reasons indicated in the last chapter, Voltaire's
critical rationalism, invaluable as it was and is, remained
destructive rather than constructive. And the inspira-
tion of the philosophers and men of science could only appeal
to a few. It was from a httle nation, but from a nation that
had immemorial traditions of freedom, and from a city trained
in self-government, that the call came which was to give the
new age its distinctive creed of reform. The voice was the
voice of an obscure watchmaker's son, French on the father's
side, but penetrated by the influence of the Geneva that was
later on — such are the paradoxes of reaction — to repudiate
his works.
His temperament was a maze of contradictions. Jean
Jacques Rousseau, morbidly sensual, craving, suspicious,
treacherous, never, in spite of all, lost his admiration for
what was simple, generous, and self-controlled. His sensitive
genius, roused by the clash of thought in Paris, and by his
own swift sense of the contrast between its hard self-centred
life and the active ideals of citizenship and family love that he
had left behind him, flung itself on the problems of Society and
the State with a feverish ardour and indignation. His very
weaknesses were of help to him here. Shelley was right when
he made him say
" If I have been extinguished, yet there rise
A thousand beacons from the spark I bore."
Knowing his own need of self-discipline, yet sympathizing in
253
254 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
every fibre with the craving for personal freedom, longing for
intimate union with men, yet turning with disgust from what
men had so far made of the world, he could, and he did, feel
with the whole force of his fervid nature that the only salvation
for man lay in struggling to combine both impulses, the
individualist and the social. That they could be combined
was, he held, the glory of the ideal civic life : " The essence
of the body politic lies in the harmony of obedience and
libert}^ the terms subject and sovereign representing two sides
of one thing and the same, the thought of both being united in
the single name of Citizen." ^ ("The Social Contract," Bk.
Ill, c. 13.) And it is only in such a life that man could
grow to his full stature. Thus, quite definitely, Rousseau
sets out to combine the two principles that we have seen to
be of such vital importance and so difficult of combination.
It is a serious misprision to imagine that his mature thought
hankered after the condition of " the noble savage." Trae,
he preferred it to the corrupt and decadent society he saw
about him — and here historical research, at first hostile to
Rousseau, has since, in many points, confirmed him — but that
did not prevent him from recognizing the civil state as higher
than the savage, because only in it could man acquire " moral
freedom, which alone makes him the master of liimself. For
the impulse of mere appetite is slavery, while obedience to a
self-ordained law is hberty." (" The Social Contract," Bk. I,
c. 8.) Conscious reason taking the place of instinct marks the
change in man from savagery to civil society, and the balance
of gain is so large that " if the abuses of this new condition
did not often degrade him below that fr(?m which he had
risen, he ought to bless without ceasing the happy moment
that tore him from it for ever, transformed him from a stupid
and limited animal into a rational being, and made him
into a man."
The words could scarcely be stronger, and we can under-
stand from them alone how deeply Rousseau could influence
a temperament so different from his own as Kant's. At the
1 It was from Rousseau that the Revolutionists took their title of
••Citoyen."
THE NEW CREED OF REFORM 255
same time he never lost his sympathy— extravagantly ex-
pressed in his earlier writings — with the revolt from
sophisticated over-civihzation. The burden of his teaching
was always just this, that if disciphne is necessary for men,
as it is, it must be a disciphne that they themselves in the
bottom of their hearts can recognize as just, and for that
they must learn to make the laws as well as to obey them.
" L'homme est ne hbre," he wrote, as every one knows, at
the beginning of " The Social Contract," " et partout il est
dans les fers." But he does not stop there ; the precise
business of his book, as the very same paragraph shows, is to
ask and to answer what it is that justifies these chains. And
the answer, in brief, is that their justification lies in the spirit
of the Social Contract, conceived not as a supposed historical
episode dead and done with — the question of historic fact is
not for Rousseau vital — but as a living and growing factor,
never ceasing to operate in all men's minds. La Volonte
Generate, as he called it — the Social Conscience, as we might
say, and not do violence to his thought — that sense, in short,
of the common interest and the public welfare, which alone
can fashion a State worth the having, and which, though it may
be over-powered by other impulses, is in itself, just because
it is the voice of the common reason seeking the common
good, a thing " constant, unalterable, and pure." (Bk. IV,
This power must be kept active in men by exercise, trained
to discuss, to elect worthy ministers, and in the last resort
to decide. A strong executive need not infringe on the
sovereignty of the people, if only the people do their duty
in watching and guiding its general course. It used to be
thought that Rousseau was chimerical in assigning so active
a part in politics to the people, but recent experience has
indicated that it is far more chimerical to hope for good
government unless backed by an enlightened and vigorous
public opinion. Thus by his detailed proposals, and still more
by the principles underlying them, Rousseau appealed to the
numberless critics, vocal and silent, who were bitterly dis-
satisfied with the old regime, but who were afraid to move
256 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
because they saw nothing to replace it. Rousseau cried to
them, " Here, here in the pubhc conscience, in man's latent
sense of justice, is the basis that you need. Build on that ;
it will be a long task and a heavy, but just because you are
men you have it in you to achieve it." He was only the more
stimulating because he did not at all beheve in Progress as an
inevitable and, so to speak, mechanical law. What he did
beheve in was men's power to raise themselves into freedom
if they chose. He did not minimize the dangers. Liberty
made demands higher than the merely Factious could dream
of. Nothing can be more scathing in his admirable letter on
the government of Poland than his contempt for those " qui,
les coeurs pleins de tons les vices des esclaves, s'imaginent que,
pour etre libres, il sufht d'etre des mutins." Nor did he urge
sudden and " revolutionary " methods.
In the same excellent letter to that unhappy land which
had asked for his advice but was never allowed by her neigh-
bours to act on it, he counselled her to advance cautiously,
keeping what was good in her past traditions, keeping her
monarchy elective, for example, but refusing to elect self-
interested foreigners, restricting, but not at once destroying
the liberum veto— that fatal right of any one member of the
Diet to hold up even administrative measures by his single
opposition— gradually, but only gradually, emancipating her
serfs. Yet he knew that in class division lay her greatest evil,
the division into " les nobles qui sont tout, les bourgeois qui
sont rien, et les paysans qui sont moins que rien." Then,
with a magnificent gesture, " Nobles Polonais, soyez plus,
soyez hommes ! " And again, after admitting fully the
defects of the peasants, back to his fundamental theme,
" Mais . . . songez que vos serfs sont des hommes comma
vous, qu'ils ont en eux I'etoffe pour devenir tout ce que vous
ates." It was a call to rouse the dead, much more the surging
half-repressed forces in France. True it is that there were
elements in his writing calculated to arouse also both the
anarchy and the oppression which he dreaded, but such defects
ought not to blind us to the depth and value of his central
thought. Burke, certainly not prejudiced in his favour,
THE NEW CREED OF REFORM 257
did him no more than justice when he wrote during the
Revolution : "I beheve that were Rousseau ahve, and in
one of his lucid intervals, he would be shocked at the practical
phrensy of his scholars who in their paradoxes are servile
imitators." (" Reflections on the French Revolution.")
Rousseau, beheving in the possibility of men governing
themselves, was thus strongly opposed to Voltaire in spite of
much common ground, and the belief overflowed into other
spheres than the political. Rousseau is one of the first writers
in modern Europe to urge in detail that education should aim
at development from within. And his influence here spread
in widening circles. Pestalozzi in Switzerland, training
children to teach themselves in their play, followed directly
on the lines of Rousseau. Educationalists in Germany hke
Herder and Jean Paul Richter acknowledged his lead, even
as Kant and Schiller responded to his appeal for humanity
and republican liberty, and Goethe to his double ideal of
Romance and Law.
In his novel-WTiting and the extraordinary revelation of his
" Confessions " he opened new paths for the literature of his
period, ways for the direct expression of personal feeUng.
Intimate and emotional to the last degree, they are also
morbidly sensual and charged with the sentimentality so
constantly hnked to sensuahsm, but they are ahve with the
vividness of his own mind and temperament. The Confessions
will probably always be read with keen if painful interest,
and the influence of his " Nouvelle Heloise," the theme
divided characteristically between the ardours of physical
passion and the duties of married hfe, was something pro-
digious in its day. But the influence of his pohtical writings
went far deeper and remains far more important. Of practical
results he saw little during his Ufetime. Dying in 1778, the
very same year as Voltaire, he left the world more than a
decade before the outbreak of the Revolution. But the
watchwords of that gigantic uprising were drawn from him.
17
CHAPTER XXXVI
EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND AND
EXPANSION OVERSEAS
IN England the impression Rousseau made was naturally
far less, in spite of the interest that made Hume invite
him, and George III offer him a pension. Since the
Restoration England had been growing more and more self-
satisfied, and during the hundred years from the expulsion of
James II (1689) to the opening of the French Revolution
she was perhaps more serenely proud of herself than at any
other period of her generally complacent career. For political
prophets she had little use, as little as she had for ethereal poets.
She counted herself to have attained. Locke's generous
" Essays on Civil Government " come at the close of the seven-
teenth century. Until the time of Burke there is no advance
on their political wisdom ; and Burke, alarmed by revolution,
is actually and in many ways less broad-minded than Locke.
In poetry the wild songs and the solemn both fall silent.
Milton, Donne, Herrick, Crashaw, Vaughan, Bunyan, are
all of an earlier age. Such satirists as Gay and Pope, like
Congreve earlier, and the greater Dryden earlier still, are
obviously not the least perturbed by the evils they flick
so neatly. The sharp reaction from Puritanism had left
a distinct dislike for fervour. Literature was in essence
prose, subtle often and often strong, but as a rule undeni-
ably smug. Yet the bitter suffering anger of Swift is
a startling and perhaps a significant exception. Nor should
we forget the lifelong evangelical mission of John Wesley
(b. 1703, d. 1791), though his appeal scarcely touched
258
EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND 259
the cultured classes. And as the century advances there is
a perceptible warning of emotion in the world of letters,
not, however, kindling until much nearer the close into
anything like "enthusiasm," a term indeed of opprobrium
at the time. But the strong humanity of Johnson and the
kindliness to be felt in the diverse (and often indecent) work
of Fielding and Sterne, the lesser Smollett, and the " respect-
able " Richardson are notably different from the arid brilliance
that had just preceded them. These men are interested
enough in human beings to create types that are far more
than mere butts for mockery. Inaugurators of the modern
novel, they brought back imagination into the market-place,
and it is ill done ever to be ungrateful, even if we feel that
they have never visited the high lands of poetry and that
too often their wares are fly-blown.
The other arts show much the same characteristics : a
sound sense of proportion, an assured ease and dignity, but
little to expand the higher faculties of the imagination. There
are exceptions again here : if the stately genius of Chris-
topher Wren belongs rather to the age of Milton, the eighteenth
century has full right to the grave gracious harmonies of
Gainsborough, one of England's few real painters. In Gains-
borough's dignity and quiet subtlety there is something that
suggests an Enghsh Velazquez, though he has none of the Span-
iard's suppressed fire. Reynolds, though the lesser man, must
always be coupled with Gainsborough, and Hogarth earlier
offers a parallel to Smollett that is exact almost to absurdity.
In philosophy Berkeley and Hume make their mark in
criticism, as we shall note in a later chapter, and at the close
of the period Gibbon opens a new era in history, the era of
unprejudiced penetrating inquiry into the long-buried past.
Both Hume and Gibbon show a freedom from prejudice and
a readiness to dispense with what they would have called
" the consolations of religion," which indicate how markedly
the scientific spirit and the rationahst were changing the
orientation of men's minds. Thought was pointing now in a
direction almost exactly opposed to that of mediaevalism,
towards the study of this world simply for what it is and can
260 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
be made in itself, turning aside from the problems of another
or of the universe as a whole as from riddles felt to be
insoluble. The attitude has much in common with later
Agnosticism and Positivism, in short with all those systems,
typically modern, that admit ignorance of fundamental
truths and content themselves with the steady exercise of
man's own mind and will.
England's genius for action, moreover, was in full evidence.
During the struggle with Louis XIV she had set foot
in India, and as the century advanced she established
the basis of her dominion there, laid broader the
foundations of her colonies, and expanded her sea-power.
The eighteenth century is eminent for the expansion of
Western Europe over the savage and backward countries of
the world, and England was foremost in the adventure.
There was little sense that Europe owed a duty to these
countries with whose liberties she gratuitously interfered,
still less that a new and larger unity was possible between
them and the West. Still, there were signs of a broader view.
Mistakes and crimes enough England committed, but there
was a leaven of criticism, sound and humane, that kept her
from the worst faults of the Spaniards. Burke's indictment
of Warren Hastings for extortion and cruelty against the
Indians, the protests of the Quakers against slavery, are note-
worthy instances.
But the general attitude to the colonies was still that
of the European world at large. Colonies were plantations
for the exclusive benefit of the home country. In the
case of America a deliberate attempt at taxation without
representation roused a spirit of indomitable revolt, as was
indeed foreseen, but in vain, by two at least of England's
statesmen, Chatham and Burke. These men knew that a
young and virile nation, founded by men who had left the
Old World for freedom, would not tolerate claims such as their
forefathers had given up everything to avoid. Chatham and
Burke, however, pleaded to no effect, at least for the time.
Concession was refused and America lost to us. But we learnt
from the loss. Chatham's son, the younger Pitt, was able to
EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ENGLAND 261
inaugurate a more liberal policy. Commercial considerations
helped him. It became increasingly clear to " a nation of
shopkeepers " that more was to be gained in the long-run by
allowing young communities to trade freely to their own best
advantage and thus to furnish a richer market for our wares
than to pinch them into comparative uselessness by Hmiting
their traffic to the httle islands of the mother-country. Others
beside ourselves learnt from America's revolt and in other
ways. Her triumphant Declaration of Independence (1776),
echoing the Dutch proclamation nearly two centuries before,
was to France an example in action of what- Rousseau had
been in theory. It was the call to Repubhcan hberty.
Moreover, America set up on a large scale the notable
experiment of Federation. This indeed had been tried already
in Europe, but never with any persistency except in areas
too hmited to show its possibiHties. Rousseau in one of
his pregnant asides had actually spoken of it as perhaps the
best form of government, combining the advantages of large
States and smaU (and we may add making room for a new
combination of freedom and unity). But it was a daring
thing to put in practice on the American scale and a difficult
thing, even to a people trained in representative government.
The way was thick with problems, many of them never solved
until that convulsion of civil war which cast out slavery.
WTiatever the difficulties, however, the success from the outset
was greater, and the Federal principle has won its way steadily
to fuller and fuller acceptance by the Western world. Perhaps
in estabhshing it as a prime factor in government America
may prove to have given as potent a stimulus to the progress
of Europe as in her defiant assertion of all men's natural
rights to " life, Hberty, and the pursuit of happiness." More
and more in recent years, for example, the British Common-
wealth has adopted the principle and always with success.
Though the problems of Ireland, Egypt, and India are not
yet solved, there are signs that the solution will be along
these lines. And it is noteworthy that in the last thirty
years as the prospects of self-government have progressed
in Ireland there has been an output of distinctively Irish
262 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
literature unparalleled since the early days of the sagamen.
Most hopeful sign of all, the world as a whole is turning to the
Federal principle embodied in a universal League as the one
remedy for recurrent war and insensate competition between
nations.
CHAPTER XXXVII
GERMANY AND MUSIC
MEANWHILE in Germany and all through the
eighteenth century, what is perhaps the most
wonderful of aU the arts, the art of music, had been
exploring undreamt-of heights and depths. Music offers the
most striking instance of the value in Art pure and simple,
being, undeniably and obviously, neither utilitarian nor
imitative, neither serving physical comfort, nor giving definite
information, nor, except indirectly and rarely, mimicking
natural events. Free of the world, it yet moves the world,
lifting the emotions of man above himself, and leading
him, as it were, into a place which he feels to be more
fundamental than the place of appearance and at the same
time intimately bound to it. For music works, hke aU
arts, out of the very stuff of things manifest to the
senses, at home, though none can explain how, among the
mysteries of Time and Space that are so bewildering to the
intellect, the stones of its magical building being no more and
no less than the effects on the human ear of vibrations that
combine with and foUow each other. But out of these it
makes something new.
The rise of music belongs in the main to the mediaeval world
and the modern. From the dawn of history, no doubt, music of
a kind was known, and the song of the birds suggests a further
origin. Simple folk-tunes almost everywhere show a genuine
beauty. But it is a beauty like the beauty of a bird-song or a
ballad, one melody of single successive notes. In mediaeval
263
264 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
times, by steps we cannot now fully trace, there grew up the
conception of harmony as distinct from melody, a richer effect
being gained by concurrent notes, differing from but har-
monizing with each other. It was essential for the notes to
differ, but at first the differences were carefully limited, all
harshness, unless obviously transitory, being avoided. This
serene effect was consecrated by the ideal of church music
as of something uplifted beyond the discords of earth. But
towards the close of the sixteenth century the desire made
itself felt for something closer to the stress of human life.
The Italians, as we have suggested above, seem to have led
the way here, Monte verde (1567-1643), a successor of Pales-
trina, being the first, according to Professor Tovey, " to
make deliberate use of unprepared dissonances."
But the real strides were made in Germany as the
seventeenth century passed into the eighteenth, when the
country was at last, comparatively speaking, at peace from
foreign wars and internal strife. It is one of the many
unexplained paradoxes in history, but a reassuring one,
that during the early eighteenth century, an age, as we
have seen, pre-eminently of prose, this art, the least prosaic
of all, should have come into its kingdom. And while its
affinities with free architecture seem particularly close, both
depending in a high degree on clear and complex structure —
" architecture is frozen music " — music found its path of
development exactly when architecture was dying. There is
no name of the first rank in architecture after Christopher
Wren. The palaces of music are built instead.
And they are built especially by Germans, men who for other
arts have shown little aptitude. What Germany has given
to the world in music may fairly be counted compensation
enough. Bach, living and working in Germany (1685-1750),
Handel, born either the same year or the year before, but
resident during most of his life in England, opened new and
endless vistas. Of the two Bach is undoubtedly the grander
genius. But he is also far more difficult. Handel is better
known to the English public than any other leading com-
poser, partly through his simplicity and partly through the
GERMANY AND MUSIC 265
happy chance of his residence here. His famiharity with the
Enghsh Bible gave him the opportunity of choosing its
glorious language for his " Messiah." The appeal of that
work is at once to the sense of music, of literature, and of
rehgion, and this composite character, aided by the pellucid
clearness of its themes and structure, has made it readily
accessible to the multitude. And that by no unworthy means.
It is one of the few masterpieces that are easy for the tyro
to grasp on a first acquaintance.
Bach, however, is far richer, as well as stronger. He has
more human pathos than any musician except Beethoven, but
he has also, and always, access to remote places where sorrow
and personality ahke seem swallowed up in something quite
other than human. Goethe speaks of his music suggesting
" the eternal harmonies at play on the breast of God, before
ever the world was made." That is exactly the impression
given again and again as of something free from all created
forms we know of, yet out of which creation could rise. There
is a peculiar quality in his work that seems to liberate us from
the cark and care of humanity even more completely than the
touch of Nature herself. He is, moreover, one of the most
controlled of ardent geniuses, and to this rare combination
much of his restorative and sanative power is due. There are
fugues of his fresher than the morning, just as there are others
more massive than the everlasting hills or fuller of rushing
force than the sea. And there are others gentle as the pipes
of shepherds in Arcady, and others again wistful and mysteri-
ous beyond words. Always the web of his design is so close
and firm that it is impossible to misplace a note without
obviously marring the texture, and the solidity that comes
from his perfect form is so strong that single notes will give
on occasion as monumental an effect as chords. In his
stupendous production, the Mass in B minor, the most majes-
tic religious work in the world, everything in the universe
seems to combine together, the effort and longing of man
linked to cosmic processes, the Christian tragedy a symbol of
all heroic suffering, the Christian resurrection a rising-up of
all hfe, the triple waves of the " Sanctus " an ocean of
266 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
unfathomable blessedness. " The morning stars sang together
and all the sons of God shouted for joy."
It may be admitted that Bach is chary of, possibly unfertile
in, delightful melodies. He is undeniably austere, and there
are few of his themes that any one would be tempted to
whistle. And again he has not the kind of temper that would
make him write glowing songs of love. Mozart gives us
more enchanting tunes, Beethoven a more burning flood of
passion.
Mozart, born a wonder-child and dying in the bloom of
early manhood, though he never possessed the massive power
of Bach, was master of a form as perfect, and in his senti-
ment there is a clarity, gaiety, and tenderness that make
it easy to understand how Goethe wished that he, of all
musicians, could write the songs for the scenes in the second
part of "Faust," where the young Euphorion, child of Romance
and Classicism, demands all the loveliness of the world.
Nor is Mozart, any more than other great artists, aloof from
the vital forces of his time. His " Magic Flute " is a joyful
and solemn glorification of the spirits that make for liberty
and peace and oppose obscurantism and despotism ; while
the sunny music of his " Figaro " accompanied the satire
of Beaumarchais that preluded the Revolution.
Beethoven (1770-1827), the fiery enthusiast for Republi-
canism, is perhaps of all masters the one who gives the most
overpowering effect of Man the Titan, the Titan who has it
in him to become a God, whether toiling to heave a dead-lift
weight against the thunderous blows of Destiny, as in the
first movement of the C Minor Symphony, or exultant
among the armies that ride through the heavens at the close,
or hurrying through a hfetime of restless activity as in the
Sonata Appassionata until the sheer force in him tears a
passage through the skies, or confronting the magnificence
of the universe with a pride equal to its own, as in the Em-
peror Concerto, or rollicking among the elements as in the
last movement of the Seventh Symphony. And always and
ever, wrought into the fabric, there is Beethoven's ineffable
lovingness and solemnity, suffering constantly, but with a
GERMANY AND MUSIC 267
sense of greatness in the suffering at which the music itself
seems to marvel.
In the final phase, while the suffering does not lessen, an
unearthly beauty, laughter, and wildness enter into the
music as though the composer, old, deaf, buffeted by Fate
and the ingratitude of men, had apprehended a sphere
of existence entirely new, with new glories and new terrors.
To some extent this may be noted in other geniuses, in
Shakespeare, for example, with Caliban and Ariel and his
hints of " untried waters, unpath'd shores," but it has never
been so marked as in Beethoven. It is most obvious in his
later Quartets, but it is to be felt also in his later piano
sonatas, particularly in the last of all, where the Adagio
seems, hke the Paradise of the Itahan poet, at once as full of
peace as a placid sea is full of ripples and vivid with " carolling
flames." Nor did the breadth of his humanity lessen because
of his entry into the aerial places. In the last and greatest
of his s5miphonies, crowned by the Hymn to Joy that he had
always meant to write and did write when every external joy
had failed him, the final theme chosen does not recall the
individual tortured heart, nor yet the ecstasy that is freed
from earth, nor yet the swan-song of love at the gates of death ;
it is rather the voice of hfe mature and glad, rejoicing to
embrace the whole world of men in a brotherhood of action.
So again in the Thirty-three Diabelli Variations (Op. 136),
after all the abysmal experiences, the tumult, the agony, the
mystery, the terrible and elfin messengers, the whisperers of
comfort, we are led into a sturdy fugue, self-controlled and
resolute, advancing more and more insistently until it quickens
into a triumphant ride straight for the crash of doom and so
to the lifting of the Song into the airs of childhood and Paradise.
After Beethoven and all through the nineteenth century
music has shown no signs of failing. No one indeed has
achieved so much and so perfectly as these earlier men, but
what a wealth is suggested by the mere names of Schubert,
Schumann, Wagner, Brahms, Strauss ! Beethoven with all
his range could not write supremely well for the voice, and
his one opera is not counted among his masterpieces. But
268 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
there have never been greater song-makers than Schubert,
Schumann, and Brahms, while Wagner and Strauss have dis-
covered a new world in opera, fusing drama with pure music
in a manner that, with whatever failings and aberrations, does
on occasion produce unparalleled effects.
Shortly after the first bloom of music in Germany, and often
stimulated by it, the music of the Slav nations quickened into
life. The closing years of the eighteenth century saw the
emergence of Chopin's fairy poetry and chivalric romance, the
nineteenth century saw stronger growths in definitely Russian
work, and Scriabin, who promised to overtop all his com-
patriots, has only just been taken from us.
1
CHAPTER XXXVIII
GERMANY AND PHILOSOPHY : KANT, HEGEL,
AND MODERN THOUGHT
T
I HE second outstanding achievement of Germany
during the latter half of the eighteenth century and
the opening of the nineteenth was again in the realm
of philosophy. And here it is interesting to note that the
advance after Leibnitz was stimulated by a foreigner, Hume
the Enghshman. England, though she has never distinguished
herself by original constructions in philosophy, has shown
penetration and sagacity in criticism, and Hume, influenced
himself by French scepticism, pushed the critical inquiry into
the bases of knowledge with a daring and acumen that, as Kant
said afterwards, awakened him from his " dogmatic slumber."
Berkeley, as Hume recognized (" Concerning Human Under-
standing," Part I, § xii.), had familiarized Enghsh readers
with the theory that all our sensations and impressions could
never really be known to correspond, or, as Berkeley writes
in his " Principles " (§ 86), "to be conformable " with any
unperceivable counterpart in external objects. Here, as
Eraser observes in his note on the passage, Berkeley touched
on one of the greatest difficulties in any theory that takes
knowledge to be merely a copy of something that exists
entirely outside mind and is entirely different from mind.
For how can we ever know that such a copy is correct ? How
can the mind get outside itself and its sensations so as to
compare the copy with the wholly external reahty ? On
the other hand the question faces us — If there is no corres-
ponding reality at all, have we any more right to talk of a
269
270 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
knowledge beyond ourself ? Can we give the name of true
knowledge to what depends wholly and solely on our own
sensation ? How can the stuff of that be better than a
dream ?
Berkeley evaded the difficulty by assuming that our
sensations, those, for example of sight, were, so to speak, a
divine symbolism, " a visual language " by which God made
known to us His ideas.
But an hypothesis of this type could not satisfy the robust
positive spirit of Hume's Inquiry : " As to those impressions,
which arise from the senses, their ultimate cause is, in my
opinion, perfectly inexplicable by human reason, and 'twill
always be impossible to decide with certainty whether they
arise immediately from the object, or are produced by the
creative power of the mind, or are derived from the author of
our being."
And Hume went even further. He took up again such
questions as those of Cause and such problems as those sug-
gested by the infinite divisibilities that seem involved in our
conceptions of Space and Time. He subjected them to a
relentless attack. As regards natural causes he asked, and
he pressed the question, what logical right can we have, from
the mere fact of two events having often been conjoined, to
infer that they will always, unless a third should intervene,
be so conjoined again ? We have no right at all, he answered.
Nothing but custom makes us believe that there is any necessary
connexion between what we designate as natural cause and
what we designate as natural effect. ("An Inquiry concern-
ing Human Understanding," § vii.. Part ii.). And yet he saw
very plainly that to admit this without qualification was to
shake the whole fabric of scientific knowledge. " For surely
if there be any relation among objects w^hich it imports to us
to know perfectly, it is that of cause and effect. On this are
founded all our reasonings concerning matter of fact or
existence." So again, while recognizing that the conceptions
of quantity and number were essential for certain grades of
precise thought, Hume emphasized the bewildering paradoxes
to which they led. " A real quantity infinitely less than any
GERMANY AND PHILOSOPHY 271
finite quantity containing quantities less than itself, and so on
in infinitum : this is an edifice so bold and prodigious that it
is too mighty for any pretended demonstration to support
because it shocks the clearest and most natural principles of
human reason. But what renders the matter more extra-
ordinary is that these seemingly absurd opinions are supported
by a chain of reasoning, the clearest and most rational ; nor
is it possible for us to allow the premises without admitting
the consequences." (" Inquiry," § xii., Part ii.)
The upshot of the whole matter was for Hume a profound
distrust on every side, " Reason," in his own words, being
" thrown into a kind of amazement and suspense," with an
inexpugnable " diflidence of herself and of the ground on which
she treads."
The results of Hume's uncompromising doubt, provoking
as it did the original force of German thinkers, have not yet
ceased to operate. Kant's remarkable sj^stem, as already
indicated, arose from brooding over it. Kant showed in the
first place that such conceptions as Hume criticized, e.g. those
of quantity, cause, time, and space, were interwoven far more
deeply than Hume reahzed into the very texture of our
simplest experience, that without them, or something involved
in them, there could be for us no human experience, no ordered
world, at all, nothing but a formless chaos of sensation which
we could not realize distinctly enough even to call a chaos.
Further, Kant showed that these conceptions were the work of
thought as distinct from mere sensation, or, as Kant called it,
perception. The two together, thought and perception,
were necessary for our rational experience. Neither alone
would do. The mere impression of hght, for example, if we
could not so much as think to ourselves, ' ' This is an impression
of light and somehow caused by something," would leave us
little better than vegetables. On the other hand, mere
general conceptions of cause and existence with no sensations
or memories to fill them would be barren and featureless.
" Percepts without concepts are bhnd ; concepts without
percepts are empty" ("Critique of Pure Reason"). The
conceptional element, being the work of Thought, Kant held
272 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
to be contributed by the human mind ; the stimulus of
Sensation, not being dependent on our will, to come from the
outside world. And since order-giving conceptions were
involved in all human experience, it followed for Kant
that it was possible for us in some degree to predict rationally
what our experience would be : it would, for example, be
bound to conform to the conception of consistency. In this
sens^ we could lay claim to knowledge.
On the other hand Kant, in his critical analysis, influenced
by his predecessors, showed a deeply sceptical side. In the
first place, such difficulties as those in the current conceptions
of Cause and Time and Space, touched upon by Hume, were
felt still more keenly by his own more penetrating intellect,
and he faced the conclusion that these conceptions of ours
led to such odd results that they could not be accepted as
giving us the real truth of things. Moreover, though the
stimulus to sensation came to us from the outside world, yet
sensation itself as such he held to be a matter of human feeling,
and it was impossible to conclude that it existed in the " thing
itself " apart from our impressions. Therefore this " thing
in itself," das Ding an Sich, remained for Kant (so far as a
purely intellectual analysis could take him) a thing in the last
resort unknowable.
But there is still another side to the matter. When Kant
attacked the problem from other standpoints, from that of
the practical life, for example, or the artist's love of beauty,
he found himself led to other considerations. The moral
impulse, he considered, bore witness to a sense of duty as a
command over and above the individual wiU of man : it
impelled him to something that he reverenced whether it
harmonized with his personal inclination or not. There are
passages in his ^\Titings here that reveal the countryman of
Eckhard and the Theologia Germanica. This moral command
of the inner voice, this " Categorical Imperative," pointed
out to Kant that he should never treat another man as a
means merely, but always as an End in Himself, and indicated
that the only thing ultimately worth striving for was a
universal kingdom where all these Ends could be found
GERMANY AND PHILOSOPHY 273
subsisting in harmony. But that Kingdom obviously was
impossible under earthly conditions. Therefore in practical
hfe a man had to postulate a Will of God as above his own
will and an Immortahty for the attainment of his goal. He
had to act, whatever his intellectual criticism, as though he
possessed this transcendent knowledge about the world beyond
himself. Again, the beauty in things — so Kant suggested,
and the suggestion goes deep — indicated a harmony between
every least particular of sensation and our own mind, a
harmony which we cannot in the least explain by the ordinary
concepts of our understanding, and which points to the
conclusion that Nature, even in her transitory phenomena,
shows a spirit profoundly akin to our own, and promises a
satisfaction deeper than any we can at present comprehend.
Beauty and its problems " compel us, whether we hke it or
not, to look beyond the horizon of the sensible." (" Critique
of Judgment," § 57.)
Thus Kant's edifice of philosophic doubt was, so to speak,
shown by himself not to be impregnable, and the outburst of
optimistic speculation that followed attacked it also from the
purely intellectual side. Hegel, obscure and inspiring, is
here the dominant name, but there were many workers in the
field. Kant himself had emphasized the power of thought,
and younger men, learning from him, were eager to go beyond
him. Sensation alone, they admitted, might not be able to
lead us further than our self, but was not Thought able ?
Had not Descartes and others shown how it was impossible
for a thinking man to deny that the sum-total of Reahty
existed, whatever that Reahty might turn out to be ? Was
it not equaUy clear that a thing radically incoherent could not
exist ? Might it not be possible to think out what must be
logically involved in a coherent Reahty ? If we could do
this, avoiding all inconsistencies and accepting as only
relatively true what was only relatively coherent and complete,
should we not then be within our rights in claiming that the
inner nature of existence was no longer closed to us ? Hegel
at least thought the task achievable. " The Gates of Thought
are stronger than the Gates of Hell." " Man, since he is
18
274 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
Spirit, cannot think greatly enough of the greatness and
strength of his own mind, and, in this faith, he will find
nothing so hard and unyielding that it will not open before
him. The nature of the universe, hidden and barred from
him at first, has no power to withstand the assaults of science :
it must unclose and lay bare the depths of its riches before him,
ready for his enjoyment." (" Hist, of Phil.," Introd., B. 2.)
Contradictions and inconsistencies in human thought were
not for Hegel insuperable barriers. On the contrary, if we were
only patient and penetrating enough, they themselves gave us
the hint which showed us how to solve them. Such in-
adequacies as those in mathematical conceptions or in the
ideas of natural cause, emphasized by Leibnitz and Hume
and re-emphasized by Kant, led Hegel to the conclusion, not
that things could never be fully known, but that they could
never be fully known by such imperfect means. Current
mathematical ideas, for example, valid within their range,
were only true for certain aspects of things, and if we applied
them to things as a whole they broke down. The only
conception that could prove coherent for a complete universe
was that of spirits united through their knowledge of each
other in a state of existence far above the limitations of time
as time appears to man. Conceived under the form of time,
this was the state to which all things were tending ; conceived
under the true form of eternity, this was what the universe
really was. Hegel's system has stood fire for a century, and
there would be few now to maintain the vahdity of all the
complex inferences he considered himself to have established
from less adequate to more adequate conceptions. But,
apart from details, his general view is extraordinarily stimulat-
ing, and amid the heavy obscurity of his ordinary style there
flash out memorable utterances.
Since his day, the day par excellence of brilliant system-
makers, the courses of philosophy have shown three main
elements. There is the tendency to uphold the work of
Kant, and Kant at his most critical, to admit that the ultimate
basis of our knowledge is ignorance, and the ultimate nature
of things essentially unknowable ; to be content with recogniz-
GERMANY AND PHILOSOPHY 275
ing a certain order among our perceptions and with forecasting
those in the future, much as Plato's cave-men, gazing at the
shadows on the wall, guessed what figure would succeed
figure, and often guessed rightly, but never asked what the
real thoughts might be of the beings who cast the shadows.
Those who extol natural science at the expense of philosophy
belong to this group. So also, but without altogether
despising philosophy, do the chief followers of Comte and
Herbert Spencer.
Others, working on Hnes more or less ideahstic and often
Hegehan, lay repeated stress on the activity of thought.
They ask, for example, if the very fact of mathematical
deductions corresponding with experiences not known when
the deductions were made, as for example the calculations
of Leverrier foretold the appearance of Neptune, does not
indicate that Thought is active in the universe as well as in
man and that man can spell out at least some of its arguments.
Similarly with Beauty. Men can appreciate natural beauty,
and all such appreciation is in a sense constructive. But
what man can beHeve that in the full sense he constructs the
whole of natural beauty? Is it not after all a soberer
hypothesis to imagine that a Spirit of Beauty is working
beyond himself with which he can communicate, as mind can
meet with mind ? Again, while it is practically impossible
to suppose that all perceptions as such exist apart from the
possibility of a perceiver, that the smallness of a man,
for example, seen at a hundred yards distance, and the
bigness of him seen at close quarters, can both exist apart
from any possible onlooker, the same difficulty does not
occur in supposing that the man himself as a conscious
unit has a hfe of his own distinct from the observer's.
Consciousness of some kind, that is, can be conceived to
exist on its own account in a manner impossible to mere
sensations. It is not things as perceived but things in
some sense as perceiving that we should take as fundamental.
In this connexion the speculations of Leibnitz about degrees of
consciousness have been renewed, and reinforced by modern
theories of the sn&conscious as distinct from the wwconscious.
276 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
Thirdly, there are stalwart thinkers who cannot be classified
as belonging to any one group, but who, resenting the vague-
ness of much system-making, especially the idealistic, are
concerned above all to clarify our conceptions piece by piece,
accepting nothing that cannot be rigidly demonstrated.
Notable here is the work done in apphed mathematics, and
in particular the speculation led by Einstein. And finally, on
the opposite wing have stood the poetic sages, brooding too
deeply over man's destiny to be called mere singers or rhetori-
cians, but certainly not systematic philosophers.
CHAPTER XXXIX
GOETHE
OF such was Wolfgang von Goethe, friend of Hegel and
Beethoven, but neither metaphysician nor musician,
only one of the most universally-minded men that
Europe ever produced. His long and crowded life links the
pre-Revolutionary epoch to our own times. Born in 1749,
just before the turn of the century and while Voltaire and
Rousseau were still in middle life, he lived to be the revered
teacher of the young Cartyle, to admire and mourn over
Byron, and to welcome Victor Hugo. Dying in 1832, the year
of our Reform Bill, he left behind him nearly seventy years of
superb and varied work.
His youth fell at a time when Germany was beginning to
appreciate to the full both the general inheritance of European
culture and her own power of making an original contribution to
it. For Germany it was a Renaissance more real than any she
had known in the sixteenth centurj^ The passion for classic-
ism, the love of Nature, the zeal for truth were in the air, and
Goethe was of all men the man to serve their ends. More
profoundly than any leader of the Itahan Renaissance, he com-
bined throughout his life the enthusiasms for art and for
science, and in art itself he had striven to unite the Romantic
and the Classic, the fullest expression of the individual's
personal longings with the high, impersonal calm that has lost
itself in its object. Nor to him was it foolishness to attempt
a harmony betwegi the Pagan ideal and the Christian, self-
expression through triumphant activity with the self-sacrificing
discipline that could reverence the lowest and weakest of
mankind.
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278 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
Blessed and cursed with a temperament inflammable and
restless as that of his own Werther, he worked his way forward
to a belief in self-control and constancy as the only clues in the
labyrinth of love. Like many strong men, he had always in
him a marked vein of egotism, but it was balanced by a singular
sweetness and generosity, and his aim at least was never
egotistic. That aim he served faithfully and never conceived
narrowly. He gave years of his life to arduous administrative
routine at Weimar — routine which, though in the end it
broadened, often for the time hampered his poetic production.
" I can't go on with Iphigenia," he wrote to Frau v. Stein.
" The King of Tauris has to speak as though there were no
starving weavers in Apolda."
His distrust of all political upheaval made him look askance
at the French Revolution, but no man ever desired more
earnestly than he the full development of all men. " Mankind
is only made by all men," he wrote in so many words, " Nur
alle Menschen zusammen machen die Menschheit aus, nur
alle Krafte zusammen genommen die Welt." Endless glories
lie latent in man and must be developed, " only not in one
man, but in many" ("Wilhelm Meister "). The crowning
work of his " Faust " is actually to drain the marshes for a land
where millions of men may lead the good life in common.
Undemocratic as he counted himself, he gave a better lead to
democracy than many professed democrats. Nor did this
fellow-feeling stop short with his own nation ; it overflowed
bounteously into the life of the whole world. " There is a
plane," he said to Eckermann, " where, in a sense, we rise
above the nations, and there the joys and sorrows of another
people become to us as our own." On that plane Goethe lived.
The dramatic poem of " Faust," long, difficult, defective,
and magnificent, that he carried in his heart for over sixty
years, remains his most representative work, a storehouse of
his most intimate secrets, as he himself admitted. The turn
he gives to the old legend is characteristically modern. Faust
still tries to sell his soul, wearied with the slow steps of science,
for a short and easy way into all the fullness of experience,
but Goethe, unlike the mediaevalist and the Puritan, finds
GOETHE 279
in that very attempt, charged with peril tliough it is, the seed
of Good. For man is made essentially to desire the absolute
Good, which is not merely his private good, and if he will
only go on testing all things he will somehow find it :
" A true man, struggling in the dark and blinded,
Still knows the way that leads him home at last."
So Jehovah declares at the opening.
" The soul that still has strength to strive
We have the strength to free,"
So the Angels chant at the close.
Thus Mephistopheles, the Satan of this modern Paradise
Lost and Regained, the asserter of the Self in its narrowest
form, the form that refuses suffering, cannot really make
Faust his prisoner for ever, because the Self in the man being
stimulated, he cannot help desiring more than himself.
Mephistopheles, half conscious of this, has to admit that his
own power is a fragment of the Force
" That wills the evil and yet works the good."
(" ein Teil von jener Kraft
Die stets das Bose meint und stets das Gute schafft.")
The power to suffer and to admire never deserts Faust, and
therefore he can never be satisfied with the tiny closed circle
of the devil's false " satisfaction." Even when on the point
of rejecting all scientific search in despair, he can behold the
vision of the Earth- Spirit overpowering his puny self, and
hear its fire-song, the song which, once heard, haunts
every student of science who has in him also any touch of
poetry or rehgion :
" In the storm of action, the floods of life,
I surge and sway.
Above and below.
Further, nigher,
To and fro 1
Birth and death, an infinite sea,
A web that changes eternally,
A living fire 1
I work at the loom of Time, I smite with the weaver's rod.
In the whirr and the roar I fashion the living garment of God."
280 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
So again even after Faust has sealed his wager with the
devil, promising his soul if Mephistopheles can satisfy him,
even when he is on the point of seducing Margaret, the divine
element in his passion can still pour itself out in his confession
of faith, Goethe's own creed, one suspicious of dogma but
confident in the response of a man's heart to the splendour
of life and the universe :
" Who dare name His name
And say, I believe in Him ?
Who dare silence the heart
And say, I believe Him not ?
The All-upholder,
The All-enfolder,
Does He not hold, enfold
You and me and Himself ?
Is not the sky overhead
And the firm-set world at our feet ?
Do not the great stars move
Through the infinite vault above
And look down with immortal love ?
And I look into your eyes ?
Does not the glory press
Into your heart and brain,
And the open eternal secret float '
All round you, hidden and plain ? "
So, once more, Faust can speak for Goethe's own devout
joy in his scientific behef that all forms of life are akin, a
conviction he held in common with other notable men of the
time, foreshadowing the more detailed theory of evolution that
marks the nineteenth century. Goethe's emotion in dis-
covering the inter-maxillary bone in man, a discovery indi-
cating that the human frame was built on the same lines as
that of other vertebrates, his excitement in the garden at
Palermo over the conception that all plants conformed to the
same general type, are reflected in Faust's hymn of thanks to
Nature for having opened her secrets to him :
" Bringing the ranks of all thy living creatures
Before my sight and teaching me to know
My brothers in the quiet forest ways.
The airs, the waters."
GOETHE 281
It is exactly part of Goethe's plan to conceive the Faust who
is capable of this impassioned insight as also the Faust who
seduces Margaret against her conscience, leaves her in despair,
and ret\irns in remorse too late to save her from the law's
vengeance for the drowTiing of their child in her madness. His
Faust was to exhibit both the weakness and the strength of
the personal desire for Ufe. As the drama develops through
its scenes of pity and terror Faust, though too weak to save
his soul by a supreme effort of self-denial, as ]\Iargaret saves
hers when she chooses the scaffold rather than palter with
Mephistopheles, is yet strong enough to take up the struggle
of life after the tragedy and make his Future retrieve his Past.
The Second Fart, too often neglected by Enghsh readers,
is necessary for the full understanding of Goethe's outlook on
human existence.
There Faust discovers that a worthy conception of hfe can
only be attained through the help of Greece and the Greek
vision of a harmony between spirit and sense, guarded by
vahant defenders, itself at rest among a happy people and a
beautiful. The winning of Helen by Faust is no longer
conceived, as it was in the old legend, to be a mere triumph
of voluptuous ecstasy : it is the grasp on the Hellenic ideal
itself. Warriors watch over the union of Faust and Helen,
but they themselves have escaped from war, and making the
right use of Time they seem to have discovered Eternity.
Faust sings his own Epithalamion with the spirit of Hellas,
lovely and deathless for ever :
" Here happiness through every generation
SmUes from glad faces and can never cease.
Each is immortal in his age and station,
And sane and joyous are they, and at peace.
" Even so among the shepherds stood Apollo,
Like him they seemed, Uke his the fairest face,
For where pure Nature leads and men dare follow
All worlds can meet together and embrace.
" No palace prison thee, no fortress capture !
The world's youth flows eternal, fresh and free I
For us, for us, and our own secret rapture,
In Sparta's neighbourhood lies Arcady ! "
282 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
But the vision has no sooner been grasped than something
is born of it that insists on making its way into the turmoil of
the actual world. It is Euphorion, son of Faust and Helen,
impatient and heroic, who calls for the action that breaks the
dream, and fulfils it. Fulfils it, that is, so far as it can be
fulfilled in Time and by imperfect mortals. It is of the essence
of the ideal, Goethe always insisted, to actualize itself, yet it
can never do so completely. The vision fades, while it leaves
enough light to Hve by. Faust must hold fast to Helen's
mantle as she sinks back to the world of dreams :
"It is not the divinity that's gone.
Divine it is. Up ! use the priceless gift ;
Use it and rise ! For it will carrj^ you
Through the clear sky, above the dim and vile.
So long as you endure."
The closing scenes are the test of Faust's endurance.
Inspired by the memory alike of Margaret and of Hellas he sets
himself to a real work of statesmanship, reclaiming from the
lawless ocean the land where he may build up a home for the
Hellenic ideal on the larger scale of the modern world.
But the sin besetting all his desires, the craving for sheer
personal dominance that had poisoned his love and made him
desert the toilsome ways of science, reappears in the politician's
lust for power. It is another form of the primal curse on men
and on nations, a curse that clings perhaps most closely to men
and nations of the West with their ever-insurgent ambitions.
An independent old couple in their cottage resist the high-
handed colonizing schemes of this enlightened Empire-maker.
He sweeps them impatiently aside and his servant Mephis-
topheles burns the house over their heads. Faust's cry of
remorse that this is not what he had meant is the cry repeated
again and again by the conscience of history, before Goethe's
day and more than once since. It brings Faust face to face
with the black element in his nature. By a desperate effort
he wrenches himself from the clutch of Mephistopheles, makes
head against the spirit of restless dissatisfaction, his old
enemy, a demon-woman lurking in dry places and hunting
GOETHE 283
her victims into despair or crime. It is significant that Goethe
does not make him give up his enterprise. Far from that, he
wins his freedom by persisting in it, only without the fevered
thirst for immediate triumph. None the less Goethe does not
conceive him to have purged himself. The Angels who rescue
him toil up the sky dragging a burden of dross, to be cut
from him only through the creative force of the Eternal Love
that fills the unending circles of the Christian heaven. Thus
did Goethe, in perhaps the last verses he ever wrote, unite
once more Hellenism and Hebraism, Paganism and Chris-
tianity, the ideals of the past with the problems of the modem
world. This breadth of view, itself the outcome of the mastery
gained by a strong will and a steady intellect over sensi-
bilities far acuter than outsiders guessed, helped him to the
position that he claimed, modestly and proudty, at the close of
his hfe, that of a Liberator, not of a Master, a title he put
from him with distaste.
The Romantic Revival with its thirst for experiment in life
had already begun in Germany when he was a lad, and he
who was the friend in youth of Herder and Jacobi, in mature
manhood of Schiller, in old age of Schopenhauer, was at once
its most daring leader and its soberest critic. And this
because he never lost his hold on a centre of calm in all his
storms of emotion, as might be apparent from his rehgious
development alone, the dogmas of Christianity dropping
away from him early in life without disturbing his fundamental
faith in the spiritual nature of the universe. Thus he could
at once judge and forgive both himself and his contemporaries.
And it was in part due to this central security that he watched
with a patience almost amounting to indifference the huge
convulsions shaking Europe for close on thirty years (1789-
18 15) through the French Revolution and the career of
Napoleon.
CHAPTER XL
THE FRENCH REVOLUTION AND NAPOLEON
THE problems raised by both cataclysms, though
Goethe himself scarcely recognized it, were problems
of his own, but they were attacked from quite another
angle. Goethe was always neghgent about political questions
proper, and so far as he gave them thought he preferred the
old system of an active monarchy with an ordered hierarchy of
classes. But the leaders of the French Revolution reahzed
that the full development of men's faculties, their goal as
much as his, was impossible without abolishing the old
privileges and admitting the people at large to a decision on
their own destinies. The spirit of civic freedom which Rous-
seau had invoked, the spirit which conceives Law as " the
expression of the General Will," was supported by the spirit
of rational criticism and scientific research so strongly stimu-
lated by Descartes and Voltaire. And if Europe was appalled
by Revolutionary excesses and mob fury, it was also inspired
by the prodigious spectacle of a nation transforming its entire
system under the impulse of a new ideal. The first flush of
the movement, no doubt, bright with the watchwords of
Freedom, Equality, Brotherhood, and Citizenship, was dark-
ened within a year or two by the distrust and violence of
the extremists on either side. The actual Terror, it is true,
lasted little more than a year — (April, 1793- July, 1794) — but
when it subsided, France was left in the trough of the wave,
her fate apparently in the hands of a corrupt and inefficient
Directory. Yet even then she had achieved marvels, and
shown that it was possible not only to subsist without the
284
FRENCH REVOLUTION AND NAPOLEON 285
ancient fetters, but that her citizen army could repel the
foreign aristocrats who, aided by her reactionary sons, had
attempted to crush her. But the building up of the new
and stable order of which she had dreamed seemed for the
time beyond her strength.
At this moment appeared, for good and for evil, the super-
man Napoleon. His Italian birth was no accident. By
endowment as by race he recalled those Roman Emperors of
the past who together with an intellectual enthusiasm for
order had scant sympathy for freedom except so far as it
provided them with efficient workmen. Yet just because
Napoleon desired efficient workmen he had some reason for
claiming that he was the true son of the Revolution. The
side of it that meant " la carriere ouverte aux talens," an
essential side, appealed to him forcibly, and he knew that
organization, security, and the chance of a special reward for
special effort were necessary to ensure it. Absence of official
privilege was not enough to make the average man exert his
talents to the full.
Therefore with a statesman's instinct he set himself aknost
at once to organize the tenure of property, the system of law,
the status of the Church, the methods of administration, and
the structure of the army. Up to a certain point he had a
marvellous instinct for what the average supporter of the
Revolution most desired and needed, and what the wiser of
the Revolutionary leaders had outhned. He confirmed once
and for all the distribution already made of the large estates
among the bourgeoisie and the peasants ; he took up the
constructive work of codifying the law, begun in earnest by
the Revolutionary leaders and foreshadowed even earlier, and
he carried it through to a conclusion that has made it the law
of France to this day, adding a body of judges to administer
it ; he set up a system of " prefects," local heads of the civil
administration appointed by the chief of the State, a system
which, while it proved a good instrument for his own despotism,
was also capable of becoming, as it has become since, the ser-
vant of a Chamber elected by the people. He saw that the
Revolutionists in their hatred of rehgious fanaticism had
286 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
pushed their own fanaticism far beyond the sentiment of the
nation at large. They had made it penal for the clergy to
perform their own rites in the ancient churches, and the
intolerance was bitterly resented by the masses. No single
measure did more to re-establish unity of spirit in France than
Napoleon's repeal of these ordinances. At the same time he
was careful to guard against the chance of the Church regaining
any real political influence. He insisted on the State having
a decisive voice in the appointment of the clergy, and he
supported an independent system of secular and State
education. That he over-centraHzed the goverimient of
France is undeniable, and the evil results in this respect may
have been the more lasting because of the tendency to over-
centralization already strong in French tradition. But
there is no denying his constructive power.
Since his consummate ability marked him out for the
unquestioned head of the Executive and since no one was
more dexterous than he in posing as the representative of the
people's will, he was able to draw all the threads into his own
hands without at first too openly or too constantly outraging
the democratic faith. But he never had any scruple, after
his first recourse to the " whiff of grape-shot," in drawing
upon military force if persuasion failed. Only he was a
master, as the greatest generals have always been, in the art
of combining the two.
With the eye of genius he saw that he possessed in the
ragged, undisciplined, fiery soldiers of the Revolution a most
admirable military material. Under the stress of invasion
the Republic had introduced conscription, and Napoleon was
not the man to let the weapon rust. Added to this, the
enthusiasm of Republican France for spreading her ideas over
Europe gave him a unique opportunity for founding an
impregnable Dictatorship and gratifying ahke his genius
for organizing on a grand scale and his master-passion for
power.
Thus with the rebirth of Republicanism was also revived
once again in Europe, and with results both astonishing and
natural, the Imperial tradition of a dominant race imposing,
FRENCH REVOLUTION AND NAPOLEON 287
by force if necessary, a system of good government on sub-
ordinate and backward nationalities.
Nor was it entirely hypocrisy that made Napoleon give
himself out as a Liberator. He did to some extent really
share the new-born Republican belief in the value of distinct
and coherent national units freed from stupid oppression.
This was part of the general belief in the value of individuality
and its natural development that underlay the Revolution,
and Napoleon was too acute not to see its foundation in fact.
Only his ambition insisted that in the last resort the nation-
alities must all be subject to himself. Napoleonic France
followed him, and thus the two of them, hke Faust in the close
of Goethe's drama, were perpetually destroying with the one
hand what they tried to build with the other.
Italy, Napoleon saw and said, was destined for aU her
dismemberment to become once again a united nation, and
the Itahan patriots of his day welcomed his first advance.
And though he sold Venice to Austria and let his satellites
fleece the country which he was by way of redeeming, yet he
did introduce a type of unified government, the impressions
of which were of immeasurable value in training those
Italians who liberated their owti land at last.
Again, in Germany he taught Germans to break through the
petty restrictions that separated tiny State from tiny State,
checked industry, hampered trade, and prevented the active
devotion to a common cause. On the other hand, the force
of his tyranny overreached itself, and nowhere more remark-
ably than in Prussia. He saw in that httle State the possi-
bilities of the strongest German power against him and he
determined to crush her. She had fallen in his day, after the
vigorous and unscrupulous achievements of Frederick the
Great, into a half-paralysed condition, hide-bound by anti-
quated conventions, at least as feudal and as cramping, with
the one exception of priestly dominance, as those of the
ancien regime in France. Serfdom was still in existence, and
no member even of the bourgeoisie could hold land or become
an officer in the army. A Prussia of this type fell prostrate
before Napoleon, but there was a new Prussia in her womb.
288 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
Stimulated by the force of Stein's leadership and by her
own fury at the monstrous terms Napoleon exacted after
Jena, the Prussian nation swept aside the old strangling
restrictions, sweeping aside also the solemn engagements her
king had made with the oppressor. Patriotism was held to
justify unscrupulous measures, and while there is undeniable
grandeur in a people awakening from lethargy under the
very grip of a tyrant and becoming the heart and soul of a
triumphant resistance, it is obvious that the war taught them
evil lessons also and reinforced evil traditions left them by their
own Frederick. Goethe saw this ; his love of order and his
admiration for Napoleon's genius prevented him from being
blinded by the passions of patriotism. A ribald bit of telling
doggerel (which he shrank from publishing in his life-time)
has in it the cutting truth of satire :
" The angels fought for us and the right.
But the angels were beaten in every fight.
Devil above and angel under,
And the devil walked off with the whole of the plunder.
Then all our good folk fell to prayer,
And the Lord looked into the whole affair.
Said God the Son — (and we know that He
Saw the matter plain from eternity) —
' They'd better act as the devils act.
They must scruple no longer, that's the fact,
But use all means till the war is won.
And sing Te Deiim when all is done.'
We didn't wait to be told it twice.
And lo ! the devils were whacked in a trice.
So now we sing complacently,
' It pays to behave like a devil, you see.' "
(" Zahme Xenien," Bk. IX.
Cotta, Jubilee Edition).
It was not only in Germany that aggression overreached
itself. Napoleon's invasion of Russia had roused the country
to a sense of unity and a power of self-sacrifice that astonished
both itself and the rest of Europe. The modern novel of
Tolstoy's " War and Peace," a novel almost epic in its scope,
brings this home with amazing vividness, even allowing for
FRENCH REVOLUTION AND NAPOLEON 289
the caricature in his drawing of Napoleon. Nor was it only
the national sense that was now awakened in Russia. The
struggle with Napoleon brought her at last into enduring
commuiiion with the West. The ferment of Repubhcan ideas
about freedom, responsible government, and the rights of
thought, began to vivify her dreaming. The great writers
of the nineteenth century, Turgenev, Tolstoy, Dostoievsky,
show this again and again. It was the spirit of freedom that
released the genius of Russia.
At the other end of Europe, Spain, when actually overrun
by French armies, seemed to be rising from the dead. The
high spectacle of her defiance roused the enthusiasm of
Shelley and prompted some of the finest prose that Words-
worth ever wrote. Unhke Russia, Spain's work throughout
the nineteenth century has not borne out this promise, but at
the time she produced a painter, Goya, whose mastery of his
craft and power of characterization give us a hghtning-Uke
impression of latent forces kept somewhere in reserve. There
is a ferocity of truth in his pictures of war and suffering unique
in the records of painting.
In England there was no need to rouse the national sense.
That had been strong for centuries, often over-strong. But the
effects of Napoleon and the French Revolution together were
quite as great as elsewhere and as many-sided. A by-product
of the struggle, but one with far-reaching results, was the
huge development of her power overseas. Napoleon had
quickened the pace by his expedition into Egypt, and England
emerged with the basis of a colossal empire, India completely
in her hands, Gibraltar still hers, Malta and the Cape of Good
Hope resting-places for her ships, and the latter the starting
point for the control of untapped resources. Her commercial
instinct discerned at once the value of the tropics for the Old
World, highly populated as it is and needing countless materials,
from rice to rubber, that can only be produced in the warm
places of the earth. That need has grown with the growing
complexity of civilization, and England's early triumph in
securing a direct hold on such sources of production gave her
a perceptible advantage in the economic race.
19
290 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
At home the immediate influence of the Continental turmoil
told in the two opposite directions of Reform and Reaction,
making a long and doubtful equilibrium in politics. But in
1832 the canying of the Reform Bill showed a decisive victory
for the popular cause. Meanwhile we have to note, first, a
glorious outburst of poetry as the eighteenth century passed
into the nineteenth, an outburst that has points of resemblance
with the earher movement in Germany of which Goethe
became the leader and also with the bound forward in France
a little later when the pressure of the Napoleonic tyranny was
removed. And next, sometimes clearly reflected in the
literature, the emergence of problems, more particularly
industrial and social problems, in something like their present
form. These topics will occupy our next two chapters.
CHAPTER XLI
THE ROMANTIC REVIVAL AND THE NEW REALISM
T
WO fresh tendencies are to be emphasized in the
starthng change from the typical prose that marks
the eighteenth century to the poetry and enthusiasm
that meet us at the close of it and at the opening of the nine-
teenth. One we may call, for want of a better word, the
Romantic, in the good sense of that term, with its renewed
search for the mysterious, the remote, the marveUous, its
ardour for the ideal, its dehght in the picturesqueness of the
past, its revival of the longing to sing from the heart, the lyric
impulse proper. The other is the desire to make hterature
adequate to the whole of reahty, to sweep aside any conven-
tions that interfere with this, to accept any subject, however
common or repellent to the ordinary mind, if the artist him-
self found it fit to his hand, a desire often accompanied by a
revolt against accepted standards in religion and morals.
Both tendencies make for liberty, both were united with the
spirit of liberty, and both have remained strong in Europe ever
since, have indeed grown in strength, and perhaps that is one
reason why the great writers of that time are among all
classics the chosen of modern readers.
The lyric impulse, the zest for actuahty, the love of romance,
the passion for freedom and equality, all come surging up in
Burns, first herald of the movement (1749-1796). But
Burns, though a genuine poet, has deficiencies and crudities
that keep him from the first rank. And he is notliing of a
thinker. Wordsworth and Coleridge when working together
show an ardour for liberty that is far more deeply reasoned,
291
292 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
and a union of the strange and the simple that is far more
subtle. The mysterious magic of " Kubla Khan " is set side
by side with the human mystery of "Margaret" and the
" Idiot Boy." Indeed, this desire to keep in touch with ord-
inary human life led Wordsworth, unsaved by any sense of
humour, into some of his baldest absurdities. But it also
helped him to his highest achievements. The plain grotesque
figure of the old leech-gatherer, weary and indomitable among
the lonely mountains, grows superhuman before our eyes as
a type of man's power to match himself with circumstance.
This respect for common humanity, accompanying the poet's
extraordinary responsiveness to the unfathomable appeal of
lonely Nature, gives a massiveness to his most dream-
like moods. There is nothing thin about his mysticism. It
is not a man unable to face ordinary life who is haunted by
those
" huge and mighty forms, that do not Uve
Like hving men."
It is entirely in harmony with his character that, prophet
of solitude though he was, nothing could have been warmer
than his sympathy with the French Revolution in its youth-
ful prime when it promised peace to men, or sterner than
his condemnation of it when it passed into aggression and he
could only see
" Frenchmen losing sight
Of all they struggled for."
The thirst both for the facts of life and the dreams of poetry
confronts us again in the lesser and very different genius of
Byron. " The Vision of Judgment " owes much of its force
and splendour to the alliance of close humorous observation
and flashing satire with the breadth of imagination that can
behold the Prince of Darkness rising on wings hke thunder-
clouds through the vast fields of space. In this poem Byron
is at his finest because a genuine interest in pohtical freedom
has set him free for the time from the obsession of his
own craving. Elsewhere he is incessantly thwarted and
perverted by it. His verse is fevered by a passion Hke
Faust's for personal triumph, fretting savagely at any
ROMANTIC REVIVAL AND NEW REALISM 293
restraint, repudiating as monkish any control over the flesh.
But this mood is never steady : it is shaken perpetually
by doubt of itself, by disgust, by ill-concealed remorse,
by everything that would be repentance if the repentance
in its turn could be sure. His power cannot give him
peace, it only tears his owti Hes to tatters, and even in
cynicism he can find no refuge. A similar turmoil of feeling
has reappeared now, with no sign as yet of its ending. Byron
is on the whole out of fashion in England for the very good
reasons that his poetry is not of the first quahty and that his
posing annoys a generation quick to detect affectation any-
where except in itself. But we have not got rid of BjTonism.
The best of his work sprang always from his love of liberty.
Long before Italy was free he gave her his genuine sympathy,
as jMazzini was to recognize with burning gratitude, and he
gave his life to help Greece in her revolt from the Turk.
Goethe, we have admitted, had little hking for revolution,
but it was Byron's gallantry that fired him to complete his
conception of Euphorion, the spirit of restless action born of
Desire and Beauty, feverish as his father Faust before him,
but discovering, just not too late, the goal of a Hfe prepared
to die for liberty.
The liberty that Byron revered was, however, only political
hberty. Shelley, on the other hand, was filled with longing
first for an external hberty not only political but economic
and social, with full opportunity of all good things for all
men, and next for the inward liberty that should set free a
man's own deepest nature. It is thus that he anticipates so
many modern movements. He was the singer of a Sociahst
ideal as yet hardly born. He chanted the national independ-
ence of every nation that he knew, wondering wistfully none
the less whether triumphant nationahsm would only bring
the world back to the conflicts in which men hate and die.
He demanded the emancipation of women in the interest of
men as much as in their own. He welcomed science with
unfeigned rapture as flinging open the world to man, and while
there is no sign that, like Goethe, he conceived the outhnes
of Evolution, yet his sense of a kinship in all life was every
294 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
whit as keen. His enthusiasm for nature and all natural
impulses made him, in spite of occasional misgivings, a
confident believer in progress, if only the shackles of tradition
could be struck off. He challenged, as such, the dogmas and
the mythology of Christianity, tossing the whole system aside
and then returning in tenderness to discover, if he could, what
was eternally precious in it.
His challenge to official morality was as daring. He was
prepared to test, and, in theory, to throw over every one of
its canons, except those of truth and brotherly love, which
his sincere and compassionate temperament would not suffer
him to question. The Hkeness and the contrast to bold
questioners later, to Ibsen, for example, or to Nietzsche, are
both noticeable. Among the men of his time and country
William Blake, more visionary even than himself, is closest
to him here. The fettering of natural impulse was odious to
them both, and there was an anarchic element in their thought
that responds to a factor far more prominent now than in the
soberer Victorian age that intervened. Poets, no doubt, long
before Shelley, had sung the joys of sense with an unrestraint
shocking to the narrowly moral. What is remarkable in
himself and in Blake is their assertion that this freedom of
view is part of a finer morality. It is of importance to add
at once that in neither poets is this the dominant trait.
Natural mysticism is the first thought for the lover of Blake :
" To see a World in a grain of sand.
And a Heaven in a wild flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand.
Or Eternity in an hour."
("Auguries of Innocence.")
And Shelley possessed the rare power of criticizing his own
criticism. His last, and in some respects strongest poem,
" The Triumph of Life," shows how his thought, led by
Dante, was beginning to brood over the meaning of discipline.
It is only the self-controlled who can conquer Life. Anarchic
to the full Shelley could never be, any more than Blake,
because he could never conceive of liberty as divorced from
a clear-sighted and all-embracing love. It is only the natural
ROMANTIC REVIVAL AND NEW REALISM 295
climax of all his feeling that the hberated world of his
" Prometheus Unbound " should culminate in the vision
of Man as
" one harmonious soul of many a soul,
Whose nature is its own divine control
Where all things flow to all, as rivers to the sea."
I have said nothing so far of Shelley's pure poetic gift,
but the pecuUar mark of liis genius is exactly the union of this
high-flown enthiisiasm with the exquisite sense of beauty.
And a union not dissimilar can be felt in the achievement of
his fellow-poet Keats, less Utopian than Shelley, and without
Shelley's bent for wild speculation, but not less distinguished
by a steady pressing forward from the sheer dehght in sensuous
images and the golden coin of fancy to the deeper treasures
of imagination. It is significant that in his earliest long poem
he put the joy given by the loveliness of " daffodils and the
green world they live in " side by side with
" the grandeur of the dooms
We have imagined for the mighty dead."
Both poets, in their meditations, can even grow impatient
of their own art, crying out that the men of action or of science
do greater works than they. But no two men have achieved
more in the short compass of their brief hves for the sustain-
ment of all who believe with them that a world without beauty
would be a dead world, that the sense of it is a second hfe,
and that they who follow its spirit faithfully can neither be
divided from other men nor enslaved in their own souls.
The passion for Beauty, for Nature, and for that artist's
dreaming that is other than Nature, reappears, though far less
triumphantly, in the English painting of the time. It is often
faulty and erratic, as could never be said of Gainsborough's
work, but it is full of interest. Blake is our one painter with
a power of imaginative design, creating visions that can make
him at times a not unworthy companion for Dante ; Turner,
pouring forth rhapsodies, often too rhapsodical, can at his
best give us something that is kindred to the radiance and the
296 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
dignity of Nature as the solemn music of Wordsworth is
kindred and the ethereal lilt of Shelley ; Constable, held by
the quiet charm of English summer landscape, searches after
a noble realism that explains his influence later in France.
The vivifying impulse he gave to the painter's dehght in things
seen added a new and needed element to the classic tradition
of form that the French had taken over years before from the
art of Italy, and that was now threatening to become stereo-
typed and empty. The course of painting in France since
the Englishman prompted the new departure has shown
a vigorous interplay, and sometimes a vigorous strife, be-
tween these two elements in art, the element of realistic
portraiture and the element of pure design.
Beside the florescence of poetry and the promise in painting,
two great branches of literature begin to take on a fresh
development, the art of the novel and the art of history.
There were clear signs that the ferment of feeling would find
its most popular expression in the novel, that loose form in
which a WTiter can heap together, in a style closer to common
life than is possible for poetry, both his own personal emotions
and his impressions of the world as he sees it round him or
dreams of it in the past or speculates on its destiny.
The fullest development of the form in England was to
come later. England had produced, as we have seen, pioneers
in novel-writing during the eighteenth century, but their
range had been limited to personal themes of contemporary
life, or rather of contemporary manners, in which the deepest
feehngs were usually left untouched. With Walter Scott a
new vein of romance was now opened, the echoes of the
chivalry and charm of the past blending with a robust modern
humour ; while in Jane Austen the absurdities of exaggerated
romance, like many other absurdities, encountered the keenest,
most delicately humorous of realist critics. But it was not
till well on into the nineteenth century that the Enghsh novel
widened out to include all emotional issues. In Germany it
had already done this, once. Goethe's " Wilhelm Meister "
had dealt deliberately with what he counted one of the
greatest tasks set to a man, the finding of his true vocation,
ROMANTIC REVIVAL AND NEW REALISM 297
and the treatment gains rather than loses in impressiveness
because the problem is worked out among the commonplace
complexities of Bohemian and conventional life. The novel
in Germany, however, did not follow up this broad opening,
while in France, and later in Russia, it gathered to itself the
most potent forces.
Balzac and Victor Hugo at the opening of the century,
giants for all their faults, were both marked in different degrees
by the characteristic union of romanticism and realism. They
are avid for facts, but especially for facts that illustrate the
wild element in the characters and hopes of men. Balzac,
little concerned with political theory, is absorbed in a fierce
observation of men and women as they show themselves in
the detail of their individual lives and passions, a detail
meticulous often to the last degree, prosaic to the last degree
one might even say, except that it is lit up incessantly with
a kind of thunderous hght showing in blinding clearness the
force of man's desire. And this desire, though perpetually
squandered on trivialities or perverted into monstrosity, has
always something infinite in its character. Balzac, despite
constant lapses into sentimentalities and extravagances, is
one of the greatest among novelists just because of this fiery
intensity united to an unsurpassed sense of actuality. He
might have reached unimaginable heights if he had possessed
the crowning gift of humour, that comforting and redeeming
spirit in which English writers of lesser calibre surpass him.
Almost all our novehsts indeed are dowered with that deh-
cious gift, each in a different and highly-individualized form.
Fielding, Smollett, Sterne, Walter Scott, Jane Austen,
Thackeray, Dickens, Charlotte Bronte, George Eliot, Mere-
dith, Hardy, how varied they are in this and how alike !
Victor Hugo, out of date as some of his rhapsodies may
seem, is more modern than Balzac in his preoccupation with
the problem of the suffering and the poor. He had no remedy
for it save the remedy of Republican hberty, but he felt
something of its urgency. He and Balzac together head very
fitly the long and magnificent series of French novehsts in the
nineteenth century, casting a wide net from elusive shades
298 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
of personal passion to the reasons for a nation's downfall.
Only, as before in French Uterature, we miss the indescribable
touch of poetry, and perhaps that is why their treatment of
love, subtle as it is on the physical side, has in it always a
sense of barrenness, a desolating gap. The great Russian
writers, of whom Turgenev at least was in close touch with
the French artists, contrast very markedly with them here.
The insatiable curiosity for facts and the impulse to ask
questions and to speculate, fostered by and fostering the
scientific spirit, manifested themselves again in the zeal for
history, already, as we have seen, showing itself in the eigh-
teenth century. England, France, Germany all continue the
work. And, roughly, we can distinguish two schools, one
less interested in conclusions and more concerned with data,
the other studying history for the light it throws on life. In
England Gibbon (1737-1794), who would have smiled at
Romanticism, is the type of the first ; Carlyle, full of Roman-
tic affinities, and born the year after Gibbon's death, is the
type of the second.
Carlyle, profoundly influenced by Goethe, was penetrated
with a religious belief in every man's duty to develop himself
by single-minded work, and hence not only his deep sjmipathy
for the patient drudge, but his exultation in the heroes who
had carved their way to full expression, or opened the path
for others, or swept away, even if by a destroying Revolu-
tion, corrupt systems which blocked the road. He is little
read now, partly because his perpetual preaching exasperates,
for all his humour, a generation in full re-action from Vic-
torian earnestness and alert to see in life many values besides
the strictly moral, partly because, with all his sturdy love of
independence, he was critical of political liberty. The liberty
he desired was the liberty to work. The short-cut of force,
making men work at the point of the bayonet if they would
not do so of themselves, had a fatal appeal for him. On the
other hand he saw, what has been seen with increasing clear-
ness since, that even political hberty without further organiza-
tion of forces economic and social must end for millions in a
grinding slavery, where any talk of free self-development was
ROMANTIC REVIVAL AND NEW REALISM 299
a mockery. Hence his attack on the incomplete PoHtical
Economy of his day — " the dismal science," with its dominant
gospel of laissez faire, hence his contempt for the current
Utilitarianism — the " Pig-Philosophy " that seemed to offer
men only a sordid happiness. The one, he thought, was
working with inadequate means, the other had no conception
of an adequate end. But without adequate means or end
man's Ufe was a chaos, and Carlyle detested chaos.
CHAPTER XLII
THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION AND THE
EMERGENCE OF MODERN PROBLEMS
THE chaos has not ceased, but perhaps we reahze that
it is chaos more fully than we did. If we do, it is in
large measure because of the impetus given both by
Carlyle and the Economists and Utilitarians whom he criticized
so severely.
The Industrial Revolution, made possible through the
inventions of applied science, had, since the end of the
eighteenth century, been shifting work on an increasing scale
from the field, the home, and the small shop where it was
performed under the individual eye of the master, to the
impersonal system of huge factories and mines. The result
brought colossal evil as well as good. Science and Tool-
making, the powers that combine with Nature and manual
toil to produce all our wealth, powers that exalt man above
the beasts, give him also licence to sink below them. The
Tree of Knowledge can become a Tree of Death, This para-
dox, which is also a truism, has been proved over and over
again both in peace and in war, from the superb poetry of
flight and the recondite researches of the laboratory to the
humbler achievements of the spinning- jenny and the threshing-
machine. A new invention always means dislocation for the
superseded trades, and the best cure is, by suitable distribu-
tion, to make the products of the invention compensate for
the undeserved distress. But no attempt at this, speaking
broadly, was made at first by the men to whom the structure
of society had left the main task of distribution. They did
300
THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 301
not raise wages, they lowered them. Hence, in the first
quarter of the nineteenth century the growth of wealth was
startling, but so also to any who looked below the surface
was the misery and poverty among the workmen and the
chronic trouble of unemployment. Not only was the poverty
greater than it had been just before, but the contrast with
the wealth was greater also, and a generation that had heard
the names of liberty and equality could not continue to pass
it by entirely. The " Condition of England Question," Carlyle
insisted fiercety, was the question of questions and an answer
must be found. Something was wrong with a system under
which men went ragged because, it was said, too many clothes
were made, or wore themselves to death by toil while others
starved for lack of work and others again lived in plenty and
idleness. The French Revolution had been a Nemesis on
injustice : was the warning to be in vain ? ]\Ien besides
Carlyle were looking for an answer. Robert Owen in England
had been experimenting in Socialism, theorists in France were
dreaming of communist Utopias. Sober thinkers like John
Stuart IMill turned to reconsider the foundations already
assumed for the 3^oung science of Political Economy.
Towards the end of the eighteenth century the problems
of wealth and industry, production and distribution, had
attracted critical and methodical thought. Adam Smith's
"Wealth of Nations," published in 1776, two years before
the death of Voltaire, marks an epoch, and his view may be
taken as typical of the first stage. The work had its limita-
tions, as will appear in a moment, but it laid dowTi certain
basic principles. It recognized truths now accepted as
truisms but long unrecognized, for example, that money is
only the symbol of wealth ; that wealth strictly so-called, the
total, namely of those goods and services which can be got
and given in exchange, springs ultimately from two sources
only, the bounty of nature and the labour, manual and
intellectual, of men ; that whatever checks or wastes such
labour is, so far, destructive. Further, that to maintain this
labour and make it effective a great reserve of capital is
needed, in other words, a store of power and material for
302 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
future work, material without wliich production cannot
proceed at any adequate pace.
The chief deductions from these now commonplace truths
were drawn as clearly. Spending money on ephemeral trifles
could not, Adam Smith saw, as Voltaire had failed to see,
be ultimately " good for trade." So far from increasing the
means of future production, it turned aside the labour neces-
sary for them. His attack on wasteful usages of wealth, from
luxurious private equipages to needless expenditure on war,
was trenchant enough to kill for ever the fallacy that so long
as wages are paid it does not matter much to future wealth
what they are paid for. But the fallacy re-appears in many
forms : in our own day, for example, from the side of those
artisans who urge a reckless policy of " ca' canny " in order
that there may be work enough for all, as though there were
no danger lest the limitation of production should lessen the
material essential for more.
Again, it was because he saw the waste in the dominant
colonial system that Adam Smith attacked the policy of ex-
clusive trade with the colonies. The colonies could not sell in
the most advantageous market, and thus, receiving less wealth,
they had less to support future labour and their production
was the less. The system might make England richer than
other countries, it could not make her richer than she would
have been had they been free to develop their own energies to
the full. For similar reasons he inveighed against the incred-
ibly foolish restrictions that in his time prevented labourers
from moving freely out of one parish into another. But his
attention was concentrated rather on high production than on
fair distribution. He urges, it is true, that employers should
pay more liberal wages to their workmen, but his chief stress
is on the point that to do so would be in the interest of higher
production. " The wages of labour are the encouragement of
industry which, hke every other human quality, improves in
proportion to the encouragement it receives." It is important
not to confuse Adam Smith himself with followers who tra-
vestied his doctrine, protesting in the sacred name of economic
law, against any serious effort to increase the resources of the
THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 303
poor. Still, he certainly seems to have felt that any attempt
to fix by law a minimum wage would be futile, and this
largely because of his conviction, shared by most thinkers
then and for some time later, that with higher wages the
labourers would at once beget larger famihes, and thus, with
a greater number of claimants for work, wages would fall
again. The stress laid by Malthus on the need of prudence
in the begetting of children was inspired by the same fear.
Since the days of Adam Smith and of ]\Ialthus three consid-
erations have modified this behef in " the iron law " of wages.
First, it has become evident that with a higher standard of
comfort the inconsiderate begetting of children does not
increase, but lessens : next the power of workmen to combine
prevents the greed of the masters from pressing to the full
their advantage in a supply of labour that has no great capital
of its own to sustain it. This power of combined resistance
was withheld from labour in Smith's day by the Combination
Laws, and their gradual repeal has made it possible for the
Trade Union movement to Hmit the desperate competition
for paid work that made a penniless man accept wages barely
sufficient to support fife. No one doubts to-day that the
limitation has on the whole been good. Thirdly, the sense of
justice in the community supported, step by step, the definite
restriction by law of child labour in its worst forms. The
success of these measures, hotly opposed as they were for a
long time in the supposed interest of freedom by men other-
wise enlightened, has had its share in making it possible now
to fix by law a minimum wage in certain staple trades.
At the other end of the scale the public conscience all over
the world has been concerned, intermittently but unceasingly,
with the question of over-payment for slight services, or with
the actual receipt by men and women of "a revenue " that,
in Adam Smith's own words, " costs them neither labour
nor care." Property, especially property that, like land, has
a monopoly value over and above what is due to the exertions
and abilities of the owner, can, it is clear, give its fortunate
possessor an unearned advantage in the economic struggle,
an advantage often measured by money rent, an advantage
304 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
that he may use in ways disastrous to other men. Should not
this power, it is asked now, Uke enormous pohtical power in
the past, cease to be left entirely to individuals, and be limited
by the opinion and advice of the community ? Certain regu-
lations we have all accepted, but are not still more needed ?
Yet a sound instinct shrinks from over-regulating. Not selfish-
ness merely, but foresight distrusts the out-and-out demand
of the doctrinaire Communist or Sociahst that all the means
of production should be in the hands of the community. In
short, the pressing problem of the time, as MiU foresaw, is
how to ensure a fairer distribution without lessening output.
Increase in output is imperatively demanded, seeing that a
rigorously equal distribution of the national dividend in
England, the wealthiest of European countries, would only
work out for each individual at something under l^fi a year,
an amount clearly not enough for the full hfe that the modern
spirit demands. And up to a certain point competition with-
out a doubt stimulates production. Sociahsm in whatever
form. Guild Sociahsm or State, while it might ensure better
distribution, is likely to blunt the spur of need and the
incentive of private ambition. Can it put adequate motives
in their place ?
And here two things should be distinguished. The one,
that in our present society, on the whole individuaHst, there
is the chance, at any rate for the luckier individuals, of
unfettered personal enterprise, and it is hard to see how this
invaluable liberty can be retained under any uncompromising
scheme of Communism. If the community owns all the
capital it will dictate its terms to all the labour. The other
is, that while men are no better than they are now, the bribe
of high profits and the dread of personal poverty appear for
the majority necessary incentives to the needed production.
Are we to supplant these indirect incentives by direct
dragooning ? There have been thinkers and men of action
to urge it, from Plato to Trotsky. But the prospect is
scarcely inviting to the lover of liberty. The hope remains
that it may become possible in the development of man to
supplant the mercenary instincts, at least in great measure, by
THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 305
something better. Whether indeed this shall come to pass
or no is a question that, after all, " not argument, but effort
shall decide." In so far, however, as their place is not so
supphed, it is of the utmost importance to recognize them :
the art of government hes largely in making terms with lower
motives while fostering the higher. " God must still obey the
Devil," in Wychfhan phrase. To shut one's eyes to the lower
is simply to court catastrophe of the type that has befallen
the doctrinaires of Russian Communism, untrained in
corporate hfe, and with no tradition behind them of sane
and sensible compromise, the give-and-take essential to
co-operation, " the yieldingness of a strong will."
The problems of price alone are enough to illustrate the
intricacy of our dangers. In an ordinary capitalist society
price is fixed by two main factors : first, the cost of sustaining
the labour needed to produce the article, and next, the amount
that the consumer is willing to give for it, and this latter may,
and often does, depend directly on the " scarcity value " of
the goods in question. During a famine the price of all
bread goes up, though conceivably for any one particular
loaf no more labour may be needed in its production. The
producer wants, and takes, as high a price as he can get, and
the consumer, famine-stricken, will pay almost any price. Now
the older school of political economists — (their followers, at
least, if not their leaders) — were, on the whole, content with
the operation of these two forces. They saw in them an auto-
matic adjustment of supply to demand, for if the price went
up it would attract producers to increase the output until the
demand was met. Nor in the long-run, so they urged, would
the consumers suffer, because, as soon as the supply was
sufficiently increased, the scarcity value would disappear and
prices fall.
In all this there is much, as we have fully admitted, that is
perfectly sound. But other questions press for an answer.
What about the short-run ? And the excessive profits made
in that short-run ? Do they not often go to men who shp
away from the dangers of the " slump," and never disgorge
their inordinate gains ? The coining of the word " profiteer "
20
306 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
is significant of the shrewd popular apprehension on this
point, and indicates, by the way, in its distinction from " fair
profit," the important truth that economic questions are
often questions of degree. Moreover, there are cases, those,
namely, of monopolies and quasi-monopolies, such as the
control over land or over a limited stock of minerals, where
the supply cannot be increased indefinitely and where,
owing to this, it is easy for the fortunate possessor to hold
the community indefinitely to ransom. This is the case, for
example, with building-land where the population is growing.
There the value may go up and up, and yet the owners have
done no work whatever to deserve their " unearned incre-
ment." Yet to tax the whole of such " surplus value " out
of hand in every case is not the simple thing it may appear
to the superficial enthusiast. The boundary between fair
profit, i.e. payment for work done plus a due allowance for
risk and for waiting, excess profit (" profiteering "), and sheer
economic " rent " where no labour whatever is performed
and no risk taken, is uncommonly difficult to draw. If it is
drawn too much against the capitalist (large or small), industry
will inevitably dwindle, may dwindle even to starvation-
point, as appears to have happened in Russia : if it is drawn
too much in his favour, as undoubtedly is the case in most
modern societies, then those dependent on him, whether
consumers or workmen, are pretty sure to be fleeced. And
even supposing that it is fairly drawn, what is to be done with
the proceeds ? Is the sum that represents the surplus value
simply to be handed over to the State ? That assumes that
the State will spend it more wisely than the profiteer. And
very likely it will (though this conclusion, be it noted, is by no
means certain). That the community, through its voting-
power, has some power of controlling the spending, and that
the Government of the State at least professes to aim at the
good of all, furnish perhaps the most cogent arguments for
this course. There are, however, obvious dangers, and there
are other ways proposed of distributing the surplus. Even
this cursory survey should not omit to note the expansion of
those group organizations within the State that play so
THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION 307
large, and on the whole so promising, a part in modern
industry. The principle that non-capitalists and workers
should and must organize appeared first in the Trade Union
movement, but it shows itself now in other forms. The
consumers' Co-operative Societies, for example, have made
a substantial contribution towards solving the problem of
price. All members buying regularly at the Company's shops
receive a dividend from the profits at the end of the year in
direct proportion to the purchases each has made. Thus if an
article happens to be in high demand it is not the producer
only who benefits by the good price : the benefit is shared
by all who buy it.
Another, and a most important aspect of the industrial
problem, is the especial concern of those who advocate Guild
Sociahsm or Syndicalism. They argue that intelligent human
beings cannot be satisfied with wages, even good wages, fixed
merely from above ; they desire a voice in the conditions of
the industry by which they five, something to make them more
than mere " hands," mere " living tools," as Aristotle (who
accepted slavery) would have caUed them. And they urge that
cut-throat competition between branches of the same regular
trade has been proved to be wasteful, silly, and nearly always
fatal to reasonable co-operation between employers and em-
ployed. In a slack time the unscrupulous employer, skilful at
grinding the faces of his men, has too great an advantage over
his humaner competitors. Let all the resources of such a trade,
they suggest, be pooled, and let all masters and workmen
join as equals in the general management of the whole. It is
the principle of the Trust or the " Merger," applied in the
interests of all who toil in the trade, not of the capitahst
merely. Of course there are grave objections, chiefly the
time-honoured and not ill-grounded fear lest the security
gained might lead to a slackening of effort and the stress on
team-work prevent personal initiative. But the scheme has
the huge advantage that it opens to the workman the prospect
of an intelhgent share in great enterprises and a chrect veto
on degrading conditions. That both are imperative needs,
if our civihzation is to become truly civihzcd and our culture
308 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
more than the precarious inheritance of a few, no impartial
student is hkely to deny.
Meanwhile modern thought, struggling with the com-
plexities of the problem, cannot be too grateful to the earlier
economists who paved the way by first analysing the wealth-
making motives which do actuate the average man and
tracking out their interplay, even if it holds that they ignored
too often the connexion of wealth with welfare. It is the
outstanding merit of later pioneers such as the German Karl
Marx that, like Owen before them, they do, with whatever
crudities and fallacies, draw attention to the glaring inequali-
ties in our present system of distribution and point out the
conceivability of an arrangement at once more economical
and more equitable. It is not probable that their services
wiU be forgotten. If the well-to-do are tempted to forget,
the chronic "labour unrest" is not likely to allow it.
The workers, often selfishly, continue clamorous for a solution.
The considerations we have touched upon indicate that the
solution will be found in a composite system, combining
both Individualism and Socialism : organizing, for example,
on the lines of national services those trades where the
demand is stable or the supply essentially limited, while leaving
free play to competition in more adventurous paths : fixing
minimum wages and maximum incomes, but not so narrowly
as to leave scant scope for personal ambition.
The problem is felt to be the more insistent because the
modern world cannot go back to any mediaeval worship of
asceticism, nor yet can it accept with a conscience undisturbed,
as the ancients could, a basis of practical slavery on which
a chosen few could live the life of leisure and culture. Its
goal, whether it believes it can reach it or not, is that of
happiness for all.
It was the merit of the English Utilitarians to make this
clear ; to judge everything according as it served this end :
— creeds, prejudices, institutions. It was their defect that
they did not see clearly that what would satisfy men was not
merely a happiness desired, but one approved, and indeed
they themselves, by choosing for their aim the happiness of
MODERN PROBLEMS 809
all, had admitted, without reahzing the admission, that it was
not any kind of happiness, high or low, that would content
them, but happiness of a definite quahty, for it was to be
based on the justice that counted each man as an end in
himself, and no one as " more than one." And as we look
back on the vista of history we see that the modern mind,
inheritor of the past, recognizes not justice and kindness only
but other definite qualities in the happiness it pursues. It
wants the happiness found in health, splendid physique,
congenial work, laughter, self-determination, the discovery of
truth, the dehght in beauty. But ahnost all these things
require wealth. The preoccupation with economic questions
that marks this age is not merely a sign of materialism. It
is at least also a sign of the rich ideal for human hfe gathered
from the experience of centuries, illumined by a slowly
awakening sense of justice and a growing realization both of
the difficulty in combining justice with freedom and the
paramount necessity of attempting it for all. This is the aim
of the modern conscience. It desires a unity that would
include the freedom of every man, just as it desires in its
thought and its art to take stock of every fact. But it has
not yet found a solution, any more than it has yet found a
philosophy or a rehgion to unify its speculations. And it
would be Pharisaical to hide from ourselves the unpleasant
truth that with the bulk of us it is Httle but hp-service that
we pay to our conscience. Hence in part the influence of
those headstrong reformers who, in despair at the callousness
and wilful blindness of the propertied classes, look to armed
rising of the masses as the only means to the end we most
of us profess to desire.
There is no short and easy way out from the toils of a
problem complicated by the very forces that may in the end
find a solution. It is obvious, for example, that the problems
of labour and capital cannot be solved by any one nation
alone. Only joint international effort can succeed. And a
sane internationalism can only be built up by those forces of
sympathy and unity that, acting in smaller spheres, have
made nations themselves possible. Yet nationaUsm has
310 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
proved over and over again a foe to that wider development
which would complete its service to the world. So true is it
that
" the God of old time will act Satan of new
If we keep him not straight at the higher God aimed."
The fervent expectation of Mazzini that, nationahsm once
satisfied, nations would see that their interest lay in help-
ing each other, has not, alas ! been fulfilled. Mazzini's was a
true gospel, but the Day of its Coming is not as he thought.
Co-operation, " association," should doubtless be, as he an-
nounced, the watchwords of the coming age, but their problems
are thornier than he guessed, martyr-spirit though he was.
Even where nationahsm is not aggressive, it often comphcates
the task. Free-trade, for example, would probably be adopted
universally and increase the wealth of the world at a rapid
rate, if it were not that men desire, not merely to make money,
but to make it in their own country and under their own flag.
And still the fact remains that the mind of Europe, after
its long journey, so full of tragedies and glories, does find its
richest memories in the varied work of varied nations, and
does conceive a condition for all its children immeasurably
nearer to the ideal union of justice and freedom. This of
itself may give us hope that the world of the West is, after
all, approaching nearer to the undiscovered law of its own
liberty.
How far has that hope been fortified by the years since
1832 ? It has been a time crowded ahke with great successes,
great expectations, and great disasters. It culminated,
characteristically enough, both in the Great War and the
founding of a League of Nations intended to be universal.
Its distinctive achievement in thought, the estabhshment of
the theory of Evolution, gave rise, and stiU gives rise, ahke
to the most hopeful and the most despairing views of existence.
Already before the nineteenth century, individual thinkers,
as for example Goethe (mentioned before in this connexion),
inspired largely by the study of comparative anatomy and
comparative botany, reached the view that all hfe was akin.
MODERN TROBLEMS 311
The Frenchman Lamarck, at the very opening of the nine-
teenth century, definitely advanced to the position that all
Hfe was linked together by chains of heredity, that species
were not fixed from all time and for all time, but came into
existence through growth from a primitive common stock.
The nascent science of geology, deciphering the fossil " record
of the rocks," indicated that the advance was, on the whole,
towards higher and higher forms, forms more rich and complex
and better suited to their surroundings.
But what was the inner meaning of this advance ? And
how did it come about ? Lamarck took the bold and hopeful
view that there was an inherent tendency in living organisms
themselves to expand their life and adapt it to its environment.
The upward movement in complexity would be continuous
except that changing conditions in the environment could
produce different habits in the animal, and these, when con-
firmed, could affect their structure. " Progress in complexity of
organization exhibits anomalies here and there in the general
series of animals, due to the influence of environment and of
acquired habits." (" Philosophic Zoologique," Part I, c. vi.,
tr. by Hugh Elliot.) The drawbacks to Lamarck's way of
putting it were, first, that the mere assertion of an upward
tendency in Nature did not at all explain how exactly she
brought her works into being, and, next, that it was hard
to see how his subordinate factor of acquired habit could
produce anything like the effects he assumed. These
difficulties, among others, prevented any general acceptance
of the theory. And, indeed, controversy is still raging over
them to-day, although in subtler and more complicated forms.
But by the middle of the century a huge advance was made
through Darwin's patient analysis of the factor he called
" Natural Selection." The organisms showing variations
which, however caused, were calculated to secure the survival
of their possessors in the struggle for scanty sustenance amid
a host of enemies would, he argued, naturaUy tend to survive ;
while those not so well furnished would die out.
Now this view, so stated, does not directly conflict with a
refined form of Lamarckianism ; does not, in truth, touch the
812 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
ultimate cause of variations at all. But as a matter of fact
Darwin was very anxious not to assume any definite tendency
to vary along any particular lines. This seemed to him a
plunging back into fanciful and also unfruitful hypotheses,
like a recurrence to doctrines of special creation or of God's
will in heu of a search into actual processes. He thought it
enough to admit a tendency to small variations in any and
every direction compatible with life, an admission that he
considered to be amply confirmed by observation. Working
on this tendency, a tendency in itself indifferent, the forces of
natural selection, sexual selection, and also in a minor degree
the forces of use and disuse so greatly over-emphasized by
Lamarck, would, he held, be enough to develop the complex
and widely-divergent forms of Hfe which we behold.
No one can be surprised that the Darwinian theory roused a
whirlwind of controversy and emotion among thinkers, rehgious,
philosophic, and scientific. It was not merely that it made the
literal interpretation of the Old Testament incredible. That
had been already undermined, first, by the study of geology,
and then by historical criticism and the comparison with other
religions. Nor was it even that it allied man by direct descent
to the beasts who are believed to perish. The trouble at
bottom lay in the nature of the prominence given to Natural
Selection. The exhibition of this factor undoubtedly estab-
lished the theory, and even to-day modern thought, recasting
the whole system, full of new lights on the inner processes of
heredity, and prepared to recognize, as Darwin was not, the
possibihty of sudden large mutations, cannot deny that
Natural Selection has been an instrument indispensable in the
history of development. But if it is taken as practically the
sole factor and if the basis assumed for it is that of sheer
indiscriminate variation, then the hope that the essential
characteristic of hfe on earth is Progress, the hope that burst
into flower about the time of the French Revolution, would
appear to be stricken at its root. What real ground is there
for hope if there is nothing to indicate an immanent purpose
in the universe ? Bhnd accident and the sheer struggle for
life among creatures competing for the chance of a precarious
MODERN PROBLEMS 813
existence are, at bottom, the forces that have made the world.
That, at least, is the natural inference, and it was drawn by
many. Further, an uncritical application of the principle to
the pecuhar problems of man in a self-conscious society, led to
fresh arguments for race and class domination, for ruthless com-
petition, and for incessant war. But a wholly different turn
could be given to the evolutionary hj'pothesis if it was held
that Lamarck, after all, was on the right track, and that,
underlying natural selection and the struggle for life, there
was a real tendency in organisms themselves to produce
higher forms, meaning by higher those that gave more scope
for intelligence, beauty, and love. The moral effort of man
and the gradual flowering of culture out of savagery would
then take their places as processes in harmony with the
fundamental trend of things towards the better.
This, the xdew of hope, is the one that has tended to prevail
in our modern world. As such, it might almost be called the
distinctive rehgion of our time, all the more significant because
it revives, possibly with the added weight given by modern
science, that old behef in formative impulses struggling up
through chaos into ordered freedom, the belief that we saw
dominated so much of Greek thought and influenced so pro-
foundly the mediaeval mind. But if it is a rehgion, it is one
crossed by doubt. Is the process, even if upward, really towards
perfection and permanence ? Or, as the Greeks themselves
dreaded, is it destined in time to reverse itself and recur to
the original formlessness ? There are speculations of cosmic
physics that reinforce the prospect of such a desolating end ;
suns grow cold, and physical energy tends to be dissipated
into positions where no activity is possible unless an impact
from without disturbs the quiescent frame. This double
outlook towards growth and final decay was actually accepted
in the views of Herbert Spencer, who outlined a concep-
tion of the whole cosmos developing from a primitive
nebulous " homogeneity " into a fully-articulated and
harmonious system, but a system doomed to sink back again
into the undifferentiated sameness from which it sprang.
The ultimate conclusion here is gloomy enough, but it did
314 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
not bite on the age. It was an age after all of general
buoyancy, it was preoccupied with questions of immediate
practice and discovery, distrusting all speculation concern-
ing ultimate issues. Without asking whither a real faith in
continuous development led the mind, or whether it could be
reasonably accepted without a further faith in the spiritual
as completing and transcending the physical, the nineteenth
century took the belief in Progress through Evolution for the
cardinal article of its creed. That belief was the mainspring
of numberless movements for reform, political, economic,
educational, throughout England, France, Germany, Italy,
Russia. How far, we may ask once more, did the results of
the nineteenth century and the years that followed it justify
such hope and faith ?
CHAPTER XLI I I
THE NINETEENTH CENTURY AND RECENT
DEVELOPMENTS
(F. S. Marvin)
THE period from 1832 to the present time, though
crowded with world-events and developments of
thought of the most far-reaching kind, has yet certain
persistent features which enable us to treat it summarily in one
survey and give us some indication of a common direction.
We take 1832, the date of our own first Reform Act. But it
will be noticed at once that 1830, which is the corresponding
date in France, has much the same significance. In each case
an end was reached of the reaction which followed the French
Revolution and the Napoleonic wars. The forces of reform
which had been penned up for thirty years from fear of revolu-
tion, began to play again. In both countries democracy began
to take on a definite shape and an authority which have never
been seriously threatened since. In each case the elevation of
the middle-class was the first step. In England the stages are
clear and unbroken. In 1867 the franchise was extended to
the working classes in the towns, in 1884 to the agricultural
labourers, in 1918 to women and to a large number — practically
the whole — of the remaining adult men. In France, after the
middle-class monarchy of Louis Philippe and the short second
Republic, the second Empire makes a temporary break. But
this interval in democratic power was more apparent than
real. Napoleon III came in as the result of a plebiscite ; his
tenure was short and always precarious and he disappeared,
unregretted, at the first serious external check.
315
316 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
The democratic lead of the two Western European powers
gives in poHtics, as in so much else, the keynote of the tendency
in other civilized states. All have now become, nominally at
least, democratic. It might be maintained, perhaps, that the
example of the greatest Republic, farther West, counted for
most in this development. But the United States, in their
comparative isolation and with their freedom from restrictive
traditions, though powerful by example, had less influence in
practice. In Europe more difficult problems had to be faced,
and France and England, since their final and reconciling
struggle over Napoleon, have faced them in common. This
was the case in the first Entente under Louis Philippe, it was
again the case at the Crimean War when the affairs of the
Near East first came under united European cognizance, it
has come to a decisive issue in the Great War and the League
of Nations which follows.
It is impossible in this short chapter to trace the growth of
the other democracies which now practically occupy the whole
surface of the globe. But one or two cases are typical of
others and illustrate some especial point. In Italy we see the
intimate connexion between the democratic spirit and the
sense of nationality, Italy made herself, as the liberators
predicted. The national consciousness, finding appropriate
instruments in Mazzini, Garibaldi, and Cavour, ensured her at
the same time freedom from external rule and democratic
government within. The House of Piedmont was accepted
as the Royal House, partly in gratitude for its services, partly
as the safest form of a hereditary Presidency. In Germany
the want of previous political experience led to the postpone-
ment of a popular constitution which seemed possible at
Frankfort in 1848. The training in combination and self-
government which the people needed was furnished under
the Empire by the growth of Socialism. It was Socialism of a
moderate type which disciplined the working classes in the
last three decades, and when the crash came in 1918 which
removed the imperialistic government, it was the socialists who
succeeded to power and who are now preserving the unity of
the State in face of grave difficulties on both extremes.
RECENT DEVELOPMENTS 317
There is in fact no doubt of the triumph of democracy in
Western and Central Europe, The Great War removed all
the autocratic rulers, and has set up in the new States created
by the Peace Treaty democracies of a more complete and
sociahstic character than any which preceded it.
The other type of democracy about which it is more difficult
to generahze or predict is that which has arisen, increasingly
in recent years, through imitation of the West. Japan, the
first example, we know and respect for her activity and stable
power. One awaits with hope, but less certainty, the demo-
cratic evolution of China, as a great united State. In India
we have ourselves to supervise the experiment. Persia,
Arabia, Syria, Egypt, all are inspired by the same ambition.
In each case there is the double problem, the want of self-
governing institutions of long standing within the State, and
the relation — tutelary, mandatory or protective — in which
each stands to some European power estabhshed within its
borders.
It is this relation which brings us to the second great political
and social fact of recent years.
Side by side with the spread of democracy in Europe has
gone the spread of European power and culture throughout the
world. It is true that the earhest pioneers of Europe in other
lands went under feudal or monarchical patronage. The
Crusades were thus organized. Columbus sailed under the
flag of Ferdinand and Isabella. Jacques Cartier reported to
Francis I, as Drake to Ehzabeth. But the expansion, from
the Crusades onwards, was in fact a popular one. Europe
began to overflow phj'sically just as its mind began to find
fresh fields for conquest. Thus the nineteenth century, and
especially the latter part of it, is the period of the greatest
geographical and colonial expansion, just as it is of scientific
and political activity.
Two painful and detrimental results followed from this
otherwise admirable exhibition of human enterprise and
endurance. One was the competition, at first open, and
keenly enjoyed, between the rival explorers and settlers of
different nations. The other was the effect, often completely
318 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
disastrous, always dangerous, of the Western settler on the
more primitive peoples whom he disturbed. Both of these
effects have a long story ; each is a strong factor in the
international settlement which the world has just been
compelled to make in the League of Nations. Rivalry in
colonies and trade divided Holland and England in the
seventeenth century, France and England in the eighteenth,
Germany and England in the nineteenth. In the eighteenth
it was so potent a cause of strife that some historians — though
no doubt wrongly — have treated it as the leading motive in
the period. In the nineteenth and twentieth it contributed
largely to the outbreak of the Great War. The effects, harm-
ful and otherwise, of European expansion on less progressive
people, are a subject still requiring deep and extensive study :
it is one of the greatest topics in history.
One result, however, of these two dangers — the competition
among the European nations themselves and the treatment of
weaker people — became more and more apparent towards the
end of the nineteenth century. Men awoke to the need of
much more careful dealings and agreement between nations,
and, above all, to the duty of recognizing a higher law than
their own selfish interests in exploiting the earth.
It may seem strange to make this claim for an age which
ended in the greatest of all wars, and in any case it must not
be supposed that the principles involved were quite new ideas ;
both can, no doubt, be traced back for ages. But it is un-
doubtedly true that more frequent intercourse, the needs of
commerce, and the dangers of war led steadily throughout the
nineteenth century to a network of international relations
being formed, dealing with all manner of subjects — posts,
sanitation, commerce, treatment of native races, etc. — and
forming a basis for the Hague Conference in 1899 and the
League of Nations in 1919. A great deal of this arose from
simple necessity ; a great deal — including all the arbitration
treaties — was inspired by the desire to avoid wars. For
arbitration between nations, as well as the making of per-
manent agreements, increased greatly during this period. The
expansion of the West, however, involved the interests of the
RECENT DEVELOPMENTS 319
whole world as well as of the European nations themselves.
This was recognized more and more clearly and generally as
the century wore on. Isolated thinkers, especially rehgious
men like Las Casas at the time of the Conquistadores or the
Quakers in North America, had long striven for the more
humane ideal. But from the end of the eighteenth century
onwards the ideal of humanity and of trusteeship was inscribed
on the banners of all progressive nations. If they fell away
from, it — and they often did — it was not from general ignorance
but from passion. The wrong was recognized and sometimes
punished.
The best landmark for the growth of humanity in expan-
sion, before the inauguration of the League of Nations, is the
Brussels Conference of 1890. A previous conference at Berhn
in 1884 had secured freedom of trade for the competing nations
in the basins of the Congo and the Niger. This was the
obvious interest of business. But in 1889 Lord Salisbury,
through the Belgian Government, again called the Powers
together to consider questions relating to the slave trade in
Africa. Now the motive was humanitarian. The general Act
of the Conference, agreed to by all and issued in 1890, declared
that the purpose of the Powers was to " put an end to the
crimes and devastations engendered by the traffic in African
slaves, to protect effectively the aboriginal populations of
Africa, to ensure for that vast continent the benefits of peace
and civihzation."
A worthy aim, but not beyond what the dictates of humanity
would impose upon a united Western Civihzation dealing with
the weaker and less civilized.
The League of Nations, with its mandates, is the next great
step after this. It aims at developing and providing a per-
manent machinery for the purposes of the Brussels Conference,
just as on the international side it develops and makes
permanent the work of the Hague Conferences and the Hague
Tribunal. Europe, as a political, social, and intellectual unity,
had since the Reformation lost sight of the common forces
which gave it birth. But these were growing all the time
under other forms. International Law, recognized as such
320 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
since the seventeenth century, has its roots in Rome, but
spreads its branches over all the world. Science, and its
apphcations to industry and transport, have co-operated in
the same three centuries to bring mankind more closely
together. A deeper and more widely diffused sense of a
common humanity and a common duty is pervading the
Churches and bringing them also into a possible concord. All
these, more purely spiritual motives, have concurred with
the sheer necessities of trade and self-preservation to make a
world-organization the natural issue, not only or even primarily
of the war but of the whole historical evolution which preceded
it. The war shook from the tree the fruit which had long
been ripening.
There are many other aspects of world co-operation which
claim attention in this last period of European history, beside
the two which took the leading place in the organization of
the League. Another, the industrial, has made for itself a
special and a very active branch. It has been clear for over
a hundred years that a political democracy must carry with it
such regulations of industry as will enable every citizen to act
as a free man and enjoy the happiness and opportunities of
life. This industrial organization of the State has proceeded
rapidly in recent years, through trade unions, combinations of
employers, trade boards and councils promoted by the State,
as well as by a mass of factory legislation. Some thinkers
even look forward to national Councils representing all the
citizens by their professions, as parliaments, assembUes, etc.,
represent them territorially. No doubt experiments of that
kind will be tried. But this side of national life has also its
international bearing. From the sixties onwards men hke
Marx have striven to organize the working classes of all nations
in one body, and, though his, the earliest International, failed,
we see at the present moment three rival " Internationals "
competing for the allegiance of the workers. The " Inter-
national Labour Bureau of the League of Nations," perhaps its
most flourishing department, aims at levelling up the con-
ditions of labour all over the world. It proposes to bring the
pressure of a united world to bear on the backward and
RECENT DEVELOPMENTS 821
recalcitrant nation which tolerates a standard below that
generally agreed on. Only thus can the risk of levelHng down
be surely avoided ; only by a united and world-conscious
working class can world-peace be secured.
Science, even more than labour, is an international activity,
and its products in industry as weU as in healing, hygiene, and
education, are, or should be, of international application.
The war, with its stimulus to scientific invention of a special
kind, has created a wholesome alarm that, unless we take
counsel together, men may soon find themselves possessed of
forces so deadly that civilization might easily be \vrecked and
mankind destroyed wholesale in a fit of madness. It is a
real danger, but not a new one. From the eighteenth century
onward man's mechanical genius has outstripped his moral
powers. He made money by the steam-engine almost as
quickly as he wished, and before he knew how to use it for the
good of the workers. Hence the slums of our cities and the
unthinkable horrors of child-labour. Our present command
over unlimited powers of destruction, by poison gases, by
aeronautics, and by explosives, creates an even worse outlook,
if the power and the wiU to combine for other purposes lags
behind. For nature as revealed by human skill presents
problems which will task to the utmost the resources of
our wisdom and our goodwill. To hasten the development of
the latter must appear, to every thoughtful mind aware of the
facts, as the most urgent task imposed on the race in the
interests of its own preservation and prosperity.
The story of science is not, however, a tragic episode in
the human comedy, but the most encouraging, if looked at
broadly and continuously, and without a pessimistic twist.
With deadly potentiahties, it offers immense realized good
and possibilities for the future beyond the dreams of the past.
We can only here notice one or two of these broader aspects
which have become prominent in recent years. The first and
the most congenial to our general subject is the essentially
social and international character of all scientific work.
There has never been a time when scientific discovery has
not depended on the intercourse, not only of individual minds,
21
822 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
but of different races, Greeks with Egyptians and Babylonians,
Arabs with Europeans, Itahans with ancient Greeks. The
last hundred years have accentuated this and made science
and learning appear conspicuously as the most substantial
basis of international unity. It is one of the striking contra-
dictions of which our nature is full, and which it is our task
to reconcile, that science, containing the possibilities some-
times realized, of wholesale international destruction, is also
that department of our activity in which national and other
distinctions are least felt. Every great step in its recent
development has been shared, by two or three of the leading
nations in the world. Carnot, Joule, Mayer, and Helmholtz
all contributed essential elements to the doctrine of the
Conservation of Energy which was the chief physical law
reached in the middle of the nineteenth century (1848).
Lamarck, Treviranus, Darwin, are three names from a host,
especially of French, German, and English thinkers, which
built up the greatest of all biological conceptions in the latter
part of the century. Einstein now takes his place among the
giants of mathematical physics whose birth in Italy, France,
Germany, England or any other land, has been quite irrelevant
to their fame or work. The fact is of course obvious and well
recognized, and every one knows too that, though men of
science and professors may occasionally lapse, yet normally
they are much more united in mutual respect and mutual help
than any other class.
The latter part of our period is distinguished by the number
of international associations which grew up naturally to
promote some common scientific aim and strengthen this
feeling of comradeship in a great human effort. Such con-
ferences are the counterpart in modern times of the oecumeni-
cal councils in the Catholic world. It will be noted that
conference for political purposes and other practical matters
has also in quite recent days become increasingly common
and useful, 1 side by side with the League of Nations. Con-
ference is the order of the day, and science set the example.
* Sir Maurice Hankey, " Diplomacy by Conference," " Round
Table," April, 192 1.
RECENT DEVELOPMENTS 323
But we Jiave to look at the matter of scientific work even
more than at its place of origin to estimate its social nature
and its bearing on the unity of mankind. Four groups of
discoveries, special hues of work, are pre-eminent in the last
seventy or eighty years. The first is of those connected with
the doctrine of evolution. Biology became in this period the
predominant branch of science. The second is of those
connected with the conservation of energy. The third arises
from spectral analysis. The fourth, which quite recently has
enjoyed special prominence, concerns the nature of matter
and its connexion with light, electricity, and other forms of
wave-energy. The second, third, and fourth groups come
constantly more closely together and form the physical
sciences as distinguished from the first, the biological or
animate.
Now it is no idle fancy, but the deepest conclusion ap-
proached by the workers in both the main departments of
science, that in spite of the enormously increased number and
complexity of the observed facts, the tendency is always
towards discovering links and identities between phenomena
previously regarded as distinct. The spectroscope, greatest
revealer of wonders to the age, brought sun, stars, and planets
into one chemical system and taught us the similarity in the
structure of all the known material universe. It was thus
the completion of the work done by the telescope in the
seventeenth century. As Galileo and Newton had identified
the mechanics of the heavenly bodies with that of mass and
motion on the earth, so the dark lines of Kirchhoff and
Fraunhofer, when fully interpreted, showed matter of like
molecular nature, evolving at different stages throughout the
depths of space.
This was the most imposing feat of human insight and
ingenuity. But parallel with it on the mathematical side
went the gradual extension of one scheme of thought, ex-
pressed in differential equations, to all the types of wave-
motion into which the phenomena of hglit, heat, magnetism,
and electricity had been reduced. Here Clerk-Maxwell took
up the work of Lagrange and by interpreting mathematically
324 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
the electrical discoveries of Faraday, gave mankind the
highest exact generahzations yet reached of physical pheno-
mena. It was another and still more profound act of unifica-
tion, educed by the power of abstract thought.
On the side of the sciences of life the progress was not
widely different, though the gulf between animate and
inanimate remains unpassed. Research has constantly traced
further into the realm of the living the laws of physics and
chemistry ; it has not yet eliminated the distinctive quality
of the living thing ; it has rather emphasized it. And this
quality of life consists itself largely in a certain unity of action.
One of the greatest of our living biologists has summed up
his conclusions on the whole subject in a recent book : ^
" (i) Living creatures are individualities standing apart from
things in general, and not exhaustively described in mechanis-
tic terms ; (2) Their lives abound in behaviour with a
psychical aspect ; (3) There is in Animate Nature a preva-
lence of orderly systematization, balance and smooth working ;
(4) There is a pervasive beauty both hidden and revealed ;
(5) A very large proportion of the time and energy at the
disposal of organisms is devoted to activities which make not
for self-maintenance and self-aggrandisement, but for the
continuance and welfare of the race. In fact, we find in
Animate Nature far-reaching correspondences to the ideals
of the True, the Beautiful and the Good."
This is an inspiring and a hopeful view. The conception of
Animate Nature as a whole, based on the laws of physical,
inanimate nature but rising above them by laws, qualities,
impulses of its own, has been elaborated in this period, and
owes its unity to the doctrine of evolution, the most charac-
teristic, scientific, and philosophic achievement of the age.
In Professor Thomson's treatment we see this dominating
idea — of life as a whole — worked out with all the detail of
modern research. " Each living thing is an individual, i.e.
a complete unity in itself and yet each shares in the common
activities which in their highest form we associate with the
human race. Such a view gives both a soHd basis and an
» Professor J. Arthur Thomson, " The System of Animate Nature."
RECENT DEVELOPMENTS 825
infinite hope to mankind. The basis is natural law and a
progress from simpler to higher forms throughout the living
world as an incessant and eternal fact. The hope is the
further reahzation of the ideals of Truth, Beauty and Good-
ness of which elements are to be found at every stage in the
process."
It will be seen at once how close akin this philosophical
idea is to many current notions in the social and political
sphere. Bergson, who chiefly represents it in philosophy, is
acclaimed as a leader by many in active life who follow a line
of free development, vigorous activity, or even " anarchy."
In philosophy and in active life the real issue, forced more
and more into prominence in recent years, is the balance,
somewhere and somehow to be found, between the unre-
stricted play of impulses and notions of every kind, and the
control of the individual by common duties and supreme
ideals.
We have seen, both in politics and in science, the need of
such controlling ideas, and also their gradual emergence.
We have noted the urgency of increasing their force both for
mental breadth and stabihty and for the peaceful progress of
mankind.
Social well-being, education and art, philosophy and
rehgion, all present somewhat similar features. Social wel-
fare falls properly to be mentioned next to science because,
as the heralds of science predicted three hundred years ago,
she has justified herself by the alleviation of suffering and by
the increase both in the length and the healthiness of hfe and
in the number of those who enjoy it.
We can only judge exactly of the progress made in health
and general well-being during the time in which statistics
have been taken and preserved. These begin with the
census which was first taken in the first year of the nineteenth
century. Pubhc registration of births and deaths followed
immediately after the first Reform Act. The Pubhc Health
Act of 1848 coincides with the Chartist demonstration which
was the English equivalent for the French Sociahst Second
Repubhc. This Act constituted a supreme authority for
326 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
Public Health, which, having passed in the interval through
the stage of the " Local Government Board," has just re-
turned, since the War, to its original conception of a " Ministry
of Health."
It will be noticed that the activity of the State in improving
the health of its citizens began, as science itself began, by
making measurements, and these measurements have all
demonstrated an increase in vitahty and a growing triumph
for medicine. The growth of population, if life be a good
thing and the numbers are not sufficient to interfere with its
happiness, is surely a good thing also. The fall in the death-
rate, the almost complete disappearance of certain virulent
diseases and the mitigation of others, are a clear proof of
healthier conditions. One fact alone — the saving of child
life — is sufficient evidence of the greater care and the greater
skill which medical science now demands and public opinion
supports. Doctors had long regarded it as an ideal very
difficult of attainment to bring the death-rate of the first
year of life below one hundred in a thousand. It was
ninety-two in 1916 and last year it was under eighty.
Medicine is the best example of unquestioned progress due
to science, and, partly as a cause and partly as a result of this,
we find medical men the most hopeful of the future and
confident of their powers. Their science is the most perfect
type of accurate and systematic knowledge applied to the
good of man. It has, too, the high merit of encouraging us
to expect similar results in political, social, and economic
matters and to take steps to secure them. For we cannot
divide man's nature into two quite separate and dissimilar
parts and say that to one, viz. health, which is mental as well
as physical, scientific treatment is applicable, but in the
other, i.e. his activities as a citizen, no law can be detected
and no remedial measures are possible. Our comparative
failure in the latter sphere is due, not to any essential differ-
ence in the two cases, but to the fact that we have not yet
apphed our minds with the same zeal and determination to
the task, and the task itself is even more difficult than that
of medicine. Nor must we flatter ourselves that the task of
RECENT DEVELOPMENTS 327
medicine is near its completion : in both regions we are only
beginning our journey, but in medicine we are a little further
ahead.
There have been ample signs recently of increased attention
to economic, social, and international affairs, not from the
point of view of supporting a party or pleading a case, but in
the interest of accurate knowledge, which must be the founda-
tion of any poHcy. Vesalius and the anatomists had to
describe the body truly and Harvey to demonstrate its chief
mechanical law before medicine could be constituted as a
scientific art. Thus side by side with the League of Nations,
the Institute for the Study of International Affairs has arisen,
which aims simply at the study of international problems
without direct advocacy of any kind. So in home affairs
there are schools and courses of study on economic and
social problems at all important educational centres. Twin
difficulties beset them. One is the complexity of the ques-
tions involved, the other, the almost irresistible tendency to
bias. In the 'forties and 'fifties David Urquhart was keeping
in being one hundred and fifty Associations, mostly of working
men, for the Study of Foreign Affairs. They were inspired
by a passion for international justice and peace ; but they
flickered out, partly from want of a sufficient intellectual
foundation in the members, partly because their leader, with
all his high ideals, was himself the victim of violent pre-
possessions on the subjects of his study.
It is not that truth and justice are unattainable either in
theory or practice in human affairs, but that we need a
breadth and vigour of mind above the average to master the
complexity of the problem with its infinite details and to
reach the calm height from which they may be surveyed.
We reach therefore the educational aspect of recent pro-
gress. Assuming that our nature as a whole is capable of
rising to the height that its advance on special lines demands,
how is this to be secured and what has been done in these last
years by education of all kinds to attain it ?
Note that education in this sense is a far wider thing than
the State schools and institutions which tend more and more
328 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
in ordinary parlance to monopolize the term. It must here
at least be thought of as the deliberate effort of the more
mature mind to train the less developed ; it must include all
collective action of such kinds, and even more than this, the
action of individuals over themselves in stretching out to a
state of greater power and control over their own natures in
the interest of a higher ideal. It will be understood at once
therefore that education in this, the fullest sense, is sequent
and not antecedent to advances of the human mind in making
discoveries or altering the constitution of society. The
pioneer explores and gains fresh hght ; h criticizes old
institutions and makes experiments in living. The educative
process follows and aims at raising the whole man or the
whole society to another level and accommodating its habitual
response to new conditions and new stimulus.
This has been the case in the great social and intellectual
changes which we have already noticed in this chapter. The
democratic basis of government had virtually estabhshed
itself in the West before the attempt began to educate all
citizens to fill the position assigned to them in the new scheme
of things. We may date this beginning in France and England
from the 'thirties of the last century — Germany was earlier
still — and each step in the extension of democracy has been
followed by an extension of public education. The School
Board Act of 1870 followed closely on the Reform Act of
1867. The Fisher Act of 1918 coincides with the latest and
widest extension of the franchise. So with the growth of
science and the introduction of science into the ordinary
curriculum of all schools. All the greatest achievements in
scientific discovery and the formulation of results had been
settled and recognized before " science " as a subject made
its appearance in school time-tables. We are now trjang to
digest into some sort of coherent and manageable mass the
huge accretion of knowledge due to recent research, not with
a view of teaching it all, but of so preparing a foundation for
the young mind that it may enter later into the inheritance
of the race, and become a full citizen of the nation and the
world.
RECENT DEVELOPMENTS 329
One is apt in such matters to see rather what one wants to
see than the actual facts ; yet there can be httle doubt that
in Europe and the farther West the determination has steadily
gro^^^l, and is now accepted by the governing minds in each
community, that all young people should be as fully instructed
as they are capable of being, and that it is part of the business
of the State to assist, but not to control, such instruction, and
to see that all attain at least such a minimum of knowledge
as will enable them to go farther and to act intelligently as
citizens. This is a new conclusion since the French Revolu-
tion, and to put it into force, both by voluntary and state
agencies, is taxing, and will long tax, to the utmost the
resources and the ingenuity of us all. One may discern
emerging in the slowly forming system of education which
we are trying to apply the same great ideas and principles
which have appeared in European thought as a whole in the
years preceding. Education is to be a freer thing than
it was, giving scope to individual differences and initiative
and imposing a less rigid authority and a less uniform routine.
Herein we see the new conception of abundant and varied
hfe. But this hfe is not to be unrestrained. It is to be
subordinated, through a self-discipline suggested by more
fully instructed minds, to an ideal of the general good with
which we have to learn to identify our own. Herein is an old
conception of sei-v'ice, newly adapted to our modern hfe, with
a wider content than that of the old rehgious thinkers, and
therefore more difficult to make as deep and intense as
theirs.
And, for the content of the instruction, while we are here
still in the experimental stage, one seems to see it turning
gradually to another great conception of the last hundred
years, that of development. The teaching of histor}^ as an
integral part of education, appeared in our schools side by
side with the spread of democracy in the state. The former
was a necessary foundation to the latter and a corrective to
its possible excesses. To gain a firm footing in the present,
and to look with hope towards the future, it is necessary to
be conscious of progress achieved in the past and to be guided
330 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
by its lessons. The Arnolds, father and son, were for us in
England two of the main channels for this spirit of education.
Haply, the river of Time
As it grows, as the towns on its marge
Fling their wavering lights
On a wider, statelier stream —
May acquire, if not the calm
Of its early mountainous shore.
Yet a solemn peace of its own.
And the width of the waters, the hush
Of the grey expanse where he floats
Freshening its current and spotted with foam
As it draws to the Ocean, may strike
Peace to the soul of the man on its breast —
As the pale waste widens around him.
As the banks fade dimmer away.
As the stars come out, and the night wind
Brings up the stream
Murmurs and scents of the infinite sea.
It is seen then, at each step in our summary analysis, how
Europe and the West, the vanguard of man's march to con-
quest of nature and of himself, has after unexampled triumphs,
conflicts and growth, come in the latest years to the conscious-
ness of a supreme need for stability, reconcihation and hopeful
harmony, both in the individual mind and in society at large.
Wlien looking at work accomplished in almost every sphere,
there is no cause for discouragement : there is abundant skill,
eagerness and activity. But the highest qualities — the power
of seeing things whole, the calmness of long views, the per-
sistence of great efforts, the confidence of hfelong devotion —
are at present less with us. Men sacrificed themselves freely
and cheerfully in the war, but the world, as a whole, is less
sure of anything, even of the rightness of their sacrifice, than
they were of themselves. We need to collect our thoughts.
Art and literature in the latter part of the last century as
compared with the earlier, give evidence of this. They are
full of deep thought and passionate feeling ; they often have
great beauty of expression and are ready to explore new tracts
both of form and of experience ; but they do not attain the
RECENT DEVELOPMENTS 331
grandeur of effort and the comprehensiveness of vision which
were hoped for and sometimes reached by the earUer artists.
We have seen no fellow to Beethoven or to Wordsworth in
the later years.
The famous Preface to the Second Edition of the " Lyrical
Ballads " in 1800 gives Wordsworth's high hopes for the
future of poetry, and the sequel explains in some measure the
nature and the causes of our disappointment. " The man of
science seeks truth as a remote and unknown benefactor ;
the poet, singing a song in which all human beings join with
him, rejoicing in the presence of truth as our visible friend
and hourly companion. Poetry is the breath and finer spirit
of all knowledge. , . . Emphatically may it be said of the
Poet as Shakespeare hath said of man ' that he looks before
and after.' ... If the time should ever come when what is
now called science, thus famiharized to men, shall be ready to
put on, as it were, a form of flesh and blood, the poet will lend
his divine spirit to aid the transfiguration and will welcome
the Being thus produced as a dear and genuine inmate of the
household of man."
It cannot be said that this time has yet come, though
experiments have been made, and occasional fine things said,
and an air of philosophic reflection has come upon much of
the poetry and some of the prose fiction since Wordsworth's
time. The " transfiguration " has not been accomplished.
Knowledge in Uterature, as well as in its mechanical applica-
tions, has broken through the limits which would make it, for
the present, the " dear and genuine inmate " of the house.
It has still to be assimilated by education and tamed by
morahty before the ideal of the poet — a true and necessary
ideal — comes near fulfilment. It is a work of synthesis,
parallel to that which needs accompHshment and is being
accompUshed, in the social life of most civiHzed states and in
the international fife of the whole world.
The great writers of a hundred years ago, Goethe, and, a
little later, Victor Hugo and Carlyle, had a titanic power of
consuming the material which history, art, and science offered
for their genius to transform. In recent years the material
332 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
has grown immeasurably, but the transforming genius has not
appeared in equal force. The new direction of the century,
however, is clearly marked in all the leading writers — the
zeal for social reform, the humanitarian passion, in Dickens ;
the influence of science, the new philosophy of history, in
George Eliot ; the rise of women, the zest of life and nature, in
George Meredith. While from Russia, the mysterious country
which brings a breath of the East into European life, we have
in her modern school of novelists perhaps the most perfect
approach to the ideal of prose fiction in this period. They,
especially Tolstoy, Turgeniev, and Dostoievsky, have a wider
sweep of sympathy than any of their Western contemporaries
and a marvellous imaginative power which makes their
characters and incidents pieces of real life. And in them all
there is that sure appreciation of greatness and goodness in
the persons they portray, which is essential if art of any kind
is to raise and fortify human nature.
A fresh and growing sense of beauty is one of the many
hopeful signs of recent days. In such things there has been
unquestioned gain since the early Victorian era. Ruskin and
Morris stand out as prophets of a new spirit of joy in beauty
and care in securing it. But they do not stand alone. In
the last century there has been a general turning back from
the conventionally approved and ornamental, to natural
beauty and simpHcity of taste, to the Primitives in art and
building and living, as against the more artificial and imitative
constructions of the Renascence and since.
In some cases the turn has been so great that the very
element of beauty itself has been called in question, and men
have advocated and attempted the wildest form of expression
in the belief that individual expression, if it be genuine and
deeply felt, is the one essential part. In this, as in so many
aspects of recent thought, some sort of social synthesis is the
corrective needed ; and the remedy is happily growing in the
same soil near by.
France and Italy have taken the lead lately in the philosophy
of art and science and history. From them have come the
Impressionists, the Futurists, and other innovators in painting ;
RECENT DEVELOPMENTS 333
from them, too, the most prominent Hving figures in philo-
sophy— Bergson and Croce. With the death of Wundt in
Germany the other day the last of the synthetic thinkers of
the Victorian age passed away — the kindred of Kant, Hegel,
Comte, and Spencer. The new synthesis is being sought by
the co-operation of many minds, and we shall find in it the
same elements as in society at large — vigorous life, experiment,
and free expression on the one hand, and a growing sense of
social unity and historical continuity on the other. It is in
fact from the reconciliation of these two tendencies that
salvation may be won. Bergson and Croce, though by no
means sufficient to complete this work, are typical of its chief
factors. Bergson has expressed more forcibly and pictur-
esquely than anyone else the doctrine of the creation of living
forms and thought by a persistent force. Life is the creator
of hfe and the fullest human thought is the most perfectly
free. Croce, steeped in history, as Bergson in biology, sees
all present events as the unroUing of the human past and all
history as contemporary history. Neither gains much for
his system from the great structure of physical science, built
up by the action and reaction of the mind and external nature
since the beginning of thought. To Bergson indeed advance
consists in constantly breaking down the systems which
thought of the mathematical kind is constantly building up.
Yet in France and in Italy the school of positive, or strictly
scientific, thinkers is strong also. Durkheim, a recent loss,
was in his time the leader in Europe of the new-found study
of sociology, and laboured abundantly to demonstrate the
evolution of ideas and institutions from simpler elements by
ascertainable law.
Bergson and Durkheim thus represent the two poles which
divide contemporary thought and which many well-balanced
thinkers in all Western lands are endeavouring to bring into
harmonious relation. France has, perhaps, done most in
this role,^ and it was a Frenchman who, just over a hundred
years ago, saw more clearly than any of his contemporaries
the hne which rehgious development was to take in the
1 See Parodi, " La Philosophie Contemporaine en France."
334 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
succeeding century. In 1797 Joseph de Maistre declared,
that " every true philosopher must choose between these two
hypotheses, either that a new rehgion is about to arise or that
Christianity will renew its youth in some extraordinary
manner." He saw the need and the possibility of either
event ; he threw himself strongly into the support of the
second ; he did not contemplate the joint arrival of both.
Yet " the true philosopher " now reviewing European thought
would surely conclude that something of both had occurred.
Wesley, whose long life overlaps that of de Maistre, had initi-
ated, in the eighteenth century, a spiritual revival, precursor to
that which stirred the English Church in the nineteenth ; and
the Tractarian movement was in turn inspired by the return
to the past which was one of the leading notes of the Romantics.
Later in the century, when the notion of development became
predominant, it played its part within the Churches as well
as without. Christianity, which to the typical Revolutionist
was an effete and encumbering thing, ready to be cut down,
took on fresh life, as de Maistre foresaw, and became to the
evolutionist mind the growth of ages, developing as Western
society itself developed, with its Greek and Oriental origins,
its Roman organization, its democratic revolution and its
final ideals of freedom and humanity in the nineteenth
century.
In our own days the latter features become clearer and
clearer, and all the Churches are looking out for means of
union with one another similar to those which are to link the
world in the League of Nations. We cannot here even glance
at the questions of doctrine involved ; the question of vitality
and general spirit can alone be touched on. The vitahty of
rehgion we may not judge only by the church statistics of
estabhshed bodies : we must look outside to the vast and
growing numbers of looser organizations — the Adult Schools,
the Student Christians, the Christian Endeavour members —
the multitudes enrolling themselves in a new and freer
spirit under the Christian banner. " Authority " in the old
CathoUc sense they have not. But they differ from those
who cultivate a rehgious sense without the Chiistian name.
RECENT DEVELOPMENTS 335
in looking back to a definite religious tradition and a personal
Divine and human Founder. If this divides them from the
hosts of others, Buddhists, Confucians, Mahometans, who
have another tradition and name another prophet, it is a
source of strength and unity within their own ranks. Their
universal purpose is service, control and devotion of them-
selves to the interests of others, and in all cases they have
no limit to the sphere of their benevolent activity but man-
kind. Thej^ rank also the cultivation of the mind as part of
their human duty, and thus come into relation with the
general intellectual movement of the age.
But it is impossible to ignore the large number of those
who would not subscribe to any creed or accept any one
Superhuman Teacher, and yet are acting in their own way a
religious part. Men of this kind, Positivists, Ethicists, and
the like, definitely organized in religious bodies, in any
Western country, are very few, and many would deny that
in this shape a " new religion," as de Maistre imagined
possible, has arisen. But to the broader view it will seem
right to extend the term " rehgious " to all those who have
a definite non-selfish object to which they devote their lives,
and in this sense Socialism, Science, or Art may become a
religion.
Are there not some clear common elements which have
become prominent in all forms of true rehgious activity in
these later years ? It will be accepted by most men that
there are, and that they are identical with the leading
tendencies in general thought and hfe ; for the real reHgion
of any age is the synthesis which binds its life and thought
together. In our time this new synthesis is in the making,
but we may already discern some of its traits. It is social
and human in the widest sense, looking to an immemorial
social growth for the sanction of its behefs and its precepts,
and to the good of all mankind for the object of its action.
Such a basis is common ground for all current belief, whether
Christian, Theistic, Pantheistic, or Humanist, All current
Western rehgion includes also some form of a belief in progress,
for all rehgious men in the West now beheve that either by
836 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
Divine will or human activity, or both combined, the world
has grown to be something better than it was, and is capable
of still further betterment. But to this belief rehgion of any
order adds, that the betterment is conditional on effort, and
that men must make this effort in accordance with the leading
of Something outside and above the individual will. It may
be the prompting of a personal God ; it may be the immanent
working of a Divine Will ; it may be the Human Spirit rising
from the abysses of an infinite past. However he presents
it to himself, the religious man finds somewhere beyond his
own will a greater thing to which he bows, and by the strength
of which he grows himself in stature and promise.
In la sua volontade e nostra face. Modern rehgion accepts
and re-interprets the words of Dante. Our peace is the end —
harmony, that is, between our desires and the dictates of
reason within us, and harmony without between all who make
up the human community. And this peace is to be found by
the exercise of a will, which is not merely individual, but is
part of, and subordinate to, a greater will, the greatest and
highest which each type of rehgious mind can conceive.
In such a conception — action towards a common harmony
and good, devotion to, and guidance by, the highest known
inspiration — it would seem that all forms of religion in the
modern Western world are being gradually reconciled.
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CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 341
A.D. A.D.
306- Constantine the Great, Emperor. He recognizes c. 306-
337 Christianity. He founds Constantinople. 337
The Goths cross the Danube. 376
Theodosius the Great, Emperor. 379-
395
Virtual division of the Empire into East and West. 395
Alaric the Visigoth captures Rome. 410
fl. 413 St. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo.
Attila the Hun. c. 451-
453
Genseric the Vandal. 455
End of the Roman Empire in the West. 476
IL MEDI/EVAL
c. 450 St. Patrick converts Ireland.
Teuton Franks settle in Gaul ; Teuton Angles, c. 450-
Saxons and Jutes in Britain. 500
Theodoric the Ostrogoth in Italy. 489-
526
Justinian revises and consolidates the Roman 527-
Law. His generals drive the Goths out of Italy. 565
c. 450- Bloom of Byzantine Art.
550
b. 480 St. Benedict.
d. 543
The Lombards invade Italy. 568
Pope Gregory the Great. 590-
604
c. 597 St. Augustine, the Benedictine monk, lands in
Kent.
622 Mohammed's flight from Mecca to Medina (the
HSglra).
The Arabs conquer in Asia Minor, Persia, Africa, c. 632-
Spain, but are defeated in Gaul by Charles 732
RIartel, the Frank,
c. 700- They show power in architecture, and begin to
800 study Greek science and philosophy.
768- Charlemagne supports the Pope against the 768-
814 Lombards. He is crowned Emperor at Rome 814
(800). He fosters learning and poetrj'.
Treaty of Verdun, dividing his dominions into 843
three parts,
c. 600- New beginnings of Heroic Poetry. Traces in the
850 Elder Edda, Beowulf, the Nibclungenlied, the
saga of Deirdre, the Chanson de Roland.
Definite emergence of Feudalism. c. 800-
900
Raids of the Northmen in France, Germany, the c. 800-
British Isles, Sicily, etc. 1000
Traditional date of Rurik the Norseman in 862
Russia.
342 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
A.D. A.D.
871- Alfred the Great. His work for freedom and 871-
901 culture. 901
Henry the Fowler King over the German Duchies. 918
Otto the Great crowned Emperor at Rome. 962
Hugh Capet in Paris. 987
The Normans settle in Sicily. c. 1040-
1090
William the Norman in England. 1066-
1087
Quarrel between Hildebrand (Gregory VH) and 1075-
Henry IV, Emperor. 1085
The First Crusade. 1096
Frederick Barbarossa, Emperor. 1152-
1190
National unity in England under Henry H. 1154-
1189
Emergence of the cities as centres of freedom, c. iioo-
Slavery disappearing. 1200
c. 850- First bloom of Mediaeval Architecture : Lombard ;
1200 Byzantine and Romanesque in Italy ; Roman-
esque in France, England, German}^
c. 1075- Literature : Final form of the Chanson de Roland.
1200 The Romances. The Fabliaux. Proven9al
Troubadours. Final form of the Nibelungenlied.
The Minnesingers. ViUehardouin. Icelandic
Sagas.
c. 1 1 00- Arab learning at Cordova.
1200 Averroes.
c. iioo- Christian Theology: Abelard, St. Bernard, St.
1200 Dominic, St. Francis. Innocent III and the
Albigensian " Crusade."
Magna Charta in England. 1215
Mongol-Tartar invasion and subjection of Russia, c. 1224-
1243
c. 1212- Frederick II, Emperor. His struggles with the c. 121 2-
1250 Papacy and the cities. He fosters culture. 1250
Rudolph of Hapsburg, Emperor. Rise of Austria. 1273-
1292
Parliaments of Edward I. 1275-
1295
"Great Privilege" of Aragon. 1283
Philippe IV and the States-General. 1302
Germ of the Swiss Confederation. 1307
The Popes go to Avignon. 1308
c. 1200- Theology and Thought : Albertus Magnus, Thomas
1300 Aquinas, Roger Bacon,
c. 1200- Bloom of Gothic Architecture.
1400
c. 1225- First bloom of Italian Art: Niccolo Pisano,
1350 Cimabue, Giotto.
c. 1275- First bloom of Italian Literature : Dante,
1375 Petrarch, Boccaccio, Marsiglio of Padua (writing
in Latin).
1358
I38i
1338-
1453
1453
1455-
1485
1461-
1483
1477
1462-
1505
c. 1400-
1500
c. 1300-
1500
CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 343
A.D. A.D.
c. 1275- German Mysticism: Eckhard, the Theologia
1375 Germanica. Cf. Jan Ruysbroeck in Flanders,
c. 1300- English Literature: Wycliffe, Chaucer, Langland.
1400
The Peasants' Rising in France.
The Peasants' Rising in England.
The "Hundred Years' War" and
Jeanne d'Arc.
The Turks take Constantinople.
Wars of the Roses in England,
Louis XI re-organizes France.
Mary of Burgundy marries Maximilian of Haps-
burg.
Ivan the Great shakes off the Tartar domination.
Germany without strong central government.
Italy without central government.
Italian despots and their struggles.
Florence and Venice republican.
c. 1375- Literature and Thought. Germany : Thomas k
1500 Kempis, Nicholas of Cues. Invention of Printing.
France : Froissart.Commines, Villon.
England : Malory.
C.I 375- Bloom of Art in Italy (Florence and Venice
1500 leaders): Brunelleschi and early " Renaissance "
building, Donatello, Era Angelico, Masaccio,
Piero della Francesca, Botticelli, Mantegna,
the Bellinis. (Cp. the van Eycks and Memling
in Flanders and the Primitives in France.)
in. RENAISSANCE
c. 1485- Discovery of the New World : Bartolommeo
1525 Diaz, Columbus, Vasco da Gama, Cortez.
Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile. 1471-
Expulsion of the Jews. Revival of the In- 1504
quisition.
Charles V, Emperor. 15 19-
1558
c. 1500- The Reformation : Luther, Zwingli, Erasmus, Sir
1600 Thomas More, Calvin.
The Peasants' Rising in Germany. 1525
The German " Reception " of Roman Law. c. 1475-
1550
French, Spanish and Austrian invasions of Italy, c. 1494-
1559
344 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
A.D. A.D.
c. 1509- England decides for the Reformation (Henry VIII c. 1509-
1603 to Elizabeth). 1603
Ivan the Terrible. Serfdom increases in Russia. 1533-
1584
Wars of Religion m France. Compromise of c. 1559-
Henri IV. 1598
Spanish oppression in the Netherlands. Rise of c. 1559-
the Dutch Republic. 1609
c. 1475- The last bloom of Italian Literature and Art :
1600 Machiavelli, Ariosto, Tasso, Leonardo da Vinci,
Michael Angelo, Giorgione, Titian, Raphael,
Correggio, Tintoretto, Veronese. (Cp. Diirer and
Holbein in Germany, Brueghel in Flanders.)
Palestrina, the king of sixteenth century music.
0. 1500- Renaissance and Reaction in Spain : Ignatius
1600 Loyola, St. Teresa, Cervantes, El Greco,
Servetus.
c. 1500- The Renaissance in France : Rabelais, Marot,
1600 Ronsard, Montaigne, the Huguenot writers.
c. 1550- The Renaissance in England : Spenser, Marlowe,
1625 Shakespeare, Beaumont and Fletcher, Ben
Jonson, Hooker, the translators of the Bible,
Francis Bacon.
English expansion overseas : First charter of East c. 1600-
India Co., Settlement in Virginia, Landing of 1625
Pilgrim Fathers,
c. 1543- The Awakening in Science : Copernicus, Vesalius,
1650 Galileo, Kepler, Harvey.
The Thirty Years' War in Germany. 1618-
1648
Richelieu and Absolutism in France. 1624-
1642
Charles I, the Commonwealth and Cromwell, the 1625-
Restoration, James II and the Revolution. 1688
c. 1625- English Literature and Thought : Donne, Hobbes,
1688 Herrick, Sir Thomas Browne, Milton, Harring-
ton, Jeremy Taylor, Vaughan, George Fox,
Bunyan.
c. 1600- Last bloom of Spanish culture : Calderon, Velaz-
1688 quez. (Cp. the Fleming Rubens and the
Frenchman Poussin.)
c. 1600- Holland : Grotius, Rembrandt.
1688
Louis XIV in France. 1643-
1715
England leads the combination against Louis to 1689-
the Peace of Utrecht. 1713
c. 1600- " The Augustan Age " in French Literature :
1700 Corneille, La Rochefoucauld, La Fontaine,
Pascal, Mme. de Sevigne, Moliere, Saint-Simon,
Racine.
CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 345
IV. MODERN
A.D. A.D.
c. 1600- Advance in Science and Mathematics : Descartes,
1700 Pascal, Boyle, Huygens, Newton, Leibnitz.
c. 1600- Rise of Modern Philosophy: Descartes, Spinoza,
1700 Locke, Leibnitz.
c. 1650- English Literature and Art : Dryden, Christopher
1789 Wren, De Foe, Swift, Congreve, Addison, Pope.
Richardson, Fielding, Johnson, Sterne, Smollett,
Goldsmith. Hogarth, Reynolds, Gainsborough.
Thinkers and Reformers : Berkeley, John Wesley,
Hume, Adam Smith, John Howard, Chatham,
Burke, Gibbon.
c. 1 7 13- Pre-Revolutionary Criticism in France: Montes-
1789 quieu, Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, and the
Encyclopaedists.
c. 1689- Russia under Peter the Great. 1689-1725
1789 Russia under Catherine the Great. 1 729-1 796
1740- Prussia under Frederick the Great. Frederick 1740-
1786 fosters education and culture. 1786
First Partition of Poland. 1772
Expansion of England oversea (from Treaty of c. 1713-
Utrecht to Peace of Paris). 1763
Rise of the United States. Washington and the 1763-
Declaration of Independence. 1776
The French Revolution. 1789-
1795
Rise and Fall of Napoleon. c. 1795-
1815
c. 1700- German music : Bach, Handel, Gluck, Haj'^dn,
1832 Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert.
c. 1 750- German Philosophy and Literature : Kant,
1832 Lessing, Goethe, Schiller, Fichte, Hegel,
c. 1750- Romanticism and Realism in England : Burns,
1832 Blake, Wordsworth, Walter Scott, Coleridge,
Jane Austen, Charles Lamb, Byron, Shelley,
Keats. Jeremy Bentham, Malthus, Carlyle
(young). (For painting see below.)
0. 1760- Advance in Science : Herschel, Laplace, Jenner,
1832 Lavoisier, Volta, Lamarck, Dalton.
Industry in England: Spinning- jennies, power- c. 1760-
looms, new smelting processes, steam-engines, 1832
changes in agriculture; " Industrial Revolution."
Political and Social Changes : c. 1800-
England : Reaction and Reform, " Act of Union " 1918
with Ireland, " Peterloo," Robert Owen's Before
Socialist experiments, Rise of Trades-Unionism, 1870
Reform Bill (1832), Factory Acts, Poor Law,
Beginning of Local Government, Co-operative
Pioneers, Repeal of Corn Laws.
Settlement in Australia, Self-Government in
Canada, Expansion in India, Indian Mutiny,
Dissolution of East India Co.
846 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
A.D. A.D.
Forster's Education Act, Advance of Trades- c. 1870-
Unionism, Extensions of Franchise, Women's 191 8
Movement, Irish Home Rule, Labour Party.
Great expansion overseas (Colonies and Pro-
tectorates) .
The Great War.
France : Reaction, revolt and reform. Return of c. 1815-
the Bourbons and their final expulsion. Utopian 1870
speculations. Second Republic. Louis Napoleon.
War with Prussia. Commune. Third Republic.
Payment of German indemnity. Advance of c. 1870-
Socialist Party. Boulanger episode. Dreyfus 191 8
Affair.
Colonial expansion. Alliance with Russia.
The Great War.
Germany : Revival during Napoleonic war. Work c. 1800-
foreducation (Humboldt, Froebel). Movements 1870
for unity and liberation. " Year of Revolutions,"
1848. Parliament at Frankfort. Prussia's
opposition. Bismarck. Austro-Prussian War.
Franco-Prussian War. King of Prussia German
Emperor.
Great expansion of wealth, industry, population. 1870-
Colonial experiments. Building of navy. The 191 8
Great War. Overthrow of the monarchy and
establishment of a Republic.
Italy : Impulse towards unity given by Napoleon, c. 1800-
War of Liberation under Mazzini and Garibaldi. 1918
The short-lived Roman Republic (1848). Cavour,
Victor Emmanuel. Renewed war (1858). Italy
united under the Piedmontese monarchy. Triple
Alliance. Entry into the Great War.
Russia : Movement for reform. Alexander II c. 1800-
emancipates the serfs. Reaction and Nihilism. 1918
" Industrial Revolution." Crimean War. War
with Turkey. Expansion in Far and Near East.
Alliance with France. Renewed reform move-
ments. The Duma and reaction. The Great War,
First and Second Revolutions (191 7). The
" Dictatorship of the Proletariat."
Greece and the Balkans : Greece freed from c. 1800-
Turkey (Navarino, 1827). Rise of Bulgaria, 1918
Serbia, Roumania (San Stefano, 1878). First
and Second Balkan Wars (1912, 1913). The
Great War.
America : Peace with England and disarma- c. 1800-
ment. Civil war and abolition of negro slavery. 1918
Expansion of industry, wealth, and popu-
lation. Monroe doctrine. Entry into the Great
War.
The Peace of Versailles and the League of Nations. 1919
CHRONOLOGICAL TABLE 847
A.D. A.D.
Increased Invention and Industry : Railroads, c. 1832-
steamships, telegraphs, telephones, torpedoes, 191 8
submarines, aeroplanes, poison-gas.
c. 1832- Science. — Physics : Faraday, Helmholtz, Kelvin,
191 8 Clerk-Maxwell, Mendeleeff ; Discovery of
Rontgen rays and of radium. Medicine : Dis-
covery of anaesthetics, Claude Bernard, Florence
Nightingale, Pasteur, Lister, Koch, Virchow,
MetchnikoS. Discovery of malaria bacUlus.
Geology and Biology : Lyell, Darwin, Mendel,
Huxley. Mathematics : Gauss, Lobachevsky,
Riemann, Einstein.
c. 1832- Philosophy : Schopenhauer, Comte, Herbert
1918 Spencer, Lotze, T. H. Green, Bradley, Bergson.
c. 1800- Literature, Art, and General Thought :
1918 England : Carlyle, Macaulay, J. H. Newman,
Tennyson, Browning, J. S. Mill, Thackeray,
Dickens, the Brontes, George Eliot, Kingsley
and the Christian Socialists, Ruskin, Huxley,
M. Arnold, Meredith, the Rossettis, W. Morris,
Swinburne, Thomas Hardy.
c. 1800- France : Balzac, Victor Hugo, George Sand,
19 1 8 Flaubert, Baudelaire, Renan, Zola, Verlaine,
Guy de Maupassant.
Germany : Heine, the brothers Grimm (fairy-tales
and philology), Baur, Strauss (Biblical criti-
cism), Ranke, Mommsen, Treitschke, Karl
Marx, Nietzsche.
Italy : Mazzini, Leopardi, d'Annunzio, Croce.
Russia : Pushkin, Turgenev, Dostoievsky, Tolstoy,
Tchehov.
America : Emerson, Poe, Whitman, William
James, Henry James.
Norway : Ibsen.
c. 1800- Painting : Goya, Ingres, Turner, Constable,
1918 Delacroix, Corot, Rousseau, Millet, the English
Pre-Raphaelites, Monet, Whistler, Manet,
Degas, Cezanne, Renoir, Gauguin, Vincent van
Gogh.
c. 1832- Music : Schumann, Wagner, Brahms, Strauss,
1918 Chopin, Borodin, Moussorgsky, Tschaikovsky,
Scriabin.
(Note. — As a rule the names of living men have been omitted.)
INDEX
Abelard, 104, 342
iEschylus, 6, 13, 14, 24, 189 (note),
338
k Kempis, Thomas, 152, 153, 342
Alaric, 42, 341
Albertus Magnus, 104, 106, 342
Albi, the Heretics of {Albigensians),
97. 106, 342
Alcuin, 55
Alexander (the Great), 12, 17-19,
24-26, 33, 338. 339
Alfred, 54, 61, 342
Amos, 19, 337
Anaxagoras, 17, 338
Aquinas, Thomas, 102-106, 108,
109, 342
Archimedes, 25, 33. 203, 204, 339
Arian, 42, 43
Ariosto, 149, 180, 344
Aristarchus (the Astronomer), 198
Aristotle, 8-10, 17, 37, 99-102,
104-106, 134, 141, 196, 204,
216, 307, 339
Aristophanes, 6, 10, 11, 173, 338
Arnold, Matthew, 113, 117, 330,
347
Arnold, Thomas, 330
Ataulf, 43
Athanasius, 30, 340
Attalus (of Pergamus), 24
Attila, 43, 44, 341
Aucassin et Nicolette, 120, 128
Augustus, see Caesar
Austen, Jane, 296, 297, 345
Averroes, 102, 103, 107, 163, 342
Avicenna, 102
B
Bach, 2, 264-266, 345
Bacon, Francis, 191-193, 208, 344
Bacon, Roger, 105, 106, 194-
197. 342
Balzac, 176, 240, 297, 347
Beaumarchais, 266
Beaumont, 189, 344
Beccaria, 252
Bede (the Venerable), 45, 50, 57
Beethoven, 2, 266, 267, 277, 345
Belisarius, 43
Bellini, Giovanni, 147, 343
Beowulf {Saga of), 57-63, 65, 341
Bergson, 325, 333, 347
Berkeley, 244, 258, 269, 270, 345
Bible, the, 130, 155-157. 178, 191.
200, 344
Blake, 294, 295, 345
Boccaccio, 11 4-1 17, 342
Boethius, 43, 61
Borgia (Pope Alexander VI), 146
Botticelli, 120, 138, 139, 176, 343
Boyle, 228, 231
Bradley (the Scientist), 232
Brahms, 267, 268, 347
Brueghel, Pieter, 147, 344
Bruno, Giordano, 205
Bunyan, 128, 185, 258, 344
Burke, 256, 258, 260, 345
Burns, 291, 345
Byron, 277, 292, 293 345
Cabot, 201
Caesar, Augustus, 37, 220, 339
Caesar, Julius, 36, 37, 41, 339
Calderon, 165, 344
Calvin, 156, 175, 343
Capella, Martianus, 198
Capet, Hugh, 84, 342
Carlo Dolci, 147
Carlyle, 49, 277, 298, 299, 301
331. 345. 347
Carnot, 322
348
INDEX
349
Catherine the Great, 252, 345
Catullus, 35, 340
Cavour, 316, 346
Caxton, 125
Cervantes, 2, 165, 166, 344
Cezanne, 176, 347
Charlemagne, 35, 44, 48, 51, 53-
56, 62, 68-72, 79, 341
Charles, Martel, 48, 341
Charles (grandson of Charle-
magne), 68
Charles I (of England), 210, 344
Charles V (Emperor), 143, 148,
151, 161-164, 343
Charires Cathedral, 93-95
Chatham, 260, 345
Chaucer, 93, 95, 113-117, 126,
127, 18S, 343
Chopin, 268, 347
Christ, 18, 22, 29, 28, 33, 50, 339
Cicero, 33, 35, 340
Cimabue, 95, 342
Cleanthes (the Stoic), 25, 339
Clerk-Maxwell, 235, 323, 347
Coleridge, 14, 291, 345
Colet, 156
Columbus, 163, 317, 343
Commines, 172, 343
Comte, 275, 333, 347
Conde, 210, 220
Congreve, 258, 345
Conrad (of Franconia), 70
Constable, 296, 347
Constantine (the Great), 31, 40,
46. 341
Copernicus, 25, 192, 194, 197
Corneille, 35, 219-221, 344
Cortez, 201, 343
Crashaw, 258
Croce, 333, 347
Cromwell, Oliver, 211, 212, 218,
344
Cyrus (the Great), 20, 337
D
Dalton, 236, 345
Dante, 37, 38, 44, 47, 82, 91, 95,
99-106, 108-114, 117, 120,
134, 135, 146, 153, 180, 188.
294. 336, 342
Darwin, 199, 311, 312, 322, 347
d'Aubigne, Agrippa, 180
David, 18
Degas, 176, 347
Deirdre {Saga of), 66, 67, 341
Democritus, 7, 338
Descartes, 169, 178, 207, 225, 227,
232-234, 237-239, 242, 244,
273. 345
Diaz, Bartolommeo, 163, 343
Diophantus, 234
Donatello, 137, 138, 343
Donne, 258, 344
Dostoievsky, 289, 332, 347
Dryden, 113, 258, 345
Diirer, 161, 202, 344
Durham Cathedral, 90
Durkheim, 333
Ecclesiastes, 23, 339
Eckhard, 153, 154, 272, 343
Edda, 57, 341
Edward the Confessor, 84
Edward I, 87, 152, 342
Edward III, 130, 131
Einhard (Eginhard), 53-55
Einstein, 204, 245, 276, 322, 347
El Greco, 164, 344
Eliot, George, 297, 332, 347
Epictetus, 26, 27, 340
Epicurus, 27, 339
Erasmus, 156, 175, 181, 343
Esdras, 57, 340
Ethelbert the Saxon, 45, 46
Euclid, 25, 339
Euripides, 6, 10, 15, 24, 25, 212,
221, 338
Ezekiel, 23, 338
Ezra, 23
Faraday, 324, 347
Ferdinand (of Aragon), 151, 162,
163. 343
Fermat, 234
Fielding, 259, 297, 345
Flaubert, 176, 347
Fletcher, 189, 344
Ford, John, 189
Era Angelico, 135-137. 343
France, Anatole, 180
Fraunhofer, 323
350 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
Frederick I (Barbarossa), 35, 72
(note), 78-81, 342
Frederick II (Emperor), 79, 105,
106, 133, 342
Frederick the Great, 252, 345
Froissart, 128, 129, 172, 343
Gainsborough, 259, 295, 345
Galen, 102, 196, 340
Galileo, 194, 197, 199, 201-207,
228-231, 234, 323, 342
Galla Placidia, 42
Garibaldi, 316, 346
Gay, 258
Gibbon, 42, 223, 259, 298, 345
Giorgione, 147, 344
Giotto, 92, 95, 96, 135, 342
Goethe, 2, 82, 265, 266, 277-284,
287, 288, 293, 296, 298, 310,
331. 345
Goya, 289, 347
Gregory I (the Great), 45-47. 53.
54. 75. 341
Gregory VII (Hildebrand), 74-
77. 342
Grotius, 169, 181, 344
Gustavus Adolphus, 209
H
Hadrian, 38, 340
Handel, 264, 265, 345
Hardy, 297, 347
Haroun al Raschid, 51, 52
Harrington, 212
Harvey, 192, 203, 327, 344
Hegel, 24, 36, 109, 243, 273-275,
277. 333. 345
Helmholtz, 322, 347
Henri II, 168, 177
Henri IV, 177, 180, 217, 344
Henry II (of England), 85, 86
Henry IV (Emperor), 74-76, 342
Henry V (of England), 130, 131
Henry VIII (of England), 182,
344
Henry the Fowler (Germany),
70, 72, 342
Heracleitus, 337
Herder, 257, 283
Herodotus, 13, 18, 338
Herrick, 258, 344
Hildebrand, see Gregory VII
Hipparchus (the Astronomer),
25, 339
Hippocrates, 9, 102, 104, 338
Hobbes, 35, 215-217, 242, 344
Hogarth, 259, 345
Hohenzollern, 35, 71
Holbein, 161, 344
Homer, 13, 16, 337
Honorius, 42
Horace, 34, 177, 340
Hugh (Abbot of Cluny), 76
Hugo, Victor, 277, 297, 331, 347
Hume, 258, 259, 269-272, 345
Huss, 154, 155
Huygens, 230, 232, 345
Iliad, the, 5, 6, 337
Innocent III, 35, 77, 78, 342
Innocent X, 166
Isabella (of Castile), 151, 162-
. 164, 343
Isaiah of Jerusalem, 337
Isaiah^the Second, 20, 21, 338
Jacobi, 283
Jeanne d'Arc, 127, 131, 343
Jesuits, 163, 209, 224
Jesus, see Christ
Joh, 22, 338
Johannes Erigena (John the Scot),
47. 103
John (of England), 86, 87
Johnson, 259, 345
Jonah, 22
Jonson, Ben, 190, 344
Joule, 322
Juliana (of Norwich), 152
Julius, see Csesar
Julius II (Pope), 144, 146, 147
Justinian, 38, 39, 341
K
Kant, 227, 236, 254, 257, 269,
271-274, 333, 345
Keats, 66, 176, 185, 295, 345
Kepler, 199, 202-204, 20S, 228-
230. 344
Kirchhoff, 323
INDEX
351
La Bruyere, 222, 223
La Fontaine, 120, 177, 222, 344
Lagrange, 235, 323
Lamarck, 311, 313, 322, 345
Lancelot and Guinevere, 68, 128
Langland (or Langley), 58, 130,
183. 343
La Rochefoucauld, 222, 223, 344
Las Casas, 319
Lavoisier, 236, 345
Leibnitz, 227, 228, 236, 239, 243-
248, 269, 274, 275, 345
Leo I, 44
Leo IIL 53
Leo X, 146, 147
Leonardo da Vinci, 142, 143, i97'
198, 203, 344
Leverrier, 275
Lippo Lippi, 138
Livy, 35. 340
Locke, 244, 258, 345
Lollards, 127, 154
Lothair (grandson of Charle-
magne), 68
Louis the German, 68
Louis IX (St. Louis), 120, 121
Louis XI, 134, 172, 218, 343
Louis XIV, 35, 220-223. 344
Louis Philippe, 315, 316
Loyola, Ignatius, 163, 225, 344
Luca della Robbia, 138
Luca Signorelli, 139
Lucretius, 27, 33, 35, 340
Luther, 154-161, 199. 200, 343
M
Machiavelli, 44, 97. 98, 148. I49.
344
Maistre, Joseph de, 334, 335
Maldon {Poem of), 61, 62
Malor>', 125, 182, 343
Manet, 176, 347
Marcel, Etienne, 132
Marco Polo, 196
Marcus Aurelius, 26, 27
Mariotte, 228, 231
Marlowe, 116, 120, 186, 187
Marot, 177, 344
Marsiglio (of Padua), 134
Marx, Karl, 308
Matilda of Tuscany, 76
Mayer, 322
Mayo, 236
Mazzini, 35, 293, 310, 316, 346, 347
Medici, the, 138, 143, 144, 146
Medici, Catherine de, 177
Melancthon, 200
Mendeleeff, 236, 347
Meredith, 173, 297. 333. 347
Michael Angelo, 135, 142-145,
344
Mill, John Stuart, 301, 304, 347
Milton, 40, 149, 185, 205, 212-
215, 258, 259, 344
Mohammed, 48, 49-53. loi. 34^
Moliere, 176, 221, 222, 344
Montaigne, 178-182, 184, 218,
344
Montesquieu, 250, 252, 345
Monteverde, 264
More, Sir Thomas, 156, 175, 181,
183, 343
Morris, William, 129, 332, 347
Mozart, 176, 266, 345
N
Napoleon (the Great), 35, 284-
290, 345
Napoleon III (Louis), 315, 346
Nathan (the Prophet), 19
Nero, 31, 340
Newcomen, 231
Newton, 201, 204, 228-232, 234,
235. 245. 323. 345
Nihelungenlicd, 71, 72, 341, 342
Nicholas (of Cues), 157, 158, 197,
343
Njal {Saga of), 122-124, 342
O
Odoacer, 43
Odyssey, 5, 337
Origen, 32, 340
Otto the Great (Emperor), 72,
342
Otto of Freising, 74 (note), 78,
79
Owen, Robert, 301, 308, 345
Palestrina, 149. 264, 344
Parthenon, 3, 6, 7, 339
352 THE MAKING OF THE WESTERN MIND
Pascal, 176, 224, 225, 228, 231,
344. 345
Penn, 252
Pericles, 11, 339
Pestalozzi, 257
Peter the Great, 252, 345
Petrarch, 115, 342
Phihp (of Macedon), 12, 338
Phihp II (of Spain), 164, 166-
168
Phihp IV (of Spain), 166
PhiHppe IV (of France), 88, 342
Picard, 230, 232
Piero della Francesca, 1 39-141,
343
Piers Plowman, 126, 127
Pindar, 12, 338
Pinturicchio, 146
Pisanello, 139
Pisano, Niccolo, 92, 342
Pitt, 260
Pizarro, 201
Plato, 4, 8, 9, 17, 27, 29, 99, 103,
104, 187, 238, 246, 304, 33S
Plotinus, 27, 340
Plutarch, 25, 340
Polybius, 25, 34, 340
Pompey, 41, 339
Pope, Alexander, 258, 345
Poussin, 148, 344
Priestley, 236
Procopius, 43
Ptolemy (Astronomer), 25, 196
Ptolemy (King), 25, 340
Pythagoras, 7, 337
R
Rabelais, 38, no, 173-177, 179,
181, 344
Racine, 221, 222, 344
Raphael, 147, 344
Rembrandt, 2, 136, 170, 344
Renan, 31, 102, 105, 107, 180,
347
Reynolds, 259, 345
Richardson, 259, 345
Richelieu, 209, 217-219, 344
Richter, Jean Paul, 257
Roomer, 232
Roland {Chanson de), 51, 62-65,
341. 342
Roman de la Rose, 117, 118
Ronsard, 177, 344
Rousseau, 216, 253-259, 261,
277, 284, 345
Rubens, 136, 170, 171, 344
Ruskin, 92, 138, 332, 347
Ruth, Book of, 22
Ruysbroeck, 136, 152, 343
St. Ambrose, 39
St. Anthony, 32, 173, 340
St. Augustine (the Bishop of
Hippo), 36, 37, 54, 155
St. Augustine (the Benedictine
Monk), 45, 341
St. Benedict, 46, 47, 341
St. Bernard, 103, 104, 342
St. Catherine (of Siena), 152
St. Columba, 45
St. Dominic, 97, 98, 163, 342
St. Francis, 95-98, 342
St. John (of the Cross), 152, 163
St. John (the Divine), 31
St. Mark's Church, 91, 92
St. Paul, 29, 30, 31, 42, 340
St. Peter, 31, 42
Saint-Simon, 222-224, 344
St. Teresa, 152, 163
Salisbury Cathedral, 90
Salisbury, Lord, 319
Sappho, 6, 337
Savonarola, 138
Schiller, 283, 345
Schopenhauer, 283, 347
Schubert, 267, 268, 345
Schumann, 267, 268, 347
Scott, Walter, 296, 297, 347
Scriabin, 268, 347
Seneca, 177, 186, 220
Sevigne, Mme. de, 222, 344
Sforza, Ludovico, 142
Shakespeare, 142, 165, 179, 187-
190, 344
Shelley, 14, loi, 165, 176, 185,
253, 289, 293-296, 345
Simonides, 177
Smith, Adam, 251, 301-303, 345
Smollett, 259, 297, 345
Socrates, 7, 8, 16, 17, 29, 178, 338
Sophocles, 6, 14, 31, 177, 338
Spencer, Herbert, 275, 313, 333,
347
INDEX
353
Spenser, 58, 168, 183-187, 344
Spinoza, 22, loi, 103, 169, 239-
243. 247. 345
Sterne, 259, 297, 345
Stoicism, 25, 26, 27
Strauss, Richard (the Musician),
267, 268, 347
Sully, 180
Swift, 258, 345
Swinburne, 144, 347
Tacitus, 34, 36, 340
Talleyrand, 221
Tasso, 149, 344
Tennyson, 58, 125, 347
Thackeray, 297, 347
Thales, 7, 337
Theocritus, 25, 339
Theodolinda, 45
Theodoric, 43, 341
Theodosius (the Great), 39, 40,
341
Theodosius (the Younger), 40,
212
Theologia Germanica, 155, 272,
343
Thomas k Kempis, 152, 153, 155,
343
Thucydides, 10-12, 338
Tilly, 209
Tintoretto, 147, 344
Titian, 147, 148, 202, 344
Tolstoy, 96, 97. 288, 289, 332,
347
Torricelli, 231
Toscanelli, 197
Treviranus, 322
Tristan and Isolde, 68, 114, 124
Turenne, 210
Turgenev, 289, 298, 332, 347
Turner, 295, 296, 347
Tycho Brahe, 228
U
Ulfilas, 42
Ulpian, 39
Urquhart, David, 327
llrquhart, translator of Rabelais,
182
Van Dyck, 136
Van Eyck, Hubert, 136, 343
Van Eyck, Jan, 136, 137, 343
Vasco da Gama, 163, 343
Vaughan, 258, 344
Velazquez, 2, 148, 165, 166, 170,
259. 344
Verlaine, 172, 347
Veronese, 147, 344
Vesahus, 194, 202, 203, 327, 343
Villon, 172, 343
Virgil, 33, 34, 109, 340
Vittorino da Feltre, 139
Vogelweide, Walther von der, 82,
83, 152
Voltaire, 180, 220, 248-253, 257,
277. 301. 345
W
Wagner, 65, 124, 267, 268, 347
Wallenstein, 209
Warren Hastings, 260
Watt, 231
Watteau, 136
Webster, 189
Wesley, John, 258, 334, 345
William (the Conqueror), 62, 77,
84, 85, 89, 342
William of Orange (William the
Silent), 167-169
Wordsworth, 58, 108, 289, 291,
292, 331, 345
Wren, Christopher, 252, 259, 345
Wundt, 333
Wycliffe, 127, 130, 183, 191, 305,
343
Xenophon, 18, 154, 155, 338
Yeats, W. B., 66
Zeno (the Metaphysician), 234
Zeno (the Stoic), 25, 339
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