THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA IRVINE GIFT OF FRIENDS OF THE LIBRARY MANY MINDS MANY MINDS By MAURICE BUTTON Author of "The Greek Point of View " TORONTO THE M US SON BOOK COM PANT LIMITED M3 Made and Printed in Great Britain for Hoddcr and Stoughton Limited, by Butler & Tanner.Ltd., Frome and London PREFATORY NOTE THE papers in this volume were originally com- posed either as popular lectures to miscel- laneous audiences in Ontario Myot, xQOTQenrixol, or Myot yQixoi, or Ao'yot fjicuspTixot, as an older sophist of Greece would have called them : or in other cases as lectures to University societies, authors' societies and the like in Toronto, Montreal and Ottawa : or, in the third case, were printed in the periodical called " The University Magazine," which represented in its day the Univer- sities of Dalhousie and McGill and Toronto. CONTENTS CHAP. PAGE POPULAR LECTURES ...... 9 I THE MIND OF HERODOTUS ..... 17 II THUCYDIDES AND HISTORY 29 III PLATO AND POETRY 61 IV FRANCIS BACON 76 V KIPLING . 110 VI PLATONISTS AND ARISTOTELIANS . . . .148 VII SOME OXFORD TYPES 157 VIII THE ENGLISHMAN : THE FRENCHMAN : THE ROMAN : THE GREEK 191 IX SATIRE AND HUMOUR 242 X THOUGHT AND ACTION 252 XI QUALITY AND EQUALITY 266 XII THE BEST POLICY 281 POPULAR LECTURES AT the inauguration half a century ago of one of the minor English Universities, " Ladies and Gentlemen," began the Founder, pointing proudly to two young gentlemen fresh from Oxford and to two Cambridge men a trifle more mature, " here I offer you a University eddication free of cost." The University of Toronto in somewhat the same fashion is wont to send out, on Friday evenings, members of its staff to deliver popular lectures in the various cities, towns and villages of Ontario. On such occasions it is obvious to anyone who will reflect a moment that the audience cannot be treated in the high-handed fashion recommended once by the Master of an Oxford College to a youthful and conscientious extension lecturer, who was finding it hard to hold his hearers. " What concessions, Master, must I make to the limitations of the audience ? " asked a youthful economist. The answer was un- expectedly emphatic : " Damn the audience." We in Ontario dare not do so ; we humour them generally ; which means that we attempt to impart humour even into the subject of economics or even into more serious subjects. A single instance will illustrate sufficiently and is taken from my own experience. After I had endea- voured to sketch the ancient Roman, the ancient Greek, etc., to a small Ontario country town of Scotch origin and had received the customary vote of thanks, I was asked to convey a message to my colleague due on the following Friday. *' Will you kindly tell Dr. Blank that this village likes its sub- 10 POPULAR LECTURES jects handled humorously." " Certainly," I said, " and what is his subject ? " " The creation of the world." A large portion of the book that follows is taken from the exercises of these flamboyant Fridays, so to speak ; a smaller portion from the sinister Satur- days that succeeded them : when, I mean, suffering from the reaction, one spoke in more serious fashion than usual to one's usual students in University College. It is already clear that popular lecturing itself invites a popular lecture " handled humorously." I can only skirt the fringes of a fruitful theme, con- fining myself to my own entertainments and those of my familiar friends and colleagues. When I was first imported into Canada from Oxford fifty years ago, a babe and suckling thrown into the midst of the wise after the flesh and the children of this world who are more prudent in their generation than the children of Oxford, I was sent to a mercantile centre to introduce " The Women of Greece." I did my best and waited for the reporters' verdict. My friends painfully and earnestly sought to keep the next morning's papers from me ; but I outwitted them and found a passage which then and after- wards brought me such enlightenment and such entertainment as often sweeten these intellectual gymnastics. " The lecturer's delivery," I read, " was monotonous and his accent distressingly Oxonian ; but the subject-matter unexpectedly turned out to be not without interest." After fifty years the subject-matter remains the same ; but in the other qualities there has been time, I believe, for some improvement. Other places helped to rub in these useful and needed lessons. At Niagara Falls (Canadian side) I once trod upon the toes of an Irish reporter by my lecture on Roman, Greek, etc. ; he said quite fairly POPULAR LECTURES 11 that it should have been called rather a lecture on Rome, Athens, London and Paris ; but he began his report with more vivacity. " Professor Hutton lec- tured here last night, if reading in a monotonous voice from MSS. can be called a lecture ; however, his accent was less unpleasant than that of Professor Z., who preceded him last week and who was understood to say, after George Eliot, that 'Jyne was in the cowl-house ' ; (Professor Z. had come to us from London.) The morning papers contained this criti- cism, but a later morning's paper criticized the critic : 1 1 have looked up ' lecture ' in a dictionary," wrote " Working Man," " and I read 'a reading from MSS.' ' The reporters of those days were more vivacious than those of to-day. One of them introduced me in happy fashion somewhat as follows : " The polished head of University College lectured here last night " ; those who were present appreciated the mot. A simi- lar reporter in the mercantile centre recorded above wrote in a similar vein of a colleague : " From such of the remarks of the reverend gentleman as perco- lated to us through his beard we gathered," etc. ; or, again from Niagara Falls, where the roar of the cataract makes distinct enunciation necessary : " Many of the learned lecturer's remarks missed us and went astray in his whiskers." Of course the humours of these evenings were much increased by casual circumstance. It was my fate to deliver the long screed on the Roman, etc., for the first time and when the ink was hardly dry in a manufacturing centre, which turned out with extraordinary keenness ; the whole population seemed to be present men, women and large numbers of innocent children. I was taken aback and astonished, but waded through the luminous-voluminous record with such speed as was possible, when I had to stick closely to the text. When I had finished, to my own relief and every one's, I was greeted with a vote of thanks which has remained embedded for 12 POPULAR LECTURES forty years in my memory. " Next Friday," said the chairman (I know his name but willingly forget it), " we are to have Dr. Blank, who, I am thankful to say, does not use notes." This was the same Dr. Blank who was to handle humorously the creation of the world : what notes indeed would have served him? The chairman's views of " notes " is still the prevalent view, though it is not universal, and would have been fatal to much literature : to Newman's sermons, for example. At Paris (Ontario) I remember gratefully that I stayed with a cultivated artist, who put in a word for me (and for Newman). " If you knew," he said to a malcontent and critic, " what a comfort it is to me to sit under a man, who will never hem and haw, and lose himself and repeat himself, but go on without turning a hair, turning only leaves, to the bitter and better end, to the haven desired by all, you would not talk so much nonsense, nor hear so much." Of course the ideal method is to have your MS. all written out fully in front of you, but to know it all by heart ; but this ideal is only reached honestly and without unprofitable exertion when the lecture is in constant and almost continuous demand, and has been given to the public, say, in its seventieth edition, or has been forgiven to the lecturer even unto seventy times seven. This was almost my fortune at one time with the often quoted " Roman." It was competing, quite vainly, with a lamented colleague's " Water-babies." The babies had reappeared three hundred times ; the " Roman " had only reached his seventy-fifth metempsychosis when my colleague's demise ended the unequal rivalry. Since then the "Roman" with no new world to conquer has largely rested in camp, waiting for other barbarian babes to fight ; but the babes like the Christianity which is based upon them dominated the civilization of pagan Rome. POPULAR LECTURES 13 Sometimes I was the unwilling and unwitting agent of matrimonial triumphs and of a husband setting down his wife : " There, my dear, you see I was right ; you have been advocating an Athenaeum for this village all this time. Professor Hutton lectured last night for an hour and a quarter and said ' Athenian ' a score of times and never once 4 Athenaeum.' : Sometimes a personal triumph wasted away on further inquiry. I lectured at Morrisburg and was accompanied by the whirr of skates upon the ice of an adjoining rink. My audience contained one man with a large number of ladies ; I thanked my one faithful ally (for whom I was minded as before and since to open the lecture " Ladies and Mr. X.). " Sir," said his wife softly to me, " he is not only lame but stone-deaf." Occasionally I have been subjected to the chequered experience of being helped out by another and almost simultaneous entertainment. When I had exhausted half the ancient Roman once at Dunnville or some place in that vicinity I was invited to sit down and take breath for a time, while a capable and excellent singer revived the audience for a further effort of listening to me. I was not ungrateful, knowing what I knew, that some of my colleagues at Collingwood had been sandwiched for the same reason with nigger minstrelsy. It goes without saying that the chairman often on these occasions, as at all lectures, furnishes the comedy or the tragedy of the evening. One of my colleagues in history was sent a few months after the outbreak of " The Great War " to lecture at a hamlet on the shore of Lake Simcoe. The chairman, a local politician, took the chair at 8.15 p.m., and at 9.15 was still pointing out to the audience how much Sir Edward Grey had been helped in unravelling the twisted skein of European diplomacy by the experience which he had acquired as Governor- 14 General of Canada. Canada, he pointed out truly, has more politics to the square inch and more square inches for politics than almost any other country on the face of this earth. My colleague was left with only thirty minutes in which to develop his ideas of the sources of Sir Edward Grey's diplomacy. Nor was it only the chairman who sometimes added to the humour of these occasions ; occasionally it was the local pastor when he gave board and lodging to the itinerant lecturer. I remember one of these hospitable clergymen who prayed " for the stranger who is within our gates that the Lord, to whom all things are possible, may touch even his lips with fire, so that his words may not merely instruct but edify and inspire, and may confirm the church." The indulgence of the audience often helped us out. One of us once with professorial absence of mind left his MS. in a railway carriage when he had occasion to change from one railway line to another ; he arrived at his destination without the proper ammunition. But did he fail ? Far from it ; never had he achieved, never had any of us achieved a greater succes d'estime. The audience providentially was made up of the pupils of a ladies' college. My colleague, providentially again, had his dress suit with him ; providentially for the third and fourth time he was a fine-looking man, and best of all he wore a monocle. He put on the dress suit, he adjusted the monocle and he held a reception of the young ladies. Never has a lecture before or since gone so well. At other times the success and joy of these enter- tainments has been reaped later after many days. I took up some years ago, for example, the subject of Lewis Carroll ; it seemed to go all right, but the real triumph of the lecture was withheld for many months, and only came to me in fact the other day from a young woman in the Public Library at Toronto. She confided to me how a dear old lady since dead, POPULAR LECTURES 15 God rest her soul had come to the Library and said : " I have heard that Professor Hutton is to lecture on Lewis Carroll ; I suppose I ought to read Alice." Alice was given her. Within twenty-four hours Alice was returned. As she slammed her down on the desk she said : " I thought I had to read this book ; I took ; I have read it from cover to cover ; there is not one word of sense in it." And yet I should give a very different impression from that which I ought to give, and should unduly emphasize an unfortunate experience of Professor Huxley's, if I handled this theme of popular lecturing humorously and humorously only. Professor Huxley has somewhere recorded how he was facing in some despondency one day a popular audience, when his eye caught a responsive look in a bright and feminine eye. " Come," he said to himself, " I can venture to talk about the cerebellum even to these people ; there is one intelligent eye at least among them " ; and he ventured and talked the subject out. At the close, and after the vote of thanks, the owner of the intelligent eyes came forward with profuse thanks. " There is only one small question, Professor, I should like to ask ; I did not quite gather from your charming lecture whether the cerebellum is in the head or in the feet." I, on the contrary, have never known an occasion, however unpromising, when I have not profited as well as preached, and learned as well as taught ; and not merely those lessons of accent and delivery already noticed, much more serious lessons. At the little village of Ayr I found an interested and inter- esting critic in the local minister, later to become my friend in St. Andrews (Scotland) and in Toronto- Mr. Thomson. He not only contributed some bon mots which seemed to me to illuminate the subject of ancient Rome, but he gave me the first information I had received of that quaint speculation which finds negro blood to be the source of the character of the 16 POPULAR LECTURES Romans. I have always known, I repeat, that no man who has faith, hope and charity can try popular lecturing without finding profit therein ; he will find appreciation and knowledge to interest him in the most unlikely places. One of my colleagues, e.g., lectured on Shakespeare in Madoc, a small and very hard- worked community in an out-of-the-way mining quarter of Ontario. Th whole population was present, every one but t}.< overdriven driver of the local bus, and he was absent unwillingly. " I apologize, boss," he said next morn- ing, " for not being at the lecture ; it was splendid and I hated missing it; but the missus wan hound to be there, and I had to mind the baby." At. Madoc a lecture was a real relief and refreshment. There was neither bridge nor cinema nor skating carnival to dispute the right of way ; and the audience was in proportion much better attuned to Shake- speare, and much more fully repaid the accomplished lecturer. His mind may even turn regretfully to Madoc when he if confronting his own students ; some of these, especially the young women, attend but do not attend, to p<-ak after the; manner of the Athe- nian. They are out not no much for a degree, B.A. or B.A.D. (Baccalaurea Artis Domestics*), though they may reach one, not being fools by any means, still less tor knowledge and thought, as for those weekly, nay nightly dam^s, for whi<-h a modern University seems to furnish an unwilling, unwitting OOMSJOn. Some of them, it may KafV-ly \>< ;>v,urn' d, will be like Hippoclides: faoQifooncu, tto yAfv/r they will dance away their marriage. CHAPTER I THE MIND OF HERODOTUS (1) TJKRODOTUS is called the "Father of His- ""1 tory " ; dubitative persons, full of scruples and mis:M\in:;s. prefer to call him the "Father of i Naturally ; for history is the statement of facts about past events or persons, and, if its facts are not so, it is a scries of lies ; but there is nothing so diilu ult to discover as a fact about past events, except facts about persons past or present; these art- past all diseovery. Herodotus knew this; he starts out, therefore, with a maxim absolutely abhor- rent to the more credulous and thoughtless persons \\ lu> ha\ e fancied themselves historians since his day : " it is not my business to believe what I hear, it is my business to report it." (2) But he was saved from writing lies solely or rhu nother element in his nature more fortunate than his passion for reporting ; he was not an historian only, but a poet. lie looked at persons and events in the large ; he saw men and facts in masses ; he generali/ed lilV ami history. (8) And tins brings me to a now point : I have said Herodotus was a poet as well as an historian. I now say he was an historian, also; for the true historian, as we well know, does not write much of aeeessions. eonmations. royal births ami deaths and marriages, wars and rumours of war, campaign and nwivh and eountermareh. laws and lawyers, hut of what people m the mass said and thought ; of their rehjMon and idi als of life, of their habits, their habit even, their general make-up. Measured by this MM. 17 2 18 THE MIND OF HERODOTUS standard, Herodotus is the truer historian than Thucydides. (4) Then why are they so misjudged ? The reason is near at hand : we are living under democracy, the government of the man in the street ; and this is well enough, but something follows which is not well : we allow ourselves to think that great men do not count ; that whatever happens is due to the average man and the spirit of the age ; comes from the general stream of tendencies which make the age ; from far-reaching impersonal laws ; from fate. So with Thucydides ; he also lived under a democracy and believed in fate ; in commercial forces, political forces, geographical forces, not in the real influence of individuals. This is a scientific view, and, therefore, Thucydides is called a scientific historian, and, in this sense, Herodotus is not a scientific historian ; he is so fond of human character in the individual I seem to be contradicting what I said before, that he saw men and women in masses, but it is not really the opposite. I mean that he loved human nature in the mass and in the individual, and always preferred to speak of men and women rather than of impersonal ten- dencies and forces, of nationality and geography therefore when he speaks of a war he tells you the gossip about it, the interesting personal quarrel which put a match to the kindling wood, rather than the larger and less personal forces which were the fuel maintaining the flame. (5) But even here he is not so unphilosophic as people fancy ; for, after all, individuals, especially kings, queens, and courtiers, were not always so helpless as they are to-day ; they used to have power, and to make war for their own opinions without their people's consent, even as to-day the peoples or the newspapers make wars without their rulers' consent ; the latter are only rulers and kings, so they have to follow. " Quicquid delirant Achivi THE MIND OF HERODOTUS 19 plectuntur reges," said the witty German yesterday. So much the less reproach, then, to Herodotus for telling us of the personal trifles out of which wars arose. So much the more credit to him that, in that age, when kings and courtiers counted for so much, he has written so much of ordinary men and women. (6) Take an illustration of his love for personal causes : the Persian war was traceable in part to the Greek physician Democedes, who lived in gilded slavery, as he called it, in Persia. Unable to return home, like a wise man he went to the Sultana, whom he had cured of cancer, surgery was something in those days, and told her, if she wanted to repay him, to persuade the Sultan to make war on Greece. She did so ; she told the Sultan she must have some Greek tirewomen ; they were even then the best hairdressers and the most ladylike ladies' maids in the world. (7) Now here I have stumbled on a feature in Herodotus which I cannot defend, though I can defend a good deal : he reports this whole conversa- tion between the Sultan and Sultana in the small hours of the night as though he were an American reporter stowed away beneath the royal four-poster. 4 What is truth ? " is so hard a question. Herodotus did not think it involved verbal accuracy in details ; he did think that the use of the imagination in details brought the central fact more home to the mind ; he was, after all, hardly farther from the truth than Dr. Johnson in his reports of the Parlia- mentary debates of his age. (8) Let us get a little closer to our historian's character, and, in his own spirit, become more personal. Herodotus, like all men frank, simple, and straightforward, is very fond of talking of himself : of the things he has seen, the places he has been to, the persons he has met, the stories he believes and the stories he does not believe, the ideas he approves and the ideas he reprobates. 20 THE MIND OF HERODOTUS (9) As to the extent of his travels, he is charged with lying. This is a more serious form of lying than the other lying, which was merely the permission of a vivid imagination, and natural to the historians and reporters of old. It is asserted that he confounds an island with a city ; that he claims to have been in Egyptian Thebes, yet never mentions its labyrinth, though he has made much of a smaller labyrinth elsewhere. It is said, even more ungraciously, that when he says he will not mention a god for religious reasons, it is only because he does not know what god to mention ; for he has already mentioned half a dozen times the same unmentionable god ; it is said that when he likens the language of the Egyptians to " the twittering of birds," he convicts himself of never having heard much of it ; rather, of course, he convicts his commentator of criminal dullness. The " twittering of birds " is, of course, a Greek phrase, like our " double Dutch." Herodotus means only that Egyptian was like " double Dutch " to the natives of Epirus ; and now it is in order for the same commentator to prove to me that Egyptian is not in the least like Dutch. It is said, finally, that he implies a visit to Babylon ; and that yet his mistakes about statues, temples, and town walls prove that he was never there. Some of these charges look true. I am afraid Herodotus has magnified his travels and has seen in his book some things he never saw in his body, and has been to places where he was not ; but I venture to assert that no case has been made out against him of lying deliberately and wilfully where anything serious was at stake ; or of bearing false witness against any state or individual, Aeginetans or others. (10) One ancient writer has written about his cynicism (xaxoijOeia). It is kindly, genial cynicism, a pleasant spice of acidity in his overflowing tolerance and good humour, the result as much as the cause of his tolerance. For instance, about the siege of THE MIND OF HERODOTUS 21 Troy, some people said that Helen never went to Troy, because it is incredible that the Trojans would have suffered ten years' siege and ten years' hard- ship all for one little woman. They would have surrendered her long before the end, and so Herodotus thinks. That seems a rather cynical and unimagina- tive argument ; but, after all, it is a matter of opinion. It is echoed by modern historians : by Mr. Grote and Mr. Payne Knight. Here is another amusing passage of mild cynicism. The Persian war was in part the result of ancient quarrels. Herodotus' theory of them is very pic- turesque and personal : If you want to know why East and West have never agreed, says Herodotus, the answer is simple, cherchez la femme. First of all, some Phoenicians stole lo, while she was incautiously cheapening trinkets on the beach ; then some Greeks landed at Tyre and stole Europa ; these would be Cretans (interpolates Herodotus, demurely) ; this was only tit for tat, laa ngo<; laa ; but after this the Greeks began it again and stole Medea ; and then Paris, to equalize matters, ran away with Helen. So far, continues the historian, quoting Persian opinion, not much harm had been done, but from this point Greece was grievously to blame. She collected a vast armada to recover the lost princess. Now, to carry off young ladies is wicked, but to worry about those carried off is worse than wicked it is silly ; for manifestly, if they had not liked it, they would not have been carried off. And so we are to understand the patient, philosophic East had taken no account of its light women stolen, but the childish, feverish, restless Western mind vexed itself even then, as ever it vexes itself still, about trifles. Parts of that argument are rather cynical, rather suggestive of Gibbon, of whom it was said that he never failed in human sympathy except when some young woman was being deceived. It is not^ quite 22 THE MIND OF HERODOTUS self-evident that the princesses all wanted to be carried off ; it is, perhaps, an illusion of masculine vanity. All literature has been hitherto an uncon- scious conspiracy against one side of the truth, the woman's side ; but it is exploded now, that conspiracy, and to-day we are shooting skywards among the fragments thereof. (11) I say that Herodotus perhaps misunderstands lo and Europa, but when he understands a woman and even that is not beyond his powers no one is more kindly. He has as keen an eye for the witchery of childhood. A certain Corinthian innocent, whose father's name was Eagle, was marked out for massacre by the local Herod ; but the child provi- dentially smiled upon its murderer, and he, too pitiful to slay, passed it on and on and on, till it came back to the mother, who hid the child in a chest, and he survived and was called " Chester " and became a mighty king and put his enemies under his feet, that the words of the prophet might be fulfilled, which he spake, saying : " An Eagle is with child ; the child, a lion, Shall loose men's knees and be a soul of iron. Beware, all Corinth ! Mark, all ye who dwell By her fair cliff and frowning citadel." This is one of the charms of Herodotus' work ; it bears the spirit of the Old Testament. He is living in the midst of prophecies which every one knows and repeats and waits to see verified, which often, therefore, verify themselves. (12) His own attitude to such things is thoroughly characteristic, thoroughly natural. He has no cut- and-dried system ; he is full of inconsistencies like the rest of us ; he has all the moods and fancies, which pass in turn, according to circumstances, across the average mind. Every shade of religious emotion doubt, caution, disbelief, belief is mirrored in his history and woven side by side into the same page, THE MIND OF HERODOTUS 23 even as they blend into one another in the same twenty-four hours of most men's lives ; he believes, that is, or he disbelieves, according to the prophet or according to the mood. And so with regard to oracles. When Herodotus finds the prophet Bacis saying that " after Athens has been destroyed, Divine Justice shah* quench Masterful Satiety, the son of Insolence ; and the son of Cronos is bringing on the day of liberty for Greece," he is satisfied at once that there is something in oracles, and he will neither disbelieve himself nor suffer others to do so. And yet, conversely, when he is told that the oracle of Dodona of the oak tree was established by two black doves arriving from Egypt and speaking with human voice, he is perfectly incredulous. He is of opinion that two Egyptian priestesses arrived and founded the oracle. They were swarthy and therefore were called black. Any lady may properly be termed a dove. Their language was at first gibberish to the natives, and therefore was called bird-twittering or bird language. When the women had learned the local dialect, the natives said that the doves now spake with a human voice, and so the whole fable of the black doves originated in the use of simple metaphors. In other words, Herodotus is perfectly frank and natural ; and yet, or and therefore, perfectly devout, entirely anxious neither to abdicate his own reason, on the one hand, nor yet to speak lightly of dignitaries and of sacred things, on the other, a god-fearing man, who does not think that the god he fears requires him to be a fool. (13) But let us return to his kindliness ; his large tolerance is of the essence of his character. Herodotus is always charitable, even to his rivals, the utter- most test of charity. There was a rival historian somewhat his senior, Hecatseus of Miletus, and the worst shaft he permits himself to aim at him is a little Voltairean satire : " When Hecatseus the his- 24 THE MIND OF HERODOTUS torian was in Egypt constructing a pedigree for him- self and tracing himself back to a god, the sixteenth in ascent above him, the priests of Zeus in Thebes did for him what they also did for me, who had no family tree to construct ; they showed him three hundred and forty-five statues of human father and son in succession, and argued from them that for three hundred and forty-five generations no god had appeared on earth." In another passage he permits himself to say that he laughs when he sees " some- body's " maps. " Somebody >! is supposed to be Hecatseus. One who bears so lightly on the foibles even of a rival is naturally indulgent to all other men. A certain Delphian, to oblige the Spartans, took a bowl for holy water, presented by Croesus to the temple, and engraved upon it an inscription recording Sparta as the donor. Herodotus knows his name, but will not mention it. A certain Samian detained the property of an unfortunate Persian nobleman impaled by Xerxes. Herodotus knows his name, but willingly forgets it. The Egyptians were the first to discover the immortality of the human soul and its trans- migration after death into the body of one of the lower animals, its passage thence into other creatures of earth, air and water, and its return after three thousand years into human shape. Some Greeks, both in ancient and recent times, have claimed this doctrine as their own discovery. Herodotus has their names upon his list, but does not record them. The same indulgence shows itself in the wider field of national shortcomings. The state of Argos had been accused by her neighbours of coquetting with Persia. Herodotus is content to give the Argive version, and the neighbourly version, and to conclude as follows : " I know this much, that if all men were to bring together each people its own grievances into one place, wishing to exchange them for the grievances of others, each people would be glad, THE MIND OF HERODOTUS 25 after looking at their neighbours' grievances, to take back their own ; so Argos is not the worst offender." (14) As a poet he naturally demands poetic justice, something juster than the justice of this world ; and so he improves the occasion, as we say, and adds to the dramatic effect of his history which is, after all, a drama more than a bald history by introducing characters and scenes, the historical reality of which is open to serious, question : e.g. there is Crcesus of Lydia ; "he thought himself the happiest of man- kind," says Herodotus, " and therefore I imagine came to sorrow." And therefore Herodotus is careful to keep alive this discrowned king, this living instance of the vanity of riches and power, long after his fall, in order to preach this moral. He is the chorus in Herodotus' drama, a King Lear, a tragedy king. So, and in the same vein, Herodotus tells us of the death of Cyrus on the battlefield. He ought to have died so. This is Herodotus' thought ; and therefore that version of his death which makes him die so is to Herodotus the most reasonable version. The his- torian Xenophon conversely says that he died in his bed ; it is most possible, most probable. That is how things happen in this prosaic world; poetic justice is rare. (15) But here I have stumbled upon Herodotus' religion ; it is curious and worth study. He is full of the idea that God is stern even to jealousy ; he clutches, therefore, eagerly at every legend which illustrates the idea ; everywhere he sees the jealousy which puts down the mighty from their seat, which introduces a cycle, a rotation, a see-saw of happiness among men and nations. His very first words strike this note : "I am going to set forth the history of little states alike and of great ; for those which once were great are now small, and those which once were small are in my day great ; knowing, then, that prosperity has no abiding stay, I shall speak alike of both ; the cycle rolls round."' The best-known story 26 THE MIND OF HERODOTUS in Herodotus illustrating this faith is, of course, the ring of Poly crates. (16) But this doctrine of divine jealousy has obviously a lighter and a brighter side, and passes into the law of compensation. Herodotus, though he is both sad and saddening, is much too devout not to draw this comfort from it ; the lofty are laid low, but the humble are exalted ; he ransacks both nature and the life of man for illustrations sometimes quaint to grotesqueness of this principle. There was once, e.g., a Magnesian farmer, who had accident- ally killed his son ; this man received, in the just Providence of God, a special compensation a windfall in the wreck of the Persian fleet off his farm so that he was not wholly unhappy. Again, the battle is not to the strong ; it is the meek who inherit the earth, the weak and meek who multiply while the ravening and dangerous multiply slowly or not at all (and the proud and over-civilized commit race suicide). The rabbit is the only creature which presents the phenomenon of superfetation, while the lioness has but one cub and that once only ; the mother-serpent throttles the father ; the young destroy the mother ; but harmless garter-snakes are oviparous and multiply freely ; and here is another far-fetched illustration : the goat is a sufficiently pungent creature, but Herodotus points out with triumph that nature inspires him to rub his beard in the sap of certain deliciously aromatic trees, whence he provides his owners with one of the favourite perfumes of commerce ; and so once more in the intelligent, if paradoxical, economy of nature, out of the strong has come forth sweetness. But apart from biology, the broad doctrine of compensation is so deep-seated in Herodotus' heart that he dwells upon it with his latest breath ; his history flickers out it hardly seems to end in an expression of this doctrine. " Soft lands breed soft peoples," he reflects, " but empire belongs to lands THE MIND OF HERODOTUS 27 that are poor and to people who live hard lives ; " and there, it seems, he paused as if to weigh the thought again, and there his fate overtook him, and he added not another word to bring his history to a more formal conclusion. (17) Herodotus is very quick to catch national and racial peculiarities, and to hit them off by an anecdote or apophthegm ; it is his superiority to national prejudices, his broad philosophic appreciation of all nations, which makes him so weighty an author in spite of all his levity. Herodotus lived among democrats, all exalting their own country ; but he is no Chauvinist, and he never writes buncombe. His is a temperate patriotism, and not the refuge of a scoundrel ; conversely, if he was not a jingo, still less was he a spurious cosmopolitan, the friend of every nation except his own. (18) And yet if I were to leave the impression that he cared only for men and women and character, personal or national, it would be entirely unjust to his many-sided nature, his multiplex personality. There is nothing he did not care for ; sometimes he is quite wrong, as to the causes, e.g. of the flooding of Egypt in summer by the Nile ; more often he is right, and those of his tales which have been most ridiculed, then or since, have later been established. But some of the amazing stories for which modern writers abuse him are only told by him, because they are amazing, and he tells us carefully that he does not himself believe them. Such is the story of the Phoenix, for which a reverend professor living in Oxford has condemned him for credulity ; this is the same gentleman, by the way, who tells us not to believe that the Egyptian language is like the twittering of birds, not to believe that Herodotus ever talked with the Egyptian priests. Herodotus could not understand Egyptian priests, he assures us. Time has its revenge, you see. Now it is the priests and the Egyptologists who cannot understand Herodotus. 28 THE MIND OF HERODOTUS (19) Historians have especially derided Herodotus' version of the political debate in Persia on the merits of democracy, monarchy, and aristocracy. Herodotus knew he would be derided ; he was derided even in his own times. " All the same," he remarks, with patient philosophy, " the debate did take place." Whether it did or not, commented Grant Duff a score of years ago, at any rate after all these ages there is little new light to be added on these difficult questions ; so sound, so sensible, is the debate. And now, in this year of grace 1927, we find at last all our journalists shouting at the top of their lungs that East and West are one, and that Chinamen and Persians are just as much entitled to democracy or republicanism as we are ourselves. The journalists are building better than they know. They are building on Herodotus. (20) So, then, in conclusion, whatever Egyptologists, priests, and historians may say in disparagement of Herodotus' judgment, wisdom, or accuracy, though they charge him with vanity, with credulity, with romancing, after all the reasonable charges have been allowed, and the necessary deductions from the value of his history admitted, we may rest assured that he will still remain most amiable, most witty, most wise, most pitiful, most entertaining, a very lovable historian. We shall read his books and laugh over them ; we may laugh, also, when we see his detractors' books ; we need not be at equal pains to read them. Some of their names we know, but very willingly we forget them. CHAPTER II THUCYDIDES AND HISTORY THAT the personality of an historian is a large factor in his history is the merest truism : if only because in history, as in metaphysics, there is no such thing as the fact in itself : ding an sich : but all so-called facts are strained through the moulds furnished by the special nature of the writer. But this subjective element will vary immensely in direct ratio to two forces, not identical though con- verging : to the depth and force of the writer's per- sonality but also to the theory which he holds of his function as historian. Theories of history, like theories of life itself, will modify largely the play of temperament and per- sonality. No man was temperamentally gayer or lighter hearted than Matthew Arnold : his theory of life nevertheless went a long way to diminish the gaiety and high spirits of his writings. There are broadly two theories of history. There is the large and chiefly modern school of historians, who almost seek to turn history into a record similar to the records of the investigations of the naturalist or mathematician. History is to record facts ascer- tained by severe and laborious research into the original authorities. It is to be documented by refer- ence to these authorities. It is to turn largely on the constitutional development and constitutional changes in a nation's life : on its economic changes : on the influence of geography and climate. In short, it is to be an unfolding of law, Jaw human as unfolded in constitutions and institutions, and law natural as 29 30 THUCYDIDES AND HISTORY illustrated in economic, geographic and climatic forces. It is to fight shy of the merely personal factors in life : the characters of individual men and women : partly because these are of less importance in a broad view of life, but even more because these are past finding out. The influence of moral and religious ideas in the same way must be left without treatment for the same reasons that these things are of little importance apart from economic, geographic and climatic forces, and that in any case they are too subjective for discussion. They seem to raise the thorny question of free-will in man. History had better adopt, as a working hypothesis at least, the doctrine of necessity, and assume that, so far as the historian is concerned, his work is to be a record only of the results of law : like the records of the naturalist and mathematician : and that the virtues and vices of men are equally the results of law, of conditions and environment, and are not affected by the meta- physical figment called free-will. If a man holds such a theory, as many do, it is obvious that even a marked and vivacious person- ality will not obtrude itself into his history : that his history will become almost impersonal on principle : that though the writer be a Bishop, it may be, his history will not be a hand-book of morals, a collection of inspiring anecdotes, a fountain of moral edifica- tion : that it will not improve the occasion, as the phrase is. For all such efforts, the writer will turn to such other functions as he may be in a position to discharge, the functions of a Bishop, or a school- master, or a father, and the like. Bishop Stubbs, for example, was a man of marked personality, of caustic humour and masculine good sense, intolerant only of trivialities, of humbug and affectation and waste of time. But we know this from sources other than his histories : and if he was a voracious reader of fiction as well as a veracious historian we are entitled to surmise that it was because THUCYDIDES AND HISTORY 31 he found history, as he conceived it and made it, so dull, that he turned instinctively to the opposite field of literature for relief and refreshment. If he had held a less dry theory of history he would have written better history and have read fewer novels : both his writing and his reading would have gained. The historian of to-day, says another academic historian, Lord Acton, dines in the kitchen : if he does so, he does so of his own will and judgment and no one else need complain : if he does not. But it is a different matter that he should make his readers dine there with him. After all, it is usual for the cook who prepares the entertainment in the kitchen to take her own entertainment there : it is not usual for her to ask the guests to join her at her repast. I trust I am not flippant beyond measure. Quite seriously, it does not really and rightly follow that, because history involves a lot of dull spade work and heavy research, the result, when served up, should be also dull and heavy. Goldwin Smith was not. Gibbon was not : he avoided it by footnotes. We may suppose that he was always learned : that he read Thucydides amid the diversions of the nursery : but his learning sits lightly on him and the easy read- ing which he furnishes is the best tribute he desired to the hardness of his work. There is, however, and always has been a concep- tion of history diametrically the opposite of that which imposed itself upon Bishop Stubbs : the con- ception that the historian is also or almost a poet. A true historian will give his imagination free play in the interpretation of the difficult and bygone minutiae of time and place and nationality, and will lift them up into the atmosphere which is familiar to himself and his readers, and will make modern history of them, and will re-write them in short for his own age and in the language of his own age, and in so doing will, in a sense, universalize them, in spite of certain obvious risks in so doing. Shelley said that 32 THUCYDIDES AND HISTORY every good historian was a poet. Carlyle illustrated Shelley's contentions in his history of the French Revolution. Froude illustrated it in a less degree in his histories, and has been alternately exalted and depreciated since by students of history according as they follow Shelley's or Aristotle's conception of the function of the historian. (Aristotle said that history was the antithesis of poetry, that poetry was more serious and more philosophic.) If after this preamble we turn to the historians of Greece, the same antithesis even there presents itself in germ at least, if not highly developed. Herodotus is frankly expansive, personal, imagina- tive. He desires to produce a certain general effect, and to produce this effect it is as nothing to him if some of his details be obviously imagined, be mani- festly devoid of evidence. He is willing that it should be so. He is willing that any reader of his shall say " And now I know all and more than all that is known of this or that great man " : provided that the reader can add with some confidence " but not more than the angels know," that is, provided that the added and imaginary details furnished by Herodotus from his inner consciousness are true in spirit to the details actually known : provided that they are ben trovato and furnish suitable diet for the intellectual repast of angels and other beings who live in the spirit. Nay more, Herodotus does not conceive that truth, even when conceived in this broad sense, is his only or his primary object. No : he is called upon rather to chronicle belief and word, fancy and conversation, superstition or scandal, anything and everything which occupies man's thoughts, rather than the historical facts, if any, beneath the words and fancies or scandals. He is not required to believe every- thing, nay, anything that he has heard, but he is required to chronicle it. But Herodotus redeems his dangerous theory by his choice of his anecdotes, scandals, superstitions : if THUCYDIDES AND HISTORY 33 there are a few stories introduced only because they are macabre, grotesque, or gruesome, if occasionally Herodotus suggests a modern " realist," that is a writer of matter so exceptionally nasty as hardly to be real in a broad sense any longer, still on the whole he selects his anecdotes however unauthentic for their serious inner truth, for their profound moral significance. It is for this reason that he has become a storehouse for the moral and anecdotical historian who is more concerned with human nature than with constitutions or economics. Men have been inspired to take up classics for their vocation by Rollin's history : but Rollin was first inspired by Herodotus. We do not learn from him, we have to wait for twenty centuries to learn from Mr. Leaf, that the Trojan War was akin in spirit to the GaUipoli campaign of 1915, that it was a battle for the economic control of the waterways of the Black Sea and the .^Egean and of the grain trade which issues through those waterways. But his own special and picturesque theory of the cause of the Trojan War and of other great wars between ast and West, though it wholly overlooks the play of economic forces, cannot be said to overlook the play of other true causes, and other real forces in human history, underlying life in all ages and modifying it here, there and everywhere, and far more likely to-day to be under-rated and under-stated than exaggerated : cherchez la femme is no mere flippancy or cynicism as an explanation of events, and is not antiquated and out-of-date because our historians have learned also to take more account to-day of the impersonal and less picturesque factor of economics. When we turn from Herodotus to Thucydides we are already opening the preface of the volume of scientific history : we are passing from the expansive and personal historian who parades like Byron before his readers the pageant of his heart and mind, to the reserve and the silence and the mauvaise horde of M.M. 3 34 THUCYDIDES AND HISTORY the modern scientific historian, of the man who counts it beneath him, or above him, to have moral judgments, who counts it still more unworthy of his functions to write emotionally, whose good taste or mauvaise honte rejects as egotism all reference to himself, whose aesthetic sense or mauvaise honte leaves his story always to speak for itself and suggest its own morals. I was speaking of the doctrine of necessity which underlies the work of the scientific historian. It cer- tainly underlies the work of Thucydides. He assumes in one of the best-known passages of his introduction x that human nature is the same in all ages, that as Aristotle puts it ndvra ax^dov etf^rat "pretty well everything is known " which is to be known ; and that accordingly the history of the future will follow the lines of the past as similar conditions geographical, climatic and economic recur. His book will therefore be no mere picture of local and ephe- meral conditions to which Aristotle condemns the historian but like the work of the poet, a book of reference for all times and lands. If his work is not as baldly scientific and dry as that of his modern admirers, it is only because even with him as with Herodotus, the dramatic element still lingers, and his history, like the history of Hero- dotus, seems still in part modelled on tragedy. As Herodotus, in effect, retains a chorus to strike the note of the impartial spectator and comment suitably on the tragic history of men, some Croesus or Arta- banus who lingers on in the history, after his own part is over, to point the moral (as Margaret of Anjou lingers on in Shakespeare's plays), so even Thucydides seems to entertain the doctrine of the Divine Irony as set forth by the Athenian dramatists, and presents the hour of triumph and of paeans as the hour pre- ceding downfall : the insolent exultation of Athens over Melos, the arrogance of the Athenians at the Melian dialogue becomes a sort of Bacchic chorus, 1 Book I, 22. THUCYDIDES AND HISTORY 85 ushering in the fatal Sicilian expedition with its motive of " world empire or downfall," even as the triumphant Bacchic chorus of Sophocles' Antigone heralds the suicide of Antigone Haemon and Eury- dice. And in a few other passages notably at the end of the third book in the Ambraciot episode there is a dramatic and artistic value wholly foreign to severely scientific history. But these poetic touches are the rare exceptions which relieve at long intervals the impersonal and colourless narrative : scarcely even when the events narrated are most appalling and appealing will the writer let it be seen that the appeal has reached himself. When the brutal Thracian mercenaries of Athens the Albanians or Bulgarians of Thucydidean Thrace break into an elementary school of bucolic Boeotian children and murder all the pretty babes [or heavy babes] at one fell swoop, faint and far seems the echo of the humanitarian sentiment of the sentimental Athenians which we can catch in the comments of their very unsentimental and academic historian. It is no jest but sober truth which Professor Mahaffy expresses when he remarks that Thucydides' emotion is discernible here only in the extra contortions and crabbedness of his syntax. 1 This is a crucial instance of that mauvaise honte of the scientific historian which banishes emotion and indignation from his pages, and which regards ex- pansiveness as the unpardonable sin in history. Herodotus breaks out to record his personal dissent from the mild and abstract proposition of some con- temporary Darwin that man is only an animal and need not be more careful of his behaviour in temples and holy places than animals are seen to be. 4 The proposition is displeasing to me," he tells us : Thucy- dides will not let his personal disgust be seen even when infants are butchered. It seems to be beneath the dignity of history : to be an unworthy concession 1 VII, 29. 36 THUCYDIDES AND HISTORY to popular feeling and superficial sentiment, to be a playing to the gallery and the groundlings. But note, however, how this mauvaise honte and this reserve defeats itself in a sense and debars the his- torian scientific though he may be who is its victim, from discharging one of the chief functions of history. It is the merest commonplace that history should record not only wars and battles and royalties and constitutions, but the general life of the people themselves, social, industrial, artistic, moral and religious, and this quite apart from the modern or democratic conditions, which give more or less to the mass of the people the control of their govern- ments, and therefore give the people of necessity a place in history. Even under autocratic governments, such as those of the East in Herodotus' time, and since, we expect that the historian shall not confine himself to the doings and sayings of royalty, but shall describe the life of their subjects. This is what Herodotus has done, and though he might fairly and scientifically have argued that history was made in those days by kings and generals and that therefore their deeds and words were of the essence of history, he has yet gone far outside them and has described everything he saw and heard discussed : the customs, beliefs, even the dress and food of the ordinary man : the servants he kept or did not keep, the ornaments the women wore, the uses to which they put them : the soil and climate : the yield of different cereals and fruits : the physical structure of the land and of its inhabitants : the flora and fauna : the life-history of great rivers and their effect on geography : the sources of the Nile, the circumnavigation of Africa and so on. He is an encyclopaedist, and an encyclopaedist all the more useful because he writes with verve and enthusiasm and is brimming over with a sense of the importance of his function as a reporter. The scientific historian Thucydides, on the other THUCYDIDES AND HISTORY 87 hand, is debarred by mauvaise honte, by his unfor- tunate sense of the dignity and impartiality or even neutrality that most abused of all words the neu- trality even, which he thinks incumbent on the historian. He is not to report frivolities and trivi- alities : he is not to become a tattler and a gossip dvdQconoMyos : he is not to descend to personalities : he is not to mention women : he is not to describe the petty local and picturesque occasions which serve as the odorous sulphur match to light great con- flagrations ; the occasion, for example, of the revolt of Mytilene from Athens. He is to confine himself to the great conflagration the revolt itself. All else is unnecessary and superfluous and supererogatory. He is not even to mention the names of speakers, when speeches are recorded. The speech is to show the great lines of thought, which animated peoples during the Peloponnesian War the lines of thought will be blurred or at least reduced to insignificance, if the speaker's name be obtruded : a merely personal note will seem to detract from their larger import. Life is full of trifles but art of dignity, and the trifles of life though they be also its tragedy and comedy are unworthy a place in the history, which is to go down to posterity for a book of perpetual reference : and therefore though the Peloponnesian War touched Greece closely on every side and affected every one and every thing, Thucydides has not con- descended to give much more than its military opera- tions and its broader diplomatic history. Only three continuous chapters have been given to its moral effects (one of them accounted spurious) : apart from his account of the plague, the military and diplomatic history have been relieved only by those strange speeches so curiously blent of scientific and unscien- tific elements : unscientific, since they are frankly not Hansard reports or anything approaching them ; ultra-scientific, since they exclude all the personal note and all topical allusions, and leave only a skeleton 38 THUCYDIDES AND HISTORY or outline of political or national principles very eloquent sometimes, as in the Funeral Speech, and very instructive, as in the speech of Cleon, but much more natural in the reflections of a philosophic historian, than on the lips of a popular orator. It is hard to believe that the real Pericles was not more topical, it is impossible to believe that Cleon was not. Lord Bryce some years ago in a service in honour of Mr. William Gladstone referred to the loss of young life in the Great War, and quoted from the Funeral Speech of Pericles " the year has lost its spring." Now the words are not in Thucydides' version of that speech and perhaps he thought them " tosh " ; perhaps he just forgot them : in either case it was Aristotle who had sufficient sympathy with poetry to treasure up from the Funeral Speech this little touch of the poet x : none the less poetic even if it was not original exactly on the lips of Pericles but a quotation from Gelo (Herodotus, VII, 162) much improved by a nobler application. Thucydides could have enlightened us in a million ways about the daily life of Greece, the outer and the inner life, and have shown us the soul of its peoples. He has put aside the task as unworthy of a severe and scientific thinker, has left it wholly on the shoul- ders of Herodotus and Plutarch, and only rarely- very rarely has let us see that any personal opinions or emotions were evoked in him by the course of the war. This is high art it may be said : the highest art : the historian lets his facts speak for themselves and thereby enables them to speak with tenfold force. Thucydides has so successfully concealed himself that no one ever suspected personal bias even in his account of Cleon, until the democratic enthusiasm of Grote, on behalf of demagogues, threw a light into dark places and cast a shadow on the seeming imper- sonality of the historian's history. The defence may 1 Aristotle's Rhetoric, Book I, 7. 34. THUCYDIDES AND HISTORY 39 be an adequate defence of the silence of Thucydides on moral themes, of his comparative silence about the " frightfulness " of Athenian policy or the " fright- fulness " of the war generally : I think it is : but where the facts do not speak for themselves, where they need interpretation, it is a dead loss to the modern reader that Thucydides either records facts without explanation, as, for example, the mutilation of the Hermae, or does not think them worthy of record at all. If Herodotus or Plutarch had covered the same ground with the same advantages, what a different place the Athens of Pericles and Socrates would be for us to-day ! How infinitely more real and more alive ! Plato and Aristophanes have done something to fill the gap but neither can be expected to fill it well : and each is justified, and even compelled, by his special subject matter to leave it largely unfilled. We had a right to expect from Thucydides as an historian records which cannot be required of dia- logues on philosophy and still less from the frank caricatures of ancient comedy : and least of all from the conventional and, so to speak, Sunday-school sermons and religious services of ancient tragedy. After all this generalizing and all this more or less vague beating of the air in which Thucydides moved, let me come down closer to details and endeavour to seize a few points of his mind "unseized " it may be "by the Germans yet" and publish them. It appears to me perhaps the most curiously salient or crucial passage for plumbing the depths of Thucydides' personality is that in Book VII l which records his judgment on the career and character of Nicias. It is an extraordinary verdict. Here is a general, who has been condemned already in the history, at least by implication, for lack of vigour : who has been condemned explicitly for superstition : whose unscrupulous politics in the matter of Pylos, 1 VII, 86. Oeiaoiuk, VII, 50. 40 THUCYDIDES AND HISTORY where he risked defeat for Athens for the sake of dis- crediting a rival, have been frankly stated : whose selfishness in remaining in Sicily rather than face complaints and recriminations at home, obviously sacrificed Athenian to personal interests and was afterwards emphatically contrasted for this reason by Plutarch the moralist with the unselfish patriotism of a much more obscure general, one Leo of Byzan- tium : whose craving for life even at the bitter end, when everything else but life was lost, has been recorded without comment : and yet after all these materials furnished us for a verdict more or less unfavourable to Nicias, the historian concludes : " This or something of the sort was the cause of his execution : of all Hellenes of my time he had least deserved a fate so unhappy : when his practice of every customary virtue is taken into account." The historian's verdict throws more light on his own temperament and point of view than on the peculiar hardships of Nicias' fate. Why was this conventional, wealthy, reputable and hitherto lucky Athenian general held up for special commiseration ? Grote has argued that his repute testifies to the inner conservatism of the Athenian people, who chose this typical conservative to lead them. But why did Thucydides also choose him for a special tribute of pity? I can only suggest that the historian, himself an " intellectuel," as the phrase goes in France, a member of the " aufklarung," as they say in Germany, one of the " illuminati," as the Italians have it, had arrived very positively at this conclusion from the use of his intellect and his illumination, that intellect and illumination are a very dubious advantage to their owner and his countrymen from the political point of view : that after all that man is the best citizen who sticks to the old paths and does not see beyond them ; that those laws are best which are the laws of one's own country ; and that that religion THUCYDIDES AND HISTORY 41 is truest which is the religion of one's own country the answer which the oracle of Delphi by the way also once had given to an over-speculative inquirer after absolute truth : and therefore his praise of Nicias. It is not an unfamiliar point of view of course. It finds support from Aristotle when he comes to eulo- gize the same Nicias and to criticize the reformer and idealist Hippodamus of Miletus. There is a brilliant array of Frenchmen of our own day, who similarly exalt on general grounds a conservatism and an orthodoxy which some of them can hardly be supposed to augment with their personal convictions ; which most of them perhaps endorse with their judgment rather than with their private emotions, Barres, Bazin, Brunetiere, Bordeaux, Bourget, Bergson : but I do not know that a stranger and stronger instance of this conservatism of experience and judgment can be found than the eulogy of Thucydides the dis- illusioned historian pronounced over the pietist, traditionalist and in every sense commonplace charac- ter of Nicias. It suggests that to Thucydides' mind the ultimate truth of politics is that " dullness with honesty " average honesty at any rate, " is better for a state than cleverness with recklessness ; clever- ness without balance." The words are the words of Cleon. 1 And that aphorism leads one to the very curious and piquant difficulties which surround the relations of Thucydides and Cleon. The aphorism is one of Cleon's : it belongs to his speech on the Mytilenaean question as reported by Thucydides himself.* The whole of the speech is along similar lines : a plea for common sense and practical prudence in dealing with enemies as against newfangled ideas of humanitarianism, or as against philosophic idealism or as against mere ingenious sophistry. The speech is extremely powerful as an * III, 57. 3. 87. 42 THUCYDIDES AND HISTORY indictment of Athenian humanitarianism, idealism, ingenuity and sophistry. It seems to me to be the best speech I had almost said the best passage in Thucydides, with the possible exception of the Funeral Speech. But that only makes it doubly difficult to gauge the relations of the speaker and the reporter of the speech. How comes it that Thucy- dides has reported so vigorous an expression of what we may call Tory-democracy, an expression by a democrat of the old Tory creed of horse-sense and common instinct and natural nationalism against fads, ideals and 'ologies of every kind ? and has sup- ported it by an emphatic tribute to Nicias, the incarnation of old conventions (though not of democ- racy) and yet has no word of commendation for the speaker, but on the contrary has taken away his character with posterity ? And all the more success- fully and artistically because with so much self- restraint, that no one before Grote suspected preju- dice and unfairness and a personal grudge. No one supposes that Thucydides' speeches are close reports of their originals : all the more difficult is it to understand the real force and eloquence of Cleon as reported. And there is a further contra- diction and mystification in this matter. Thucydides writes or reports, or writes partly and partly reports, Cleon' s protest against Athenian many-sidedness and susceptibility, Athenian idealism and scepticism ; Cleon' s trenchant conclusion that democracy is an impossible form of government for the conduct of foreign politics (for foreign politics must have con- tinuity and principle, and democracy is the govern- ment of fits and starts, of snap votes and see-saw emotions). Thucydides goes out of his way as though in order to supplement Cleon to exalt the humdrum moderation of Nicias, and yet per contra he im- plicitly and explicitly condemns Cleon as a violent demagogue, despite the large element of Toryism common to Cleon with Nicias. Further, in his fam- THUCYDIDES AND HISTORY 43 ous chapters of reflection, 1 Thucydides laments the ill repute and unpopularity which by reason of the war came to be attached to academic thinkers, to the enlightened and the scrupulous and the best educated men in Athens. Owing to the war he says moderation came to be regarded as a mere excuse for cowardice and to know everything people began to say was to do nothing. Is not this " trying to have it both ways " ? Who was it who said " to know everything was to do nothing " ? Not merely the Athenian public, if we may read between the lines, but the historian himself also. What can his fantastic praise of Nicias mean, except that to his own mind also as well as to the popular mind, there seemed no help for the city from its best educated and most intelligent people, and more help from the stolid conservatism and stubborn unintelligence of Nicias ? And what does the brilliant speech of Cleon mean except the same thing ? And if Thucydides feels the force of Cleon's speech and the force of Nicias' timid orthodoxy and of his blind obedience to customary virtues, why should he com- plain that the most intelligent and best educated were forced to the wall ? On his own showing that was the only place for them. They were incompetent to help the State in a crisis. They had no beliefs or habits or sheet-anchors left and in the storm of the war sheet-anchors were beyond all things necessary : and the man who had one even a Nicias was the best citizen of the State : and the man who depre- cated high-flown novelties and far-fetched sensibilities even a Cleon was a good citizen. I have tried to penetrate the ideas underlying this strange eulogy of Nicias. I have assumed that the tie uniting two men so different as Nicias and Thucy- dides was the political conservatism of each. I have assumed further that they represent between them the two schools of thought into which conservatism 1 Book III, 82-88. 44 THUCYDIDES AND HISTORY has ever been, still is, and perhaps will continue to be divided : the conservatism of unthinking loyalty to the past, conventionalism, traditionalism, or even mere class and economic interests : and, on the other hand, the conservatism of profound scepticism and doubt : doubt which reaches so far that it accepts the established always just because it is established ; and feels that any change may be for the worse, and no change in politics can be demonstrated to be for the better, since politics is not yet a science, and since even beneficent changes open the door to unsettlement and discontent, and break down that sense of finality and settled order on which the contentment and therefore the happiness of a State depends. Sir Walter Scott, to take an illustration from our own history, or a greater man, Edmund Burke, repre- sent more or less the romantic conservatism of the first kind. Gibbon, Hookham Frere, Canning, Mansel and all the Saturday Reviewers represent the con- servatism of the doubters. Aristotle has given voice to the two spirits of conservatism : one in his chapter on Hippodamus and one in his eulogy of Nicias. Thucydides has anticipated Aristotle in expressing them. I assume yet further that the conservatism of Thucydides has led him to give vivid and vital ex- pression to that glorification of selfish common sense and rough nationalism or national egotism which we find in Cleon's argument : to that depreciation of scruples and humanitarian sympathies which we find in Cleon's arraignment of Athenian susceptibility : but that, this vein of sympathy with Cleon's speech by no means prevents him from heartily disliking and distrusting the speaker. He sympathizes with him as a Tory and dislikes him as a democrat and a man. The sympathy is merely intellectual and never per- sonal. The dislike is profound and personal : a dislike of taste and feeling. There is no agreement between him and Cleon except in opinions. Thucy- THUCYDIDES AND HISTORY 45 dides was divided like other men between his judg- ment and his personal tastes, like the great Lord Falkland, for example ; his friends were all among the educated and the refined and sensitive : his judgment was against his friends, at any rate in politics, as too sensitive and scrupulous and unde- cided for the rough business of politics. His taste and judgment met together again and were reconciled when he encountered the personality of Nicias, a man of the upper class, " a gentleman " as we say, and yet an unhesitating and confirmed conservative : hence the extravagant praise of Nicias and the very mixed verdict and uncertain sound with which Thucydides expresses himself on the cultivated and refined mem- bers of his own circle : the men who knew everything and did nothing. When he coined that epigram I can- not but think that to him it expressed something more than a democratic scoff, a Cleonic scoff, at mugwumps and kidglove politicians and independ- ents. It expressed something of a serious truth. These academic thinkers were not of the stuff of statesmen : were too many-sided and undecided : independents are people who cannot be depended upon : professors and philosophers are the worst of statesmen : they think they can arrange the world with essays and lectures. They make bad Presidents. Whatever else we can read between the lines of his history is consistent with these assumptions and ex- planations. It is pretty obvious that Thucydides had a great admiration for Pericles. It is not from him but from Plutarch that we hear that Pericles was like other great reformers ; that he had to begin by playing to the gallery, if by so doing he could adver- tise himself and get a following, and prepare the way for serious and conservative reforms later on. Thu- cydides admits no such opportunism. Pericles is with him the ideal reformer who aimed at conciliating all opposites and making Athens the union of all conflicting virtues : the seat of liberty, yet the home 46 THUCYDIDES AND HISTORY of law and lawful authority : the temple of art, yet the city of severe simplicity and economy : and most of all, the very fountain of free thought, free speech, free life and philosophy, and yet the nursing mother of soldiers, sailors and men of action : a sort of Platonic Callipolis reconciling and embracing the opposite virtues of Athens and of Sparta : that Sparta to which Thucydides with Plato and all the Athenian intellectuals even Socrates so fondly turned amid the noise and blather, the babbling and bubbling, the blabbering and blubbering of Athenian democracy. It is not from Thucydides that we hear that the Periclean ideal was impracticable. He certainly im- plies that it failed ; but he does not put the blame on Pericles for its failure. He seems to suggest that it did not fail as long as Pericles was present to inspire his countrymen with his ideals. Periclean Athens to Thucydides is Athens at her best. Peri- clean Athens was nominally a democracy he writes in reality she was a city governed by her first man. 1 This is perhaps a sort of Carlylean or Ruskinese hero-worship ; it is certainly not the expression of a Lincoln-democrat. Government for the people was Pericles' aim. Government by the people was hardly even Pericles' practice, so far as we can judge. And it was certainly not Thucydides' idea of good government. There is, or was, a Society of St. Michael, I believe, to which Ruskin and Carlyle belonged at least in spirit : a society intended to pro- test that in politics as in religion a man best shows his free will by surrendering it freely to the grace given him from above, from a God or a god-like man, to whose will he submits himself : after that it is not he who works but the grace, the will of the higher nature, which works in him. Obedience a free and willing obedience to such grace is his salvation. Thucydides, I think, belonged to the same school : 1 II, 65. THUCYDIDES AND HISTORY 47 the very antithesis of the modern and characteristic school of the Socialists. " Enough of great men " is their cry : " nous en avons assez." " Do not think of me, do not magnify me," said Francisco Ferrer, a genuine and sincere martyr to this cause. " The future does not depend on individuals but on classes and communities : the individual is henceforth nothing. He has had his day and ceased to be." I turn from Thucydides' politics to his religion. A man's religion, says Carlyle, is the most interesting thing about him. It may be so, but it is not on that account the most easily discoverable. Herodotus' religion is both interesting and discoverable : the old doctrine of Divine Jealousy pushed to its logical con- clusion, illustrated with fantastic modern instances but relieved by the other Herodotean doctrine the complement of jealousy of Divine Compensation : the same God who puts down the mighty from their seat is careful to exalt the humble and the meek, and to see that the meek and not the mighty inherit the earth (that the French- Canadians and not our ambi- tious and exacting race populate Ontario). There is nothing so picturesque and definite as this in Thucy- dides' religion. It is much nearer the sombre creed of Tacitus, when he claimed to have produced evi- dence to show that Heaven, if it is not careful for our peace of mind, is careful at least to punish our offences. 1 That seems to be the conclusion very tentatively put forward by Thucydides in Book I. 1 The point is important because it is customary to say that Thucydides derided oracles and portents and was purely negative, scientifically negative on the question of religion. It is scarcely so. If he does not propound a defin- itely religious reason for the calamities of Nature, earthquake, pestilence and famine, he comes as near to it as man so sceptical can come. He sympathizes with the religious point of view, if he does not exactly 1 Tacitus, Uist., 1. 8. 1. 28. 48 THUCYDIDES AND HISTORY endorse it, just as he sympathizes with Nicias, whose religious extravagances nevertheless he has had occa- sion to deplore. There are some three passages on this subject and they are fairly consistent. There was an old oracle that a Dorian war would come and with it Ao*//o'c pestilence or hn6g famine. (The passage of course is of prime interest to the students of pronunciation ; it seems to establish almost beyond demur the proposi- tion that the classical pronunciation of " oi " and " i " was identical, or nearly so, as it is identical in modern Greek : both " oi " and " i " are the French long " i " and the English long " e.") When the Pelopon- nesian war came and pestilence with it but not famine, people quoted the line with Xoipdi;. If there had been a famine, remarks Thucydides, they would have quoted it with At^efc. Some readers read a scoff at oracles here : there is no scoff at oracles, only a mild reference to the weakness of human nature, which adjusts its memory and its evidences to the accomplished facts. Still less can hostility to the oracles of Greece be found in his comment on another oracle. This oracle said " r6 nefaayixdv aqyov fyetvov." l Accord- ingly people argued that when the plague broke out in Athens after the occupation of this forbidden dis- trict the plague was Heaven's punishment for a violation of Divine Law. Thucydides interposes a mild protest, which certainly does not scoff at oracles. Rather he commits himself to the somewhat hazard- ous proposition that the prophet foresaw that when the days should come for the occupation of the Pelasgic district they would be days of mourning. The prophet foresaw that it would never be occupied to advantage : and that is all (Thucydides says) his oracle meant. That is to say, Thucydides has rationalized away the theory of Divine Vengeance as expressed in the special locality of the plague, 1 2. 17. THUCYDIDES AND HISTORY 49 but he has contrived to do so without disputing at all, rather while accepting, the authenticity and the historical accuracy of the ancient oracle. And in the last and crucial passage of Book I l he will not even consent to rationalize away the theory of Divine Vengeance. Rather he covertly suggests he throws it out as a natural hypothesis that the prevalence of Natural calamities, of earthquakes, eclipses, tidal waves and plagues, drought and famine, concurrently with the Peloponnesian war was not a mere coincidence. He will not pledge himself to the proposition that these things were the Divine penal- ties for an unnecessary, degrading, unnatural and impious war, for this would be going perhaps beyond the province of history. But he will at least support this proposition of the conscientious and God-fearing people of the day, to the extent of adding his testi- mony to the alleged synchronism : there was a synchronism. There actually were more cataclysms of Nature during the Peloponnesian war than during any other period of similar extent. 8 When a his- torian goes out of his way to call attention to this synchronism, it can hardly be doubted that he would have liked to go further, had the spirit of his circle and the growing science of the day permitted him to do so. I will dwell yet a little longer on his sense of the " frightf ulness " of the Peloponnesian war, and of the shock which it gave to God-fearing people. Thucydides seems very full of that sense of horror. Modern historians like Mahaffy sometimes claim credit for deprecating and depreciating the eternal and inter- necine feuds of the Greeks. They even extend their indifference and contempt to Athens' battle for free- dom against Philip, as if Athens ought to have des- paired of herself, like Phocion, or ought to have sacrificed herself on the altar of futurity and humanity, in order that Alexander might the sooner over-run 1 l. 28. l. 28. M.M. 4 50 THUCYDIDES AND HISTORY the East, and spread Hellenism and civilization over Egypt and Asia Minor : whence, via Rome, it would reach the whole world, East and West alike, and go down to all ages. But whatever be thought of Demosthenes and Philip, and even though it be pre- posterous to expect of Demosthenes that sacrifice of Athens for Europe's sake which the modern reader of Demosthenes may to-day accept with resignation and even with satisfaction, there will be a general tendency among the modern readers of Thucydides to accept his reprobation of the civil wars of the Greeks, and of the Peloponnesian war in particular. His reprobation of the Peloponnesian war has two aspects one of which at least will commend itself. Thucydides, like Plato, if not like Aristotle, has no sympathy with or enthusiasm for Imperialism : for an Empire to be built up by Athens or any other Greek State over other nations, including in these other nations many Greek States ; he no doubt followed the policy of Pericles, who advocated the maintenance of the then Empire and the then sea power of Athens by means of a strong fleet but not the extension of the Empire. Pericles seems to have assumed that it was hopeless to unite Greece and to conciliate Sparta, and therefore to have advocated against Sparta " a preventive war " as the Germans call it : but he warned Athens against the policy of adventure and world domination, such as came afterwards with Alcibiades and the Sicilian Expedition. If the other policy the policy of domination in the East, instead of in the West, over Asia Minor and the Persian Empire, instead of over the Greeks of Sicily, had ever been seriously suggested to Pericles, as it suggested itself to Isocrates and to Aristotle and to Alexander, it is conceivable that he might have agreed, for this would have meant domination over Asiatics not over Greeks. But there was no room for such a sugges- tion in the divided state of Greece and its internal feuds. THUCYDIDES AND HISTORY 51 Be that as it may, Pericles remained opposed to wars of conquest, and Thucydides evidently both in principle and from bitter experience followed Pericles. It may be even that he would have agreed with Plato, that the ideal Athens was not even the Athens of Pericles with the Athenian Empire of the year 431, but just the city of Athens and the adjoining Attica, just a Greek n6h<; living in friendly relations with other Greek nofeu;; just a municipality as we call it ; or a free city of the middle ages, Genoa, Venice, Bremen, without their external possessions. It may be that even to the same degree as Plato, Thucy- dides, was a little- Athens man (/iixgojioAmyc). At any rate there is nothing to show that he would have disliked or did dislike, if he knew it, the Platonic ideal. Modern British readers are less friendly to the city-state and to this intense and extreme decentra- lization, which comes to them as doubly " suspect " ; " suspect " on account of all their associations, ex- periences and prejudices derived from the history of 2,000 years, and twice suspect as associated not with the name of Greece and the Greek n6h<; and Plato and Thucydides, but with the ideals of Rousseau and a number of impracticable modern doctrinaires, French and others : Karl Marx and Bakounine and many members of the Paris Commune of 1871, who wanted to break up France into communes like the municipality of Paris. But the other and second aspect of Thucydides' dislike of Imperialism is much more modern and commends itself just now to all of us. Thucydides' idea of Imperialism was far removed from the ideas associated with that word by reasonable Canadians, Australians, Africanders and by the majority of the people of the Mother Country : the idea of a united Empire of free peoples, bound together in a perpetual defensive alliance with the minimum of machinery for that bond and therefore the maximum of good feeling and mutual forbearance : the idea of a gener- 52 THUCYDIDES AND HISTORY ous loyalty to the past and its traditions : of a generous repudiation of narrow nativism and know- nothing-ism. Imperialism to Thucydides was rather the idea still suggested by the word to the minds of a few fanatics and doctrinaires of Radical tempera- ment in Great Britain, the idea of militarism, jingo- ism, flag-waving, red-painting. It was even worse than this, it was the idea suggested to Thucydides by the bitter evidence of the Peloponnesian war and to us by the bitter evidence of German " frightful- ness." It was the idea that " Imperialism " means the most ruthless militarism and ambition in the conduct of war and the most shameless materialism and the most unscrupulous Macchiavelism in the conduct of diplomacy. Thucydides discerned a progressive brutality and a progressive materialism in the Athenian treatment of the enemy and of the neutral states. It is no wonder that he became a little-Athens man. The received rules of war were barbarous enough to begin with and before the Peloponnesian war began. On the other hand, the Athenian tempera- ment was humanitarian enough before the war to largely cancel these rules. Athens was the one State when Pericles delivered his Funeral Speech, in which " virtue " aqe-cr) stood not for virtus valour, not for the religion of valour, but for benevolence- humanity generosity charity : the men of " vir- tue," says Thucydides in his account of the plague, that is to say, the kindly man and the charitable 1 died of the plague in the largest numbers. Athens before the war in fact had been the one Greek State which was to a certain degree Christian before Christ. And all this was lost by the brutalizing influence of the war, or at least by the influence of the brutalized and materialistic spirit in which the war was waged. No wonder that Thucydides had ceased to be if he ever was an Athenian Imperialist. 1 2. 51. THUCYDIDES AND HISTORY 53 Thucydides has told us that he wrote for all time and that his work would never be out of date. 1 If anyone wants to test that soaring ambition let him do what I was able to do recently. Let him sit down quietly and listen to two young students of Greek reading alternately from Thucydides, the dialogue at the end of Book V called the Melian debate. One reader represents the unhappy and weak neutral Melos : the other, the callous, cynical, militaristic and aggressive Athens. The readers translated almost literally : changed nothing but the names : put Belgium for Melos : and Germany for Athens : and Great Britain for Sparta. For nothing else needed to be changed ; and we heard coming to us from the year 416 B.C. the first proof, the first edition, of the identical debate between Belgium and Germany, which was republished under other names and at various times between 1860 and 1914 : but never so closely to the original as in 1914. Thucydides therefore did something more than put forward a claim to anticipate future history, he did more than claim that history repeated itself. He did more than claim that history is written for the future, that the future may guide itself by the experi- ence of the past : or in the somewhat romantic and extravagant terms which are familiar to some of us from our school days that history gives a young man all the advantages of age without its infirmities- all those claims I mean which have been definitely repudiated by some historians like Ranke, and which obviously leave out of sight the familiar experience, that no man, and a jortiori, no nation, will agree to be taught by any experience except his own these claims were not only put forward by Thucydides, but so successfully established by him, that a drama- tic debate, like the Melian dialogue, can be pitch-forked bodily into the year 1914 as a prtcis of the diplomatic history of Belgium and Germany in that eventful year. 1 1. 22. 54 THUCYDIDES AND HISTORY That debate indeed is doubly dramatic, as has been already suggested. It is not only dramatic in its form, its dialogue, it is dramatic no less in its intense though unspoken irony. It precedes Books VI, VII, and Books VI, VII introduce the fall of Athens. " Strength goeth before a fall " is the religion of Herodotus. The same religion, but spirit- ualized, deepened, purified, is the religion of Thucy- dides. By painting strength in darker colours as pride, by heightening the picture of Athenian arro- gance and cynicism towards Torone, Scione, Mende, Melos, and the rest of the cities and states which resisted Athens, he has given the Creed of Divine Jealousy a more righteous cast, a more humane interpretation. The humanitarianism of Athens the better mind of Athens is overheard in Thucydides confessing the justice of the Divine retribution which has fallen on her : not merely because she was powerful and ambitious, but because her subservience to her ambition and to her lust of power had dimmed and blighted all her greater and more characteristic qualities. " The war up to 415 B.C. made Athens great and Athenians small " : that is the comment to be read between the lines of Thucydides. No man can say that modern Germany has not applied history to her politics in spite of Ranke : her politics have almost been made by her historians. It is a pity that her historians have not gone to ancient history, and in particular to Thucydides and the history of Athens, when they were looking for historical omens. The Melian dialogue might have warned Germany off Belgium, if they had still cared for their classics. Curiously enough they did see the parallel between Great Britain and Sparta but not between themselves and Athens, or between Belgium and Melos. 1 There is little else to be found I think in Thucydides' 1 Vide What Germany Thinks, p. 205, and footnote on Pro- fessor Reinhard Frank of Munich and Tubingen (p. 193). THUCYDIDES AND HISTORY 55 history capable of throwing much light on his mind and personality. A man who so veiled his moral, religious, and artistic bias that the former is not easily understood (as in the verdicts on Nicias and Antiphon), while the two latter have been overlooked more or less entirely, until recently, is not likely to declare himself freely in smaller ways. There is occasionally a touch, a hint of dry sar- casm. The Spartan Admiral Cnemus missed attack- ing the Peiraeus, so he said, by stress of weather. 4 If he had wished to make a better pace the weather would not have been an insuperable obstacle," l observes Thucydides. There is just one speech which is not merely dramatic, like the Melian dialogue, but full of personal colour or at least of national colour : the speech of the Spartan ephor Sthenelaides. 2 Thu- cydides actually gives the speaker's name in this case, apparently because the speech is so full of character as to be too full of character, except as an individual type : too full even for a type of Sparta : more Spartan than the Spartans. " The greater part of the Athenian argument I cannot understand. They have said a great deal in eulogy of Athens but they have not shown that they are not injuring our good allies : if they behaved well against Persia all the more shame on their behaviour to-day." There seems a touch of individual portraiture here. If the name were not given, it might almost seem a touch of caricature : probably that is why the name is given. But this speech is exceptional, not only in its caricature, if there be caricature, but in the giving of a name to the speaker. Thucydides' crav- ing for the impersonal, his ambition to record the laws of history and not the feats of passing and ephemeral individuals, banishes names, broadly speak- ing, from his history, where other historians of ail ages would record them. Book II, 93. Book I, 85. 86. 56 THUCYDIDES AND HISTORY There is little else that occurs to me. Thucydides believes in fate. He is a fatalist even to the extent of believing that he can read fate and forecast the future, human nature being the same in all ages. Is it a sort of natural compensation that the man who believed in so little in which other men believed, who believed in so little that he glorifies convention- alism and conservatism just because it is conventional and conservative : who liked the conventional and conservative Nicias just because he appealed to his taste, his sense of manners and moderation : who canonizes nothing in his history except the modera- tion of aristocrats aQiaroxQaTiai; ad)