THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 RIVERSIDE 
 
 Ex Libris 
 ISAAC FOOT 
 
THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 OTHER HISTORICAL PIECES 
 
THE 
 
 MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 AND OTHER HISTORICAL PIECES 
 
 BY 
 
 FREDERIC HARRISON 
 
 LONDON 
 
 MACMILLAN AND CO. 
 AND NEW YORK 
 
 1894 
 
 All rights reserved 
 
Edinburgh : T. and A. CONSTABLE, Printers to Her Majesty 
 
NOTE 
 
 THIS volume contains a collection of essays designed 
 to stimulate the systematic study of general history. 
 They are (with two exceptions) the permanent and 
 condensed form of historical lectures given in a series 
 of courses at various places of education. The writer 
 has been constantly occupied with the teaching of 
 history since 1862; and the first two chapters of this 
 book were the introduction to a course of lectures 
 given in that year to a London audience. They were 
 printed at the time, but the issue has been long 
 exhausted. The third chapter (which is in effect a 
 Choice of Books of History) and also the fifth chapter 
 (a synthetic survey of the Thirteenth Century) were 
 inaugural lectures given in the New Schools at Oxford 
 to the summer vacation students. The other chapters 
 are based on lectures given by the writer at various 
 times at Newton Hall, Toynbee Hall, the London 
 Institution, and other literary and scientific institutions. 
 Several of these chapters (about half the present volume 
 in bulk) have already appeared in the Fortnightly 
 Review and in one or two other periodicals. They 
 have in all cases been carefully revised and partly 
 rewritten ; and the author has to express to the 
 Editors and Proprietors of these organs his grateful 
 thanks for the courtesy with which he has been 
 enabled to use them. 
 
D7 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAP. PAGE 
 
 I. THE USE OF HISTORY, i 
 
 II. THE CONNECTION OF HISTORY, . . . . . 26 
 
 III. SOME GREAT BOOKS OF HISTORY, . . . . 81 
 
 IV. THE HISTORY SCHOOLS (AN OXFORD DIALOGUE), . 124 
 V. A SURVEY OF THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY, . . 146 
 
 VI. WHAT THE REVOLUTION OF 1789 DID, . . . 180 
 
 VII. FRANCE IN 1789 AND 1889, 217 
 
 VIII. THE CITY : ANCIENT MEDIEVAL MODERN IDEAL, 233 
 
 (i) THE ANCIENT CITY, 235 
 
 (n) THE MEDIAEVAL CITY, .... 244 
 
 (in) THE MODERN CITY, 250 
 
 (iv) THE IDEAL CITY, 256 
 
 IX. ROME REVISITED, 265 
 
 X. IMPRESSIONS OF ATHENS, 298 
 
 XI. CONSTANTINOPLE AS AN HISTORIC CITY, . . . 324 
 
 (i) BYZANTINE HISTORY, 324 
 
 (n) TOPOGRAPHICAL CONDITIONS, . . . 334 
 
 (m) ANTIQUITIES OF CONSTANTINOPLE, . . 346 
 
 XII. THE PROBLEM OF CONSTANTINOPLE, .... 358 
 
 (i) THE HISTORICAL PROBLEM, . . . 359 
 
 (n) THE POLITICAL PROBLEM, .... 378 
 
 XIII. PARIS AS AN HISTORIC CITY, 3^7 
 
viii CONTENTS 
 
 CHAl'. 
 
 XIV. THE TRANSFORMATION OK PARIS, . . . 415 
 
 XV. THE TRANSFORMATION OF LONDON, . . 433 
 
 (i) LONDON IN 1887, 433 
 
 (n) LONDON IN 1894, 45 2 
 
 XVI. THE SACREDNESS OF ANCIENT BUILDINGS, . . 459 
 
 XVII. PAI./EOGRAPHIC PURISM, 479 
 
THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 THE USE OF HISTORY 
 
 WHAT is the use of historical knowledge? Is an 
 acquaintance with the events, the men, the ideas of the 
 past, of any real use to us in these days has it any 
 practical bearing upon happiness and conduct in life ? 
 
 Two very different answers may be given to this 
 question. The Gradgrinds and the Jack Cades assure 
 us that there is no use at all. We are, they would say 
 with Bacon, the mature age of the world ; with us lies 
 the gathered wisdom of ages. To waste our time in 
 studying exploded fallacies, in reproducing worn-out 
 forms of society, or in recalling men who were only 
 conspicuous because they lived amidst a crowd of 
 ignorant or benighted barbarians, is to wander from the 
 path of progress, and to injure and not to improve our 
 understandings. 
 
 On the other hand, the commonplace of literary 
 gossip declares that history has fifty different uses. It 
 is amusing to hear what curious things they did in 
 bygone times. Then, again, it is very instructive as a 
 study of character ; we see in history the working of 
 the human mind and will. Besides, it is necessary to 
 
 A 
 
2 THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 avoid the blunders they committed in past days : there 
 we collect a store of moral examples, and of political 
 maxims ; we learn to watch the signs of the times, and 
 to be prepared for situations whenever they return. 
 And it cannot be doubted, they add, that it is a branch 
 of knowledge, and all knowledge is good. To know 
 history, they conclude, is to be well-informed, is to be 
 familiar with some of the finest examples of elegant and 
 brilliant writing. 
 
 Between the two, those who tell us plainly that 
 history is of no use, and those who tell us vaguely that 
 history is of fifty uses, there is not much to choose. 
 We must thoroughly disagree with them both, and of 
 the two we would rather deal with the former. Their 
 opposition, at any rate, is concentrated into a single 
 point, and may be met by a single and a direct answer. 
 To them we may say, Are you consistent ? Do you 
 not in practice follow another course ? In rejecting all 
 connection with the facts and ideas of the past, are you 
 not cutting the ground from under your own feet? 
 Assume that you are an active politician and a staunch 
 friend of the conservative or liberal party. What are 
 the traditional principles of a party but a fraction, small, 
 no doubt, but a sensible fraction, of history? You 
 believe in the cause of progress. Yet what is the cause 
 of progress but the extension of that civilisation, of that 
 change for the better which we have all witnessed or 
 have learned to recognise as an established fact ? Your 
 voice, if you are a politician and a democrat, is on the 
 side of freedom. Well, but do you never appeal to 
 Magna Charta, to the Bill of Rights, to the Reform Acts, 
 to American Independence, or the French Revolution? 
 Or you are an imperialist, and you will suffer no outrage 
 on the good name of England. You are ready to cover 
 
THE USE OF HISTORY 3 
 
 the seas with armaments to uphold the national great- 
 ness. But what is the high name of England if it is 
 not the memory of all the deeds by which, in peace or 
 war, on sea or land, England has held her own amongst 
 the foremost of the earth ? 
 
 Nor is it true that we show no honour to the men of 
 the past, are not guided by their ideas, and do not dwell 
 upon their lives, their work, and their characters. The 
 most turbulent revolutionary that ever lived, the most 
 bitter hater of the past, finds many to admire. It may be 
 Cromwell, it may be Rousseau, or Voltaire, it may be 
 Robert Owen, but some such leader each will have ; 
 his memory he will revere, his influence he will admit, 
 his principles he will contend for. Thus it will be in 
 every sphere of active life. No serious politician can 
 fail to recognise that, however strongly he repudiates 
 antiquity, and rebels against the tyranny of custom, 
 still he himself only acts freely and consistently 
 he is following the path trodden by earlier leaders, and 
 is working with the current of the principles in which 
 he throws himself, and in which he has confidence. 
 For him, then, it is not true that he rejects all common 
 purpose with what has gone before. It is a question 
 only of selection and of degree. To some he clings, the 
 rest he rejects. Some history he does study, and finds 
 in it both profit and enjoyment. 
 
 Suppose such a man to be interested in any study 
 whatever, either in promoting general education, or 
 eager to acquire knowledge for himself. He will find, 
 at every step he takes, that he is appealing to the 
 authority of the past, is using the ideas of former ages, 
 and carrying out principles established by ancient, but 
 not forgotten thinkers. If he studies geometry he will 
 find that the first text-book put into his hand was 
 
4 THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 written by a Greek two thousand years ago. If he 
 takes up a grammar, he will be only repeating rules 
 taught by Roman schoolmasters and professors. Or is 
 he interested in art ? He will find the same thing in a 
 far greater degree. He goes to the British Museum, 
 and he walks into a building which is a good imitation 
 of a Greek temple. He goes to the Houses of Parlia- 
 ment to hear a debate, and he enters a building which 
 is a bad imitation of a mediaeval town-hall. Or, again, 
 we know that he reads his Shakespeare and Milton ; 
 feels respect for the opinions of Bacon or of Hume, or 
 Adam Smith. Such a man, the moment he takes a 
 warm interest in anything in politics, in education, in 
 science, in art, or in social improvement the moment 
 that his intelligence is kindled, and his mind begins to 
 work that moment he is striving to throw himself into 
 the stream of some previous human efforts, to identify 
 himself with others, and to try to understand and to 
 follow the path of future progress which has been traced 
 out for him by the leaders of his own party or school. 
 Therefore, such a man is not consistent when he says 
 that history is of no use to him. He does direct his 
 action by what he believes to be the course laid out 
 before him ; he does follow the guidance of certain 
 teachers whom he respects. 
 
 We have then only to ask him on what grounds he 
 rests his selection ; why he chooses some and rejects all 
 others ; how he knows for certain that no other corner 
 of the great field of history will reward the care of the 
 ploughman, or bring forth good seed. In spite of him- 
 self, he will find himself surrounded in every act and 
 thought of life by a power which is too strong for him. 
 If he chooses simply to stagnate, he may, perhaps, dis- 
 pense with any actual reference to the past ; but the 
 
THE USE OF HISTORY 5 
 
 moment he begins to act, to live, or to think, he must 
 use the materials presented to him, and, so far as he is 
 a member of a civilised community, so far as he is an 
 Englishman, so far as he is a rational man, he can as 
 little free himself from the influence of former genera- 
 tions as he can free himself from his personal identity ; 
 unlearn all that he has learnt ; cease to be what his 
 previous life has made him, and blot out of his memory 
 all recollection whatever. 
 
 Let us suppose for a moment that any set of men 
 could succeed in sweeping away from them all the influ- 
 ences of past ages, and everything that they had not 
 themselves discovered or produced. Suppose that all 
 knowledge of the gradual steps of civilisation, of the 
 slow process of perfecting the arts of life and the natural 
 sciences, were blotted out ; suppose all memory of the 
 efforts and struggles of earlier generations, and of the 
 deeds of great men, were gone ; all the landmarks of 
 history ; all that has distinguished each country, race, or 
 city in past times from others ; all notion of what man 
 had done, or could do ; of his many failures, of his suc- 
 cesses, of his hopes ; suppose for a moment all the 
 books, all the traditions, all the buildings of past ages 
 to vanish off the face of the earth, and with them the 
 institutions of society, all political forms, all principles 
 of politics, all systems of thought, all daily customs, all 
 familiar arts ; suppose the most deep-rooted and most 
 sacred of all our institutions gone ; suppose that the 
 family and home, property, and justice were strange 
 ideas without meaning ; that all the customs which 
 surround us each from birth to death were blotted out ; 
 suppose a race of men whose minds, by a paralytic 
 stroke of fate, had suddenly been deadened to every 
 recollection, to whom the whole world was new, can 
 
6 Till; MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 we imagine a condition of such utter helplessness, con- 
 fusion, and misery ? 
 
 Such a race might retain their old powers of mind 
 and of activity, nay, both might be increased tenfold, 
 and yet it would not profit them. Can we conceive such 
 a race acting together, living together, for one hour? 
 They would have everything to create. Would any two 
 agree to adopt the same custom, and could they live 
 without any? They would have all the arts, all the 
 sciences to reconstruct anew ; and even their tenfold 
 intellect would not help them there. With minds of the 
 highest order it would be impossible to think, for the 
 world would present one vast chaos ; even with the 
 most amazing powers of activity, they would fall back 
 exhausted from the task of reconstructing, reproducing 
 everything around them. Had they the wisest teachers 
 or the highest social or moral purposes, they would all 
 be lost and wasted in an interminable strife, and con- 
 tinual difference ; for family, town, property, society, 
 country, nay, language itself, would be things which 
 each would be left to create for himself, and each would 
 create in a different manner. It would realise, indeed, 
 the old fable of the tower of Babel ; and the pride 
 of self would culminate in confusion and dispersion. 
 A race with ten times the intellect, twenty times the 
 powers, and fifty times the virtues of any race that ever 
 lived on earth would end, within a generation, in a state 
 of hopeless barbarism ; the earth would return to the 
 days of primeval forests and swamps, and man descend 
 almost to the level of the monkey and the beaver. 
 
 Now, if this be true, if we are so deeply indebted and 
 so indissolubly bound to preceding ages, if all our hopes 
 of the future depend on a sound understanding of the 
 past, we cannot fancy any knowledge more important 
 
THE USE OF HISTORY 7 
 
 than the knowledge of the way in which this civilisation- 
 has been built up. If the destiny of our race, and the 
 daily action of each of us, are so completely directed by 
 it, the useful existence of each depends much upon a 
 right estimate of that which has so constant an influence 
 over him ; will be advanced as he works with the work- 
 ing of that civilisation, above him, and around him ; will 
 be checked as he opposes it ; it depends upon this, that 
 he mistakes none of the elements that go to make up 
 that civilisation as a whole, and sees them in their due 
 relation and harmony. 
 
 This brings us to that second class of objectors ; 
 those who, far from denying the interest of the events 
 of the past, far from seeing no use at all in their study, 
 are only too ready in discovering a multitude of reasons 
 for it, and at seeing in it a variety of incongruous pur- 
 poses. If they suppose that it furnishes us with parallels 
 when similar events occur, the answer is, that similar 
 events never do and never can occur in history. The 
 history of man offers one unbroken chain of constant 
 change, in which no single situation is ever reproduced. 
 The story of the world is played out like a drama in 
 many acts and scenes, not like successive games of 
 chess, in which the pieces meet, combat, and manoeuvre 
 for a time, and then the board is cleared for another 
 trial, and they are replaced in their original positions. 
 Political maxims drawn crudely from history may doj 
 more harm than good. You may justify anything by a 
 pointed example in history. It will show you instances 
 of triumphant tyranny and triumphant tyrannicide. 
 You may find in it excuses for any act or any system. 
 What is true of one country is wholly untrue of another. , 
 What led to a certain result in one age, leads to a wholly 
 opposite result in another. 
 
8 THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 Then as to character, if the sole object of studying 
 history is to see in it the workings of the human heart, 
 that is far better studied in the fictitious creations of the 
 great masters of character in Shakespeare, in Moliere, 
 in Fielding, and Scott. Macbeth and Richard are as 
 true to nature as any name in history, and give us an 
 impression of desperate ambition more vivid than the 
 tale of any despot in ancient or modern times. Besides, 
 if we read history only to find in it picturesque incident 
 or subtle shades of character, we run as much chance of 
 stumbling on the worthless and the curious as the noble 
 and the great. A Hamlet is a study in interest perhaps 
 exceeding all others in fiction or in fact, but we shall 
 hardly find that Hamlets have stamped their trace very 
 deep in the history of mankind. There are few lives in 
 all human story more romantic than that of Alcibiades, 
 and none more base. Some minds find fascination in 
 the Popish plots of Titus Gates, where the interest 
 centres round a dastardly ruffian. And the bullies, the 
 fops, the cut-throats, and the Jezebels who crowded the 
 courts of the Stuarts and the Georges, have been con- 
 signed to permanent infamy in libraries of learned and 
 of brilliant works. 
 
 Brilliant and ingenious writing has been the bane of 
 history ; it has degraded its purpose, and perverted 
 many of its uses. Histories have been written which 
 are little but minute pictures of scoundrelism and folly 
 triumphant. Wretches, who if alive now would be con- 
 signed to the gallows or the hulks, have only to take, as 
 it is said, a place in history, and generations after 
 generations of learned men will pore over their lives, 
 collect their letters, their portraits, or their books, search 
 out every fact in their lives with prurient inquisitiveness, 
 and chronicle their rascalities in twenty volumes. Such 
 
THE USE OF HISTORY 9 
 
 stories, some may say, have a human interest. So has 
 the Neivgate Calendar a human interest of a certain 
 kind. Brilliant writing is a most delusive guide. In 
 search of an effective subject for a telling picture, men 
 have wandered into strange and dismal haunts. We none 
 of us choose our friends on such a plan. Why, then, 
 should we choose thus the friends round whom our re- 
 collections are to centre? We none of us wish to be 
 intimate with a man simply because he is a picturesque- 
 looking villain, nor do we bring to our firesides men 
 who have the reputation of being the loudest braggarts 
 or keenest sharpers of their time. 
 
 Let us pass by untouched these memoirs of the un- 
 memorable these lives of those who never can be said 
 to have lived. Pass them all : these riotings, intrigues, 
 and affectations of worthless men and worthless ages. 
 Better to know nothing of the past than to know only 
 its follies, though set forth in eloquent language and 
 with attractive anecdote. It does not profit to know 
 the names of all the kings that ever lived, and the 
 catalogue of all their whims and vices, and a minute 
 list of their particular weaknesses, with all their fools, 
 buffoons, mistresses, and valets. Again, some odd inci- 
 dent becomes the subject of the labour of lives, and 
 fills volume after volume of ingenious trifling. Some 
 wretched little squabble is exhumed, unimportant in 
 itself, unimportant for the persons that were engaged in 
 it, trivial in its results. Lives are spent in raking up 
 old letters to show why or how some parasite like 
 Sir T. Overbury was murdered, or to unravel some plot 
 about a maid of honour, or a diamond necklace, or 
 some conspiracy to turn out a minister or to detect 
 some court impostor. There are plenty of things to 
 find out, or, if people are afflicted with a morbid 
 
10 THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 curiosity, there are Chinese puzzles or chess problems 
 left for them to solve, without ransacking the public 
 records and libraries to discover which out of a name- 
 less crowd was the most unmitigated scoundrel, or who 
 it is that must have the credit of being the author of 
 some peculiarly venomous or filthy pamphlet. Why 
 need we have six immense volumes to prove to the 
 world that you have found the villain, and ask them to 
 read all about him, and explain in brilliant language 
 how some deed of darkness or some deed of folly 
 really was done ? 
 
 And they call this history. This serving up in spiced 
 dishes of the clean and the unclean, the wholesome and 
 . the noxious ; this plunging down into the charnel- 
 house of the great graveyard of the past, and stirring 
 up the decaying carcases of the outcasts and male- 
 factors of the race. No good can come of such work : 
 without plan, without purpose, without breadth of view, 
 and without method ; with nothing but a vague desire 
 to amuse, and a morbid craving for novelty. If there 
 is one common purpose running through the whole 
 history of the past, if that history is the story of man's 
 growth in dignity, and power, and goodness, if the 
 gathered knowledge and the gathered conscience of 
 past ages does control us, support us, inspire us, then 
 is this commemorating these parasites and offscourings 
 of the human race worse than pedantry or folly. It is 
 filling us with an unnatural contempt for the greatness 
 of the past nay, it is committing towards our spiritual 
 forefathers the same crime which Ham committed 
 against his father Noah. It is a kind of sacrilege to 
 the memory of the great men to whom we owe all we 
 prize, if we waste our lives in poring over the acts of 
 the puny creatures who only encumbered their path. 
 
THE USE OF HISTORY II 
 
 Men on the battle-field or in their study, by the 
 labour of their brains or of their hands, have given us 
 what we have, and made us what we are ; a noble army 
 who have done battle with barbarism and the powers of 
 nature, martyrs often to their duty ; yet we are often 
 invited to turn with indifference from the story of their 
 long march and many victories, to find amusement 
 amidst the very camp-followers and sutlers who hang 
 upon their rear. If history has any lessons, any unity, 
 any plan, let us turn to it for this. Let this be our test 
 of what is history and what is not, that it teaches us' 
 something of the advance of human progress, that it 
 tells us of some of those mighty spirits who have left 
 their mark on all time, that it shows us the nations of 
 the earth woven together in one purpose, or is lit up 
 with those great ideas and those great purposes which 
 have kindled the conscience of mankind. 
 
 Why is knowledge of any kind useful ? It is certainly 
 not true that a knowledge of facts, merely as facts, is 
 desirable. Facts are infinite, and it is not the millionth 
 part of them that is worth knowing. What some people 
 call the pure love of truth often means only a pure love 
 of intellectual fussiness. A statement may be true, and 
 yet wholly worthless. It cannot be all facts which are 
 the subject of knowledge. For instance, a man might 
 learn by heart the Post-Office Directory, and a very 
 remarkable mental exercise it would be ; but he would 
 hardly venture to call himself a well-informed man. . 
 No ; we want the facts only which add to our power, I/" 
 or will enable us to act. They only give us knowledge 
 they only are a part of education. For instance, i 
 we begin the study of mathematics ; of algebra, or 
 geometry. We hardly expect to turn it to practical 
 account like another Hudibras, who could 'tell the 
 
12 THi: MKANING OF HISTORY 
 
 clock by algebra ' ; but we do not find Euclid's geometry 
 help us to take the shortest cut to our own house. Our 
 object is to know something of the simplest principles 
 which underlie all the sciences : to understand practi- 
 cally what mathematical demonstration means : to bring 
 home to our minds the conception of scientific axioms. 
 
 Again, we study some of the physical laws of nature 
 plain facts about gravitation, or heat, or light. What 
 we want is to be able to know something of what our 
 modern philosophers are talking about. We want to 
 know why Faraday is a great teacher ; to know what it 
 is which seems to affect all nature equally ; which brings 
 us down heavily upon the earth if we stumble, and keeps 
 the planets in their orbits. We want to understand 
 what are laws of nature. We take up such pursuits as 
 botany or geology ; but then, again, not in order to dis- 
 cover a new medicine, or a gold-field, or a coal-mine. 
 No, we want to know something of the mystery around 
 us. We see intelligible structure, consistent unity, and 
 common laws in the earth on which we live, with the 
 .view, I presume, of feeling more at home in it, of be- 
 coming more attached to it, of living in it more happily. 
 Some study physiology. We do not expect to discover 
 the elixir of life, like an eminent novelist, nor do we 
 expect to dispense with the aid of the surgeon. We 
 want to get a glimpse of that marvellous framework of 
 the human form, some notion of the laws of its exist- 
 ence, some idea of the powers which affect it, which 
 depress or develop it, some knowledge of the relation 
 of the thinking and feeling process and the thinking 
 and feeling organ. We seek to know something of the 
 influences to which all human nature is subject, to be 
 able to understand what people mean when they tell us 
 about laws of health, or laws of life, or laws of thought. 
 
THE USE OF HISTORY 13 
 
 We want to be in a position to decide for ourselves as 
 to the trustworthiness of men upon whose judgment we 
 depend for bodily existence. 
 
 Now, in this list of the subjects of a rational educa- 
 tion something is wanting. It is the play of Hamlet 
 without the Prince of Denmark : 
 
 ' The proper study of mankind is man.' 
 
 Whilst Man is wanting, all the rest remains vague, 
 and incomplete, and aimless. Mathematics would indeed 
 be a jumble of figures if it ended in itself. But the 
 moment we learn the influence which some great dis- 
 covery has had on the destinies of man ; the moment 
 we note how all human thought was lighted up when 
 Galileo said that the sun, and not the earth, was the 
 centre of our world ; the moment we feel that the de- 
 monstrations of Euclid are things in which all human 
 minds must agree indeed, are almost the only things 
 in which all do agree, that moment the science has a 
 meaning, and a clue, and a plan. It had none so long 
 as it was disconnected from the history and the destiny - 
 of man the past and the future. It is the same with 
 every other science. What would be the meaning of 
 laws of nature, unless by them man could act on nature ? 
 What would be the use of knowing the laws of health, 
 unless we supposed that a sounder knowledge of them 
 would ameliorate the condition of men ? What, indeed, 
 
 is the use of the improvement of the mind ? It is far\ 
 
 from obvious that mere exercise of the intellectual"| 
 faculties alone is a good. A nation of Hamlets (to take 
 a popular misconception of that character) would be 
 more truly miserable, perhaps more truly despicable, " ^^ 
 than a nation of Bushmen. By a cultivated mind, a r 
 mental training, a sound education, we mean a state of 1 
 
14 THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 mind by which we shall become more clear of our condi- 
 tion, of our powers, of our duties towards our fellows, of 
 our true happiness, by which we may make ourselves 
 better citizens and better men more civilised, in short. 
 The preceding studies have been but a preparation. 
 
 I They have been only to strengthen the mind, and give it 
 material for the true work of education the inculcation 
 of human duty. 
 
 All knowledge is imperfect, we may almost say mean- 
 ] ingless, unless it tends to give us sounder notions of 
 I our human and social interests. What we need are 
 clear principles about the moral nature of man as a 
 social being ; about the elements of human society ; 
 about the nature and capacities of the understanding. 
 We want landmarks to guide us in our search after 
 worthy guides, or true principles for social or political 
 action. Human nature is unlike inorganic nature in 
 this, that its varieties are greater, and that it shows con- 
 tinual change. The earth rolls round the sun in the 
 same orbit now as in infinite ages past ; but man moves 
 forward in a variable line of progress. Age after age 
 develops into new phases. It is a study of life, of 
 growth, of variety. One generation shows one faculty 
 of human nature in a striking degree; the next exhibits 
 a different power. All, it is true, leave their mark 
 upon all succeeding generations, and civilisation flows 
 on like a vast river, gathering up the waters of its tribu- 
 tary streams. Hence it is that civilisation, being not a 
 fixed or lifeless thing, cannot be studied as a fixed or 
 lifeless subject. We can see it only in its movement 
 and its growth. Except for eclipses, some conjunctions 
 of planets, and minor changes, one year is as good as 
 another to the astronomer ; but it is not so to the 
 political observer. He must watch successions, and a 
 
THE USE OF HISTORY 15 
 
 wide field, and compare a long series of events. Hence 
 it is that in all political, all social, all human questions 
 whatever, history is the main resource of the inquirer. 
 
 To know what is most really natural to man as a 
 social being, man must be looked at as he appears in a 
 succession of ages, and in very various conditions. To 
 learn the strength or scope of all his capacities together, 
 he must be judged in those successive periods in which 
 each in turn was best brought out. Let no one suppose 
 that he will find all the human institutions and faculties 
 equally well developed, and all in their due .proportion 
 and order, by simply looking at the state of civilisation 
 now actually around us. Is it not a monstrous assump- 
 tion that this world of to-day, so full of misery and 
 discontent, strife and despair, ringing with cries of pain 
 and cries for aid, can really embody forth to us com- 
 plete and harmonious man? Are there no faculties 
 within him yet fettered, no good instincts stifled, no 
 high yearnings marred ? Have we in this year reached 
 the pinnacle of human perfection, lost nothing that we 
 once had, gained all that we can gain ? Surely, by the 
 hopes within us, No ! But what is missing may often 
 be seen in the history of the past. There, in the long 
 struggle of man upwards, we may watch Humanity in 
 various moods, and see some now forgotten power, 
 capacity, or art yet destined to good service in the 
 future. One by one we may light on the missing links 
 in the chain which connects all races and all ages in 
 one, or gather up the broken threads that must yet be 
 woven into the complex fabric of life. 
 
 There is another side on which history is still more 
 necessary as a guide to consistent and rational action. 
 We need to know not merely what the essential qualities 
 of civilisation and of our social nature really are ; but 
 
16 THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 we require to know the general course in which they 
 are tending. The more closely we look at it, the more 
 distinctly we see that progress moves in a clear and 
 definite path ; the development of man is not a casual 
 \ or arbitrary motion : it moves in a regular and con- 
 sistent plan. Each part is unfolded in due order the 
 whole expanding like a single plant. More and more 
 steadily we see each age working out the gifts of the 
 last and transmitting its labours to the next. More 
 and more certain is our sense of being strong only as 
 we wisely use the materials and follow in the track pro- 
 vided by the efforts of mankind. Everything proves 
 how completely that influence surrounds us. Take our 
 material existence alone. The earth's surface has. been 
 made, as we know it, mainly by man. It would be 
 uninhabitable by numbers but for the long labours of 
 those who cleared its primeval forests, drained its 
 swamps, first tilled its rank soil. All the inventions on 
 which we depend for existence, the instruments we 
 use, were slowly worked out by the necessities of man 
 in the childhood of the race. We can only modify 
 or add to these. We could not discard all existing 
 machines and construct an entirely new set of industrial 
 implements. 
 
 Take our political existence. There again we are 
 equally confined in limits. Our country as a political 
 whole has been formed for us by a long series of wars, 
 struggles, and common efforts. We could not refashion 
 England, or divide it anew, if we tried for a century. 
 Our great towns, our great roads, the local administra- 
 tions of our counties, were sketched out for us by the 
 Romans fifteen centuries since. Could we undo it if 
 we tried, and make London a country village, or turn 
 Birmingham into the metropolis ? Some people think 
 
THE USE OF HISTORY I/ 
 
 they could abolish some great institution, such as the 
 House of Lords ; but few reformers in this country 
 have proposed to abolish the entire British Consti- 
 tution. For centuries we endured an archaic law of 
 real property. Such as it was, it was made for us by 
 our feudal ancestors misreading Roman texts. Turn 
 whichever way we will, we shall find our political 
 systems, laws, and administrations to have been pro- 
 vided for us. 
 
 The same holds good even more strongly in all moral 
 and intellectual questions. Are we to suppose that 
 whilst our daily life, our industry, our laws, our customs, 
 are controlled by the traditions and materials of the 
 past, -our thoughts, our habits of mind, our beliefs, our 
 moral sense, our ideas of right and wrong, our hopes and 
 aspirations, are not just as truly formed by the civili- 
 sation in which we have been reared ? We are indeed 
 able to transform it, to develop it, and to give it new 
 life and action ; but we can only do so as we under- 
 stand it. Without this all efforts, reforms, and revolu- 
 tions are in vain. A change is made, but a few years 
 pass over, and all the old causes reappear. There was 
 some unnoticed power which was not touched, and it 
 returns in full force. Take an instance from our own 
 history. Cromwell and his Ironsides, who made the 
 great English Revolution, swept away Monarchy, and 
 Church, and Peers, and thought they were gone for 
 ever. Their great chief dead, the old system returned 
 like a tide, and ended in the orgies of Charles and 
 James. The Catholic Church has been, as it is sup- 
 posed, staggering in its last agonies now for many 
 centuries. Luther believed he had crushed it. Long 
 before his time it seemed nothing but a lifeless mass of 
 corruption. Pope after Pope has been driven into exile. 
 
 B 
 
1 8 T1IK MKAXING OF HISTORY 
 
 Four or five times has the Church seemed utterly 
 crushed. And yet here in this nineteenth century, it 
 puts forth all its old pretensions, and covers its old 
 territory. 
 
 In the great French Revolution it seemed, for once, 
 that all extant institutions had been swept away. That 
 devouring fire seemed to have burnt the growth of ages 
 to the very root Yet a few years pass, and all reappear 
 Monarchy, Church, Peers, Jesuits, Empire, and Prae- 
 torian guards. Again and again they are overthrown. 
 Again and again they rise in greater pomp and pride. 
 They who, with courage, energy, and enthusiasm too 
 seldom imitated, sixty years ago carried the Reform of 
 Parliament and swept away with a strong hand abuse 
 and privilege, believed that a new era was opening for 
 their country. What would they think now ? When 
 they abolished rotten boroughs, and test acts, and cur- 
 tailed expenditure, little did they think that sixty 
 years would find their descendants wrangling about 
 Church Establishments, appealing to the House of 
 Lords as a bulwark of freedom, and spending ninety 
 millions a year. The experience of every one who was 
 ever engaged in any public movement whatever reminds 
 him that every step made in advance seems too often 
 wrung back from him by some silent and unnoticed 
 power ; he has felt enthusiasm give way to despair, and 
 hopes become nothing but recollections. 
 
 What is this unseen power which seems to undo 
 the best human efforts, as if it were some overbearing 
 weight against which no man can long struggle ? What 
 is this ever-acting force which seems to revive the dead, 
 to restore what we destroy, to renew forgotten watch- 
 words, exploded fallacies, discredited doctrines, and con- 
 demned institutions ; against which enthusiasm, intel- 
 
THE USE OF HISTORY 19 
 
 lect, truth, high purpose, and self-devotion seem to beat 
 themselves to death in vain ? It is the Past. It is the 
 accumulated wills and works of all mankind around us 
 and before us. It is civilisation. It is that power which 
 to understand is strength, which to repudiate is weak- 
 ness. Let us not think that there can be any real pro- 
 gress made which is not based on a sound knowledge 
 of the living institutions and the active wants of man- <* 
 
 kind. If we can only act on nature so far as we 
 its laws, we can only influence society so far as we 
 understand its elements and ways. Let us not delude 
 ourselves into thinking that new principles of policy or 
 social action can be created by themselves or can recon- 
 struct society about us. Those rough maxims, which 
 we are wont to dignify by the name of principles, may 
 be, after all, only crude formulas and phrases without 
 life or power. Only when they have been tested, 
 analysed, and compared with other phases of social 
 life, can we be certain that they are immutable truths. 
 Nothing but a thorough knowledge of the social system, 
 based upon a regular study of its growth, can give us 
 the power we require to affect it. For this end we need 
 one thing above all we need history. 
 
 It may be said all this may be very useful for states- 
 men, or philosophers, or politicians ; but what is the use 
 of this to the bulk of the people ? They are not engaged 
 in solving political questions. The bulk of the people, 
 if they are seeking to live the lives of rational and 
 useful .citizens, if they only wish to do their duty by 
 their neighbours, are really and truly politicians. They 
 are solving political problems, and are affecting society 
 very deeply. A man does not need even to be a vestry- 
 man, he need not even have one out of the 500,000 
 votes for London, in order to exercise very great 
 
20 THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 political influence. A man, provided he lives like an 
 honest, thoughtful, truth-speaking citizen, is a power 
 in the state. He is helping to form that which rules 
 the state, which rules statesmen, and is above kings, 
 parliaments, or ministers. He is forming public opinion. 
 It is on this, a public opinion, wise, thoughtful, and 
 consistent, that the destinies of our country rest, and 
 not on acts of parliament, or movements, or institu- 
 tions. 
 
 It is sheer presumption to attempt to remodel exist- 
 ing institutions, without the least knowledge how they 
 were formed, or whence they grew ; to deal with social 
 questions without a thought how society arose ; to con- 
 struct a social creed without an idea of fifty creeds 
 which have risen and vanished before. Few men 
 would, intentionally, attempt so much ; but many do it 
 unconsciously. They think they are not statesmen, or 
 teachers, or philosophers ; but, in one sense, they are. 
 In all human affairs there is this peculiar quality. They 
 are the work of the combined labours of many. No 
 statesman or teacher can do anything alone. He must 
 have the minds of those he is to guide prepared for him. 
 They must concur, or he is powerless. In reality, he is 
 but the expression of their united wills and thoughts. 
 Hence it is, I say, that all men need, in some sense, the 
 knowledge and the judgment of the statesman and the 
 
 X social teacher. Progress is but the result of our joint 
 public opinion ; and for progress that opinion must be 
 enlightened. ' He only destroys who can replace.' All 
 other progress than this one based on the union of 
 many minds and purposes, and a true conception of the 
 future and the past is transitory and delusive. Those 
 who defy this power, the man, the party, or the class 
 who forget it, will be beating themselves in vain against 
 
THE USE OF HISTORY 21 
 
 a wall ; changing, but not improving ; moving, but not 
 advancing ; rolling, as the poet says of a turbulent city, 
 like a sick man on the restless bed of pain. 
 
 The value of a knowledge of history being admitted, 
 there follows the complicated problem of how to acquire 
 it. There are oceans of facts, mountains of books. 
 This is the question before us. It is possible to know 
 something of history without a pedantic erudition. Let 
 a man ask himself always what he wants to know. 
 Something of man's social nature ; something of the 
 growth of civilisation. He needs to understand some- 
 thing of the character of the great races and systems of 
 mankind. Let him ask himself what the long ages of 
 the early empires did for mankind ; whether they estab- 
 lished or taught anything ; if fifty centuries of human 
 skill, labour, and thought were wasted like an autumn 
 leaf. Let him ask himself what the Greeks taught or 
 discovered : why the Romans were a noble race, and 
 how they printed their footmarks so deeply on the earth. 
 Let him ask what was the original meaning and life of 
 those great feudal institutions of chivalry and church, 
 of which we see only the remnants. Let him ask what 
 was the strength, the weakness, and the meaning of the 
 great revolution of Cromwell, or the great revolution in 
 France. A man may learn much true history, without 
 any very ponderous books. Let him go to the museums 
 and see the pictures, the statues, and buildings of 
 Egyptian and Assyrian times, and try to learn what 
 was the state of society under which men in the far 
 East reached so high a pitch of industry, knowledge, 
 and culture, three thousand years before our savage 
 ancestors had learned to use the plough. A man may 
 go to one of our Gothic cathedrals, and, seeing there the 
 stupendous grandeur of its outline, the exquisite grace 
 
22 TIIK MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 of its design, the solemn expression upon the faces of 
 its old carved or painted saints, kings, and priests, may 
 ask himself if the men who built that could be utterly 
 barbarous, false-hearted, and tyrannical ; or if the power 
 which could bring out such noble qualities of the human 
 mind and heart must not have left its trace upon man- 
 kind. 
 
 It does not need many books to know something of 
 the life of the past. A man who has mastered the lives 
 in old Plutarch knows not a little of Greek and Roman 
 history. A man who has caught the true spirit of the 
 Middle Ages knows something of feudalism and chivalry. 
 But is this enough? Far from it. These desultory 
 thoughts must be connected. These need to be com- 
 bined into a whole, and combined and used for a purpose. 
 Above all, we must look on history as a whole, trying 
 to find what each age and race has contributed to the 
 common stock, and how and why each followed in its 
 place. Looked at separately, all is confusion and con- 
 tradiction : looked at as a whole, a common purpose 
 appears. The history of the human race is the history 
 of a growth. It can no more be taken to pieces than 
 the human frame can be taken to pieces. Who would 
 think of making anything of the body without knowing 
 whether it possessed a circulation, a nervous system, or 
 a skeleton. History is a living whole. If one organ be 
 removed, it is nothing but a lifeless mass. What we 
 have to find in it is the relation and connection of the 
 parts. We must learn how age develops into age, how 
 country reacts upon country, how thought inspires 
 action, and action modifies thought. 
 
 Once conceive that all the greater periods of history 
 have had a real and necessary part to fulfil in creating 
 the whole, and we shall have done more to understand 
 
THE USE OF HISTORY 23 
 
 it than if we had studied some portion of it with a micro- 
 scope. Once feel that all the parts are needed for the 
 whole, and the difficulty of the mass of materials vanishes. 
 We shall come to regard it as a composition or a work 
 of art which cannot be broken up into fragments at 
 pleasure. We should as soon think of dividing it as of 
 taking a figure out of a great picture, or a passage out 
 of a piece of music. We all know those noble choruses 
 of Handel, such as that ' Unto us a child is born,' and 
 have heard the opening notes begin simple, subdued, 
 and slow, until they are echoed back in deeper tones, 
 choir answering to choir, voice joining in with voice, 
 growing fuller and stronger with new and varying bursts 
 of melody, until the whole stream of song swells into 
 one vast tide of harmony, and rolls on abounding, wave 
 upon wave in majestic exultation and power. Some- 
 thing like this complex harmony is seen in the gathering 
 parts of human history, age taking up the falling notes 
 from age, race joining with race in answering strain, 
 until the separate parts are mingled in one, and pour on 
 in one movement together. 
 
 There is one mode in which history may be most 
 easily, perhaps most usefully, approached. Let him who 
 desires to find profit in it, begin by knowing something 
 of the lives of great men. Not of those most talked 
 about, not of names chosen at hazard ; but of the real 
 great ones who can be shown to have left their mark 
 upon distant ages. Know their lives, not merely as 
 interesting studies of character, or as persons seen in a 
 drama, but as they represent and influence their age. 
 Not for themselves only must we know them, but as the 
 expression and types of all that is noblest around them. 
 Let us know those whom all men cannot fail to recog- 
 nise as great the Caesars, the Charlemagnes, the Alfreds, 
 
24 THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 the Cromvvells, great in themselves, but greater as the 
 centre of the efforts of thousands. 
 
 We have done much towards understanding the past 
 when we have learned to value and to honour such men. 
 It is almost better to know nothing of history than to 
 know with the narrow coldness of a pedant a record 
 which ought to fill us with emotion and reverence. Our 
 closest friends, our earliest teachers, our parents them- 
 selves, are not more truly our benefactors than they. 
 To them we owe what we prize most country, freedom, 
 peace, knowledge, art, thought, and higher sense of right 
 and wrong. What a tale of patience, courage, sacrifice, 
 and martyrdom is the history of human progress ! It 
 affects us as if we were reading in the diary of a parent 
 the record of his struggles for his children. For us they 
 toiled, endured, bled, and died ; that we by their labour 
 might have rest, by their thoughts might know, by their 
 death might live happily. For whom did these men 
 work, if not for us ? Not for themselves, when they 
 gave up peace, honour, life, reputation itself as when 
 the great French republican exclaimed, ' May my name 
 be accursed, so that France be free ! ' not for themselves 
 they worked, but for their cause, for their fellows, for us. 
 Not that they might have fame, but that they might 
 leave the world better than they found it. This sup- 
 ported Milton in his old age, blind, poor, and dishonoured, 
 when he poured out his spirit in solitude, full of grace, 
 tenderness, and hope, amidst the ruin of all he loved 
 and the obscene triumph of all he despised. It sup- 
 ported Dante, the poet of Florence, when an outlaw and 
 an exile he was cast off by friends and countrymen, and 
 wandered about begging his bread from city to city, 
 pondering the great thoughts which live throughout all 
 Europe. This spirit, too, was in one, the noblest victim 
 
THE USE OF HISTORY 25 
 
 of the French Revolution, the philosopher Condorcet ; 
 who, condemned, hunted to death, devoted the last few 
 days of his life to serene thought of the past, and, whilst 
 the pursuers were on his track, wrote in his hiding-place 
 that noble sketch of the progress of the human race. 
 
CHAPTER II 
 
 THE CONNECTION OF HISTORY 
 
 LET us now try to sketch the outline of this story, link 
 century to century, continent to continent, and judge 
 the share each has in the common work of civilisation. 
 To do so, we must go back to ages long before records 
 began. It is but of the latter and the shorter portion of 
 the duration of progress, that any record has been made 
 or preserved. Yet for a general view, sufficient materials 
 of certain knowledge exist. If we write the biography 
 of a man we do not begin with the year of his life in 
 which his diary opens ; we seek to know his parentage, 
 education, and early association. To understand him 
 we must do so. So, too, the biography of mankind must 
 not confine itself to the eras of chronological tables, and 
 of recorded events. In all large instances the civilisation 
 of an epoch or a people has a certain unity in it their 
 philosophy, their policy, their habits, and their religion 
 must more or less accord, and all depend at last upon 
 the special habit of their minds. It is this central form 
 of belief which determines all the rest. Separately no 
 item which makes up their civilisation as a whole, can 
 be long or seriously changed. It is what a man believes, 
 which makes him act as he does. Thus shall we see 
 that, as their reasoning powers develop, all else develops 
 likewise ; their science, their art break up or take new 
 forms ; their system of society expands ; their life, their 
 
THE CONNECTION OF HISTORY 2J 
 
 morality, and their religion gradually are dissolved and 
 reconstructed. 
 
 Let us, then, place ourselves back in imagination at a 
 period when the whole surface of the earth was quite 
 unlike what it is now. Let us suppose it as it was after the 
 last great geologic change the greater portion of its area 
 covered with primeval forests, vast swamps, dense jungles, 
 moors, prairies, and arid deserts. We must not suppose 
 that the earth had always the same face as now. Such 
 as it is, it has been made by man ; the rich pasturages 
 and open plains have all been created by his toil even 
 the grain, and fruits, and flowers that grow upon its soil 
 have been made what they are by his care. Their 
 originals were what we now should regard as small, value- 
 less, insipid berries or weeds. As yet the now teeming 
 valleys of the great rivers, such as the Nile, or the 
 Euphrates, or the Po, were wildernesses or swamps. 
 The rich meadows of our own island were marshes ; 
 where its cornfields stand now, were trackless forests or 
 salt fens. Such countries as Holland were swept over by 
 every tide of the sea, and such countries as Switzerland, 
 and Norway, and large parts of America, or Russia, 
 were submerged beneath endless pine-woods. And 
 through these forests and wastes ranged countless races 
 of animals, many, doubtless, long extinct, in variety and 
 numbers more than we can even conceive. 
 
 Where in this terrible world was man? Scanty in 
 number, confined to a few favourable spots, dispersed, 
 and alone, man sustained a precarious existence, not yet 
 the lord of creation, inferior to many quadrupeds in 
 strength, only just superior to them in mind nothing 
 but the first of the brutes. As are the lowest of all 
 savages now, no doubt even lower, man once was. Con- 
 ceive what Robinson Crusoe would have been had his 
 
28 THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 island been a dense jungle overrun with savage beasts, 
 without his gun, or his knife, or his knowledge, with 
 nothing but his human hand and his human brain. 
 Ages have indeed passed since then at least some 
 twenty thousand years possibly twice or thrice twenty 
 thousand. But they should not be quite forgotten, and 
 all recollection perish of that dark time when man 
 waged a struggle for life or death with nature. Let us 
 be just to those who fought that fight with the brutes, 
 hunted down and exterminated step by step the races 
 too dangerous to man, and cleared the ground of these 
 monstrous rivals. Every nation has its primeval heroes, 
 whose hearts quailed not before the lion or the dragon : 
 its Nimrod, a mighty hunter before the Lord ; its 
 Hercules, whose club smote the serpent Hydra ; its 
 Odin, who slew monsters. The forests, moreover, had to 
 be cleared. Step by step man won his way into the 
 heart of those dark jungles ; slowly the rank vegetation 
 was swept off, here and there a space was cleared, here 
 and there a plain was formed which left a patch of 
 habitable soil. 
 
 Everywhere man began as a hunter, without imple- 
 ments, without clothing, without homes, perhaps without 
 the use of fire. Man's supremacy over the brutes was 
 first asserted when his mind taught him how to make the 
 rude bow, or the flint knife, or to harden clay or wood 
 by heat. But not only were all the arts and uses of life 
 yet to be found, but all the human institutions had to be 
 formed. As yet language, family, marriage, property, 
 tribe, were not, or only were in germ. A few cries 
 assisted by gesture, a casual association of the sexes, a 
 dim trace of parentage or brotherhood, a joint tenure by 
 those who dwelt together, were all that was. Language, 
 as we know it, has been slowly built up, stage after stage, 
 
THE CONNECTION OF HISTORY 29 
 
 by the instinct of the entire race. Necessity led to new 
 sounds, which use developed ; sounds became words, 
 words were worked into sentences, and half-brutish 
 cries grew into intelligible speech. Our earliest teachers 
 were those whose higher instincts first taught men to 
 unite in permanent pairs, to group the children of one 
 home, to form into parties and companies, to clothe 
 themselves, and put checks upon the violent passions. 
 They who first drew savage man out of the life of un- 
 bridled instinct and brutal loneliness ; who founded the 
 practices of personal decency and cleanliness ; who first 
 taught men to be faithful and tender to the young and 
 the old, the woman, and the mother ; who first brought 
 these wild hunters together, and made them trust each 
 other and their chief these were the first great bene- 
 factors of mankind ; this is the beginning of the history 
 of the race. 
 
 When such was the material and moral condition of 
 man, what was his intellectual condition ? what were his 
 knowledge, his worship, and his religion ? Turn to the 
 earliest traditions of men, to the simple ideas of child- 
 hood, and especially to the savage tribes we know, and 
 we have the answer. Man's intellect was far feebler 
 than his activity or his feelings. He knew nothing, he 
 rested in the first imagination. He reasoned on nothing, 
 he supposed everything. He looked upon nature, and 
 saw it full of life, motion, and strength. He knew what 
 struggles he had with it ; he felt it often crush him, he 
 felt he could often mould it ; and he thought that all, 
 brutes, plants, rivers, storms, forests, and mountains, 
 were powers, living, feeling, and acting like himself. 
 Do not the primeval legends, the fairy tales of all 
 nations, show it to us ? Does not the child punish its 
 doll, and the savage defy the thunder, and the horse 
 
30 THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 start at a gnarled oak swaying its boughs like arms in 
 the wind ? Man then looked out upon nature, and 
 thought it a living thing a simple belief which answered 
 all questions. He knew nothing of matter, or elements, 
 or laws. His celestial and his terrestrial philosophy was 
 summed up in this things act so because they choose. 
 He never asked why [the sun or moon rose and set. 
 They were bright beings who walked their own paths 
 when and as they pleased. He never thought why a 
 volcano smoked, or a river overflowed ; or thought only 
 that the one was wroth and roared, and that the other 
 had started in fury from his bed. 
 
 And what was his religion ? What could it but be ? 
 Affection for the fruits and flowers of the earth dread 
 and prostration before the terrible in nature worship 
 of the bright sun, or sheltering grove, or mountain in a 
 word, the adoration of nature, the untutored impulse 
 towards the master powers around. As yet nothing 
 was fixed, nothing common. Each worshipped in love 
 or dread what most seized his fancy ; each family had 
 its own fetishes ; each tribe its stones or mountains ; 
 often it worshipped its own dead friends who had 
 begun a new existence : who appeared to them in 
 dreams, and were thought to haunt the old familiar 
 spots. Such was their religion, the unguided faith of 
 childhood, exaggerating all the feelings and sympathies, 
 stimulating love, and hatred, and movement, and de- 
 struction, but leaving everything vague, giving no fixity, 
 no unity, no permanence. In such a condition, doubt- 
 less, man passed through many thousand years : tribe 
 struggling with tribe in endless battles for their hunting 
 grounds ; often, we may fear, devouring their captives ; 
 without any fixed abode, or definite association, or 
 material progress ; yet gradually forming the various arts 
 
THE CONNECTION OF HISTORY 31 
 
 and institutions of life, gradually learning the use of 
 clothes, of metals, of implements, of speech a race 
 whose life depended solely upon the chase, whose only 
 society was the tribe, whose religion was the worship of 
 natural objects. 
 
 In this first struggle with nature, man was not long 
 quite alone. Slowly he won over to his side one or two 
 of the higher animals. This wonderful victory assured 
 his ultimate ascendancy. The dog was won from his 
 wolf-like state to join and aid in the chase. The horse 
 bowed his strength in generous submission to a master. 
 We do not reflect enough upon the efforts that this cost 
 We are forgetful of the wonders of patience, gentleness, 
 sympathy, sagacity, and nerve, which were required for 
 the first domestication of animals. We may reflect upon 
 the long centuries of care which were needed to change 
 the very nature of these noble brutes, without whom we 
 should indeed be helpless. By degrees the ox, the sheep, 
 the goat, the hog, the camel, and the ass, with horse and 
 dog, were reared by man, formed part of his simple 
 family, and became the lower portion of the tribe. Their 
 very natures, their external forms, were changed. Milk 
 and its compounds formed the basis of food. The 
 hunter's life became less precarious, less rambling, less 
 violent. In short, the second great stage of human 
 existence began, and pastoral life commenced. 
 
 With the institution of pastoral a modified form of 
 nomad life, a great advance was made in civilisation. 
 Larger tribes could now collect, for there was now no 
 lack of food ; tribes gathered into a horde ; something 
 like society began. It had its leaders, its elders, perhaps 
 its teachers, poets, and wise men. Men ceased to rove 
 for ever. They stayed upon a favourable pasture for long 
 periods together. Next, property that is, instruments, 
 
32 THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 valuables, and means of subsistence began ; flocks and 
 herds accumulated ; men were no longer torn daily by 
 the wants of hunger ; and leisure, repose, and peace were 
 possible. The women were relieved from the crushing 
 toil of the past. The old were no longer abandoned or 
 neglected through want. Reflection, observation, thought 
 began ; and with thought, religion. As life became 
 more fixed, worship became less vague and more 
 specific. Some fixed, great powers alone were adored, 
 chiefly the host of heaven, the stars, the moon, and the 
 great sun itself. Then some elder, freed from toil or 
 war, meditating on the world around him, as he watched 
 the horde start forth at the rising of the sun, the 
 animals awakening and nature opening beneath his 
 rays, first came to think all nature moved at the will 
 of that sun himself, perhaps even of some mysterious 
 power of whom that sun was but the image. From 
 this would rise a regular worship common to the whole 
 horde, uniting them together, explaining their course of 
 life, stimulating their powers of thought. 
 
 With this some kind of knowledge commenced. 
 Their vast herds and flocks needed to be numbered, 
 distinguished, and separated. Arithmetic began ; the 
 mode of counting, of adding and subtracting, was slowly 
 worked out. The horde's course, also, must be directed 
 by the seasons and the stars. Hence astronomy began. 
 The course of the sun was steadily observed, the re- 
 currence of the seasons noted. Slowly the first ideas of 
 order, regularity, and permanence arose. The world 
 was no longer a chaos of conflicting forces. The earth 
 had its stated times, governed by the all-ruling sun. 
 Now, too, the horde had a permanent existence. Its 
 old men could remember the story of its wanderings 
 and the deeds of its mighty ones, and would tell them 
 
THE CONNECTION OF HISTORY 33 
 
 to the young when the day was over. Poetry, narrative, 
 and history had begun. Leisure brought the use of 
 fresh implements. Metals were found and worked. 
 The loom was invented ; the wheeled car came into 
 use ; the art of the smith, the joiner, and the boat- 
 builder. New arts required a subdivision of labour, and 
 division of labour required orderly rule. Society had 
 begun. A greater step was yet at hand. Around 
 some sacred mountain or grave, in some more favoured 
 spot, where the horde would longest halt or oftenest 
 return, some greater care to clear the ground, to protect 
 the pasture, and to tend the plants was shown ; some 
 patches of soil were scratched to grow some useful 
 grains, some wild corn ears were cultivated into wheat, 
 the earth began to be tilled. Man passed into the 
 third great stage of material existence, and agriculture 
 began. 
 
 Agriculture once commenced, a new era was at hand. 
 Now organised society was possible. We must regard 
 this stage as the greatest effort towards progress ever 
 accomplished by mankind. We must remember how 
 much had to be learnt, how many arts had to be 
 invented, before the savage hunter could settle down 
 into the peaceful, the provident, and the intelligent 
 husbandman. What is all our vaunted progress to this 
 great step ? What are all our boasted inventions com- 
 pared with the first great discoveries of man, the 
 spinning-wheel and loom, the plough, the clay-vessel, 
 the wheel, the boat, the bow, the hatchet, and the forge ? 
 Surely, if we reflect, our inventions are chiefly modes of 
 multiplying or saving force ; these were the trans- 
 formations of substances, or the interchange of force. 
 Ours are, for the most part, but expansions of the first 
 idea ; these are the creations. 
 
 c 
 
34 THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 Since it is with agriculture solely that organised 
 society begins, it is with justice that the origin of 
 civilisation is always traced to those great plains where 
 alone agriculture was then possible. It was in the 
 basins of the great Asian rivers, the Euphrates, the 
 Tigris, the Indus, the Ganges, the Yang-tse-kiang, and 
 in that of the Nile, that fixed societies began. There, 
 where irrigation is easy, the soil rich, the country open, 
 cultivation arose, and with cultivation of the soil the 
 accumulation of its produce, and, with more easy 
 sustenance, leisure, thought, and observation. Use 
 taught man to distinguish between matter and life, 
 man and brute, thought and motion. Men's eyes were 
 opened, and they saw that nature was not alive, and 
 had no will. They watched the course of the sun, and 
 saw that it moved in fixed ways. They watched the 
 sea, and saw that it rose and fell by tides. Then, too, 
 they needed knowledge and they needed teachers. 
 They needed men to measure their fields, their barns, 
 to teach them to build strongly, to calculate the seasons 
 for them, to predict the signs of the weather, to ex- 
 pound the will of the great powers who ruled them. 
 Thus slowly rose the notion of gods, the unseen rulers 
 of these powers of earth and sky a god of the sea, of 
 the river, of the sky, of the sun ; and between them and 
 their gods rose the first priests, the ministers and 
 interpreters of their will, and polytheism and theocracies 
 began. 
 
 Thus simply amidst these great settled societies of 
 the plain began the great human institution, the 
 priesthood at first only wiser elders who had some 
 deeper knowledge of the arts of settled life. Gradually 
 knowledge advanced ; knowledge of the seasons and of 
 the stars or of astronomy, of enumeration or arithmetic, 
 
THE CONNECTION OF HISTORY 35 
 
 of measurement or geometry, of medicine and surgery, 
 of building, of the arts, of music, of poetry ; gradually 
 this knowledge became deposited in the hands of a few, 
 was accumulated and transmitted from father to son. 
 The intellect asserted its power, and the rule over a 
 peaceful and industrious race slowly passed into the 
 hands of a priesthood, or an educated and sacred class. 
 These were the men who founded the earliest form 
 of civilised existence ; the most complete, the most 
 enduring, the most consistent of all human societies, 
 the great theocracies or religious societies of Asia and 
 Egypt. Thus for thousands of years before the earliest 
 records of history, in all the great plains of Asia and 
 along the Nile, nations flourished in a high and elaborate 
 form of civilisation. We will examine one only, the 
 best known to us, the type, the earliest and the greatest 
 the Egyptian. 
 
 The task to be accomplished was immense. It was 
 nothing less than the foundation of permanent and 
 organised society. Till this was done all was in danger. 
 All knowledge might be lost, the arts might perish, the 
 civil community might break up. Hitherto there had 
 been no permanence, no union, no system. What was 
 needed was to form the intellectual and material frame- 
 work of a fixed nation. And this the Egyptian priesthood 
 undertook. The spot was favourable to the attempt. 
 In that great, rich plain, walled off on all sides by the 
 desert or by the sea, it was possible to found a society 
 at once industrial, peaceful, and settled. They needed 
 judges to direct them, teachers to instruct them, men of 
 science to help them, governors to rule them, preachers 
 to admonish them, physicians to heal them, artists to 
 train them, and priests to sacrifice for them. To meet 
 these wants a special order of men spontaneously arose, 
 
36 THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 by whose half-conscious efforts a complete system of 
 society was gradually and slowly formed. In their 
 hands was concentrated the whole intellectual product 
 of ages ; this they administered for the common good. 
 
 Gradually by their care there arose a system of 
 regular industry. To this end they divided out by 
 their superior skill all the arts and trades of life. Each 
 work was apportioned, each art had its subordinate 
 arts. Then as a mode of perpetuating skill in crafts, to 
 insure a sound apprenticeship of every labour, they 
 caused or enabled each man's work to become here- 
 ditary within certain broad limits, and thus created or 
 sanctioned a definite series of castes. To give sanction 
 to the whole, they consecrated each labour, and made 
 each workman's toil a part of his religious duty. 
 Then they organised a scheme of general education. 
 They provided a system of teaching common to all, 
 adapted to the work of each. They provided for the 
 special education of the sacred class in the whole 
 circle of existing knowledge ; they collected observa- 
 tions, they treasured up discoveries, and recorded events. 
 Next they organised a system of government. They 
 established property, they divided out the land, they 
 set up landmarks, they devised rules for its tenure, 
 they introduced law, and magistrates, and governors ; 
 provinces were divided into districts, towns,* and 
 villages ; violence was put down, a strict police exer- 
 cised, regular taxes imposed. Next they organised 
 a system of morality ; the social, the domestic, and the 
 personal duties were minutely defined ; practices re- 
 lating to health, cleanliness, and temperance were 
 enforced by religious obligations : every act of life, 
 every moment of existence, was made a part of sacred 
 duty. Lastly, they organised national life by a vast 
 
THE CONNECTION OF HISTORY 37 
 
 system of common religious rites, having imposing 
 ceremonies which awakened the imagination and 
 kindled the emotions, bound up the whole community 
 into an united people, and gave stability to their 
 national existence, by the awful sense of a common 
 and mysterious belief. 
 
 If we want to know what such a system of life was 
 like, let us go into some museum of Egyptian antiqui- 
 ties, where we may see representations of their mode of 
 existence carved upon their walls. There we may see 
 nearly all the arts of life as we know them weaving 
 and spinning, working in pottery, glass-blowing, building, 
 carving, and painting ; ploughing, sowing, threshing, and 
 gathering into barns ; boating, irrigation, fishing, wine- 
 pressing, dancing, singing, and playing a vast com- 
 munity, in short, orderly, peaceful, and intelligent ; 
 capable of gigantic works and of refined arts, before 
 which we are lost in wonder ; a civilised community 
 busy and orderly as a hive of bees, amongst whom 
 every labour and function was arranged in perfect 
 harmony and distinctness : all this may be seen upon 
 monuments 5000 years old. 
 
 Here, then, we have civilisation itself. All the arts 
 of life had been brought to perfection, and indelibly 
 implanted on the mind of men so that they could never 
 be utterly lost. All that constitutes orderly govern- 
 ment, the institutions of society, had been equally 
 graven into human existence. A check had been 
 placed upon the endless and desultory warfare of 
 tribes ; and great nations existed. The ideas of 
 domestic life, marriage, filial duty, care for the aged 
 and the dead, had become a second nature. The 
 wholesome practices of social life, of which we think 
 so lightly, had all been invented and established. The 
 
38 THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 practice of regular holidays, social gatherings, and 
 common celebrations began the record and division 
 of past ages, the exact times of the seasons, of the 
 year, the months and its festivals ; the great yet little- 
 prized institution of the week. Nor were the gains to 
 thought less. In the peaceful rolling on of those 
 primeval ages, observations had been stored up by 
 an unbroken succession of priests, without which 
 science never would have existed. It was no small 
 feat in science first to have determined the exact length 
 of the year. It needed observations stretching over 
 a cycle of 1 500 years. But the Egyptian priests had 
 enumerated the stars, and could calculate for centuries 
 in advance the times of their appearance. They 
 possessed the simpler processes of arithmetic and 
 geometry ; they knew something of chemistry, and 
 much of botany, and even a little of surgery. There 
 was one invention yet more astonishing ; the Egyptians 
 invented, the Phoenicians popularised, the art of writing, 
 and transmitted the alphabet our alphabet to the 
 Greeks. A truly amazing intellectual effort was re- 
 quired for the formation of the alphabet ; not to shape 
 the forms, but first to conceive that the complex sounds 
 we utter could be classified, and reduced down to those 
 simple elements we call the letters. We can imagine 
 hardly any effort of abstract thought more difficult than 
 this, and certainly none more essential to the progress 
 of the human mind. 
 
 They had indeed great minds who did all this ; for 
 they did not so much promote civilisation as create it. 
 Never perhaps before or since has any order of men 
 received this universal culture ; never perhaps has any 
 order shown this many-sided activity and strength. 
 Never before or since has such power been concentrated 
 
THE CONNECTION OF HISTORY 39 
 
 in the same hands the entire moral and material 
 control over society. They had great minds, great 
 souls also, who could conceive and carry through such 
 a task greater perhaps in this that they did not care 
 to celebrate themselves for posterity, but passed away 
 when their work was done, contented to have seen it 
 done, as Moses did when he went up alone to die in 
 secret, that no man might know or worship at his tomb. 
 The debt we owe these men and these times is great. 
 It is said that man learns more in the first year of his 
 childhood than in any year subsequently of his life. 
 And in this long childhood of the world, how many 
 things were learnt ! Is it clear that they could have 
 been learnt in any other way ? Caste, in its decline, is 
 the most degrading of human institutions. It is doubt- 
 ful if without it the arts of life could have been taught 
 and preserved in those unsettled ages of war and 
 migration. We rebel justly against all priestly tyranny 
 over daily life and customs. It is probable that without 
 these sanctions of religion and law, the rules of morality, 
 of decency, and health could never have been imposed 
 upon the lawless instincts of mankind. We turn with 
 repugnance from the monotony of those unvarying 
 ages, and of that almost stagnant civilisation ; but are 
 we sure that without it, it would have been possible to 
 collect the observations of distant ages, and the records 
 of dynasties and eras on which all science and all 
 history rest ? would it have been possible to provide a 
 secure and tranquil field in which the slow growth of 
 language, art, and thought could have worked out, 
 generation after generation, , their earliest and most 
 difficult result ? 
 
 No form of civilisation has ever endured so long ; its 
 consequences are stamped deeply still upon our daily 
 
40 THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 life ; yet the time came when even these venerable 
 systems must die. 
 
 Their work was done, and it was time for them to 
 pass away. Century after century had gone by, 
 teaching the same lessons, but adding nothing new. 
 Human life began to be stifled in these primeval forms. 
 The whole empire of the priests grew evil and corrupt. 
 We know them chiefly in their decline, when kings 
 and conquerors had usurped and perverted the patient 
 energies of these long-tutored peoples. These great 
 societies passed from industrial and social communities 
 into stupendous tyrannies, made up of cruelty and 
 pride. It was the result of the great and fatal error 
 which lay beneath the whole priestly system. They 
 had misconceived their strength and their knowledge. 
 They had undertaken to organise society whilst their 
 own knowledge was feeble and imperfect. They had 
 tried to establish the rule of mind, of all rules the most 
 certainly destined to fail ; and they based that rule 
 upon error and misconception. They pretended to 
 govern society instead of confining themselves to the 
 only possible task, to teach it. They who had begun 
 by securing progress, now were its worst obstacles. 
 They who began to rule by the right of intelligence, 
 now dreaded and crushed intelligence. They fell as 
 every priesthood has fallen which has ever based its 
 claims upon imperfect knowledge, or pretended to 
 command in the practical affairs of life. Yet there was 
 only one way in which the nightmare of this intellectual 
 and social oppression could be shaken off, and these 
 strong systems broken up. It was no doubt by the 
 all-powerful instinct of conquest, and by the growth of 
 vast military monarchies, that the change was accom- 
 plished. Those antique societies of peace and industry 
 
THE CONNECTION OF HISTORY 4! 
 
 degenerated at last into conquering empires ; and, during 
 the thousand years which precede the Persian empire, 
 Asia was swept from side to side by the armies of 
 Assyrian, Median, Babylonian, and Egyptian con- 
 querors. Empire after empire rose and fell with small 
 result, save that they broke the death-like sleep of ages, 
 and brought distant people from the ends of the earth 
 into contact with each other. 
 
 The researches and discoveries of our own generation 
 have thrown much light on these Asiatic kingdoms, and 
 many names and events have been sufficiently identffied. 
 But no regular and authentic history of the tracts en- 
 closed between the Black Sea, the Caspian, the Mediter- 
 ranean, and the Persian Gulf has yet become possible ; 
 nor has our general conception of the civilisation of 
 these Asiatic monarchies been modified in essential 
 features. From time to time we find traces of efforts 
 made by independent peoples, Arabs, Syrians, Phoeni- 
 cians, and Jews, to free themselves from the pressure of 
 the regime of caste and of the military empires. Of 
 these efforts the Jewish nationality is, from the moral 
 and spiritual point of view, far the most important. 
 From the practical and material point of view, the most 
 important is undoubtedly the Phoenician. These two 
 most interesting peoples may be traced for eight or ten 
 centuries before they were both absorbed in the Persian 
 empire, making heroic and persevering efforts to found 
 a new type of society, or to develop the arts and 
 resources of civilised life. The Jewish nation, though its 
 subsequent influence on the conscience and imagination 
 of mankind has made it of such transcendant interest to 
 us in a later age, was too small, too feebly seated, and 
 with too little of practical genius, to produce any de- 
 cisive effect on the general course of civil organisation. 
 
42 THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 That very remarkable people, the Phoenicians, did 
 more to that end. Their wonderful enterprise and in- 
 domitable nature, their seats on the shores of the Medi- 
 terranean and the possession of maritime strongholds, 
 with their unique aptitude for the sea in the early ages, 
 enabled them to play a most important part in the 
 evolution of human civilisation. They did what Venice 
 did in the Middle Ages and Holland in subsequent 
 times. They carried the arts, inventions, and products 
 of the various continents and zones of climate over the 
 whole known world from Britain to Ceylon. But they 
 were too much dispersed, too mobile, and too defective 
 in military and political genius to confront a great 
 empire, and they successively fell before the Assyrian, 
 Babylonish, and Egyptian conquerors. Their arts, their 
 trade, their naval supremacy, passed to the inhabi- 
 tants of Western seaboards, islands, and more sheltered 
 bays. 
 
 The world seemed in danger of perishing by exhaus- 
 tion. It needed a new spirit to revive it. But now 
 another race appears upon the scene ; a branch of that 
 great Aryan people, who from the high lands of central 
 Asia have swept over Assyria, India, and Europe, the 
 people who as Greeks, Romans, Gauls, or Teutons have 
 been the foremost of mankind, of whom we ourselves 
 are but a younger branch. Now, too, the darkness 
 which covered those earlier ages of the world rolls off: 
 accurate history begins, and the drama proceeds in the 
 broad light of certainty. 
 
 It is about 550 B.C. that the first great name in general 
 history appears. Cyrus founds the Persian empire. For 
 ages, along the mountain slopes between the Hindoo 
 Koosh and the Caspian Sea, the Persian race had 
 remained a simple horde of wandering herdsmen, apart 
 
43 
 
 from the vast empires of Babylon and Nineveh in the 
 plains below. There they grew up with nobler and 
 freer thoughts, not crushed by the weight of a powerful 
 monarchy, not degraded by decaying superstitions, nor 
 enervated by material riches. They honoured truth, 
 freedom, and energy. They had faith in themselves 
 and their race. They valued morality more than cere- 
 monies. They believed in a Supreme Power of the 
 universe. Just as the northern nations afterwards 
 poured over the Roman empire, so these stronger tribes 
 were preparing to descend upon the decaying remains 
 of the Asiatic empires. They needed only a captain, 
 and they found one worthy of the task in the great 
 King Cyrus. 
 
 Marshalling his mountain warriors into a solid army, 
 Cyrus swept down upon the plains, and one by one the 
 empires fell before him, until from the Mediterranean 
 to the Indus, from Tartary to the Arabian Gulf, all 
 Asia submitted to his sway. His successors continued 
 his work, pushing across Arabia, Egypt, Africa, and 
 Northern Asia itself. There over that enormous tract 
 they built up the Persian monarchy, which swallowed 
 up and fused into one so many ancient empires. The 
 conquerors were soon absorbed, like the Northmen, into 
 the theocratic faith and life of the conquered ; and 
 throughout half of the then inhabited globe one rule, 
 one religion, one system of life alone existed. But the 
 Persian kings could not rest whilst a corner remained 
 unconquered. On the shores of the Mediterranean 
 they had come upon a people who had defied them 
 with strange audacity. Against them the whole weight 
 of the Asian empire was put forth. For ten years fleets 
 and armies were preparing. There came archers from 
 the wastes of Tartary and the deserts of Africa ; 
 
44 THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 charioteers from Nineveh and Babylon ; horsemen, 
 clubmen, and spearmen ; the mailclad footmen of 
 Persia ; the fleets of the Phoenicians ; all the races of 
 the East gathered in one vast host, and, as legend said, 
 5,000,000 men and 2000 ships poured over the Eastern 
 seas upon the devoted people. 
 
 And who were they who seemed thus doomed ? 
 Along the promontories and islands of the eastern 
 Mediterranean there dwelt the scattered race whom \ve 
 call Greeks, who had gradually worked out a form of 
 life totally differing from the old, who had wonderfully 
 expanded the old arts of life and modes of thought. 
 With them the destinies of the world then rested for all 
 its future progress. With them all was life, change, 
 and activity. Broken into sections by infinite bays, 
 mountains, and rivers, scattered over a long line of 
 coasts and islands, the Greek race, with natures as 
 varied as their own beautiful land, as restless as their 
 own seas, had never been moulded into one great solid 
 empire, and early threw off the weight of a ruling caste 
 of priests. No theocracy or religious system of society 
 ever could establish itself amidst a race so full of life 
 and motion, exposed to influences from without, divided 
 within. They had borrowed the arts of life from the 
 great Eastern peoples, and, in borrowing, had wonder- 
 fully improved them. The alphabet, shipbuilding, com- 
 merce, they had from the Phoenicians ; architecture, 
 sculpture, painting, from the Assyrian or Lydian em- 
 pires. Geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, they had 
 borrowed from the Egyptians. The various fabrics, 
 arts, and appliances of the East came to them in pro- 
 fusion across the seas. Their earliest lawgivers, rulers, 
 and philosophers had all travelled through the great 
 Asian kingdom, and came back to their small country 
 
THE CONNECTION OF HISTORY 45 
 
 with a new sense of all the institutions and ideas of 
 civilised life. 
 
 The Greeks borrowed, they did not imitate. Alone 
 as yet, they had thrown off the tyranny of custom, 
 of caste, of kingcraft, and of priestcraft. They only 
 had moulded the ponderous column and the uncouth 
 colossus of the East into the graceful shaft and the life- 
 like figure of the gods. They only had dared to think 
 freely, to ask themselves what or whence was this earth, 
 to meet the problems of abstract thought, to probe the 
 foundations of right and wrong. Lastly, they alone had 
 conceived the idea of a people not the servants of one 
 man or of a class, not chained down in a rigid order of 
 submission, but the free and equal citizens of a republic ; 
 for on them first had dawned the idea of a civilised 
 community in which men should be not masters and 
 slaves, but brothers. 
 
 On poured the myriads of Asia, creating a famine as 
 they marched, drying up the streams, and covering the 
 seas with their ships. Who does not know the tale of 
 that immortal effort? how the Athenians armed old 
 and young, burned their city, and went on board their 
 ships how for three days Leonidas and his three 
 hundred held the pass against the Asian host, and lay 
 down, each warrior at his post, calmly smiling in death 
 how the Greek ships lay in ambush in their islands, 
 for the mighty fleet of Persia how the unwieldy mass 
 was broken and pierced by its dauntless enemy 
 how, all day the battle raged beneath the eyes of the 
 great king himself, and, at its close, the seas were heav- 
 ing with the wrecks of the shattered host. Of all the 
 battles in history, this one of Salamis was the most 
 precious to the human race. No other tale of war can 
 surpass it. For in that war the heroism, the genius, the 
 
46 THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 marvellous audacity shown by these pigmy fleets and 
 armies of a small, weak race, withstood and crushed the 
 entire power of Asia, and preserved from extinction the 
 life and intellect of future ages. 
 
 Victory followed upon victory, and the whole Greek 
 race expanded with this amazing triumph. The old 
 world had been brought face to face with the intellect 
 which was to transform it. The Greek mind, with the 
 whole East open to it, exhibited inexhaustible activity. 
 A century sufficed to develop a thoroughly new phase 
 of civilisation. They carried the arts to a height 
 whereon they stand as the types for all time. In poetry 
 they exhausted and perfected every form of composi- 
 tion. In politics they built up a multitude of com- 
 munities, rich with a prolific store of political and social 
 institutions. Throughout their stormy history stand 
 forth great names. Now and then there rose amongst 
 them leaders of real genius. For a time they showed 
 some splendid instances of public virtue, of social life, 
 patriotism, elevation, sagacity, and energy. For a 
 moment Athens at least may have believed that she 
 had reached the highest type of political existence. 
 But with all this activity and greatness there was no 
 true unity. Wonderful as was their ingenuity, their 
 versatility and energy, it was too often wasted in barren 
 struggles and wanton restlessness. For a century and 
 a half after the Persian invasion, the petty Greek states 
 contended in one weary round of contemptible civil 
 wars and aimless revolutions. One after another they 
 cast their great men aside, to think out by themselves 
 the thoughts that were to live for all time, and gave 
 themselves up to be the victims of degraded adven- 
 turers. For one moment only in their history, if indeed 
 for that, they did become a nation. At last, wearied 
 
THE CONNECTION OF HISTORY 47 
 
 out by endless wars and constant revolutions, the Greek 
 states by force and fraud were fused in one people by 
 the Macedonian kings ; and by Macedon, instead of by 
 true Hellas, the great work so long postponed, but 
 through their history never forgotten, was at length 
 attempted the work of avenging the Persian invasion, 
 and subduing Asia. 
 
 Short and wonderful was that career of conquest, due 
 wholly to one marvellous mind. Alexander, indeed, in 
 military and practical genius seems to stand above all 
 Greeks, as Caesar above all Romans ; they two the 
 greatest chiefs of the ancient world. No story in history 
 is so romantic as the tale of that ten years of victory 
 when Alexander, at the head of some thirty thousand 
 veteran Greeks, poured over Asia, crushing army after 
 army, taking city after city, and receiving the homage 
 of prince after prince, himself fighting like a knight- 
 errant : until, subduing the Persian empire, and piercing 
 Asia from side to side, and having reached even the 
 great rivers of India, he turned back to Babylon to 
 organise his vast empire, to found new cities, pour life 
 into the decrepit frame of the East, and give to these 
 entranced nations the arts and wisdom of Greece. For 
 this he came to Babylon, but came thither only to die. 
 Endless confusion ensued ; province after province broke 
 up into a separate kingdom, and the vast empire of 
 Alexander became the prey of military adventurers. 
 
 Yet, though this creation of his genius, like so much 
 else that Greece accomplished, was, indeed, in appear- 
 ance a disastrous failure, still it had not been in vain. 
 The Greek mind was diffused over the East like the 
 rays of the rising sun when it revives and awakens 
 slumbering nature. The Greek language, the most 
 wonderful instrument of thought ever composed by 
 
48 THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 man, became common to the whole civilised world ; it 
 bound together all educated men from the Danube to 
 the Indus. The Greek literature, poetry, history, science, 
 philosophy, and art were at once the common property 
 of the empire. The brilliance, the audacity, the strength 
 of the Greek reasoning awoke the dormant powers of 
 thought. The idea of laws, the idea of states, the idea 
 of citizenship, came like a revelation upon the degenerate 
 slaves of the Eastern tyrannies. Nor was the result 
 less important to the Greek mind itself. Now, at last, 
 the world was open without obstacle. The philosophers 
 poured over the new empire; they ransacked the re- 
 cords of primeval times ; they studied the hoarded lore 
 of the Egyptian and Chaldean priests. Old astronomical 
 observations, old geometric problems, long concealed, 
 were thrown open to them. They travelled over the 
 whole continent of Asia, studying its wonders of the 
 past, collecting its natural curiosities, examining its 
 surface, its climates, its production, its plants, its 
 animals, and its human races, customs, and ideas. 
 Lastly, they gathered up and pondered over the half- 
 remembered traditions and the half-comprehended mys- 
 teries of Asian belief: the conceptions which had risen 
 up before the intense abstraction of Indian and Baby- 
 lonian mystics, Jewish and Egyptian prophets and 
 priests ; the notion of some great principle or thought, 
 or Being, utterly unseen and unknown, above all gods, 
 and without material form. Thus arose the earliest 
 germ of that spirit which, by uniting Greek logic with 
 Chaldean or Jewish imagination, prepared the way for 
 the religious systems of Mussulman and Christian. 
 
 Such was the result of the great conquest of Alex- 
 ander. Not by its utter failure as an empire are we to 
 judge it ; not by the vices and follies of its founder, nor 
 
THE CONNECTION OF HISTORY 49 
 
 the profligate orgies of its dissolution, must we condemn 
 it. We must value it as the means whereby the effete 
 world of the East was renewed by the life of European 
 thought, by which arose the first ideas of nature as a 
 whole and of mankind as a whole, by which the ground 
 was first prepared for the Roman empire, and for 
 Christian and Mahometan religion. 
 
 As a nation the Greeks had established little that 
 was lasting. They had changed much ; they had 
 organised hardly anything. As the great Asian system 
 had sacrificed all to permanence, so the Greek sacrificed 
 all to movement. The Greeks had created no system 
 of law, no political order, no social system. If civilisa- 
 tion had stopped there, it would have ended in ceaseless 
 agitation, discord, and dissolution. Their character was 
 wanting in self-command and tenacity, and their genius 
 was too often wasted in intellectual licence. Yet if 
 politically they were unstable, intellectually they were 
 great. The lives of their great heroes are their rich 
 legacy to all future ages ; Solon, Themistocles, Pericles, 
 Epaminondas, and Demosthenes stand forth as the 
 types of bold and creative leaders of men. The story of 
 their best days has scarcely its equal in history. In 
 art they gave us the works of Phidias, the noblest 
 image of the human form ever created by man. In 
 poetry, the models of all time Homer, the greatest 
 and the earliest of poets ; ^Eschylus, the greatest master 
 of the tragic art ; Plato, the most eloquent of moral 
 teachers ; Pindar, the first of all in lyric art. In 
 philosophy and in science the Greek mind laid the 
 foundations of all knowledge, beyond which, until the 
 last three centuries, very partial advance had been made. 
 Building on the ground prepared by the Egyptians, 
 they did much to perfect arithmetic, raised geometry 
 
 D 
 
50 THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 to a science by itself, and invented that system of 
 astronomy which served the world for fifteen centuries. 
 In knowledge of animal life and the art of healing they 
 constructed a body of accurate observations and sound 
 analysis ; in physics, or the knowledge of the material 
 earth, they advanced to the point at which little was 
 added till the time of Bacon himself. 
 
 In abstract thought their results were still more 
 surprising. All the ideas that lie at the root of our 
 modern abstract philosophy may be found in germ in 
 Greece. The schools of modern metaphysics are the 
 development of conceptions vaguely grasped by them. 
 They analysed with perfect precision and wonderful 
 minuteness the processes employed in language and in 
 reasoning ; they systematised grammar and logic, rhetoric 
 and music ; they correctly analysed the human mind, 
 the character, the emotions, and founded the science of 
 morality and the art of education ; they correctly 
 analysed the elements of society and political life, and 
 initiated the science of politics, or the theory of social 
 union. Lastly, they criticised and laid bare all the 
 existing beliefs of mankind ; pierced the imposing false- 
 hood of the old religions ; meditated on all the various 
 answers ever given to the problem of human destiny, 
 of the universe and its origin, and slowly worked out 
 the conception of unity through the whole visible and 
 invisible universe, which, in some shape or other, has 
 been the belief of man for twenty centuries. Such were 
 their gifts to the world. It was an intellect active, 
 subtle, and real, marked by the true scientific character 
 of freedom, precision, and consistency. And, as the 
 Greek intellect overtopped the intellect of all races of 
 men, and combined in itself the gifts of all others, so 
 were the great intellects of Greece all overtopped and 
 
THE CONNECTION OF HISTORY 51 
 
 concentrated in one great mind the greatest, doubtless, 
 of all human minds the matchless Aristotle ; as the 
 poet says, ' The master of those who know,' who, in all 
 branches of human knowledge, built the foundations of 
 abiding truth. 
 
 Let us pause for a moment to reflect what point we 
 have reached in the history of civilisation. Asia had 
 founded the first arts and usages of material life, begun 
 the earliest social institutions, and taught us the rudi- 
 ments of science and of thought. Greece had expanded 
 all these in infinite variety and subtlety, had instituted 
 the free state, and given life to poetry and art, had 
 formed fixed habits of accurate reasoning and of system- 
 atic observation. Materially and intellectually civilisa- 
 tion existed. Yet in Greece we feel that, socially, 
 everything is abortive. The Greeks had not grown 
 into an united nation. They split into a multitude 
 of jealous republics. These republics split into hostile 
 and restless factions. And when the genius of the 
 Macedonian kings had at last founded an empire, it 
 lasted but twenty years, and gave place to even more 
 colossal confusion. All that we associate with true 
 national existence was yet to come, but the noble race 
 who were to found it had long been advancing towards 
 their high destiny. Alexander, perhaps, had scarcely 
 heard of that distant, half-educated people, who for 
 four centuries had been slowly building up the power 
 which was to absorb and supersede his empire. 
 
 Far beyond the limits of his degenerate subjects, 
 worthier successors of his genius were at hand : the 
 Romans were coming upon the world. The Greeks 
 founded the city, the Romans the nation. The Greeks 
 were the authors of philosophy, the Romans of govern- 
 ment, justice, and peace. The Greek ideal was thought, 
 
52 THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 the Roman ideal was law. The Greeks taught us the 
 noble lesson of individual freedom, the Romans the 
 still nobler lesson, the sense of social duty. It is just, 
 therefore, that to the Romans, as to the people who 
 alone throughout all ages gave unity, peace, and order 
 to the civilised world, who gave us the elements of our 
 modern political life, and have left us the richest record 
 of public duty, heroism, and self-sacrifice it is just that 
 to them we assign the place of the noblest nation in 
 ancient history. That which marks the Roman with 
 his true greatness was his devotion to the social body, 
 his sense of self-surrender to country : a duty to which 
 the claims of family and person were implicitly to yield ; 
 which neither death, nor agony, nor disgrace could 
 subdue ; which was the only reward, pleasure, or re- 
 ligion which a true citizen could need. This was the 
 greatness, not of a few leading characters, but of an 
 entire people during many generations. The Roman 
 state did not give merely examples of heroes it was 
 formed of heroes ; nor were they less marked by their 
 sense of obedience, submission to rightful authority 
 where the interest of the state required it, submission to 
 order and law. 
 
 Nor were the Romans without a deep sense of justice. 
 They did not war to crush the conquered ; once sub- 
 dued, they dealt with them as their fellows, they made 
 equal laws and a common rule for them ; they bound 
 them all into the same service of their common country. 
 Above all other nations in the world they believed in 
 their mission and destiny. From age to age they 
 paused not in one great object No prize could beguile 
 them, no delusion distract them. Each Roman felt the 
 divinity of the Eternal City, destined always to march 
 onwards in triumph : in its service every faculty of his 
 
THE CONNECTION OF HISTORY 53 
 
 mind was given ; life, wealth, and rest were as nothing 
 to this cause. In this faith they could plan out for the 
 distant future, build up so as to prepare for vast ex- 
 tension, calculate far distant schemes, and lay stone by 
 stone the walls of an enduring structure. Hence 
 throughout the great age each Roman was a statesman, 
 for he needed to provide for the future ages of his 
 country ; each Roman was a citizen of the world, for all 
 nations were destined to be his fellow-citizens ; each 
 Roman could command, for he had learnt to obey, and 
 to know that he who commands and he who obeys are 
 but the servants of one higher power their common 
 fatherland. 
 
 Long and stern were the efforts by which this power 
 was built up. Deep as is the mystery which covers the 
 origin of Rome, we can still trace dimly how, about the 
 centre of the Italian peninsula, along the banks of the 
 Tiber, fragments of two tribes were fused by some 
 heroic chieftain into one ; the first more intellectual, 
 supple, and ingenious, the second more stubborn, 
 courageous, and faithful. We see more clearly how this 
 compound people rose through the strength of these 
 qualities of mind and character to be the foremost of 
 the neighbouring tribes ; how they long maintained 
 that religious order of society which the Greeks so early 
 shook off; how it moulded all the institutions of their 
 life, filled them with reverence for the duties of family, 
 for their parents, their wives, for the memory and the 
 spirit of their dead ancestors, taught them submission 
 to judges and chiefs, devotion to their mother-city, love 
 for her commands, her laws, and her traditions, trained 
 them to live and die for her indeed, compassed their 
 whole existence with a sense of duty towards their 
 fellows and each other ; how this sense of social duty 
 
54 THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 grew into the very fibres of their iron natures, kept the 
 state through all dangers rooted in the imperishable 
 trust and instinct of a massive people ; then how this 
 well-knit race advanced step by step upon their neigh- 
 bouring tribes, slowly united them in one, gave them 
 their own laws, made them their own citizens ; step by 
 step advanced upon the only civilised nation of the penin- 
 sula, the theocratic society of Etruria, took from them 
 the arts of war and peace ; how the hordes of Northern 
 barbarians poured over the peninsula like a flood, 
 sweeping all the nations below its waters, and when 
 they emerged, Rome only was left strong and confident ; 
 how, after four centuries of constant struggle, held up 
 always by the sense of future greatness, the Romans 
 had at length absorbed one by one the leading nations 
 of Italy, and by one supreme effort, after thirty years of 
 war, had crushed their noblest and strongest rivals, their 
 equals in all but genius and fortune, and stood at last 
 the masters of Italy, from shore to shore. 
 
 Soon came the great crisis of their history, the long 
 wars of Rome and Carthage. On one side was the 
 genius of war, empire, law, and art, on the other the 
 genius of commerce, industry, and wealth. The sub- 
 jects of Carthage were scattered over the Mediterranean, 
 the power of Rome was compact Carthage fought 
 with regular mercenaries, Rome with her disciplined 
 citizens. Carthage had consummate generals, but 
 Rome had matchless soldiers. Long the scale trembled. 
 Not once nor twice was Rome stricken down to the 
 dust. Punic fleets swept the seas. African horsemen 
 scoured the plains. Barbarian hordes were gathered up 
 by the wealth of Carthage, and marshalled by the 
 genius of her great captain. For her fought the 
 greatest military genius of the ancient world, perhaps of 
 
THE CONNECTION OF HISTORY 55 
 
 all time. Hannibal, himself a child of the camp 
 training a veteran army in the wars of Spain, led 
 his victorious troops across Gaul, crossed the Alps, 
 poured down upon Italy, struck down army after army, 
 and at last, by one crowning victory, scattered the last 
 military force of Rome. Beset by an invincible army 
 in the heart of Italy, her strongholds stormed, without 
 generals or armies, without money or allies, without 
 cavalry or ships, it seemed that the last hour of Rome 
 was come. Now, if ever, she needed that faith in her 
 destiny, the solid strength of her slow growth, and the 
 energy of her entire people. They did not fail her. In 
 her worst need her people held firm, her senate never 
 lost heart, armies grew out of the very remnants and 
 slaves within her walls. Inch by inch the invader was 
 driven back, watched and besieged in turn. The genius 
 of Rome revived in Scipio. He it was who, with an 
 eagle's sight, saw the weakness of her enemy, swooped, 
 with an eagle's flight, upon Carthage herself, and at last, 
 before her walls, overthrew Hannibal, and with him the 
 hopes and power of his country and his race. 
 
 It is in these first centuries that we see the source of 
 the greatness of Rome. Then was founded her true 
 strength. What tales of heroism, dignity, and endur- 
 ance have they not left us ! There are no types of 
 public virtue grander than these. Brutus condemning 
 his traitor sons to death ; Horatius defending the bridge 
 against an army ; Cincinnatus taken from the plough 
 to rule the state, returning from ruling the state again 
 to the plough ; the Decii, father and son, solemnly 
 devoting themselves to death to propitiate the gods of 
 Rome ; Regulus the prisoner going to his home only to 
 exhort his people not to yield, and returning calmly to 
 his prison ; Cornelia offering up her children to death 
 
56 THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 and shame for the cause of the people ; great generals 
 content to live like simple yeomen ; old and young ever 
 ready to march to certain death ; hearts proof against 
 eloquence, gold, or pleasure ; noble matrons training 
 their children to duty ; senates ever confident in their 
 country ; generals returning from conquered nations 
 in poverty ; the leader of triumphant armies becoming 
 the equal of the humblest citizens. 
 
 Carthage once overcome, the conquest of the world 
 followed rapidly. Spain and the islands of the Medi- 
 terranean Sea were the prizes of the war. Lower Gaul, 
 Greece, and Macedon were also within fifty years incor- 
 porated in Rome. She pushed further. The whole 
 empire of Alexander fell into her hands, and at length, 
 after seven hundred years of conquest, she remained the 
 mistress of the civilised world. But, long before this, 
 she herself had become the prey of convulsions. The 
 marvellous empire, so rapidly expanded, had deeply 
 corrupted the power which had won it. Her old heroes 
 were no more. Her virtues failed her, and her vast 
 dominions had long become the prize of bloody and 
 selfish factions. The ancient republic, whose freemen 
 had once met to consult in the Forum, broke up in 
 the new position for which her system was utterly 
 unfit. 
 
 For nearly a century the great empire had inevitably 
 tended towards union in a single centre. One dictator 
 after another had possessed and misused the sovereign 
 power. At last it passed to the worthiest, and the rule 
 over the whole ancient world came to its greatest name, 
 the noble Julius Caesar. In him were found more than 
 the Roman genius for government and law, with a 
 gentleness and grace few Romans ever had ; an intellect 
 truly Greek in its love of science, of art, in reach and 
 
THE CONNECTION OF HISTORY 57 
 
 subtlety of thought ; and, above all this, in spite of vices 
 and passions which he shared with his age, a breadth of 
 view and heart, a spirit of human fellowship and social 
 progress, peculiar to one who was the friend of men of 
 different races, countries, and ideas. Julius was con- 
 summate general, orator, poet, historian, ruler, lawgiver, 
 reformer, and philosopher ; in the highest sense the 
 statesman, magnanimous, provident, laborious, large- 
 hearted, affable, resolute, and brave. With him the 
 Roman empire enters on a new and better phase. He 
 first saw and showed how this vast aggregate of men 
 must be ruled no longer as the subjects of one conquer- 
 ing city, but as a real and single state governed in the 
 interest of all, with equal rights and common laws ; and 
 Rome be no longer the mistress, but the leader only of 
 the nations. In this spirit he broke with the old Roman 
 temper of narrow nationality and pride ; raised to power 
 and trust new men of all ranks and of all nations ; 
 opened the old Roman privileges of citizenship to the 
 new subjects ; laboured to complete and extend the 
 Roman law ; reorganised the administration of the 
 distant provinces ; and sought to extinguish the trace 
 of party fury and hatred. 
 
 When the selfish rage of the old Roman aristocracy 
 had struck him down before his work was half complete, 
 yet his work did not perish with him. The Roman 
 empire at last rose to the level which he had planned 
 for it. For some two centuries it did succeed in main- 
 taining an era of progress, peace, and civilisation a 
 government, indeed, at times frightfully corrupt, at 
 times convulsed to its foundations, yet in the main in 
 accordance with the necessities of the times, and rising 
 in its highest types to wise, tranquil, and prudent rule, 
 embracing all, open to all, just to all, and beloved by 
 
58 THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 all. Then it was, during those two centuries, broken as 
 they were by temporary convulsions, that the nations of 
 Europe rose into civilised life. Then the Spaniard, the 
 Gaul, the Briton, the German, the people that dwelt 
 along the whole course of the Rhine and the Danube, 
 first learnt the arts and ideas of life ; law, government, 
 society, education, industry, appeared amongst them ; 
 and over the tracts of land trodden for so many cen- 
 turies by rival tribes and devastating hordes, security 
 first appeared, turmoil gave place to repose, and there 
 rose the notion, not forgotten for ten centuries, of the 
 solemn Peace of Rome. 
 
 Let us recount what it was that the Roman had given 
 to the world. In the first place, his law that Roman 
 law, the most perfect political creation of the human 
 mind, which for one thousand years grew with one even 
 and expanding life the law which is the basis of all 
 the law of Europe, including even our own. Then the 
 political system of towns. The actual municipal con- 
 stitution of the old cities of Western Europe, from 
 Gibraltar to the Baltic, from the Channel to Sicily, is 
 but a development of the Roman city, which lasted 
 through the Middle Ages, and began modern industrial 
 life. Next, all the institutions of administration and 
 police which modern Europe has developed had their 
 origin there. To them in the Middle Ages men turned 
 when the age of confusion was ending. To them again 
 men turned when the Middle Ages themselves were 
 passing away. The establishment of elective assemblies, 
 of graduated magistracies, of local and provincial justice, 
 of public officers and public institutions, free museums, 
 baths, theatres, libraries, and schools all that we under- 
 stand by organised society, in a word, may be traced 
 back to the Empire. Throughout all Western Europe, 
 
THE CONNECTION OF HISTORY 59 
 
 from that germ, civilisation arose and raised its head 
 after the invasion of the Northern tribes. From the 
 same source, too, arose the force, at once monarchic and 
 municipal, which overthrew the feudal system. It was 
 the remnant of the old Roman ideas of provincial 
 organisation that first formed the counties and duchies 
 which afterwards coalesced into a state. It was the 
 memory of the Roman township which gave birth to 
 the first free towns of Europe. It was the tradition of 
 a Roman emperor which, by long intermediate steps, 
 transformed the Teutonic chieftain into the modern 
 king or emperor. London, York, Lincoln, Winchester, 
 Gloucester, and Chester were Roman cities, and formed 
 then, as they did for the earlier periods of our history, 
 the pivots of our national administration. Paris, Rouen, 
 Lyons, Marseilles, Bordeaux, in France ; Constance, 
 Basle, Coblentz, Cologne, upon the Rhine ; Cadiz, Bar- 
 celona, Seville, Toledo, Lisbon, in the Iberian Genoa, 
 Milan, Verona, Rome, and Naples in the Italian penin- 
 sula, were in Roman, as in modern times, the great 
 national centres of their respective countries. But, above 
 all else, Rome founded a permanent system of free 
 obedience to the laws on the one hand, and a tem- 
 perate administration of them on the other ; the 
 constant sense of each citizen having his place in a 
 complex whole. 
 
 The Roman's strength was in action, not in thought ; 
 but in thought he gave us something besides his special 
 creation of universal law. It was his to discover the 
 meaning of history. Egypt had carved on eternal rocks 
 the pompous chronicles of kings. The Greeks wrote 
 profound and brilliant memoirs. It was reserved to a 
 Roman to conceive and execute the history of his people 
 stretching over seven hundred years, and to give the 
 
60 THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 first proof of the continuity and unity of national life. 
 In art the Roman did little but develop the Greek 
 types of architecture into stupendous and complex 
 forms, fit for new uses, and worthy of his people's 
 grandeur. But the great triumphs of his skill were in 
 engineering. He invented the arch, the dome, and the 
 viaduct. The bridges of the Middle Ages were studied 
 from Roman remains. The great domes of Italian 
 cathedrals, of which that of our own St. Paul's is an 
 imitation, were formed directly on the model of a temple 
 at Rome. But in thought, the great gift of Rome was 
 in her language, which has served as an admirable in- 
 strument of religious, moral, and political reflection, 
 and, with many dialectic variations, forms the base of 
 the languages of three of the great nations of Europe. 
 Then it was, under the Roman empire, that the stores 
 of Greek thought became common to the world. As 
 the empire of Alexander had shed them over the East, 
 the empire of Rome gave them to the West. Greek 
 language, literature, poetry, science, and art became the 
 common education of the civilised world ; and from the 
 Grampians to the Euphrates, from the Atlas to the Rhine 
 and the Caucasus, for the first and only time in the 
 history of man, Europe, Asia, and Africa formed one 
 political whole. The union of the oriental half, indeed, 
 was mainly external and material, but throughout the 
 western half a common order of ideas prevailed. Their 
 religion was the belief in many gods a system in which 
 each of the powers of nature, each virtue, each art, was 
 thought to be the manifestation of some separate god. 
 It was a system which stimulated activity, self-reliance, 
 toleration, sociability, and art, but which left the external 
 world a vague and unmeaning mystery, and the heart 
 of man a prey to violent and conflicting passions. It 
 
THE CONNECTION OF HISTORY 6l 
 
 possessed not that idea of unity which alone can sustain 
 philosophy and science, and alone can establish in the 
 breast a fixed and elevated moral conscience. 
 
 The Roman system had its strong points, but it had 
 many weak. They were in the main three. It was a 
 system founded upon war, upon slavery, upon fictions 
 and dreams. As to war, it is most true that war was 
 not then, as in modern times, the monstrous negation of 
 civilisation. It seems that by war alone could nations 
 then be pressed into that union which was essential to 
 all future progress. Whilst war was common to all the 
 nations of antiquity, with the Romans alone it became 
 the instrument of progress. The Romans warred only 
 to found peace. They did not so much conquer as in- 
 corporate the nations. Not more by the strength of the 
 Roman than by the instinctive submission in the con- 
 quered to his manifest superiority, was the great empire 
 built up. Victors and vanquished share in the honour 
 of the common result law, order, peace, and govern- 
 ment. When the Romans conquered, it was once for 
 all. That which once became a province of the Roman 
 empire rested thenceforth in profound tranquillity. No 
 standing armies, no brutal soldiery, overawed the interior 
 or the towns. Whilst all within the circle of the empire 
 rested in peace, along its frontiers stood the disciplined 
 veterans of Rome watching the roving hordes of bar- 
 barians, protecting the pale of civilisation. 
 
 Still, however useful in its place, it was a system of 
 war ; a system necessarily fatal in the long-run to all 
 progress, to all industry, to all the domestic virtues, to 
 all the gentler feelings. In a state in which all great 
 ideas and traditions originated in conquest, the dignity 
 of labour, the arts of industry, were never recognised or 
 respected ; the era of conquest over, the existence of the 
 
62 THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 great Roman became in too many cases purposeless, 
 idle, and vicious. Charity, compassion, humanity, were 
 unknown virtues. The home was sacrificed. The con- 
 dition of woman in the wreck of the family relations 
 sank to the lowest ebb. In a word, the stern virtues of 
 the old Roman private life seemed ending in inhuman 
 ferocity and monstrous debauchery. 
 
 Secondly, the Roman, like every ancient system, was 
 a system of slavery. It existed only for the few. True 
 industry was impossible. The whole industrial class 
 were degraded. The owners of wealth and its pro- 
 ducers were alike demoralised. In the great towns were 
 gathered a miserable crowd of poor freemen, with all 
 the vices of the ' mean whites.' Throughout Italy 
 the land was cultivated, not by a peasantry, not by 
 scattered labourers, but by gangs of slaves, guarded in 
 workhouses and watched by overseers. Hence usually 
 the free population and all civilisation was gathered 
 in the towns. The spaces between and around them 
 were wildernesses, with pasturage and slaves in place of 
 agriculture and men. 
 
 Thirdly, it was a system based on a belief in a multi- 
 tude of gods, a system without truth, or coherence, or 
 power. There was no single belief to unite all classes 
 in one faith. Nothing ennobling to trust in, no standard 
 of right and wrong which could act on the moral nature. 
 There were no recognised teachers. The moral and the 
 material were hopelessly confused. The politicians had 
 no system of morality, religion, or belief, and were void 
 of moral authority, though they claimed to have a moral 
 right. The philosophers and the moralists were hardly 
 members of the state; each taught only -to a circle of 
 admirers, and exercised no wide social influence. The 
 religion of the people had long ceased to be believed. 
 
THE CONNECTION OF HISTORY 63 
 
 It had long been without any moral purpose ; it became 
 a vague mass of meaningless traditions. 
 
 With these threefold sources of corruption war, 
 slavery, false belief the Roman empire, so magnificent 
 without, was a rotten fabric within. Politically vigorous, 
 morally it was diseased. Never perhaps has the world 
 witnessed cases of such stupendous moral corruption, as 
 when immense power, boundless riches, and native 
 energy were left as they were then without object, con- 
 trol, or shame. Then, from time to time, there broke 
 forth a very orgy of wanton strength. But its hour was 
 come. The best spirits were all filled with a sense of 
 the hollowness and corruption around them. Statesmen, 
 poets, and philosophers in all these last eras were pour- 
 ing forth their complaints and fears, or feebly attempting 
 remedies. The new element had long been making its 
 way unseen, had long been preparing the ground, and 
 throughout the civilised world there was rising up a 
 groan of weariness and despair. 
 
 For three centuries a belief in the existence of one 
 God alone, in whom were concentrated all power and 
 goodness, who cared for the moral guidance of mankind, 
 a belief in the immortality of the soul and its existence 
 in another state, had been growing up in the minds of 
 the best Greek thinkers. The noble morality of their 
 philosophers had taken strong hold of the higher con- 
 sciences of Rome, and had diffused amongst the better 
 spirits throughout the empire new and purer types. 
 Next the great empire itself, forcing all nations in one 
 state, had long inspired in its worthiest members a 
 sense of the great brotherhood of mankind, had slowly 
 mitigated the worst evils of slavery, and paved the way 
 for a religious society. Thirdly, another and a greater 
 cause was at work. Through Greek teachers the world 
 
64 THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 had long been growing familiar with the religious ideas 
 of Asia, its conceptions of a superhuman world, of a 
 world of spirit, angel, demon, future state, and overruling 
 Creator, with its mystical imagery, its spiritual poetry, 
 its intense zeal and fervent emotion. And now, partly 
 from the contact with Greek thought and Roman civil- 
 isation, a great change was taking place in the very 
 heart of that small Jewish race, of all the races of Asia 
 known to us the most intense, imaginative, and pure : 
 possessing a high sense of personal morality, the keenest 
 yearnings of the heart, and the deepest capacity for 
 spiritual fervour. In their midst arose a fellowship of 
 devoted brethren, gathered around one noble and touch- 
 ing character, which adoration has veiled in mystery till 
 he passes from the pale of definite history. On them 
 had dawned the vision of a new era of their national 
 faith, which should expand the devotion of David, the 
 spiritual zeal of Isaiah, and the moral power of Samuel 
 into a gentler, wider, and more loving spirit. 
 
 How this new idea grew to the height of a new religion, 
 and was shed over the whole earth by the strength of 
 its intensity and its purity, is to us a familiar tale. We 
 know how the first fellowship of the brethren met ; how 
 they went forth with words of mercy, love, justice, and 
 hope ; we know their self-denial, humility, and zeal ; their 
 heroic lives andawful deaths; their lovingnatures and their 
 noble purposes ; how they gathered around them wherever 
 they came the purest and greatest ; how across moun- 
 tains, seas, and continents the communion of saints joined 
 in affectionate trust ; how from the deepest corruption of 
 the heart arose a yearning for a truer life ; how the new 
 faith, ennobling the instincts of human nature, raised up 
 the slave, the poor, and the humble to the dignity of 
 common manhood, and gave new meaning to the true 
 
THE CONNECTION OF HISTORY 65 
 
 nature of womanhood ; how, by slow degrees, the church, 
 with its rule of right, of morality, and of communion, 
 arose; how the first founders and apostles of this faith 
 lived and died, and all their gifts were concentrated in 
 one, of all the characters of certain history doubtless 
 the loftiest and purest the unselfish, the great-hearted 
 Paul. 
 
 Deeply as this story must always interest us, let us 
 not forget that the result was due not to one man or to 
 one people that each race gave its share to the whole : 
 Greece, her intellect and grace ; Rome, her social in- 
 stinct, her genius for discipline ; Judaea her intensity of 
 belief and personal morality ; Egypt and the African 
 coast their combination of Hellenic, Judaic, and Roman 
 traditions. The task that lay before the new religion 
 was immense. It was, upon a. uniform faith, to found 
 a system of sound and common morality ; to reform 
 the deep-rooted evils of slavery ; to institute a method 
 which should educate, teach, and guide, and bring out 
 the tenderer, purer, and higher instincts of our nature. 
 The powers of mind and of character had been trained, 
 first by Greece and then by Rome. To the Christian 
 church came the loftier mission of ruling the affections 
 and the heart. 
 
 From henceforth the history of the world shows a new 
 character. 
 
 Now and henceforward we see two elements in civi- 
 lisation working side by side the practical and the 
 moral. There is now a system to rule the state and a 
 system to act upon the mind ; a body of men to edu- 
 cate, to guide and elevate the spirit and the character of 
 the individual, as well as a set of rules to enforce the 
 laws and direct the action of the nation. There is 
 henceforward the state and the church. Hitherto all 
 
 E 
 
66 THE MEAN INC! OF HISTORY 
 
 had been confused ; statesmen were priests and teachers ; 
 public officers pretended to order men's lives by law, and 
 pretended in vain. Henceforward for the true sequence 
 of history we must fix our view on Europe, on Western 
 Europe alone : we leave aside the East. The half-Roman- 
 ised, the half-Christianised East will pass to the empire 
 of Mohammed, to the Arab, the Mongol, and the Turk. 
 For the true evolution of civilised life we must regard 
 the heirs of time, the West, in which is centred the 
 progress and the future of the race. Henceforward, then, 
 for the ten centuries of the Middle Ages which succeeded 
 in Western Europe the fall of the Roman empire, we 
 have two movements to watch together Feudalism and 
 Catholicism the system of the state and the system of 
 the church : let us turn now to the former. 
 
 The vast empire of Rome broke up with prolonged 
 convulsions. Its concentration in any single hand, how- 
 ever necessary as a transition, became too vast as a per- 
 manent system. It wanted a rural population ; it was 
 wholly without local life. Long the awestruck barbarians 
 stood pausing to attack. At length they broke in. 
 Ever bolder and more numerous tribes poured onwards. 
 In wave after wave they swept over the whole empire, 
 sacking cities, laying waste the strongholds, at length 
 storming Rome itself; and laws, learning, industry, art, 
 civilisation itself, seem swallowed up in the deluge. For 
 a moment it appeared that all that was Roman had 
 vanished. It was submerged, but not destroyed. Slowly 
 the waters of this overwhelming invasion abate. Slowly 
 the old Roman towns and their institutions begin to 
 appear above the waste like the highest points of a 
 flooded country. Slowly the old landmarks reappear 
 and the forms of civilised existence. Four centuries 
 were passed in one continual ebb and flow ; but at length 
 
THE CONNECTION OF HISTORY 67 
 
 the restless movement subsided. One by one the con- 
 quering tribes settled, took root, and occupied the soil. 
 Step by step they learned the arts of old Rome. At 
 length they were transformed from the invaders into the 
 defenders. King after king strove to give form to the 
 heaving mass, and put an end to this long era of con- 
 fusion. One, at length, the greatest of them all, suc- 
 ceeded, and reared the framework of modern Europe. 
 
 It was the imperial Charlemagne, the greatest name 
 of the Middle Ages, who, like some Roman emperor 
 restored to life, marshalled the various tribes which had 
 settled in France, Germany, Italy, and the north of 
 Spain, into a single empire, beat back, in a long life of 
 war, the tide of invaders on the west, the north, and 
 south, Saxon, Northman, and Saracen, and awakened 
 anew in the memory of nations the type of civil govern- 
 ment and organised society. His work in itself was but 
 a single and a temporary effort ; but in its distant con- 
 sequences it has left great permanent effects. It was 
 like a desperate rally in the midst of confusion ; but it 
 gave mankind time to recover much that they had lost. 
 In his empire may be traced the nucleus of the state 
 system of Western Europe ; by the traditions of his 
 name, the modern monarchies were raised into power. 
 He too gave shape and vigour to the first efforts of 
 public administration. But a still greater result was the 
 indirect effect of his life and labours. It was by the 
 spirit of his established rule that the feudal system 
 which had been spontaneously growing up from beneath 
 the debris of the Roman empire, first found strength to 
 develop into a methodical form, received an imperial 
 sanction to its scheme, and the type of its graduated 
 order of rule. 
 
 What was this feudal system, and what were its 
 
68 THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 results ? It may be described as a local organisation of 
 reciprocal duty and privilege. In the first place, it was 
 a system of local defence. The knight was bound to 
 guard his fee, the baron his barony, the count his county, 
 the duke his duchy. Then it was a system of local 
 government. The lord of the manor had his court of 
 justice, the great baron his greater court, and the king his 
 court above all. Then it was a system of local industry ; 
 the freeholder tilled his own fields, the knight was 
 responsible for the welfare of his own lands. The lord 
 had an interest in the prosperity of his lordship. Hence 
 slowly arose an agricultural industry, impossible in any 
 other way. The knight cleared the country of robbers, 
 or beat back invaders, whilst the husbandman ploughed 
 beneath his castle walls. The nation no longer, as 
 under Greece and Rome, was made up of scattered 
 towns. It had a local root, a rural population, and 
 complete system of agricultural life. The monstrous 
 centralisation of Rome was gone, and a local govern- 
 ment began. 
 
 But the feudal system was not merely material, it was 
 also moral ; not simply political, it was social also nay, 
 also religious. The whole of society was bound into a 
 hierarchy or long series of gradations. Each man had 
 his due place and rank, his rights, and his duties. The 
 knight owed protection to his men ; his men owed their 
 services to him. Under the Roman system, there had 
 been only citizens and slaves. Now there was none so 
 high but had grave duties to all below ; none so low, not 
 the meanest serf, but had a claim for protection. Hence, 
 all became, from king to serf, recognised members of 
 one common society. Thence sprang the closest bond 
 which has ever bound man to man. To the noble 
 natures of the northern invaders was due the new idea 
 
THE CONNECTION OF HISTORY 69 
 
 of personal loyalty, the spirit of truth, faithfulness, 
 devotion, and trust, the lofty sense of honour which 
 bound the warrior to his captain, the vassal to his lord, 
 the squire to his knight. It ripened into the finest 
 temper which has ever ennobled the man of action, the 
 essence of chivalry ; in its true sense not dead, not des- 
 tined to die the temper of mercy, courtesy, and truth, 
 of fearlessness and trust, of a generous use of power and 
 strength, of succour to the weak, comfort to the poor, 
 reverence for age, for goodness, and for woman ; which 
 revolts against injustice, oppression, and untruth, and 
 never listens to a call unmoved. It is not possible that 
 this spirit is dead. It watched the cradle of modern 
 society, and is the source of our poetry and art ; it must 
 live for future service, transformed from a military to a 
 peaceful society. It may yet revive the seeds of trust 
 and duty between man and man, inspire the labourer 
 with dignity and generosity, raise the landlord to a con- 
 sciousness of duty, and renew the mysterious bond 
 which unites all those who labour in a common work. 
 
 We turn to the Church, the moral element which 
 pervades the Middle Ages. Amidst the crash of the 
 falling empire, as darker grew the storm which swept 
 over the visible State on earth, more and more the 
 better spirits turned their eyes towards a Kingdom 
 above the earth. They turned, as the great Latin 
 father relates, amidst utter corruption to an entire 
 reconstruction of morality ; in the wreck of all earthly 
 greatness, they set their hearts upon a future life, and 
 strove amidst anarchy and bloodshed to found a moral 
 union of society. Hence rose the Catholic Church, 
 offering to the thoughtful a mysterious and inspiring 
 faith ; to the despairing and the remorseful a new and 
 higher life ; to the wretched, comfort, fellowship, and 
 
70 THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 aid ; to the perplexed a majestic system of belief and 
 practice in its creed Greek, in its worship Asiatic, in 
 its constitution Roman. In it we see the Roman 
 genius for organisation and law, transformed and re- 
 vived. In the fall of her material greatness Rome's 
 social greatness survived. Rome still remained the 
 centre of the civilised world. Latin was still the 
 language which bound men of distant lands together. 
 From Rome went forth the edicts which were common 
 to all Europe. The majesty of Rome was still the 
 centre of civilisation. The bishop's court took the place 
 of that of the imperial governor. The peace of the 
 church took the place of the peace of Rome ; and from 
 the first, the barbarian invaders who overthrew the 
 hollow greatness of the empire humbled themselves 
 reverently before the ministers of religion. 
 
 The church stood between the conqueror and the con- 
 quered, and joined them both in one. She told to all- 
 Roman and barbarian, slave or freeman, great or weak 
 how there was one God, one Saviour of all, one equal 
 soul in all, one common judgment, one common life 
 hereafter. She told them how all, as children of one 
 Father, were in His eyes equally dear ; how charity, 
 mercy, humility, devotion alone would make them 
 worthy of His love ; and at these words there rose up 
 in the fine spirits of the new races a sense of brother- 
 hood amongst mankind, a desire for a higher life, a zeal 
 for all the gentler qualities and the higher duties, such 
 as the world had not seen before. Thus was her first 
 task accomplished, and she founded a system of 
 morality common to all and possible to all. She 
 spoke to the slave of his immortal soul, to the master 
 of the guilt of slavery. Master and slave should meet 
 alike within her walls, and lie side by side within her 
 
THE CONNECTION OF HISTORY 71 
 
 catacombs ; and thus her second task was accom- 
 plished, and she overthrew for ever the system of 
 slavery, and raised up the labourer into the dignity 
 of a citizen. Then she told how their common Master, 
 of power unbounded, had loved the humble and the 
 weak. She told of the simple lives of saints and 
 martyrs, their tender care of the poorer brethren, their 
 spirit of benevolence, self-sacrifice, and self-abasement ; 
 and thus the third great task was accomplished, when 
 she placed the essence of practical religion in care for 
 the weak, in affection for the family, in reverence for 
 woman, in benevolence to all, and in personal self- 
 denial. 
 
 Next, she undertook to educate all alike. She pro- 
 vided a body of common teachers ; she organised 
 schools ; she raised splendid cathedrals, where all 
 might be brought into the presence of the beautiful, 
 and see all forms of art in their highest perfection 
 architecture, and sculpture, and painting, and work in 
 glass, in iron, and in wood, heightened by inspiring 
 ritual and touching music. She accepted all without 
 thought of birth or place. She gathered to herself all 
 the knowledge of the time, though all was subordinate 
 to religious life. The priests, so far as such were then 
 possible, were poets, historians, dramatists, musicians, 
 architects, sculptors, painters, judges, lawyers, magi- 
 strates, ministers, students of science, engineers, philo- 
 sophers, astronomers, and moralists. Lastly, she had 
 another task, and she accomplished even that. It was 
 to stand between the tyrant and his victim ; to succour 
 the oppressed, to humble the evil ruler, to moderate the 
 horrors of war ; above all, to join nation to nation, to 
 mediate between hostile races, to give to civilised 
 Europe some element of union and cohesion. 
 
5^5 THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 Let us think of this church this humanising power 
 of the Middle Ages as it was in its glory, not in its 
 decay. Let us remember it as a system of life which 
 for ten centuries possessed the passionate devotion of 
 the foremost spirits of their time ; one which has left us 
 a rich store of thought and teaching, of wise precept, 
 lofty poetry, and matchless devotion ; as a system 
 which really penetrated and acted on the lives of men. 
 Let us think of it as it was in essence in its virtues, 
 not in its vices truly the union of all the men of 
 intellect and character of their age towards one common 
 end : not like Egyptian priests, pretending to govern 
 by law ; not like Greek philosophers, expounding to a 
 chosen sect ; not like modern savants, thinking for 
 mere love of thought, or mere love of fame, without 
 method or concert, without moral guidance, without 
 social purpose ; but a system in which the wisest and 
 the best men of their day, themselves reared in a 
 common teaching, organised on a vast scale, and 
 directed by one general rule, devoted the whole energies 
 of their brains and hearts in unison together, to the 
 moral guidance of society ; sought to know only that 
 they might teach, to teach only to improve, and lived 
 only to instruct, to raise, to humanise their fellow-men. 
 Let us think of it thus as it was at its best ; and in this 
 forget even the cruelty, the imposture, and the de- 
 gradation of its fall ; let horror for its vices and pity 
 for its errors be lost in one sentiment of admiration, 
 gratitude, and honour, for this the best and the last of 
 all the organised systems of human society ; of all the 
 institutions of mankind, the most worthy of remem- 
 brance and regret. 
 
 But if we are generous in our judgment, let us be just. 
 The Catholic system ended, it is most true, in disastrous 
 
THE CONNECTION OF HISTORY 73 
 
 and shameful ruin. Excellent in intention and in 
 method, it was from the first doomed to inevitable 
 corruption from the inherent faults of its constitution ; 
 and its intellectual basis was so distorted and pre- 
 carious, that it was stained with vices and crimes from 
 the very first generation. It had trained and elevated 
 the noblest side of human nature the religious, the 
 moral, and the social instincts of our being ; and the 
 energy with which it met this, the prime want of men, 
 upheld it through the long era of its corruption, and 
 still upholds it in its last pitiable spasm. But with the 
 intellectual and with the practical sphere of man's life 
 it was by its nature incompetent to deal. In its zeal 
 for man's moral progress it had taken its stand upon a 
 false and even a preposterous belief. Burning to subdue 
 the lower passions of man's nature, it had vainly hoped 
 to crush the practical instincts of his activity. It dis- 
 carded with disdain the thoughts and labours of the 
 ancient world. It proclaimed as the ideal of human 
 life a visionary and even a selfish asceticism. For a 
 period, for a long period, its transcendent and indis- 
 pensable services maintained it in spite of every defect 
 and vice ; but at last the time came when the outraged 
 instincts reasserted their own, and showed how hopeless 
 is any religion or system of life not based on a con- 
 ception of human nature as a whole, at once complete 
 and true. 
 
 The church began in indifference towards science 
 and contempt for material improvement. Indifference 
 and contempt passed at length into hatred and horror ; 
 and it ended in denouncing science, and in a bitter 
 conflict with industry. At last it had become, in spite 
 of its better self, the enemy of all progress, all thought, 
 all industry, all freedom. It allied itself with all that 
 
74 THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 was retrograde and arbitrary. It fell from bad to 
 worse, and settled into an existence of timid repression. 
 Hence it came that the church, attempting to teach 
 upon a basis of falsehood, to direct man's active life 
 upon a merely visionary creed, to govern a society 
 which it only half understood, succeeded only for a 
 time. It was scarcely founded before it began to break 
 up. It had scarcely put forth its strength before it 
 began to decay. It stood like one of its own vast 
 cathedrals, building for ages yet never completed ; 
 falling to ruin whilst yet unfinished ; filling us with a 
 sense of beauty and of failure ; a monument of noble 
 design and misdirected strength. It fell like the Roman 
 empire, with prolonged convulsion and corruption, and 
 left us a memory of cruelty, ignorance, tyranny, rapa- 
 city, and vice, which we too often forget were but the 
 symptoms and consequences of its fall. 
 
 We have stood beside the rise and fall of four great 
 stages of the history of mankind. The priestly systems 
 of Asia, the intellectual activity of Greece, the military 
 empire of Rome, the moral government of Catholicism, 
 had each been tried in turn, and each had been found 
 wanting. Each had disdained the virtues of the others ; 
 each had failed to incorporate the others. With the fall 
 of the Catholic and feudal system, we enter upon the 
 age of modern society. It is an age of dissolution, re- 
 construction, variety, movement, and confusion. It is 
 an era in which all the former elements reassert them- 
 selves with new life, all that had ever been attempted is 
 renewed again ; an era of amazing complexity, industry, 
 and force, in which every belief, opinion, and idea is 
 criticised, transformed, and expanded. Every institu- 
 tion of society and habit of life is thoroughly unsettled 
 and remodelled ; all the sciences are constructed art, 
 
THE CONNECTION OF HISTORY 75 
 
 industry, policy, religion, philosophy, and morality are 
 developed with a vigorous and constant growth ; but, 
 withal, it is an era in which all is individual, separate, 
 and free : without system, or unity, or harmony, such as 
 had marked the four preceding epochs. 
 
 First, the feudal system broke up under the influence 
 of the very industry which it had itself fostered and 
 reared. The great fiefs, as they became settled, gradually 
 gathered into masses ; one by one they fell into the 
 hands of kings, and at length upon the ruins of feudalism 
 arose the great monarchies. The feudal atoms crystal- 
 lised into the actual nations of Europe. The variety 
 and dispersion of the feudal system vanished. A central 
 monarchy established one uniform order, police, and 
 justice ; and modern political society, as we know it, 
 rose. The invention of gunpowder had now made the 
 knight helpless, the bullet pierced his mail, and stand- 
 ing armies took the place of the feudal militia. The 
 discovery of the compass had opened the ocean to com- 
 merce. The free towns expanded with a new industry, 
 and covered the continent with infinitely varied pro- 
 ducts. The knight became the landlord, the man-at- 
 arms became the tenant, the serf became the free 
 labourer, and the emancipation of the worker, the first, 
 the greatest victory of the church, was complete. 
 
 Thus, at last, the energies of men ceased to be occupied 
 by war, to which a small section of the society was now 
 permanently devoted. Peace became in fact the natural, 
 not the accidental, state of man. Society passed into its 
 final phase of industrial existence. Peace, industry, and 
 wealth again gave scope to thought. The riches of the 
 earth were ransacked, new continents were opened, inter- 
 course increased over the whole earth. Greeks, flying 
 from Constantinople before the Turks, spread over 
 
76 THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 Europe, bringing with them books, instruments, inscrip- 
 tions, gems, and sculptures : the science, the literature, 
 and the inventions of the ancient world, long stored up 
 on the shores of the Bosphorus. Columbus discovered 
 America. The Portuguese sailed round Africa to India ; 
 a host of daring adventurers penetrated untraversed seas 
 and lands. Man entered at last upon the full dominion 
 of the earth. Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo unveiled 
 the mystery of the world, and made a revolution in all 
 thought. Mathematics, chemistry, botany, and medi- 
 cine, preserved mainly by the Arabs during the Middle 
 Ages, were again taken up almost from the point where 
 the Greeks had left them. The elements of the material 
 earth were eagerly explored. The system of experi- 
 ment (which Bacon reduced to a method) was worked 
 out by the common labour of philosophers and artists. 
 For the first time the human form was dissected and 
 explored. Physiology, as a science, began. Human 
 history and society became the subject of regular and 
 enlightened thought. Politics became a branch of 
 philosophy. With all this the new knowledge was 
 scattered by the printing-press, itself the product and 
 the stimulus of the movement ; in a word, the religious 
 ban was raised from off the human powers. The ancient 
 world was linked on to the modern. Science, specula- 
 tion, and invention lived again after twelve centuries of 
 trance. A fresh era of progress opened with the new- 
 found treasures of the past. 
 
 Next, before this transformation of ideas the church 
 collapsed. Its hollow dogmas were exposed, its narrow 
 prejudices ridiculed, its corruptions probed. Men's con- 
 sciences and brains rose up against an institution which 
 pretended to teach without knowledge, and to govern 
 though utterly disorganised. Convulsion followed on 
 
THE CONNECTION OF HISTORY 77 
 
 convulsion ; the struggle we call the Reformation opened, 
 and led to a series of religious wars, which for a century 
 and a half shook Europe to its foundations. At the 
 close of this long era of massacre and war, it was found 
 that the result achieved was small indeed. Europe had 
 been split into two religious systems, of which neither 
 one nor the other could justify its enormous preten- 
 sions. Admiration for the noble characters of the first 
 Reformers, for their intensity, truth, and zeal, their 
 heroic lives and deaths, the affecting beauty of their 
 purposes and hopes, is yet possible to us, whilst we con- 
 fess that the Protestant, like the Catholic faith, had 
 failed to organise human industry, society, and thought ; 
 that both had failed to satisfy the wants and hopes of 
 man. More and more have thought and knowledge 
 grown into even fiercer conflict with authority of Book 
 or Pope ; more and more in Catholic France, as in 
 Protestant England, does the moral guidance of men 
 pass from the hands of priests, or sect, to be assumed, 
 if it be assumed at all, by the poet, the philosopher, the 
 essayist, and even the journalist ; more and more do 
 church and sect stand dumb and helpless in presence 
 of the evils with which society is rife. 
 
 Side by side the religious and the political system 
 tottered in ruin together. From the close of the fifteenth 
 century, now one, now the other was furiously assailed. 
 For the most part, both were struck at once. The long 
 religious wars of Germany and France ; the defence by 
 the heroic William the Silent of the free Republic of 
 Holland against the might of Spain ; the glorious 
 repulse of its Armada by England ; the immortal revo- 
 lution achieved by our greatest statesman, Cromwell ; 
 the battle of his worthy successor, William of Orange, 
 against the oppression of Louis XIV., were all but parts 
 
78 THE MEANINCl OF HISTORY 
 
 of one long struggle, which lasted during the whole of 
 the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries a struggle in 
 which religion and politics both equally shared, a 
 struggle between the old powers of Feudalism and 
 Catholicism on the one side, with all the strength of 
 ancient systems, against the half-formed, ill-governed 
 force of freedom, industry, and thought ; a long and 
 varied struggle in which aristocracy, monarchy, privi- 
 leged caste, arbitrary and military power, church 
 formalism, dogmatism, superstition, narrow teaching, 
 visionary worship, and hollow creeds, were each in turn 
 attacked, and each in turn prostrated. 
 
 A general armistice followed this long and exhaust- 
 ing struggle. The principles of Protestantism, Consti- 
 tutionalism, Toleration, and the balance of power, estab- 
 lished a system of compromise, and for a century 
 restored some order in the political and religious world. 
 But in the world of ideas the contest grew still keener. 
 Industry expanded to incredible proportions, and the 
 social system was transformed before it. Thought 
 soared into unimagined regions, and reared a new realm 
 of science, discovery, and art. Wild social and religious 
 visions arose and passed through the spirit of mankind. 
 At last the forms and ideas of human life, material, 
 social, intellectual, and moral, had all been utterly 
 transformed, and the fabric of European society rested 
 in peril on the crumbling crust of the past. 
 
 The great convulsion came. The gathering storm of 
 centuries burst at length in the French Revolution. 
 Then, indeed, it seemed that chaos was come again. It 
 was an earthquake blotting out all trace of what had 
 been, engulfing the most ancient structures, destroying 
 all former landmarks, and scattering society in confusion 
 and dismay. It spreads from Paris through every corner 
 
THE CONNECTION OF HISTORY 79 
 
 of France, from France to Italy, to Spain, to Germany, 
 to England ; it pierces, like the flash from a vast storm- 
 cloud, through every obstacle of matter, space, or form. 
 It kindles all ideas of men, and gives wild energy to 
 all purposes of action. For though terrible, it was not 
 deadly. It came not to destroy but to construct, not 
 to kill but to give life. And through the darkest and 
 bloodiest whirl of the chaos there rose up clear on high, 
 before the bewildered eyes of men, a vision of a new 
 and greater era yet to come of brotherhood, of free- 
 dom, and of union, of never-ending progress, of mutual 
 help, trust, co-operation, and goodwill ; an era of true 
 knowledge, of real science, and practical discovery ; but, 
 above all, an era of active industry for all, of the dignity 
 and consecration of labour, of a social life just to all, 
 common to all, and beneficent to all. 
 
 That great revolution is not ended. The questions 
 it proposed are not yet solved. We live still in the 
 heavings of its shock. It yet remains with us to show 
 how the last vestiges of the feudal, hereditary, and 
 aristocratic systems may give place to a genuine, an 
 orderly, and permanent republic ; how the trammels of 
 a faith long grown useless and retrograde may be 
 removed without injury to the moral, religious, and 
 social instincts, which are still much entangled in it ; 
 how industry may be organised, and the workman 
 enrolled with full rights of citizenship, a free, a powerful, 
 and a cultivated member of the social body. Such is 
 the task before us. The ground is all prepared, the 
 materials are abundant and sufficient. We have a rich 
 harvest of science, a profusion of material facilities, a 
 vast collection of the products, ideas, and inventions of 
 past ages. Every vein of human life is full ; every 
 faculty has been trained to full efficiency ; every want 
 
8O THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 of our nature is supplied. We need now only harmony, 
 order, union ; we need only to group into a whole these 
 powers and gifts : the task before us is to discover 
 some complete and balanced system of life ; some 
 common basis of belief; some object for the im- 
 perishable religious instincts and aspirations of man- 
 kind ; some faith to bind the existence of man to the 
 visible universe around him ; some common social end 
 for thought, action, and feeling ; some common ground 
 for teaching, studying, or judging. We need to extract 
 the essence of all older forms of civilisation, to combine 
 them, and harmonise them in one, a system of existence 
 which may possess something of the calm, the complete- 
 ness, and the symmetry of the earliest societies of men ; 
 the zeal for truth, knowledge, science, and improvement, 
 which marks the Greek, with something of his grace, his 
 life, his radiant poetry and art ; the deep social spirit of 
 Rome, its political sagacity, its genius for government, 
 law, and freedom, its noble sense of public life ; above 
 all else, the constancy, earnestness, and tenderness of 
 the mediaeval faith, with its discipline of devotion to the 
 service of a Power far greater than self, with its zeal for 
 the spiritual union of mankind. We have to combine 
 these with the industry, the knowledge, the variety, the 
 activity, the humanity, of modern life. 
 
CHAPTER III 
 
 SOME GREAT BOOKS OF HISTORY 
 
 OF all subjects of study, it is History which stands 
 most sorely in need of a methodical plan of reading. 
 The choice of books is nowhere a more perplexing 
 task : for the subject is practically infinite ; the volumes 
 impossible to number ; and the range of fact inter- 
 minable. There are some three or four thousand years 
 of recorded history, and the annals, it may be, of one 
 hundred different peoples, each forming continuous 
 societies of men during many centuries. Many famous 
 histories in one or two thousand pages cover at most 
 about half a century : and that for the life of one nation 
 alone. Macaulay's fascinating story-book occupied him, 
 we are told, more years of labour to compose than, in 
 some of its periods, the events occupied in fact A 
 brilliant writer has given us twelve picturesque volumes 
 which almost exactly cover the life of one queen. The 
 standard history of France extends to 10,000 pages. 
 And it is whispered at Oxford that a conscientious 
 annalist of the Civil War completes the history of each 
 year in successive volumes by the continuous study of 
 an equal period. At this rate forty thousand years 
 would hardly suffice to compile the annals of mankind. 
 
 In this infinite sea of histories, memoirs, biographies, 
 and annals, how is a busy man to choose ? He cannot 
 read the forty thousand volumes nor four thousand, 
 
 F 
 
82 THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 nor four hundred. Which are the most needful ? which 
 period, which movement, which people, is most deserving 
 of study? When I say study, I am not thinking of 
 students, but of ordinary fireside reading in our mother- 
 tongue for busy men and women : men and women 
 who cannot give their whole lives to libraries, who, 
 ' like the ancient Greeks,' as Disraeli says, know no 
 language but their own, and who are not going in for 
 competitive examinations if, indeed, these islands still 
 hold man, woman, boy, or girl who has never caught 
 that mental influenza, the examination plague. Learned 
 persons and literary persons (which is not always the 
 same thing) are apt to assume that every one has of 
 course read all the ordinary books ; they never speak 
 about ' standard ' works, in every gentleman's library, 
 but, alas ! not always in every gentleman's head. They 
 give little help to the general reader, assuming that 
 every schoolboy has the dynasties of Egyptian kings at 
 his finger's end, and can repeat the list of the Popes 
 backwards, as Macaulay did. No doubt, as schoolboys 
 and schoolgirls, the week after we had ' floored ' that 
 second history paper in the final, we could most of us 
 perform these feats of memory. But many of us have- 
 forgotten these dates and names, have got rather mixed 
 about our Egyptian dynasties, and are even somewhat 
 shaky with our Bourbons, Plantagenets, and Hohen- 
 staufens. To those of us in such a case, it is tantalising 
 to be dazzled by the learned with the latest cuneiform 
 inscription, or the last newly excavated barrow, which 
 finally decides the site of some 'scuffle of kites and 
 crows ' in the seventh century. 
 
 I propose to myself to speak about a few simple old 
 books of general history, which to historians and the 
 learned are matters of A B C ; just as Mr. Cook's obliging 
 
SOME GREAT BOOKS OF HISTORY 83 
 
 guides personally conduct the untravelled to Paris, 
 Venice, and Rome. We are as ambitious and wide- 
 roaming nowadays in our reading as in our touring. 
 The travelled world hardly considers it leaving home, 
 unless it is bound for Central Asia, the Pacific, or 
 Fusiyama. There are, however, still some fine things 
 in the old country which every one has not seen ; and 
 my humble task is simply to act as cicerone to those 
 who seek to visit for the first time in their lives the 
 great fields of eternal history, who have but limited 
 time at their disposal, who could not find their way 
 without a guide, and speak no foreign tongue. 
 
 Without some organic unity in its conception, history 
 tends to become literary curiosity and display, weakening 
 our mental force rather than strengthening it History 
 cannot mean the record of all the facts that ever 
 happened and the biographies of all those whose lives 
 are recorded ; for these are infinite. There is a type of 
 bookman, most frequently met with in Germany, to 
 whom the reading and the making of books seem to 
 be functions of nature, as it is a function of nature 
 for the cow to eat grass and to give milk ; men to 
 whom it is a matter of absolute unconcern what is the 
 subject of the book, the matter, origin, or ultimate use 
 of the book, provided only the book be new. If a 
 vacant gap can be discovered in the jungle of books 
 where a spare hole can be filled, it matters no more to 
 the author what end the book may serve, than it 
 concerns the cow what becomes of its milk. The cow 
 has to secrete fresh milk, and the author has to secrete 
 a new work. And there is a type of historian to whom 
 all human events are equally material. It is not the 
 historian's concern, they think, to pick and choose, or 
 to prefer one fact to another. All facts accurately 
 
84 THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 recorded are truth : and to set them forth in a very big 
 octavo volume is history. 
 
 The true object of history is to show us the life of 
 the human race in its fulness, and to follow up the tale 
 of its continuous and difficult evolution. The conception 
 of the progress of civilisation in intelligible sequence, 
 is the greatest achievement of modern thought. History 
 is the biography of civilised man : it can no more be cut 
 into absolute sections than can the biography of a single 
 life. And to devote our sole interest to some small 
 period, country, or race is as rational as it would be to 
 take a few years to stand for the life-story of a great 
 hero. That human history makes one intelligible bio- 
 graphy does not imply that we have to load our memories 
 with an interminable roll of facts, dates, and names. 
 This long record may be grouped into a manageable 
 series of dominant phases. To understand the spirit 
 and character of each of these phases is the root of the 
 matter. The events and persons are manifestations of 
 that character, and serve to illustrate and vivify the 
 spirit. History becomes ' the old almanack ' which the 
 dull cynic called it, when we treat it from the photo- 
 graphic, the local, the tribal point of view, instead of the 
 human and the organic point of view. 
 
 Neither recondite researches nor novel theories are 
 needed to decide what are the leading epochs and 
 dominant phases in general history. The world has 
 ong been agreed upon them, with some variations in 
 detail, and modifications in the manner of subsections. 
 For practical purposes they may be grouped into six. 
 
 I. The Early Oriental Theocracies. These are the 
 great stationary systems, held together by dominant 
 religious discipline, and the pressure of social custom. 
 
SOME GREAT BOOKS OF HISTORY 85 
 
 The types of these are the Egyptian, Assyrian, Persian, 
 and Indian theocratic monarchies, and the variations we 
 find in the Chinese, Buddhist, Japanese empires, or to 
 some extent in modern Mahometan kingdoms. These 
 account for vast periods of history, and for far the largest 
 portions of the planet. 
 
 It is specially significant that the Fetichist, or spon- 
 taneous Nature-worshipping epochs of human life, have 
 no recorded history ; although they form far the longest 
 epochs in time, and are far the most extensive in space. 
 History, in the sense of recorded fact, is one of the fine 
 creations of Theocracy and the great sacerdotal state- 
 organisations. The history of the Nature-worshippers 
 has to be gathered from analogy, remnants, and extant 
 tribes. It has neither record, names, dates, nor facts. 
 
 II. The Rise and Development of the Greek World. 
 This involves the story of the separate republics, of the 
 intellectual activity, personal freedom, and individual 
 self-assertion characteristic of the Hellenic spirit. If a 
 subsection were here inserted, it would be (II.#) the rise, 
 development, and dissolution of Alexander's empire. 
 
 III. The Rise and Consolidation of the Roman World. 
 The origin of the Republic, the formation of the 
 
 dictatorial system, the ultimate dissolution of the bi- 
 furcated Roman empire. Here also, if subsections 
 were inserted, the period of a thousand years falls into 
 two divisions : (a) that of the Republic, down to Julius 
 Caesar ; () that of the Empire, down to Justinian. 
 
 IV. The Catholic and Feudal World : known as the 
 Middle Ages. This epoch, though it has the double 
 aspect, Catholic and Feudal, cannot be grouped into 
 
86 THE M FAX ING OF HISTORY 
 
 divisions. For Catholicism and Feudalism are contem- 
 porary, co-ordinate, and indissolubly associated move- 
 ments. They imply each other. They are converse 
 phases ; but not successive or distinct epochs. 
 
 V. The Formation and Development of the Great 
 European States. This includes the rise and growth of 
 the monarchies of modern times the Renascence of 
 Learning, with Humanism, the Reformation, and what 
 we call Modern History proper, down to the last century. 
 This is one of the most complex of all the epochs : 
 and it may properly be divided into subsections 
 thus : 
 
 V. (a) The rise and consolidation of the State System 
 of modern Europe, with the intellectual and 
 artistic revival that followed it. 
 
 V. (/>) The rise, issue, and settlement of the anti- 
 Catholic Reformation, and the religious wars 
 that it involved, down to the Peace of West- 
 phalia. 
 
 V. (c) The struggle between the monarchical and the 
 republican principles in Italy, Switzerland, 
 Spain, Holland, and England. 
 
 V. (d) The great territorial and mercantile wars in 
 
 Europe, and the struggle for the Balance of 
 Power, down to the close of the Seven Years 
 War. 
 
 VI. The Political and Industrial Revolution of the 
 Modern World. This would include the rise and con- 
 solidation of Prussia, of the United States ; the intel- 
 lectual, scientific, and industrial revolution of the last 
 century ; the French Revolution, and the wars that 
 issued out of it ; the development of transmarine 
 
SOME GREAT BOOKS OF HISTORY 87 
 
 empires and international communication ; Democracy 
 and Socialism in their various types. 
 
 These six great phases of human civilisation may be 
 mentally kept apart for purposes of clear thought, and 
 as wide generalisations ; but some of them practically 
 overlap, and blend into each other. And it is only 
 whilst we keep our eyes intent on the world's stage, 
 rather than some local movement, that these phases 
 appear to be distinct. The vast ages of the Eastern 
 and Egyptian Theocracies are separate enough both in 
 time and in spirit. But the Greek and Roman worlds 
 are to some extent contemporary, and at last they melt 
 into one .compound whole, when Rome incorporated 
 Greece : its territory, literature, culture, and art. The 
 whole mental apparatus, and finally the manners, of the 
 empire became Greek ; until at last the capital of the 
 Roman world was transferred to a Greek city, and the 
 so-called ' Romans ' spoke Greek and not Latin. Thu.s 
 we may, for many purposes, treat the Graeco-Roman 
 world as one : and in fact combine the second and the 
 third epochs. 
 
 What we call the Mediaeval phase is very sharply 
 marked off from its predecessor by the spread of Chris- 
 tianity ; and it seems easy enough to distinguish our 
 fourth from our third epoch, both in time and in char- 
 acter. But this holds good only for Europe as a 
 whole ; and it is not so easy, if we take Byzantine 
 history by itself, to determine the point at which the 
 imperial government at Constantinople ceases to be 
 Graeco-Roman, and begins to be Mediaeval. Nor, indeed, 
 is it quite easy to fix a date or a name, when the Papacy 
 ceased to belong to the ancient world, and came to be 
 the spiritual centre of the mediaeval world. Again, the 
 modern world is very definitely marked off from the 
 
88 THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 mediaeval, and we can with precision fix on the second 
 half of the fifteenth century as the date of its definitive 
 settlement. But if we keep our attention solely on the 
 history of the church, of literature, or of thought, the 
 dissolution of the mediaeval world is seen to be preparing 
 quite a century earlier than the taking of Constantinople 
 by the Turks. 
 
 Our sixth epoch, the age of the Revolution, is only 
 the rapid and violent form of a process which has been 
 going on since the general use of printing, of guns, and 
 the era of ocean trade and accumulated wealth. It had 
 been in operation in all the attacks on the Catholic 
 doctrines and institutions, in the revival of ancient learn- 
 ing and the advance of science, in the consolidation of 
 the European kingdoms ; and even long before in the 
 labours of such men as Roger Bacon, Dante, Langland, 
 Wickliffe, Huss, and Bruno. For these reasons the 
 revolutionary agitation of the last century and a half is 
 nothing but the more intense and conscious form of the 
 movement to found a new modern world which began 
 with the decay of Catholicism and Feudalism. 
 
 Therefore, if we are desirous of keeping in the highest 
 generalisations of history, and indeed for many practical 
 purposes, the six great epochs of universal history may 
 be reduced to these four : 
 
 1. The Ancient Monarchies or the Theocratic age, 
 
 2. The Graco-Roman world or the Classical. 
 
 3. The Catholic and Feudal world or the Mediceval. 
 
 4. The Modern or the Revolutionary world of Free 
 
 Thought and Free Life. 
 
 These dominant epochs (whether we treat them as six 
 or as grouped into four) should each be kept co-ordinate 
 and clear in our minds, as mutually dependent on each 
 
SOME GREAT BOOKS OF HISTORY 89 
 
 other, and each as an inseparable part of a living whole. 
 No conception of history would be adequate, or other 
 than starved and stunted, which entirely kept out of 
 sight any one of these indispensable and characteristic 
 epochs. They are all indissoluble ; yet utterly different, 
 and radically contrasted, just as the child is to the man, 
 or the man to the woman ; and for the same reason 
 that they are forms of one organic humanity. 
 
 It follows, that it is not at all the history of our own 
 country which is all-important, overshadowing all the 
 rest, nor the history of the times nearest to our own. 
 From the spiritual, and indeed the scientific, point of 
 view, if history be the continuous biography of the 
 evolution of the human race, it may well be that the 
 history of remoter times, which have the least resem- 
 blance to our own, may often be the more valuable 
 to us, as correcting national prejudices and the narrow 
 ideas bred in us by daily custom, whilst it is the wider 
 outlook of universal history that alone can teach us all 
 the vast possibilities and latent forces in human society, 
 and the incalculable limits of variation which are open 
 to man's civilisation. The history of other races, and 
 of very different systems, may be of all things the 
 best to correct our insular vanities, and our conventional 
 prejudices. We have indeed to know the history of our 
 own country, of the later ages. But the danger is, that 
 we may know little other history. 
 
 Thus one who had a grasp on the successive phases of 
 civilisation from the time of Moses until our own day ; 
 vividly conceiving the essential features of Egyptian, 
 Assyrian, Chaldean, and Persian society ; who felt the 
 inner heart of the classical world, and who was in touch 
 with the soul of the mediaeval religion and chivalry 
 would know more of true history than one who was 
 
90 THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 simply master of the battles of the seventeenth century, 
 and could catalogue, with dates and names, the annals 
 of each German duchy, and each Italian republic. No 
 doubt, for college examinations, they wring from raw 
 lads, as Milton says, ' like blood from the nose,' the de- 
 tails of the Saxon coinage, and the latest German theory 
 of the mark-system. These things are essential to 
 examinations and prizes, and the good boy will give his 
 whole mind to them. But they are far from essential 
 to an intelligible understanding of the course which has 
 been followed in the marvellous unfolding of our human 
 destiny. To see this, in all the imposing unity of the 
 great drama, it is not enough to be crammed with cata- 
 logues of official and military incidents. It is needful 
 to have a living sense of the characteristic types of life 
 which succeeded each other in such glaring contrast, 
 and often with such deadly hatred, through the dominant 
 phases of man's society on earth. 
 
 Our present business is to select a small choice of 
 books of history, which are of permanent and daily- 
 resource to the general reader of English, and which 
 have that charm and force of insight that no manual 
 or school-book can possess. And we may begin with 
 the fountain-head of primitive story, with the Father of 
 history Herodotus. Every one who reads seriously at 
 all, every man, woman, and child who has ideas of any 
 book above a yellow-covered novel, should know some- 
 thing of this most simple, fascinating, and instructive of 
 historians. In schools and colleges a thorough mastery 
 of Herodotus has long been the foundation of a historical 
 education. But he deserves to be the familiar friend of 
 every sensible reader. 
 
 This is the oldest volume of secular history that has 
 reached us in anything like a complete state : and here 
 
SOME GREAT BOOKS OF HISTORY 91 
 
 in the earliest books of Herodotus we may watch the 
 first naive expression of the insatiable curiosity of the 
 Hellenic mind brought face to face with the primeval 
 theocracies of the Oriental world. It is a source of 
 perennial delight to observe how the keen, busy, inquisi- 
 tive, fearless Greek comes up to the venerable monu- 
 ments of the East, and probes them with his critical 
 acumen. We may gather rich lessons in philosophy, 
 and not merely lessons in history and the story of man's 
 progress, if we follow up this European, logical, eager, 
 and almost modern observer, as he analyses and recounts 
 the ways of the unchanging Past in Africa or in Asia. 
 We seem to be standing beside the infant lispings of 
 critical judgment, at the cradle of our social and political 
 institutions, at the first tentative steps of that long 
 development of society which has brought us to the 
 world of to-day. What a prolonged epic of revolution 
 in thought and in politics lay hid in such a phrase of 
 Herodotus as this : ' The priests do say, but I think ,' 
 or in the tale of the map of Hecatseus, or the embassy 
 of Aristagoras to the Greeks of the mainland ! We trace 
 this Greek inquirer stepping up to these colossi of an 
 incalculable antiquity, with the free and bold mind of a 
 modern savant exploring an Egyptian tomb or some 
 prehistoric barrow, combined it may be with no small 
 measure of the ignorant and contemptuous wonder of 
 the ruder conqueror. In Herodotus we see a bright 
 and varied picture of the whole of the primitive types 
 of civilisation, and the first stirrings of fiery aspiration 
 in the genius of movement as it gazed into the motion- 
 less features of the genius of permanence embodied in 
 the Sphinx of the Nile valley. 
 
 It was the fashion once to disparage the good faith of 
 Herodotus, and to ridicule his childlike credulity, his 
 
92 THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 garrulous inconsequence, and his gratuitous guessing on 
 matters both spiritual and physical. But there is now 
 a reaction of opinion. And if Herodotus is not an 
 exact observer nor a scientific reasoned, there is a dis- 
 position to admit more of foundation for some of his 
 travellers' tales than was at first supposed. Nay, recent 
 explorations and excavations both in Africa and in Asia 
 have confirmed some of his most suspicious reports ; 
 and, at any rate, we may follow those who think that 
 he was doing his best with the sources of information 
 before him. And it is clear that the earliest inquiries of 
 all, in a field so vast and comprehensive, could only be 
 made in a manner thus unsystematic and casual. Where 
 scientific verification is not possible, it is well to have a 
 variety of working hypotheses. Hearsay evidence, in- 
 deed, is anything but good evidence. But, where strict 
 evidence is not to be had, it is useful, in great and 
 decisive events, to collect all the hearsay evidence that 
 is forthcoming at all. And this is what Herodotus did. 
 He is no great philosopher in things social or in things 
 physical. But he had that which the whole Eastern 
 world and all the wisdom of the Egyptians could not 
 produce, which the wealth of Persia could not buy, nor 
 the priests of Babylon discover. He had that observant, 
 inquisitive, critical eye that ultimately developed into 
 Greek philosophy and science the eye that let slip 
 nothing in Nature or in Man the mind that never 
 rested till it had found some working hypothesis to 
 account for every new and striking phenomenon. It is 
 the first dawn of the modern spirit. 
 
 This most delightful of all story-books is abundantly 
 . open to the English reader. There are several transla- 
 [ tions, and for some purposes Herodotus, whose style is 
 I one of artless conversation, may be read in English 
 
SOME GREAT BOOKS OF HISTORY 93 
 
 almost as well as in the Greek. In the elaborate work 
 of Canon Rawlinson we have a good translation, with 
 abundant historical and antiquarian illustrations by the 
 Canon and by Sir Henry Rawlinson, with maps, plans, 
 and many drawings. Herodotus preserves to us the 
 earliest consecutive account that the West has recorded 
 of the ancient empires of the East. And, although his 
 record is both casual and vague, it serves as a basis 
 round which the researches of recent Orientalists may 
 be conveniently grouped, just as Blackstone and Coke 
 form the text of so many manuals of law, in spite of the 
 fact that both are so largely obsolete. To use Herodotus 
 with profit we need such a systematic Manual of Ancient 
 History as that of Heeren. This book, originally pub- 
 lished in 1 799, and continued and corrected by the author 
 down to the year 1828, although now in many respects 
 rendered obsolete by subsequent discoveries, remains an 
 admirable model of the historical summary. Unfortu- 
 nately it requires so many corrections and additions that 
 it can hardly be taken as the current text-book, all the 
 more that the English translation itself, published in 1829 
 at Oxford, is not very easily procured. For all practi- 
 cal purposes, the book is now superseded by Canon 
 Rawlinson's Manual of Ancient History, Oxford, 1878^ 
 which follows the plan of Heeren, covers nearly the 
 same period, and treats of the same nations. It is, in 
 fact, the Manual of Heeren corrected, rewritten, supple- 
 mented, and brought up to that date, somewhat over- 
 burdened with the masses of detail, wanting in the 
 masterly conciseness of the great Professor of Gottingen, 
 but embodying the learning and discoveries of three 
 later generations. 
 
 But Egyptology and Assyriology are unstable quick- 
 sands in which every few years the authorities become 
 
94 THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 obsolete by the discovery of fresh records and relics. 
 Professor Sayce, the principal exponent of the untrust- 
 worthiness of Herodotus, assures us that Canon Rawlin- 
 son and his coadjutors have now become obsolete 
 themselves, and that the history of the plains of the 
 Nile and the Euphrates must again be rewritten. But 
 the tendency to-day is, perhaps, inclined to treat the 
 discoveries on which Professor Sayce relies as neither so 
 certain nor so important as he was once disposed to 
 think. For the general reader it may be enough to rely 
 on Max Duncker's History of Antiquity (6 vols., trans- 
 lated 1878 ; see vols. i. and ii. for Egypt and Assyria). 
 
 There is another mode, besides that of books, whereby 
 much of the general character of Oriental civilisation 
 may be learned. That is, by pictures, illustrations, 
 models, monuments, and the varied collections to be 
 found in our own Museum, in the Louvre at Paris, and 
 other collections of Oriental antiquities. Thousands of 
 holiday-makers saunter through these galleries, and 
 gaze at the figures in a vacant stare. But this is not to 
 learn at all. The monuments and cases, wall-paintings 
 and relics, require patient and careful study with appro- 
 priate books. The excellent handbooks of our Museum 
 will make a good beginning, but the monuments of 
 Egypt and Assyria are hardly intelligible without com- 
 plete illustrated explanation. These are, for Egypt, the 
 dissertations, notes, and woodcuts by various Egyptolo- 
 gists in Canon Rawlinson's English Herodotus ; in Sir 
 Gardner Wilkinson's great work on the Manners and 
 Customs of the Ancient Egyptians, 1837 ; and his Hand- 
 book for Egypt, 1858. 
 
 The facts, dates, persons, and incidents of Egyptian 
 history are still the problems of recondite archaeology. 
 The spirit of Egyptian civilisation may be grasped, 
 
SOME GREAT BOOKS OF HISTORY 95 
 
 without any copious reading, by any one who will 
 seriously study instead of stare at the great Egyptian 
 collections. Much may be learned, though in far less 
 degree, by those who will study the Asiatic antiquities 
 with such works as Layard's Nineveh, Fergusson's 
 History of Architecture, Canon Rawlinson's Five Great 
 Monarchies, and the dissertations in his English Hero- 
 dotus, And much may be learned from Professor 
 Sayce's A ncient Empires of tJie East, and from the recent 
 series of the Story of the Nations. These are unequal 
 in execution, arTd "avowedly popular and elementary in 
 design : but they are plain, cheap, accessible to all, and 
 contain the most recent general views. Brugsch's great 
 History of Egypt, translated 1879-1881, is rather a book 
 for the special student of history than for the general 
 reader. 
 
 It is not every reader who has leisure to master such 
 a book as Rawlinson's English Herodotus. But some- 
 thing of this fountain of history all may know. Even 
 in such a pleasant boy's book as Mr. Church's Stories 
 from the East and Stories from Herodotus we get some 
 flavour of the fine old Greek traveller. There are three 
 great sections of Herodotus which are of special interest : 
 
 1. the history of the foundation of Cyrus' kingdom ; 
 
 2. the books on the history, antiquities, and customs of 
 Egypt ; 3. the immortal story of Marathon, Thermopylae, 
 and Salamis. Literature contains no more enthralling 
 page than the tale by the father of prose how the first 
 great duel between the East and the West ended in the 
 most momentous victory recorded in the annals of 
 mankind. Every educated man should know by heart 
 the wonderful story : how the virtue of Aristides, the 
 daring of Miltiades, the heroism of Leonidas, and the 
 genius of Themistocles saved the infant civilisation of 
 
96 THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 Western Europe from the fate which overtook the far 
 more cultivated races of Syria and Asia Minor. A 
 distinguished Indian Mussulman, himself of the race of 
 the Prophet, is wont to bewail the defeat of Xerxes as 
 the greatest disaster in history. But for that, he says, 
 the vanguard of civilisation would have advanced on 
 Asiatic, and not on European, lines ; on Theocratic 
 instead of Democratic principles. The theology of the 
 learned Syed may be impeached ; but his history is 
 sound. 
 
 One other Greek book of history all should know, 
 perhaps the greatest of all histories, that of the Athenian 
 Thucydides. Now Thucydides was in pre-eminent degree 
 what Herodotus was not a strictly scientific historian ; 
 one whose conception of the canons of historic precision 
 has never been surpassed, against whom hardly a single 
 error of fact, hardly a single mistaken judgment, has 
 ever been brought home. Thucydides is much more 
 than a great historian ; or, rather, he was what every 
 great historian ought to be he was a profound philo- 
 sopher. His history of the Peloponneslan Wa'f is like a 
 portrait by Titian : the whole mind and character, the 
 inner spirit and ideals, the very tricks and foibles, of the 
 man or the age come before us in living reality. No 
 more memorable, truthful, and profound portrait exists 
 than that wherein Thucydides has painted the Athens 
 of the age of Pericles. 
 
 Athens in the age of Pericles, and under the guidance 
 of Peficles, L readied one of "those supreme moments in 
 the varying course of civilisation which, like the best 
 dramas of Shakespeare or the Madonnas of Raphael, 
 are incomparable creations of the human faculties stand- 
 ing apart for ever. With^all its vices, follies, and little- 
 ness, nothing like it had ever been seen before, nothing 
 
SOME GREAT BOOKS OF HISTORY 97 
 
 like it can ever be seen again. It embodied originality, 
 simplicity^ beauty, audacity, and grace, with a fulness 
 and harmony which the weary world, the heir of all the 
 ages, can never recall And m~Thucydides it found 
 the philosopher who penetrated to its inmost soul, and 
 the artist who could paint it with living touch. How 
 memorable are those monumental phrases which he 
 puts into the mouth of his favourite hero or claims for 
 his own work ! ' My history,' he says, ' is an everlasting 
 possession, not a prize composition which is heard and 
 forgotten.' ' We men of Athens know how to cultivate 
 the mind without losing our manhood, and to create 
 beauty without extravagant costliness.' ' We count the 
 man who cares nothing for the public weal as a worth- 
 less nuisance, and not simply an inoffensive nonentity.' 
 ' All citizens take their share of the public burdens : all 
 arc Tree to offer their opinion in the public concerns.' 
 ' We have no cast-iron system : every man with us is 
 free to live his own life.' ' Life is harmonised by our 
 civic festivals and our personal refinement.' ' The whole 
 earth is the funeral monument of those who live a noble 
 life : their epitaph is graven, not on stone, but on the 
 hearts of men.' 
 
 Thucydides, alas ! is not like Herodotus, easy to read 
 and simple in his thought and language. His only, and 
 very moderate, volume (a _single copy of the Times 
 newspaper contains as many words) is very close read- i * fj 
 ing : crammed with profound thought, epigrammatic, 
 intricate, obscure, and most peculiar in the turn of con- 
 glomerate phrase. But in the masterly translation of 
 Dr. Jowett, and with the paraphrase and illustrations in 
 the corresponding part of Grote's History of Greece, he 
 may be read without difficulty ~"6y~ every "senous'reader. 
 All at least should know his resplendent picture of 
 
 G 
 
98 THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 I Pericles, and the Periclean ideal of Athens, an ideal as 
 usual only reached by a few exalted spirits, and by them, 
 but for a moment of glowing inspiration an ideal of 
 which we have the grotesque obverse in the wild comedies 
 of Aristophanes. All too should know the story of 
 Cleon and of Alcibiades, the terrible scene of the plague 
 at Athens, and the ghastly insurrection at Corcyra, and 
 perhaps the most stirring of all, the overthrow of Athens 
 in the port of Syracuse. I can remember how, when I 
 f read that within sight of the heights of Epipolae and the 
 fountain of Arethusa, it seemed as if the bay around me 
 still rang with the shout of triumph and the wail of the 
 defeated host It is surely the most dramatic page, yet 
 one of the simplest and most severely impartial and 
 exact, in the whole range of historical literature. 
 
 For the remainder of Greek history after the defeat 
 and decline of Athens we have no contemporary authori- 
 ties of any value, except the Memoirs of Xenophon ; and 
 for the marvellous career of Alexander, the best is Arrian, 
 who at least had access to the works of eye-witnesses. 
 And thus when we lose the light of Thucydides and 
 Xenophon, we must trust to Plutarch and the later com- 
 pilers, who had materials that are lost to the modern world. 
 Between ThucycTides and Xenophon the analogy is 
 strange, and the contrast even more strange. Both were 
 Athenians, saturated with Attic culture, both exiles, both 
 unsparing critics of the democracy of their native republic ; 
 but the first stood resolute in his proud philosophic neu- 
 trality, whilst cherishing the ideal of the country he had 
 lost ; the other became a renegade in the Greek fashion, 
 the citizen of his country's natural enemy, and alienated 
 from his own by temperament, in sympathy, and in habits. 
 When these Athenian philosophers fail us, we had 
 better rely on Curtius and Grote. Both have their 
 
SOME GREAT BOOKS OF HISTORY 99 
 
 great and special merits. And if the twelve volumes of 
 Grote are beyond the range of the ordinary reader with 
 their mountains of detail and microscopic exaggeration 
 of minute incidents and insignificant beings, Curtius in 
 less than a third of the bulk has covered nearly the 
 same ground with a more philosophic conception. 
 Strictly speaking, there is not, and cannot be, a history 
 of Greece.* Greece is scattered broadcast over South- 
 eastern Europe and North-western Asia. Greece was 
 not so much a nation as a race, a movement, a language, 
 a school of thought and art. And thus it comes that 
 any history of Greece is utterly inadequate without such 
 books as Miiller's or Mahaffy's Literature of Ancient 
 Greece, Winckelmann's History of Ancient Art, Fustel 
 de~~Coulanges' Cite Antiqtie, and Mahaffy's Social Life 
 in Greece and Greek Life and ThougJit, or John Adding- 
 torrSymonds' delightful essays on Greek Poets and the 
 scenery of Greece. 
 
 The twelve volumes of Grote's History of Greece are 
 neither manageable nor necessary for any but regular 
 scholars of the original authorities. But there are sec- 
 tions of his work of peculiar value and well within the 
 scope of the general reader. These are : the account of 
 the Athenian democracy (vol. iv. ch. 31) ; of the Athe- 
 nian empire (vol. v. ch. 45) ; the famous chapters on 
 Socrates and the Sophists (vol. viii. ch. 67, 68), and the 
 account of Alexander's expedition (vol. xii). For the 
 general description of Greece, Curtius is unrivalled, and 
 in many things he is a valuable corrective of Grote's 
 pedantic radicalism. But it is a serious drawback to 
 Curtius as a historian that with his purist Hellenic 
 sympathies he treats the history of Greece as closed by 
 Philip of Macedon, whereas in one sense it may be said 
 that the history of a nation then only begins. The 
 
100 TFIK MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 histories of Greece too often end with the death of 
 Demosthenes, or the death of Alexander, though Free- 
 man and Mahaffy have shown that neither the intellect 
 nor the energy of the Greek race was at all exhausted. 
 The German work of Holm, pronounced by Mahaffy to 
 be amongst the very best, will soon be open to the 
 English reader. 
 
 The historians of Rome, with two exceptions, are too 
 diffuse, or too fragmentary : such mere epitomes or such 
 uncritical compilations, that they have no such value for 
 the general reader as the great historians of Greece. 
 Yet there are few more memorable pages in history than 
 are some of the best bits from the delightful story-teller 
 Livy. We cannot trust his authority ; he has no pre- 
 tence to critical judgment or the philosophic mind. He 
 is no painter of character ; nor does he ever hold us 
 spellbound with a profound thought, or a monumental 
 phrase. But his splendid vivacity and pictorial colour, 
 the epic fulness and continuity of his vast composition, 
 thtTglowing patriotism and martial enthusiasm of his 
 majestic theme, impress the imagination with peculiar 
 force! It is a prose JEneld the epic of the Roman 
 commonwealth from ./Eneas to Augustus. It is inspired 
 with all the patriotic fire of Virgil and with more than 
 Horatian delight in the simple virtues of the olden time. 
 For the first time a great writer devoted a long life to 
 record the continuous growth of his nation over a period 
 of eight centuries, in order to do honour to his country's 
 career and to teach lessons of heroism to a feebler 
 generation. Had we the whole of this stupendous work, 
 we should perhaps more fully respect the originality as 
 well as the grandeur of this truly Roman conception. 
 
 One of the abiding sorrows of literature is the loss of 
 the 107 books, out of the 142 which composed the 
 
SOME GREAT BOOKS OF HISTORY IOI 
 
 entire series. They were complete down to the seventh 
 century : now we have to be content with the ' epitomes/ 
 or general table of contents. But 35 books, a little 
 short of one quarter of the whole, have reached us. In 
 these times of special research and critical purism, the 
 merits of Livy are forgotten in the mass of his glaring 
 defects. Uncritical he is, uninquiring even, nay, almost 
 ostentatiously indifferent to exact fact or chronological 
 reality. He seems deliberately to choose the most 
 picturesque form of each narrative without any regard 
 to its truth ; nay, he is too idle to consult the authentic 
 records within reach. But we are carried away by the 
 enthusiasm and stately eloquence of his famous Preface : 
 we forgive him the mythical account of the foundation 
 of Rome for the beauty and heroic simplicity of the 
 primitive legends, and the immortal pictures of the 
 early heroes, kings, chiefs, and dictators. Where the 
 facts of history are impossible to discover, it is some- 
 thing to have epic tales which have moved all later 
 ages. And we may more surely trust his narrative of 
 the Punic wars, which is one of the most fascinating 
 episodes in the roll of the Muse of History. 
 
 She is still weeping bitter and silent tears for a loss 
 even greater from the side of scientific record of the 
 past. The Romanised Greek, Polybius, a thinker and 
 patriot worthy of an older time, the "wise and cultured 
 friend of the second Scipio, wrote the history of Rome 
 in forty books, for the seventy-four years of her history 
 from the origin of the second Punic war to the end of 
 thef'third and the final overthrow of Carthage. It was 
 the crisis in the fortunes of Rome, one of the most 
 crucial turning-points in the history of the world. And 
 it found a historian, who was statesman, philosopher, 
 and man of learning, curiously well placed to collect 
 
102 THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 trustworthy materials, and peculiarly endowed for just 
 and independent judgment. In all the qualities of a 
 historian but one, no other Greek but Thucydides can 
 be placed beside him. But five of his forty books 
 remain entire. His dry and prosaic method has cost 
 him immortality ancl robbed us of all but a small 
 remnant of this most precious record. Of all great 
 historians he is the one most wanting in fire and in 
 grace. If we would contrast the work of a mighty 
 master of narrative with that of a scrupulous annalist, 
 we may read the famous scene in the Carthaginian 
 senate, when the second Punic war is declared to the 
 ambassadors of Rome, as it is told by Polybius, and 
 then turn to the same story in the stirring pages of Livy. 
 It is the fashion now to neglect Plutarch ; to our 
 fathers of the last three centuries he was almost the 
 mainstay of historical knowledge. His Greek is poor ; 
 his manner gossipy ; his method uncritical ; and his 
 credulity unlimited. But he belongs himself to the 
 ancient world that he describes. He is an ancient 
 describing the look of the ancient heroes to us moderns. 
 He was a moralist, not a historian, a painter of char- 
 acters rather than a narrator of events. But with all 
 this, Plutarch's forty-six Parallel Lives have a special 
 value oT their own. We must loolc on them as the 
 spontaneous moralising of a fine old polytheistic 
 preacher, recounting with enthusiasm the deeds of the 
 famous chiefs of Greece and Rome ; full of superstitious 
 tales, traditional anecdotes, loose hearsay by no means 
 exact and critical history. The classical enthusiasm 
 of the eighteenth century was nursed upon Plutarch's 
 Lives. In his simple pages the genius of the ancient 
 world stands out in living realMy! One who knew his 
 Plutarch would understand the genius of Greece and 
 
SOME GREAT BOOKS OF HISTORY 103 
 
 Rome better than if he knew a hundred German 
 monographs. 
 
 It is one of the cruel bereavements of Humanity that 
 of his Lives no less than fourteen are lost ; those of the 
 foremost types of the ancient world. We have lost 
 that of Epaminondas, the noblest of the Greeks, and of 
 Scipio, the~no51est of the old patrician chiefs. We have 
 lost the life of Julius, and of all the earlier emperors ; 
 and, perhaps worst of all, we have lost the life of Trajan, 
 the greatest of the emperors : the emperor wriom 
 Plutarch "knew in life, and of whose majestic life and 
 empire we have the scantiest record of all. It is a 
 melancholy and interesting coincidence that Trajan, one 
 of the grandest figures of the ancient world, to whom 
 Plutarch dedicated one of his works, is almost unknown 
 to us, though he may have been himself familiar with 
 the Parallel Lives. History has strangely neglected to 
 record the acts of one of the noblest of all rulers and 
 the events of one of the most typical of all ages 
 mainly, it would seem, because his genius had given to 
 his age such peace, well-being, and unbroken security. 
 
 Although so large a part of Roman history is known 
 to us only through Greek writers, Rome produced at 
 least one historian who may be set beside Thucydides 
 himself. Tacitus was a philosopher, who, if inferior to 
 Thucydides in calm judgment and insight into the 
 compound forces of an entire age, was even greater than 
 Thucydides as a master of expression and in his insight 
 into the complex involutions of the human heart. The 
 literature of history has nothing to compare with his 
 gallery of portraits, with his penetration into character, 
 his tragic bursts of indignation, his judicial sarcasms, 
 and his noble elevation of soul. As a painter of 
 character in a few memorable words, Thomas Carlyle 
 
104 THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 alone amongst historians comes near him. But Tacitus 
 is vastly superior in monumental brevity, in reticence, 
 in simplicity, and in dignity. There arc pa^es of 
 Tacitus, where we must go to Shakespeare himself, to 
 Moliere, Cervantes, Swift, or one of the great masters 
 of character, to find the like of these dramatic strokes 
 and living portraiture. 
 
 Tacitus, it is true, presents us in his Histories and 
 Annals with the inner, that is, the Roman side of the 
 empire alone. And we must correct his view with that 
 of the provinces Gaul, Spain, Britain, as seen by the 
 larger and wider world of the West which was absorbing 
 Rome in ways little intelligible to the proud Roman 
 himself. And Tacitus' strange parody of the history of 
 the Jews may serve to remind us how apt is the wisest 
 believer in his own type of civilisation to be blind to 
 the new moral forces which are gathering up to destroy 
 it. Of Tacitus we now have an excellent English 
 version (Church and Brodribb, 3 vols., 1868-1877); and 
 all solid readers who care for great historical pictures 
 may know the trenchant judgment on the empire 
 under Augustus and Tiberius, the noble portraits of 
 Germanicus and of Agricola, and above all his masterly 
 account of the German races, our sole documentary 
 record of the first stages in the civilisation of our 
 Teutonic ancestors. 
 
 It is of course necessary to have some continuous 
 summary of the history of Greece and Rome. We 
 have already spoken of the general manuals of Heeren 
 and of Rawlinson. For Greece, those who find Bishop 
 Thirlwall's scholarly and sensible work too long, may con- 
 tent themselves with the summary of Dr. Smith or Sir 
 G. W. Cox. For Rome we have the admirable manual 
 of Dean Merivale (General History of Rome, 1875) 
 
SOME GREAT BOOKS OF HISTORY IO5 
 
 which condenses the history of 1200 years in 600 pages. 
 For the career of Julius Caesar and the foundation of the 
 dictatorship which became the Roman empire, all 
 should read the eleventh and twelfth chapters of 
 
 __^^ ..^^^^^ 
 
 Mommsen's History of Rome, in the fourth volume of 
 the'English translation. 
 
 For the ancient world we have several well-known 
 and familiar works, which take us into the heart of its 
 political, military, and intellectual life : Xenophon's 
 Memoir of Socrates, Arrian's Persian Expedition of 
 Alexander, compiled in imperial times from original 
 sources, Caesar's Commentaries, and Cicero's Letters to 
 his Friends. Xenophon, the fastidious and ambitious 
 soldief who forsook Athens for Sparta, has given us the 
 most faithful picture of Socrates, which is a revelation 
 of the intellectual aspect of ' the eye of Greece ' in the 
 great age. Arrian compiled from the memoirs of eye- 
 witnesses a truthful and complete picture of one of the 
 most wonderful episodes in the history of mankind 
 the conquest of the East by the King of Macedon. 
 Caesar was almost as great in letters as he was in war. 
 His account of the Conquest of Gaul, one of the 'great 
 pivots of general history, was famous from its first 
 appearance for the exquisite purity of its language, its 
 masterly precision of truthfulness, its noble simplicity 
 ancTheroic brevity. It has served all after ages as the 
 first Latin text-book, and describes for us one of the 
 most memorable episodes in history, recounted ty its 
 principal actor, himself the greatest name in the history 
 of mankind. We need not be admirers of Cicero as 
 a man, nor partial to his type of eloquence, to enjoy 
 the graceful gossip of his familiar correspondence, with 
 its wonderful picture of the modern side of Roman 
 civilisation. 
 
106 THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 No rational understanding of history is possible 
 without attention to geography and a distinct hold on 
 the local scene of the great events. Nor again can we 
 to any advantage follow the political, without a know- 
 ledge of the aesthetic and practical life of any ancient 
 people. For the geography we need Sprinter's Atlas, 
 or Freeman's Historical Geography, Wordsworth's or 
 Mahaffy's 'l ravels in Greece, the first chapter of Curtius' 
 History of Greece. Dr. Smith's Dictionaries of A n liquifies 
 and of Biography, \. S. Murray's History of Sculpture, 
 or Liibke's History of Art, M i<ldlet< -n's Rome, Dyer's 
 Pompeii, and our museums may serve for art. 
 
 It is no personal paradox, but the judgment of all 
 competent men, that the Decline and Fall of Gibbon is 
 the most perfect historical composition that exists in 
 any language : at once scrupulously faithful in its facts ; 
 consummate in its literary art ; and comprehensive in 
 analysis of the forces affecting society over a very long 
 and crowded epoch. In eight moderate volumes, of 
 which every sentence is compacted of learning and 
 brimful of thought, and yet every page is as fascinat- 
 ing as romance, this great historian has condensed the 
 history of the civilised world over the vast period of 
 fourteen centuries linking the ancient world to the 
 modern, the Eastern world to the Western, and marshal- 
 ling in one magnificent panorama the contrasts, the 
 relations, and the analogies of all. If Gibbon has not 
 the monumental simplicity of Thucydides, or the pro- 
 found insight of Tacitus, he has performed a feat which 
 neither has attempted. ' Survey mankind,' says our 
 poet, ' from China to Peru ! ' And our historian surveys 
 mankind from Britain to Tartary, from the Sahara to 
 Siberia, and weaves for one-third of all recorded time 
 the epic of the human race. 
 
SOME GREAT BOOKS OF HISTORY IO/ 
 
 Half the hours we waste over desultory memoirs of 
 very minor personages and long-drawn biographies of 
 mere mutes on the mighty stage of our world, would 
 enable us all to know our Decline and Fall, the most 
 masterly survey of an immense epoch ever elaborated 
 by the brain of man. There is an old saying that over 
 the portal of Plato's Academy it was written, 'Let no one 
 enter here, till he is master of geometry.' So we might 
 imagine the ideal School of History to have graven on 
 its gates, ' Let nope enter here, till he has mastered 
 Gibbon.' Those who find his eight crowded volumes 
 beyond their compass might at least know his famous 
 first three chapters, the survey of the Roman empire down 
 to the age of the Antonines ; his seventeenth chapter on 
 Constantine and the establishment of Christianity ; the 
 reign of Theodosius (ch. 32-34) ; the conversion of the 
 Barbarians (ch. 37) ; the kingdom of Theodoric (ch. 39) ; 
 the reign of Justinian (ch. 40, 41, 42); with the two 
 famous chapters on Roman Law (ch. 43, 44). If we add 
 others, we may take the career of Charlemagne (ch. 49) ; 
 of Mahomet (ch. 50, 51); the Crusades (ch. 58, 59, 
 which are not equal to the first-mentioned) ; the rise of 
 the Turks (ch. 64, 65) ; the last siege of Constantinople 
 (ch. 68) ; and the last chapters on the city of Rome 
 (69,70,71). 
 
 Gibbon takes us into mediaeval history, but he is by no 
 means sufficient as a guide in it. The mediaeval period is 
 certainly difficult to arrange. In the first place, it has a 
 double aspect Feudalism and Catholicism the organi- 
 sation of the Fief and Kingdom, and the organisation of 
 the Church. In the next place, these two great types 
 of social organisation are extended over Europe from 
 the Clyde to the Morea of Greece, embracing thousands 
 of baronies, duchies, and kingdoms, each with a common 
 
108 THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 feudal and a common ecclesiastical system, but with dis- 
 tinct local unity and an independent national and pro- 
 vincial history. The facts of mediaeval history are thus 
 infinite and inextricably entangled with each other ; the 
 details are often obscure and usually unimportant, whilst 
 the common character is striking and singularly uniform. 
 
 The true plan is to go to the fountain-head, and, at 
 whatever trouble, read the best typical book of the age 
 at first hand if not in the original, in some adequate 
 translation. I select a few of the most important : 
 Eginhardt's Life of Charles the Great ; The Saxon 
 Chronicle ; Asser's Life of Alfred, which is at least 
 drawn from contemporary sources ; William of Tyre's 
 and Robert the Monk's Chronicle of the Crusades ; 
 Geoffrey Vinsauf ; Joinville's Life of St. Louis ; Suger's 
 Life of Louis the Fat ; St. Bernard's Life and Sermons 
 (see J. C. Morison's Life) ; Froissart's Chronicle ; De 
 Commines' Memoirs ; and we may add as a picture of 
 manners, The Paston Letters. 
 
 But with this we must have some general and con- 
 tinuous history. And in the multiplicity of facts, the 
 variety of countries, and the multitude of books, the 
 only possible course for the general reader who is not 
 a professed student of history is to hold on to the 
 books which give us a general survey on a large scale. 
 Limiting my remarks, as I purposely do, to the familiar 
 books in the English language to be found in every 
 library, I keep to the household works that are always 
 at hand. It is only these which give us a view suffi- 
 ciently general for our purpose. The recent books are 
 sectional and special : full of research into particular 
 epochs and separate movements. It is true that the 
 older books have been to no small extent superseded, 
 or at least corrected by later historical researches. 
 
SOME GREAT BOOKS OF HISTORY 109 
 
 They no longer exactly represent the actual state of 
 historical learning. They need not a little to supple- 
 ment them, and something to correct them. Yet their 
 place has not been by any means adequately filled. At 
 any rate they are real and permanent literature. They 
 fill the imagination and strike root into the memory. 
 They form the mind ; they become indelibly imprinted 
 on our conceptions. They live : whilst erudite and 
 tedious researches too often confuse and disgust the 
 general reader. To the ' historian,' perhaps, it matters 
 as little in what form a book is written, as it matters in 
 what leather it is bound. Not so to the general reader. 
 To teach him at all, one must fill his mind with impres- 
 sive ideas. And this can only be done by true literary 
 art. For these reasons I make bold to claim a still 
 active attention for the old familiar books which are too 
 often treated as obsolete to-day. 
 
 There are four books on mediaeval history from 
 which the last generation learned much ; though we 
 can hardly count any of them amongst the great books 
 of history. Hallam's Middle Ages is now seventy-five 
 years old ; Guizot's Lectures on Civilisation in Europe 
 is sixty-five years old ; Michelet's early History of 
 France is sixty years old ; and Dean Milman's Latin 
 Christianity is forty years old. They are all books 
 that cannot be neglected : even though it is true that 
 modern research has proved them to have not a few 
 shortcomings and some positive errors. Yet withal, I 
 know no books in familiar use, from which the general 
 English reader can learn so much of the nature of the 
 Middle Ages as in these. 
 
 Guizot's Lectures on Civilisation, in spite of its sixty- 
 five years, in spite of the recent additions to all that we 
 know of the origin of the feudal world, of mediaeval law 
 
I 10 THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 and custom, of mediaeval sovereignty, still remains the 
 most valuable short conspectus of the mediaeval system 
 which the general reader has. His essay was the 
 earliest attempt to explain by real historical research 
 the great services to civilisation of the feudal monarchy 
 and the Catholic Church, which Chateaubriand, Walter 
 Scott, de Maistre, and Manzoni had already embodied 
 in romantic episodes or in trenchant controversy. It is 
 of prime importance for the historian to be conversant 
 with the affairs of state, or at least to pass his life 
 amidst politicians and practical chiefs. This is the 
 strength of Thucydides, Xenophon, Polybius, Caesar, 
 Livy, Tacitus, de Commines, and we may almost add 
 Hume and Gibbon. But amongst modern historians 
 there is no more conspicuous example of this than 
 Guizot, a large part of whose life was passed in office 
 and in the Chamber. He writes of Charlemagne, St. 
 Louis, and Philip the Fair, like a man who has had 
 charge of the destinies of a great nation. A work of 
 real historical insight may be supplemented or corrected 
 by later research. But no industry in the examination 
 of documents will ever make a useful compilation into 
 a great book of history. 
 
 Hallam's Middle Ages first appeared in 1818, and 
 with Guizot's Lectures on Civilisation in Europe, ten 
 years later, created an epoch in historical study. But 
 Hallam continued to labour on his first work for thirty 
 years and more of his long life ; and the complete shape 
 of the Middle Ages dates from 1848. Since then much 
 has been added to our knowledge, especially as to the 
 organisation of feudal relations, both in town and 
 country, in the history of the English constitution, 
 and the land-system at home and abroad. But no 
 book has filled the whole space occupied by Hallam 
 
SOME GREAT BOOKS OF HISTORY III 
 
 with his breadth of view and patient comparative 
 method. At present, perhaps, the most valuable por- 
 tions of his work are the first four chapters on France, 
 Italy, and Spain, and the concluding chapter on the 
 state of society, much of which, it is true, may now be 
 corrected by later research. The account of Germany 
 is much better read in Mr. Bryce's Holy Roman Empire, 
 that of the church in Dean Milman, and that of the 
 English constitution in Bishop Stubbs. One of the 
 main wants of historical literature now is a book on the 
 Middle Ages which should cover the whole of Europe, 
 in its intellectual, its spiritual, and its political side, 
 with all the knowledge that we have gained from the 
 researches of the last fifty years. Unhappily, it seems 
 as if history were condemned to the rigid limits of 
 special periods, as if the philosophic grasp were pro- 
 nounced to be obsolete by indefatigable research. 
 
 Michelet's History of France down to Francis I., 
 although it is a collection of brilliant pensees, caracteres, 
 and aper^us rather than a continuous history, is a fine 
 and stirring work of special value to the English reader. 
 It is now sixty years old; but a century will not destroy 
 its living inspiration. Hallam, the very antithesis of 
 Michelet, one who was never once betrayed into an 
 epigram or fired into poetry, has acknowledged in fit 
 language the beauty and vigour of his French competitor. 
 There are magnificent chapters on the eleventh, twelfth, 
 thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries ; and his picture of 
 physical France, his story of Charles the Great, of 
 Louis the Fat, Philip Augustus, St. Louis, Philip the 
 Fair, of the Crusades, the Albigenses, the Communes, 
 his chapters on Gothic architecture, on the English 
 wars, and especially on Jeanne Dare, are unsurpassed 
 in the pages of modern historical literature. Michelet 
 
112 THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 has some of the moral passion and insight into 
 character of Tacitus, no little of the picturesque colour 
 of Carlyle, and more than the patriotic glow of Livy. 
 Alas ! had he only something of the patient reserve of 
 Thucydides, the simplicity and precision of Csesar, the 
 learning and harmonious completeness of Gibbon ! He 
 is a poet, a moralist, a preacher, rather than a historian in 
 the modern sense of the word. Yet with all his short- 
 comings (and his later work has but flashes of his old 
 force), Michelet's picture of mediaeval France will long 
 remain an indispensable book. 
 
 Dean Milman's Latin Christianity, which appeared 
 forty years ago, just misses, it may be, being one of 
 ' the great books of history ' but will long hold its own 
 as an almost necessary complement to Gibbon's Decline 
 and Fall. It was avowedly designed as its counterpart, 
 its rival, and in one sense its antidote. And we cannot 
 deny that this aim has been, to a great extent, attained. 
 It covers almost exactly the same epoch ; it tells the 
 same story ; its chief characters are the same as in the 
 work of Gibbon. But they are all viewed from another 
 point of view and are judged by a different standard. 
 Although the period is the same, the personages the 
 same, and even the incidents are usually common to 
 both histories, the subject is different, and the plot of 
 the drama is abruptly contrasted. Gibbon recounts 
 the dissolution of a vast system : Milman recounts the 
 development of another vast system : first the victim, 
 then the rival, and ultimately the successor of the first. 
 Gibbon tells us of the decline and fall of the Roman 
 empire : Milman narrates the rise and constitution of 
 the Catholic Church the religious and ecclesiastical, 
 the moral and intellectual movements which sprang 
 into full maturity as the political empire of Rome passed 
 
SOME GREAT BOOKS OF HISTORY 113 
 
 through its long transformation of a thousand years. 
 The scheme and ground-plan of Milman are almost 
 perfect. Had he the prodigious learning, the super- 
 human accuracy of Gibbon, that infallible good sense, 
 that perennial humour, that sense of artistic proportion, 
 the Dean might have rivalled the portly ex-captain of 
 yeomanry, the erudite recluse in his Swiss retreat. He 
 may not be quite strong enough for his giant's task. But 
 no one else has even essayed to bend the bow which the 
 Ulysses of Lausanne hung up on one memorable night 
 in June 1787 in his garden study; none has attempted 
 to recount the marvellous tale of the consolidation of the 
 Christianity of Rome over the whole face of Western 
 Europe during a clear period of a thousand years. 
 
 The whole of the closely-packed six volumes of Latin 
 Christianity are possibly beyond the limits of many 
 general readers. But we can point to those parts 
 which may be best selected from the rest. The Intro- 
 duction in the first book, and the General Survey which 
 forms the fourteenth book at the end of the work, are 
 the parts of the whole of the widest general grasp. To 
 these we may add the chapters which treat of the 
 greater Popes : Leo the Great in Book ii., Gregory the 
 Great in Book iii., Hildebrand in Book vii., Innocent 
 the third in Book ix., Boniface VIII. in Book xi. the 
 chapters on Theodoric, Charlemagne, the Othos, the 
 Crusades, St. Bernard, St. Louis those on the four 
 Latin Fathers, Ambrose, Jerome, Augustine, and 
 Gregory, the monastic orders of St. Benedict, St. 
 Dominic, and St. Francis the Conversion of the 
 Barbarians, and the Reformers and Councils of the 
 fifteenth century. As is natural and fortunate, the 
 Dean is strongest and most valuable just where Gibbon 
 is weakest or even misleading. 
 
 H 
 
I 14 THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 In his Library, Auguste Comte recommended as the 
 complement of Gibbon, the Ecclesiastical History of 
 the Abb6 Fleury. But it seems in vain to press upon 
 the general reader of English a work in French so 
 bulky, so unfamiliar, and so far removed from us in 
 England to-day both in date, in form, and in tone. It 
 was published in 1690, more than two hundred years 
 ago, and is in twenty volumes quarto, and only in part 
 translated into English. It contains an excellent 
 narrative, which was warmly praised by Voltaire. But 
 it is entirely uncritical ; it is of course not on the level 
 of modern scholarship ; and as the work of a prelate 
 under the later reign of Louis XIV., it is naturally com- 
 posed from the theological and miraculous point of 
 view. The Abb6 gives us the view of the Catholic 
 world as seen by a sensible and liberal Catholic divine 
 in the seventeenth century. The Dean has painted it 
 as imagined by a somewhat sceptical and Protestant 
 man of the world in the nineteenth. 
 
 When we pass from Mediaeval to Modern History, we 
 are confronted with the difficulty that modern history 
 is infinitely the more intricate and varied, and that, as 
 we advance, the histories become continually more and 
 more devoted to special epochs and countries, and are 
 minute researches into local incidents and chosen 
 persons. The immediate matter in hand in this essay 
 is to direct attention to great books of history, meaning 
 thereby those works which take us to the inner life 
 of one of the great typical movements, or which in 
 manageable form survey some of the great epochs of 
 general history. Such surveys for the last four centuries 
 are exceedingly rare. There are many valuable standard 
 works, which are supposed to be in every gentleman's 
 library, and which are familiar enough to every his- 
 
SOME GREAT BOOKS OF HISTORY 115 
 
 torical student. But they form a list that can hardly 
 be compressed into one hundred volumes, and to master 
 them is beyond the power of the average general reader 
 to whom these pages are addressed. We can mention 
 some of them : though they are hardly ' great books,' 
 and neither in range of subject, in charm, or in insight, 
 have they the stamp of Herodotus or Gibbon. 
 
 I am accustomed to recommend as a general summary 
 the Outline of Modern History by Jules Michelet. It 
 is unsurpassed in clearness and general arrangement. 
 It begins with the taking of Constantinople by the 
 Turks in 1453, and has been well translated and con- 
 tinued to our own day by Mrs. W. Simpson. I am 
 also old-fashioned enough to rely on the Manual of a 
 great historian Heeren's Political System of Europe 
 which covers almost exactly the same ground though 
 it is now more than eighty years old, not easily pro- 
 curable in the English form, and avowedly restricted to 
 the political relations of the European States. But its 
 concise and masterly grouping, its good sense and just 
 proportion, make it the model of a summary of a long 
 and intricate period. But we must not ask more from 
 it than it professes to give us. We shall look from it 
 in vain for any account of the revolution directed by 
 Cromwell or of the culture that gave splendour to the 
 early years of Louis XIV. 
 
 Summaries and manuals are of course made for 
 students and it would be vain to expect the general 
 reader, who is not about to be ' extended ' on the ' mark- 
 system,' and who, tired with work, takes up a volume at 
 his fireside, to commit to memory the dates and sub- 
 divisions which are the triumph of the examiner and 
 the despair of the practical man. Records and summaries 
 there must be, if only for reference and general clearness 
 
Il6 THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 of heads. We must to some extent group our periods ; 
 and, without pretending to very minute details, the 
 following may serve for practical purposes, and are 
 those which are commonly adopted : 
 
 1. The formation of the European monarchies and 
 
 the rise of the modern State- System. 
 
 2. The revival of learning and the intellectual 
 
 movement known as the Renascence. This is 
 synchronous with, and related to, the first 
 mentioned. 
 
 3. The Reformation and the great religious wars 
 
 down to the middle of the seventeenth century. 
 
 4. The dynastic, territorial, and colonial struggles 
 
 from the Peace of Westphalia to the close of 
 the Seven Years' War. 
 
 5. The struggle against autocracy in (a) Holland 
 
 in the sixteenth century ; (b} England in the 
 seventeenth century ; (c) America in the eigh- 
 teenth century. This is a special phase of the 
 general movements noted as 3 and 4. 
 
 6. The Revolution of the eighteenth century and 
 
 its political, social, and industrial effects. 
 
 We will take each of these six movements in their 
 order : 
 
 I. For the first we have a book of established fame, 
 now well entered on its second century, which still lives 
 by virtue of its high powers of generalisation, its pellucid 
 style^jand sureness of judgment Robertson's Charles V. 
 In spite of the development of research in the last one 
 hundred and thirty years, the famous Introduction or 
 Survey of Europe from the fall of the Roman empire to 
 the fifteenth century remains an indispensable book, the 
 
SOME GREAT BOOKS OF HISTORY 117 
 
 appendix as it were, and philosophic completion of The 
 Decline and Fall. 
 
 The volume on the Middle Ages is indeed one of 
 those permanent and synthetic works which have been 
 almost driven out of modern libraries by the growth of 
 special studies, but it belongs to that order of general 
 histories of which we are now so greatly in need. For 
 the consolidation of States in Italy we must resort to 
 Sismondi's Italian Republics, of which there is a small 
 English abridgment ; for that of France to Michelet ; 
 for Spain to Prescott's Ferdinand and Isabella ; and for 
 England to Hallam's Constitutional History of 'England '; 
 this, though fifty years have much impaired its value, 
 still holds the field by its judicial balance of mind. 
 For later authorities we must turn to the general 
 Histories of England of J. R. Green and of Dr. F. Bright. 
 But we can point to no work save that of Robertson 
 which in one general view will give us the history of 
 Europe in the sixteenth century. 
 
 II. For the Renascence of Learning and Art, we have 
 no better exponents than Burckhardt, Michelet, and 
 Symonds. The German is full of learning and sound 
 judgment ; the Frenchman has a single volume of 
 wonderful brilliancy and passion ; the Englishman has 
 produced a long series of works charged with learning 
 and almost overloaded with ingenious criticism and 
 superabundant illustration. But the Renascence is best 
 studied in the biographies of its leaders, Lorenzo de' 
 Medici, Columbus, Bruno, Leonardo da Vinci, Michael 
 Angelo, Rabelais, Erasmus, Ariosto, and Calderon in 
 the great paintings, buildings, inventions, and poems 
 in such books as those of Cellini, More, Montaigne, 
 and Cervantes. A movement so subtle, so diffused, so 
 
IlS THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 complex can have no history. But its spirit has been 
 caught and embalmed by Michelet in some hundred 
 pages of almost continuous epigram and poetry. A 
 sort of catalogue raisonnee presenting its versatile and 
 ingenious force may be best collected from a study of 
 Hallam's great work The Literature of Europe in the 
 fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries. 
 
 III. For the Reformation we rely on Ranke's History 
 of tJie Popes, especially for Germany. For England the 
 history has been adequately told both by Green and 
 by Froude ; for Holland by Motley ; for France by 
 Michelet. It is here of course that the most violent 
 partisanship comes in to disturb the tranquil judgment- 
 seat of history. History becomes controversy rather 
 than record. The Catholic will consult the splendid 
 polemical invective of Bossuet The variations of Pro- 
 testantism. The Protestant will rely on the vehement 
 impeachment of Merle D'Aubigne". 
 
 IV. The dynastic, territorial, and colonial struggles 
 from the Peace of Westphalia to the close of the Seven 
 Years' War have been well summarised by Heeren in 
 his Political System, by Michelet in his summary of 
 Modern History, and by Duruy in his Histoire des 
 Temps Modernes. There is rto book which can be said 
 to enter into literature and gives an adequate picture of 
 this period, unless it be Voltaire's Age of Louis XIV. and 
 Louis XV. Lord Stanhope's Histories of Queen Anne 
 and of England, Carlyle's Frederick the Great, H. 
 Martin's Histoire de France, Lecky's excellent History 
 of England in the Eighteenth Century, are standard 
 works for this period ; but they are all far too volu- 
 minous, too special, and diffuse for the purposes of the 
 
SOME GREAT BOOKS OF HISTORY 119 
 
 general reader, nor do they enter into the scheme of the 
 present essay. 
 
 V. Nor again is it possible to put into the hands of 
 the general reader of English any single work which 
 will give an adequate conception of the successive 
 struggles for freedom in Holland, England, and America. 
 They must be read in the separate histories, of which 
 there are some that are excellent, though all of a 
 formidable length and bulk. The nine volumes which 
 Motley devoted in his three works on the struggle in 
 Holland, the three works of Guizot on the English 
 Revolution and its leaders, the standard work of 
 Bancroft on the United States, form a series beyond 
 the resources of the mere general reader as distinct 
 from the student. 
 
 There are, however, three works which, whilst being 
 in form and in bulk within the compass of the average 
 reader, give adequate portraits of the three noble chiefs 
 of the Dutch, the English, and the American revolutions. 
 Motley's Rise of the Dutch Republic, Carlyle's Letters 
 and Speeches of Cromwell, and Washington Irving's 
 Life of Washington, are all indispensable books to one 
 who desires to know the work of three of the great 
 heroes of the Protestant republics. And these three 
 are peculiarly suited for the biographical method. For 
 not only were they each the undoubted chiefs of great 
 historic movements, but they were all three men of 
 singularly pure and magnanimous life, who each em- 
 bodied the highest type of the age which they inspired. 
 
 Carlyle's Cromwell has definitely formed the view 
 that Englishmen take of their own history and even 
 their view of their political system. It is one of the 
 most splendid monuments of historical genius, for it 
 
120 THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 reversed the false judgment which, for two centuries, 
 political and religious bigotry had passed on the greatest 
 ruler that these islands ever knew, and formally enthroned 
 him on the love and admiration of all thinking men. It 
 is needful to bear in mind that this great work is not a 
 Life of Cromwell ; it was not so designed ; it is not so 
 in result. It is the materials annotated for a biography 
 of Cromwell which Carlyle never wrote, and which is 
 yet to be written. And it is essential to have alongside 
 of this masterpiece of industry and genius, a continuous 
 history of the whole period from the accession of 
 Charles I. to that of William III. With all its defects, 
 we shall find that told in the two works of Guizot 
 The History of the English Revolution and the Life of 
 Cromwell as they appear in two volumes in the English 
 version. From the enormous detail of Mr. Gardiner's 
 works on the period, and their still incomplete state, the 
 general reader will be content to trust to the fine 
 narrative as we read it in Green's Short History. If 
 we hesitate to add to his Cromwell Mr. Carlyle's 
 Friedrich the Second, it is on account of its pre- 
 posterous length, its interminable digressions, its trivial 
 personalities and tedious scandal ; because, with all its 
 amazing literary brilliancy, it entirely omits to give us 
 any conception of Frederick as a creative civil statesman, 
 though this is the character in which after ages will 
 principally honour him. 
 
 VI. For the Revolution of 1789 we have the wonderful 
 book of Carlyle, perhaps the most striking extant 
 example of the poetical method applied to history. 
 It is an enduring book ; and it has now passed into 
 its sixth decade and that immortality which, by copy- 
 right law, enables the public to buy it for a shilling. 
 
SOME GREAT BOOKS OF HISTORY 121 
 
 The poetical and pictorial method too often ends in 
 caricature and gives tempting occasions for telling 
 portraiture. And both in his loves and his hates, 
 Carlyle has too often proved to be extravagant or 
 unjust, and sometimes flatly mistaken in his facts. 
 With all its shortcomings it is a great book : which, in 
 literary skill, has not been surpassed by any prose of 
 our century, and which, as historical judgment, has 
 deeply modified the social and political ideas of our 
 age. But as for the Cromwell we need a complement, 
 if not a corrective, so we need it far more for the French 
 Revolution. We may find it in Von Sybel's or in 
 Michelet's French Revolution, or, better still, in the 
 clear, judicial, and just summary of Mignet. For the 
 history of the Great War, we may turn to the abridged 
 edition of Sir Archibald Alison's in a single volume, as 
 fairly adequate and satisfactory. This avoids nearly all 
 his* besetting faults, and contains a very fair share of 
 his undoubted merits. A far superior book, which takes 
 in the whole period from 1792 to 1848, is the History of 
 Modern Europe by the late C. A. Fyffe, too early lost 
 to historical literature. 
 
 For the growth of our social and industrial life in the 
 present century a subject of cardinal importance which 
 must practically determine our political sympathies it 
 is too obvious that no adequate general account exists. 
 Perhaps in the whole range of historical literature no 
 book is more urgently needed than a real history of 
 the development of industry and social existence in 
 Europe in the present century. The movement itself is 
 European rather than national and social and economic 
 rather than political. In the meantime we have no 
 other resource except to follow up this complex evolu- 
 tion of modern society, both locally and sectionally. 
 
122 THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 Of the various extant histories, the most important is 
 Harriet Martineau's History of England from the Peace 
 of 1815 ; perhaps the most generally interesting is 
 Charles Knight's Popular History of England, the later 
 portions of which are less superficial and elementary 
 than the earlier. The modern English histories of 
 Spencer Walpole, Justin M'Carthy, and W. N. Moles- 
 worth, are fair, honest, and pleasant to read. 
 
 In these few notes on great books of history, it does 
 not lie in my plan to say much about national or special 
 histories. From my own point of view the life of 
 Humanity in its fulness is the central aim of sound 
 knowledge ; and that which substitutes the national for 
 the human interest, that which withdraws the attention 
 from organic civilisation to special incidents, has been 
 long too closely followed. There is always a tendency 
 to concentrate the interest on national history ; and it 
 needs no further stimulus. Nor are the details of our 
 national history ever likely to pall on the intelligent 
 reader. But histories on such a scale, that each octavo 
 volume records but a year or two, and takes nearly as 
 long to compose : on such a canvas, that every person 
 who crosses the stage and each incident that occurs 
 within the focus of the instrument, is recorded, not in 
 the degree of its importance, but in the degree of the 
 bulk that the accessible materials may fill whatever 
 may be their value, are beyond the purport of this 
 chapter. 
 
 The only aim of the present piece is to suggest to a 
 busy man a few books in which he may catch some 
 conception of the central lines of human evolution. A 
 true philosophy of human progress (if we could find it) 
 would be a practical manual of life and conduct : and 
 of such a philosophy, history in the larger sense must 
 
SOME GREAT BOOKS OF HISTORY 123 
 
 be the bible and basis. Mark, learn, and inwardly 
 digest it, not as historical romance to pass a few idle 
 hours, but as the revelation of the slow and interrupted, 
 but unceasing development of the organism of which 
 we are cells and germs. What we need to know are 
 the leading lines of this mighty biography, the moral 
 and social links that bind us to the series of our 
 ancestors in the Past. The great truth which marks 
 the science of our time is the sense of unity in the 
 course of civilisation, and of organic evolution in its 
 gradual growth. To gain a conception of this course 
 we must set ourselves in a manly way to study, not the 
 picture books of history, but the classical works as they 
 came from the master hands of the great historians. 
 Wherever it is possible we must go to the original 
 sources, being sure that no story is ever so faithful as 
 that told by those who themselves saw the great deed 
 and heard the voices of the great men. 
 
CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE HISTORY SCHOOLS 
 An Oxford Dialogue^ 
 
 ON one of those bright misty days at Oxford, when the 
 grey towers are dimly seen rising from masses of amber 
 and russet foliage, when reading men enjoy a brisk walk 
 in the keen afternoon air, to talk over the feats of the 
 Long and the chances of the coming Schools, a tutor 
 and a freshman were striding round the meadows of 
 Christ Church. The Reverend yEthelbald Wessex, 
 called by undergraduates 'the Venerable Bede,' was 
 taking a tutorial grind with his young friend, Philibert 
 Raleigh, who had come up from Eton with a brilliant 
 record. The Admirable Crichton, as Phil was named 
 by his admirers, was expected to do great things in the 
 History School : his essay had won him the scholar- 
 ship, and even the Master admitted that he had read 
 some which were worse. Phil was enlarging on the 
 lectures of the new Regius Professor. 
 
 'We are in luck,' said he, 'to be reading for the 
 Schools at a time when the Professor is one of the first 
 of living writers ; his lectures are a lesson in English 
 literature, instead of a medley of learned "tips."' 
 
 ' I hope, my dear boy,' said the Venerable, ' that you 
 are not referring to the late Professor in that rather 
 
 1 Fortnightly Review, vol. liv. N.S. October 1893. 
 
THE HISTORY SCHOOLS 125 
 
 superficial remark of yours, for he was certainly one of 
 the most consummate historians of modern times.' 
 
 ' Oh, no,' said Phil, in an apologetic tone ; ' I never 
 heard Dr. Freeman lecture at all, and I have not yet 
 finished the third volume of The Norman Conquest. 
 But surely he is hardly in it as a writer with Froude, 
 whose history one enjoys to read as one enjoys Quentin 
 Durward or Ivanhoe ? ' 
 
 ' You are giving yourself away, dear boy,' replied the 
 tutor, with his shrewd smile, ' when you class the History 
 of England with a novel. Mr. Froude's enemies (and I 
 am certainly not one of them) have never said worse of 
 him than that. I am afraid that the first thing which 
 Oxford will have to teach you is that the business of a 
 historian is to write history, not romance.' 
 
 ' Of course/ said the freshman, a little put out by the 
 snub, ' I should not compare the History of England to 
 romance, nor, I suppose, do you. But we know that 
 all the histories in the world which have permanent life 
 are composed with literary genius, and are delightful to 
 read in themselves. A great historian has to write 
 history, but he also has to write a great book.' 
 
 ' Literature is one thing,' said the Venerable, in some- 
 what oracular tones, ' and history is another thing. The 
 reXo<? of history is Truth. She may be more attractive 
 to some minds when clothed in shining robes ; but the 
 historian has to worship at the shrine of nuda Veritas, 
 and it is no business of his to care for the drapery she 
 wears. What I mean is, that history implies indefatig- 
 able research into recorded facts. That is the essence : 
 the form is mere accident.' 
 
 'The form of the sentences may be a secondary 
 thing,' pleaded the Crichton, 'but, surely, the vivid 
 power of striking home which marks every great book 
 
126 THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 is essential to a history intended to survive. Would the 
 Master have given all that labour to Thucydides if the 
 whole of his work had been occupied with monotonous 
 accounts of how the Spartans marched into Attica, and 
 how the Athenians sent seven ships to the coast of 
 Thrace ? Thucydides is a KTrj/^a et<? aei because of the 
 elaborate speeches, the account of the plague, the civil 
 war in Corcyra, the siege of Syracuse, and the last sea- 
 fight in the harbour. These are the things which make 
 Thucydides immortal, and remind one of the messenger's 
 speech in the Persce. It is these magnificent pictures of 
 the ancient world which help us to get over the weari- 
 some parade of hoplites and sling-men, and battles of 
 frogs and mice in obscure bays.' 
 
 'This will never do,' replied the tutor. 'We shall 
 quite despair of your class, if you begin by calling 
 "wearisome" any fact ascertainable in recorded docu- 
 ments. The business of the historian is to examine the 
 evidence for what has ever happened in any place or 
 time ; and nothing which is true can be wearisome to the 
 really historical mind.' 
 
 ' And are we expected to enjoy our Codex Diplomaticus 
 as much as our Macaulay and our Froude?' 
 
 ' We do not ask you to enjoy,' said the Bede, in his 
 dry way, 'we only ask you to know or, to be quite 
 accurate, to satisfy the examiners. The brilliant apolo- 
 gist of Henry VIII. seems to give you delightful lectures ; 
 but I can assure you that the Schools know no other 
 standard but that of accurate research, in the manner 
 so solidly established by the late Regius Professor whom 
 we have lost.' 
 
 ' Do you think that a thoughtful essay on the typical 
 movements in one's period would not pay?' asked the 
 Admirable one, in a rather anxious tone. 
 
THE HISTORY SCHOOLS 1 27 
 
 ' My young friend,' said the Reverend Ethelbald, ' you 
 will find that dates, authorities, texts, facts, and plenty 
 of diphthongs pay much better. You are in danger of 
 mortal heresy, if you think that anything will show you 
 a royal road to these. If there is one thing which, more 
 than another, is the mark of Oxford to-day, it is belief 
 in contemporary documents, exact testing of authorities, 
 scrupulous verification of citations, minute attention to 
 chronology, geography, palaeography, and inscriptions. 
 When all these are right, you cannot go wrong. For 
 all this we owe our gratitude to the great historian we 
 have lost.' 
 
 ' O yes/ said Phil airily, for he was quite aware that he 
 was thought to be shaky in his pre-Ecgberht chronicles ; 
 ' I am not saying a word against accuracy. But all facts 
 are not equally important, nor are all old documents of 
 the same use. I have been grinding all this term at the 
 History of the Norman Conquest, verifying all the citations 
 as I go along, and making maps of every place that is 
 named. I have only got to the third volume, you know, 
 and I don't know now what it all comes to. Freeman's 
 West-Saxon scuffles on the downs seem to me duller 
 than Thucydides' fifty hoplites and three hundred sling- 
 men, and I have not yet come to anything to compare 
 with the Syracusan expedition.' 
 
 ' This is a bad beginning for a history man,' said Basda. 
 ' Is this how they talked at Eton of the greatest period 
 of the greatest race in the annals of the world ? All 
 history centres round the early records of the English in 
 the three or four centuries before the first coming of the 
 Jutes, and the three or four after it. Let me advise you 
 to take as your period, say, the battle of Ellandun, and 
 get up all about it, and how " its stream was choked 
 with slain," and what led up to it and what came after 
 
128 THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 it. Do you know anything more interesting, as you 
 call it, than that?' 
 
 ' Yes,' said Phil readily, with all the recklessness of a 
 smart freshman ; 'why, Ellandun was merely the slogging 
 of savages, of whom we know nothing but a few names. 
 What I call fine history is Macaulay's famous account 
 of the state of England under the Stuarts, or Froude's 
 splendid picture of the trial and execution of Mary of 
 Scots. That is a piece of writing that no one can ever 
 forget' 
 
 ' Ah, just so !' said the Venerable, in that awful mono- 
 syllabic way which he had caught from the Master ; 
 'splendid picture! piece of writing! fine history! here 
 we generally take " fine history " to be ah ! false history.' 
 
 ' But fine history need not be false,' said Phil. 
 
 ' We usually find it so,' replied his tutor, ' and it is ten 
 times worse than false quantities in a copy of longs and 
 shorts. There is no worse offence outside the statute 
 book (and many offences in it are less immoral) than the 
 crime of making up a picture of actual events for the 
 sake of literary effect, with no real care for exact truth- 
 fulness of detail. A historical romance, as they call 
 novels of past ages, is often a source of troublesome 
 errors ; but, at any rate, in a novel we know what to 
 expect. It is a pity that Scott should talk nonsense 
 about Robin Hood in Ivanhoe, and that Bulwer intro- 
 duced Caxton into the Last of the Barons. But no one 
 expects to find truth in such books, and every one reads 
 them at his own peril. In a history of England it is 
 monstrous to be careless about references, and to trust 
 to a late authority.' 
 
 ' But no decent historian ever does intend to state 
 what he knows to be an error,' said Phil, somewhat sur- 
 prised at the warmth of the West Saxon's indignation. 
 
THE HISTORY SCHOOLS 129 
 
 1 1 should think not indeed,' said Wessex ; ' no one but 
 a thief intends to take what is not his own, and no one 
 but a liar means to state what he knows to be untrue. 
 But the historian of all men is bound by the sanctities 
 of his office to what we call in Roman law sunima 
 diligentia. And to be thinking of his " pictures," of the 
 scheme of his colours and other literary effects, forms a 
 most dangerous temptation to adopt the picturesque 
 form of a story in place of the recorded truth. Un- 
 fortunately, as we know to our sorrow, the materials of 
 the historian are of almost every sort good, doubtful, 
 and worthless ; the so-called histories go on copying one 
 another, adding something to heighten the lights out of 
 quite second-rate authority ; a wrong reference, a false 
 date, a hearsay anecdote gets into accepted histories, 
 and it costs years of labour to get the truth at last. If 
 you ever hope to be a historian, you must treat historical 
 falsehood as you would a mad dog, and never admit a 
 phrase or a name which suggests an untruth/ 
 
 ' Has not this purism been a little overdone?' said the 
 innocent freshman. ' I remember that Freeman once told 
 us he could not bear to speak of the Battle of Hastings, lest 
 some one should imagine that it began on the sea-shore.' 
 
 ' A fine example of scrupulous love of truth,' replied 
 the Bede, ' and I wish that all histories of England had 
 been written in a similar spirit. Can anything be more 
 unscholarly than a readiness to accept a statement which 
 we have not probed to the core, simply because it works 
 up into a telling picture, or will point an effective para- 
 graph ? It is positively dishonest ! And some of them 
 will quote you a passage which you discover, on collating 
 it with the original, has a blunder in every sentence, and 
 a mistranslation in every page. If you write a romance, 
 you may go to your imagination for your facts. If you 
 
 I 
 
130 THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 write history, you should scrupulously extract the best 
 contemporary record, and throw everything else into the 
 fire. I sometimes wish that histories were not published 
 at all in the current English of literature, but were plain 
 and disconnected propositions of fact, like the cuneiform 
 inscriptions of Daryavush at Behistun.' 
 
 ' Surely,' cried Phil, with a laugh, ' that would be a 
 little dull ! It would be a mere lexicon. No one could 
 get up Facciolati or Littr as we get up Herodotus. 
 Besides, the enormous number of propositions, each of 
 which might fairly be called "truth," would make history 
 impossible even for the most prodigious memory.' 
 
 ' You forget,' said the tutor, ' that we treat history in 
 " periods " of short or, at any rate, of manageable length. 
 Nobody has any business out of his own " period," and 
 if he trespasses on to another man's "period," he is pretty 
 certain to be caught. The " periods" in our schools are 
 far, far too long, and encourage superficial and flashy 
 habits of reading. I remember dear old Bodley, late Pro- 
 fessor of Palaeography, who was before your time, saying 
 N. that ten years in the fourteenth century was about as 
 much as any man should try to master. He died, poor 
 old boy, before his great book was ever got into shape 
 at all ; and perhaps ten years is rather short for a distinct 
 period. But it takes a good man to know as much as a 
 century, as it ought to be known. And one of our 
 greatest living masters in history, with enormous in- 
 dustry and perseverance, just manages to write the 
 events of one year in the seventeenth century within 
 each twelve-months of his own laborious life.' 
 
 Phil could stand this no longer. With a whoop and a 
 bound (he had just won the long jump in his college 
 sports) he cleared the broad ditch, and alighted clean 
 in the meadow round which they were tramping. 
 
THE HISTORY SCHOOLS 131 
 
 ' Why,' he cried, as a second bound brought him back 
 again to the side of his Venerable friend, ' at that rate 
 we should want at least a hundred works, I suppose in 
 ten volumes each, or a thousand volumes in all, cram 
 full of gritty facts of no good to any one. All this week 
 I have been entering in my note-book such bits as this : 
 " Ecgfrith marched to a place called the Hoar Apple- 
 Tree. It is not known where this is, or why he went 
 there. He left it the next day, and neither he nor it are 
 ever mentioned again in the chronicles." What is the 
 good to me of knowing that?' he asked, as if a cheeky 
 freshman was likely to put the Reverend ^Ethelbald into 
 a tight place. 
 
 ' Bad, bad ! ' said the tutor, who began to fear that he 
 was wasting his time on Phil, ' you will never be a credit 
 to your college if you can make game of " truth " like 
 that ! One would think a young man who hoped to do 
 something would care to know a few true facts about 
 his English forbears a thousand years ago. But the 
 question is not what you care to know, but what you 
 ought to know ; and every Englishman ought to know 
 every word in the Saxon Chronicle, to say nothing of the 
 rest. Nor is it a question at all about your thousand 
 volumes of history, the bulk of which deal with "periods" 
 that do not concern you at all. Your thousand volumes, 
 too, is a very poor estimate after all. You would find 
 that not ten thousand volumes, perhaps not a hundred 
 thousand volumes, would contain all the truths which 
 have ever been recorded in contemporary documents, 
 together with the elucidations, comments, and various 
 amplifications which each separate truth would properly 
 demand.' 
 
 ' But at this rate,' said the freshman gloomily, ' I shall 
 never get beyond Ecgfrith and the other break-jaw Old 
 
132 THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 English sloggers. When we come up to Oxford we 
 never seem to get out of an infinite welter of " origins " 
 and primitive forms of everything. I used to think the 
 Crusades, the Renascence, Puritanism, and the French 
 Revolution, were interesting epochs or movements. But 
 here lectures seem to go round and round the Mark- 
 system, or the aboriginal customs of the Jutes. We 
 are told that it is mere literary trifling to take any inter- 
 est in Richelieu and William of Orange, Frederick of 
 Prussia, or Mirabeau and Danton. The history of these 
 men has been adequately treated in very brilliant books 
 which a serious student must avoid. He must stick to 
 Saxon charters and the Doomsday Survey.' 
 
 ' Of course, he must,' said the tutor, ' if that is his 
 "period" and a very good period it is. If you know 
 how many houses were inhabited at Dorchester and 
 Bridport at the time of the Survey, and how many there 
 had been in the Old-English time, you know something 
 definite. But you may write pages of stuff about what 
 smatterers call the " philosophy of history," without a 
 single sentence of solid knowledge. When every in- 
 scription and every manuscript remaining has been 
 copied and accurately unravelled, then we may talk 
 about the philosophy of history.' 
 
 ' But surely,' said Crichtonius mirabilis, ' you don't 
 wish me to believe that there is no intelligible evolution 
 in the ages, and that every statement to be found in a 
 chronicle is as much worth remembering as any other 
 statement ? ' 
 
 'You have got to remember them all,' replied the 
 Reverend ^Ethelbald dogmatically, ' at any rate, all in 
 your " period." You may chatter about " evolution " as 
 fast as you like, if you take up Physical Science and go 
 to that beastly museum ; but if you mention " evolution " 
 
THE HISTORY SCHOOLS 133 
 
 in the History School, you will be gulfed take my 
 word for it ! I daresay that all statements of fact true 
 statements I mean may not be of equal importance ; 
 but it is far too early yet to attempt to class them in 
 order of value. Many generations of scholars will have 
 to succeed each other, and many libraries will have to 
 be filled, before even our bare materials will be complete 
 and ready for any sort of comparative estimate. All 
 that you have to do, dear boy, is to choose your period 
 (I hope it will be Old-English somewhere) mark out 
 your " claim," as Californian miners do, and then wash 
 your lumps, sift, crush quartz, till you find ore, and 
 don't cry " Gold ! " till you have had it tested.' 
 
 This was a hard saying to his Admirable young 
 friend, who felt like the rich young man in the Gospel 
 when he was told to sell all that he had and to follow 
 the Master. ' I have no taste for quartz-crushing,' said 
 he gloomily ; 'what I care for are Jules Michelet on the 
 Middle Ages, Macaulay's pictures of Charles II. and his 
 court (wonderful scene that, the night of Charles's 
 seizure at Whitehall !) Carlyle on Mirabeau and 
 Danton, and Froude's Reformation and Armada. These 
 are the books which stir my blood. Am I to put all 
 these on the shelf? ' 
 
 ' Certainly ! put them away this very day till you 
 have got your class and have gone on a yachting 
 holiday : when you may put them in your cabin with 
 Scott and Dumas,' said the Venerable, in his archiepis- 
 copal manner. ' Let me advise you not to waste your 
 precious hours with novels. Michelet, with his stale 
 Victor- Hugo epigrams and his absurd references to the 
 Bibliotheque Nationals Cabinet de Versailles portrait 
 du Louvre as if that was serious history. You might 
 as well put the Trots Mousquetaires in your list of 
 
134 THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 books in the History School. Macaulay is all very 
 well and a real reader, of course ; but he had always 
 one eye on his sentences, and he would almost misquote 
 a manuscript for the sake of a smart antithesis. There 
 is far too much about French harlots ; but the worst 
 vice of his book is, that it is amusing, which is the only 
 real fault in Gibbon. Carlyle is good on Cromwell, 
 though he is dreadfully prejudiced ; he had never seen 
 the Clark Papers and consequently he has to be put 
 right on a hundred points. And as to his French 
 Revolution, it reads to me like an extract from 
 Rabelais ; and what on earth can you have to do with 
 the Encyclopaedists, Girondins, Mountain, and Sans- 
 culottes ? ' 
 
 ' Why, Oscar at Eton used to tell us, that no part of 
 history was more essential than all that led up to the 
 Revolution of 1789, and all that has led down from it 
 to our present day, and John Morley says the same,' 
 replied the unhappy fresher. 
 
 ' Oscar's a radical and John is a terrorist,' replied the 
 Venerable, quite annoyed at the lad's pertinacity and 
 his shallow turn of mind. ' The French Revolution is 
 the happy hunting-ground of all the phrase-mongers 
 like Carlyle, the doctrinaires like Louis Blanc, the 
 epigrammatists like Michelet and Taine, and the liars 
 like Thiers and Lamartine. There is no history to be 
 got out of it for a century or two, till all the manuscripts 
 have been deciphered and all the rubbish that has been 
 published is forgotten.' 
 
 ' Well, but come,' said Phil stoutly, in his last ditch, 
 ' you will not bar Froude, who made up his history at 
 Simancas, and got all his facts from unpublished manu- 
 scripts ? ' 
 
 ' Simancas ! Facts ! Oh, oh ! ' laughed the Reverend 
 
THE HISTORY SCHOOLS 135 
 
 ^Ethelbald, with his grim West-Saxon chuckle. ' Si- 
 mancas indeed ! where, what, how much ? what volume 
 or what bundle, what page, and what folio? MSS. 
 penes me is a very convenient reference, but historians 
 require a little more detail than this. I am not going 
 to say one word against the Regius Professor, who is 
 an old friend of mine and has written some very 
 beautiful pieces ; but, when you talk about " facts," I 
 must put you on your guard. If you never read the 
 Saturday Revieiv on Froude's Becket, you had better do 
 so at once. They were telling a good story in Common 
 Room the other day about the reviewer. He hated 
 music, and so when he intended to send a smasher to 
 the Saturday, he got some one to play him " The Battle 
 of Prague," or the " Carnaval de Venise," which would 
 make him dancing mad, till you could hear the old 
 lion's tail lashing his sides. I never went into the 
 references myself it is not in my period but all I say 
 is this that z/~the references and citations are as full of 
 mistakes as the Saturday said (mind you, I only say if 
 for I take no part in the quarrel), it is worse than 
 picking a pocket. People may wonder how it is 
 possible for such things to be done by a dear old man 
 whom we all love, who is the soul of honour in private 
 life, and who says such beautiful things about religion, 
 morality, and the ethics of statesmen. Well ! I don't 
 know ; but in history you cannot trust a fellow who tries^X 
 to be interesting. If he pretends to be " philosophical," 
 you may know him to be an impostor. But, if he aims 
 at being interesting or at anything like a fine picture, 
 he is not far off saying the thing that is not.' 
 
 ' Come, now,' cried Phil with spirit, for he felt that 
 his turn had come, ' you may talk about the Saturday 
 articles, which are ancient history in the bad sense of 
 
136 THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 the term, but what do you say to the Quarterly articles, 
 and the palpable blunders it exposes? What about 
 Wace's "palisades" at Hastings? And why didn't 
 Freeman cite the Abb Baudri ? And why did he 
 misquote the Survey over and over again ? And why 
 are we not to use the fine old English term, " Battle of 
 Hastings " the only name given in the Tapestry, Guy 
 of Amiens, and the rest and are told we must always 
 use, if we value truth, the term, " Battle of Senlac " a 
 mere mythical phrase a piece of affectation of " dear 
 old Orderic" in his Norman monastery? Why, years 
 ago a man in the Nineteenth Century pointed out that 
 to talk nowadays of the Battle of Senlac was as absurd 
 as if a Frenchman were now to try to rechristen the 
 Battle of Waterloo the Battle of Hougoumont ! What 
 do you say to the Quarterly on the Norman Conquest?' 
 asked Phil impetuously, for he felt that he had got his 
 knife into the Bede. 
 
 ' I am sure we need not mind all these anonymous 
 personalities,' said the Venerable one somewhat stiffly, 
 for he felt that the last Quarterly article was rather a 
 nasty hit ; and as yet he had not the remotest idea how 
 it ought to be answered. ' But here, bless me ! ' he 
 cried, ' comes Middleman, of the House; what brings 
 him to Oxford just now, I wonder.' And indeed, the 
 tutor was not at all sorry that the conversation with his 
 young friend should be suddenly broken off. 
 
 ' Dear old man, what luck for me to meet you,' said 
 the newcomer genially ; ' I am going to examine in the 
 Law School, and have run up for a couple of days to 
 consult about the papers. I am staying with Bryce,' he 
 explained. Jack Middleman, Q.C., was a young lawyer 
 of much promise ; he was already in Parliament and 
 had expectations of office when Lord Salisbury returns 
 
THE HISTORY SCHOOLS 137 
 
 to power. Though he had been twelve years in good 
 practice, he kept up his reading and his love of Oxford. 
 The Courts were not sitting, and he had run up to see 
 some of the residents. 
 
 ' Our new scholar, Raleigh,' said Wessex, introducing 
 Phil to the Q.C. ; 'he is attending the lectures of the 
 Regius Professor of History, and I am trying to show 
 him the difference between the late Professor and the 
 present You can tell him what Freeman was, for you 
 used to be one of his ardent admirers and closest 
 henchmen.' 
 
 ' Yes, indeed,' said Middleman ; ' he was a noble 
 scholar, and I read and re-read every line he wrote. 
 But there is a good deal to be said for the other method 
 of work.' 
 
 'Just so,' said Phil, much relieved. 'I have been 
 sticking up for Froude's pictures of Henry vill., 
 Elizabeth and Mary of Scots, the Reformation and the 
 Armada. I won't believe that literary history is quite 
 done yet.' 
 
 ' Literary history ! ' laughed Wessex, who had re- 
 covered his good humour ; ' why not say melodious 
 science ! delicious philosophy ! graceful law ! or any 
 other paradoxical confusion of metaphors ? " Literary / 
 history " is a contradiction in terms, is it not, Middle- 
 man?' 
 
 ' Well,' said the lawyer, who was great at Nisi prius, 
 ' Let us know what we mean by literary history. 
 History in which the narrative of events is made sub- s 
 servient to literary effect is an impudent swindle. But 
 the history which has no quality of literature at all, >* 
 neither power of expression nor imaginative insight, is 
 nothing but materials, the bricks and stones out of 
 which some one one day might build a house. If 
 
138 THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 " literary history " means Lamartinc's History of the 
 Girondists, it is a sneaking form of the historical novel. 
 But if literary history means Tacitus and Gibbon, it is 
 the highest and the true form of history. What have 
 you been lecturing upon this term, Wessex ? ' 
 
 ' Well,' said the Venerable, ' for the last three terms 
 we have been on the West-Saxon coinage, and the year 
 before that I took up the system oi frith-borrow? 
 
 1 1 should like to hear your course on the legal and 
 administrative reforms of the Norman Kings,' said the 
 lawyer ; ' it is a fine subject, from which we in the 
 Temple might learn more than from Meeson and 
 Welsby? 
 
 ' I have not reached the Norman Conquest yet,' said 
 the Reverend ^Ethelbald simply, ' for we have been ten 
 years over the Old- English times ; but I hope to get 
 down to Eadweard before I leave the college.' 
 
 ' You have got so fearfully griindlich since my time,' 
 said Jack, 'that I feel quite out of it at Oxford. 
 History seems to be seen nowadays with some such 
 apparatus as the naturalists describe the eye of a fly 
 magnified to ten thousand diameters. Now, I used to 
 think Gibbon to be the type of a great historian. He 
 gives you in eight volumes the history of the civilised 
 world, for a period not short of a thousand years, with 
 a scholar's grasp of the recorded facts, a masterly 
 insight into the leading movements, and a style that 
 moves on like a Roman triumph in one unbroken but 
 varied pageant. You have not given up Gibbon at 
 Oxford, have you ? ' said the lawyer. 
 
 ' Oh no,' replied the tutor ; but he added with the 
 scintilla of a sneer, ' Gibbon made some mistakes, you 
 know ; and in the last hundred years a good deal has 
 been discovered that he never heard of. I always warn 
 
THE HISTORY SCHOOLS 139 
 
 our young people to read Gibbon with great caution, 
 and never without their Muratori and their Pertz at 
 hand. It isn't possible, is it,' asked the tutor in that sly 
 way of his which so much frightened undergraduates, ' to 
 put the true facts of a century into five hundred pages ? ' 
 
 ' You don't want all the facts,' said Jack decisively, 
 'and you could not remember or use a tenth part of/"" 
 them if you could get them. And, what is more, you 
 cannot get at the exact truth of every fact, however 
 much you labour. Such minute accuracy in unim- >^ 
 portant trifles is not only utterly unattainable, but it' 
 would be miserable pedantry to look for it' 
 
 ' Trifles ! ' cried out the Venerable in horror ; ' you 
 don't call any historical truths trifles, do you ? ' 
 
 ' Yes ! I call it an unimportant trifle,' said Jack, 
 ' whether ^Elfgifu stayed one day or two days at Cant- 
 warabyrig, and it is waste of time to discuss the question 
 in fifty pages. You see that you cannot get at the 
 exact facts for all your pains. You know the row 
 about Freeman's palisades at the Battle of Hastings. 
 I pass no opinion, for I would not waste my time over 
 such rubbish, and I don't care a sceat or a scilling 
 whether there were palisades at Senlac or not. I 
 daresay Freeman made slips like other people, possibly 
 blunders it would be a miracle if he did not. But all 
 this fuss about his blunders, and much of the fuss he 
 made about Froude's blunders, is poor fun. Freeman 
 was a consummate historical scholar, and Froude is an 
 elegant historical writer, and both have given us most 
 interesting and valuable books, for which we ought to 
 be truly grateful, however widely the two books differ 
 in method.' 
 
 'Does not Freeman overdo his love of the Old 
 English?' said Phil. 
 
140 THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 ' Is not Froude a blind advocate of Henry VIII.?' asked 
 the tutor. 
 
 ' Both of them, no doubt, have very strong personal 
 feelings and keen party interests,' said the Q.C., c and 
 both might have been free from much of what the 
 world calls their bias or their prejudice, if they had been 
 accustomed to deal with history in a far more general 
 or organic spirit as the biography of mankind ; and if 
 both had not striven to unravel every incident in their 
 limited periods, much as we seek to unravel the facts 
 of a murder or a fraud. When we have a great trial in 
 court, we have the living witnesses before us ; we con- 
 front them with the accused ; we examine them on 
 oath, we cross-examine them, and re-examine them ; 
 and then my Lord sums up the evidence without any 
 kind of feeling in the matter, and twelve jurymen have 
 got to decide. Well, after all that, we know the jury 
 do sometimes toss up for the verdict ; they are very 
 often wrong, but we seldom hang the innocent man or 
 let off a confirmed rogue. With all our pains, and the 
 cross-examination of living witnesses, we are often 
 beaten, and admit that we cannot get to the bottom of 
 it. No lawyer would hope to find out the true story of 
 anything if a witness could never be brought into court, 
 and if no evidence could ever be sifted by cross-ex- 
 amination. But cross-examination is always impossible 
 to the historian. You historians have only to rely on 
 the most plausible story you can find in a bundle of old 
 papers, the origin of which is usually doubtful. How 
 can you extract anything that we should call legal 
 evidence in court, and how can you get " at truth " by a 
 method of investigation which any lawyer would tell 
 you was ridiculous ? ' 
 
 'Do you mean to tell us that the facts of history 
 
THE HISTORY SCHOOLS 141 
 
 are not to be discovered by competent research ? ' asked 
 the tutor in dismay. 
 
 ' Certainly, the general facts of history are ascertain- 
 able in all their leading characters, if we are content to 
 strike an average, or to look at sufficiently wide epochs 
 and at the dominant tendencies and creative spirits. 
 Research and insight together will enable you to grasp 
 the main features of an age and the essential qualities 
 of a great man. But no research and no insight, and 
 no labour and no subdivision of labour will ever enable 
 you to reach the literal and particular truth about every 
 minor incident, or to penetrate to the inner motives and 
 secret disposition of every man and woman who crosses 
 the stage of history. We cannot do this for contem- 
 porary persons and events around us, with all the 
 methods of inquiry which contemporary facts and 
 characters admit. Much less can we do it for distant 
 ages, with nothing but the remnants of meagre and 
 suspicious records. People are still disputing in the 
 newspapers about the famous ball before the Battle of 
 Waterloo, and why Bazaine surrendered Metz, and how 
 the Archbishop was killed or the Tuileries burnt down 
 in the commune of Paris. If the exact truth of what 
 happened a generation or two ago is often obscure 
 whilst hundreds of eye-witnesses are still living, how 
 can you be certain whether Harold built a palisade at 
 Battle or not ? ' 
 
 'If he didn't,' cried Wessex, in a visible pet, 'I will 
 give up Freeman and the Old English for ever ! ' 
 
 ' I have far too great admiration for Freeman,' said 
 the young M.P., 'to stake his reputation on a matter of 
 stakes. No ! Freeman was an indefatigable inquirer 
 into early records, but he muddled away his sense of 
 proportion. He was not a philosopher like Thucydides 
 
142 THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 and Tacitus, nor a great writer like Robertson and 
 Gibbon ; and he made the mistake of all specialists, 
 that labour and minuteness can do the work of imagina- 
 tion and insight. The microscopic eye, with its power 
 of ten thousand diameters, will, after all, only show an 
 infinite series of minute specks. It will not put them 
 together, nor will it make an intelligible portrait of a 
 whole. Froude is a fine writer, who has painted a set 
 of brilliant scenes ; but to understand the great religious 
 and intellectual forces of the sixteenth century in 
 Europe requires a far larger range than is disclosed at 
 Simancas, and a deeper philosophy than Carlyle's, which 
 may be summed up as detestation of Popery and the 
 people. A great history cannot be made either by 
 microscopic analysis or by pictorial bravura. The 
 palaeo-photo-graphic method only gives you a shapeless 
 pile of separate bricks. The chiaroscuro-impressionist 
 method will give you some glowing pictures ; but then 
 wicked people start up and say they are not true, and 
 not fair.' 
 
 ' What method, then, has to be followed by any great 
 history ? ' cried out in the same breath the tutor and the 
 freshman. 
 
 ' Well, what I would advise a young man going into 
 the historical line to bespeak is first, indefatigable 
 research into all the accessible materials ; secondly, a 
 sound philosophy of human evolution ; thirdly, a genius 
 for seizing on the typical movements and the great 
 men ; and lastly, the power of a true artist in grouping 
 subjects and in describing typical men and events. All 
 four are necessary ; and. you seem to think at Oxford 
 that the first is enough without the rest. But, unless 
 you have a real philosophy of history, you have nothing 
 but your own likings and dislikings to direct your 
 
THE HISTORY SCHOOLS 143 
 
 judgment of men and movements. Unless you have 
 the insight to select and classify your facts, you and 
 your readers will be lost in a sea of details. Not one 
 fact in a hundred is worth preservation, just as biology 
 could only exist as a science by judicious selection of 
 typical forms. To do anything else is to assume that 
 induction could take place in logic, as Aldrich says, 
 per enumerations n simplicem. And lastly, unless you 
 can impress on your readers' minds a vivid idea of some 
 given world or some representative man, you will only 
 send them to sleep. If the historical romance can do 
 nothing but mislead, the historical ditch-water will 
 only disgust.' 
 
 ' And who ever united all these four qualifications ? ' 
 said the tutor. 
 
 ' Why, Gibbon did, or very nearly, and that is his 
 supreme merit. He was as learned as Mommsen, and 
 as accurate as Freeman ; he had something of the 
 philosophy of Hume, and almost as much critical 
 judgment as Robertson ; and he was nearly as great an 
 artist as Herodotus or Livy. Mommsen's Rome might 
 be put beside Gibbon's for its learning, insight, judg- 
 ment, and concentration had he only a spark of Gibbon's 
 fire and art. But as a German, how could we expect it 
 from him ? Henri Martin's France might be named 
 with Gibbon's Rome if the worthy Frenchman had been 
 equal to six volumes instead of sixteen. Grote's Greece 
 is a fine book, but, like Freeman, he is overwhelmed in 
 the volume of his own minutice and his extravagant 
 passion for his Chosen People.' 
 
 ' And is that the whole of the list you could make of 
 the really good histories ? ' asked the tutor. 
 
 ' Not at all,' replied the lawyer ; ' there are plenty of 
 good books but I should hardly call any of them great 
 
144 THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 by the side of Gibbon. There is Milman's Latin Chris- 
 tianity, and Curtius and Duncker, Thirlwall's Greece, 
 Merivale's Rome, Michelet's France, Finlay's Greece, 
 Carlyle's Cromwell, and Ranke's Popes, Duruy's Rome, 
 Green's Short History, and a dozen more, not to weary 
 you with a catalogue. But they all, no doubt, have 
 their limitations. Some are not adequately critical ; 
 some fall short in real study ; some are more or less 
 perverse ; and some are indifferent artists.' 
 
 ' Not one of them can be put beside the Norman 
 Conquest for profound research,' cried Wessex. 
 
 ' Nor beside Froude for beauty of style/ cried Phil. 
 
 ' Well, I admire both, as I tell you,' said Jack, ' but I 
 doubt if the method of either is destined to give us 
 much more in the future. The vast accumulation of 
 historical material is an excellent and essential thing. 
 But to deluge the world with mere extracts and trans- 
 lations of these undigested documents, as the host of 
 Freemanikins threaten to do, is a dismal outlook. If 
 the history of the world is to be written on that scale, 
 the British Museum will not contain the books that 
 shall be written. And no human intellect could master 
 or use them when they were written. On the other 
 hand, the pictorial method is constantly seducing its 
 votaries into inaccurate, garbled, and over-coloured 
 pictures. We want more concentration, greater breadth, 
 a higher philosophy.' 
 
 ' You speak as if history were played out,' said the 
 Bede.' 
 
 ' It has to be put upon a new footing, I firmly believe/ 
 said the politician. ' History is only one department of 
 Sociology, just as Natural History is the descriptive 
 part of Biology. And History will have to be brought 
 most strictly under the guidance and inspiration of 
 
THE HISTORY SCHOOLS 145 
 
 Social Philosophy. The day of the chronicler is past; the 
 day of the litterateur is past. The field of knowledge 
 is too vast for the whole of the facts to be set forth, or 
 a tenth of them. To confine ourselves to " periods " is 
 to destroy our sense of unity and proportion, and to 
 weaken our brain by ceasing to regard history as the 
 handmaid and instrumentof Social Philosophy. Excerpts 
 from ten thousand chronicles are useful as dictionaries 
 and collections, but they are a mere nuisance as con- 
 tinuous histories. It may be that Gibbon's masterpiece 
 is destined to be the last example of that rarest of 
 combinations profound scholarship with splendid art. 
 Since his age there has grown up a sense of the unity 
 of human evolution and a solid philosophy of society. 
 The histories of the future will, no doubt, fill up and 
 complete, illustrate, and correct, that general plan of 
 the biography of humanity. They will follow, more 
 likely, the method of Mommsen in his Roman Provinces, 
 or Bishop Stubbs's Constitutional History the fine old 
 way of Heeren, Hallam, Guizot ; they group move- 
 ments and forces, rather than narrate events. They 
 will no longer chronicle small beer or paint melo- 
 dramatic scenes. They will illustrate philosophy.' 
 
 ' Well, good-bye, Wessex,' said Jack ; ' I hope that 
 next time we meet, you will have got on to the Norman 
 Kings they were worth a score of Ecgberhts and I 
 hope my young friend here will one day write another 
 prize essay fit to compare with the Holy Roman Empire. 
 I must be off: the Magdalen bells have begun.' 
 
 K 
 
CHAPTER V 
 
 A SURVEY OF THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY ' 
 
 HE who would understand the Middle Ages must make 
 a special study of the thirteenth century one of the 
 landmarks between the ancient and the modern world, 
 one of the most pregnant, most organic, most memorable, 
 in the annals of mankind. It is an epoch (perhaps the 
 last of the centuries of which this can be said) crowded 
 with names illustrious in action, in thought, in art, in 
 religion equally ; which is big with those problems, 
 intellectual, social, political, and spiritual that six 
 succeeding centuries have in vain toiled to solve. 
 
 A ' Century ' is, of course, a purely arbitrary limit of 
 time. But for practical purposes we can only reckon 
 by years and groups of years. And, as in the biography 
 of a man, we speak of the happy years of a life, or a 
 decade of great activity, so it is convenient to speak of 
 a brilliant ' century,' if we attach no mysterious value to 
 our artificial measure of time. It happens, however, 
 that the thirteenth century not only has a really 
 distinctive character of its own, but that, near to its 
 beginning and to its close, very typical events occurred. 
 In 1198 took place the election of Innocent III., the 
 most successful, perhaps the most truly representative 
 name, of all the mediaeval popes. In the year preceding 
 (1197) we ma y see tne E m pi re visibly beginning to 
 
 1 Fortnightly Review, vol. 1., N.s. September 1891. 
 
A SURVEY OF THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY 147 
 
 change its spirit with the death of Henry vi., the 
 ferocious son of Barbarossa. In the year following 
 (1199) died Richard Lion-heart, the last of the Anglo- 
 French sovereigns, and, we may say, the last of the 
 genuine Crusader kings, to be succeeded by his brother 
 John, who was happily forced to become an English 
 king, and to found the Constitution of England by 
 signing the Great Charter. 
 
 And at the end of the century, its last year (1300) is 
 the date of the ominous ' Jubilee ' of the Papacy the 
 year in which Dante places his great poem a year 
 which is one of the most convenient points in the 
 memoria technica of modern history. Three years later 
 died Boniface VIIL, after the tremendous humiliation 
 which marked the manifest decadence of the Papacy ; 
 eight years later began the ' Babylonish Captivity,' the 
 seventy years' exile of the Papacy at Avignon ; then 
 came the ruin of the Templars throughout Europe, and 
 all the tragedies and convulsions which mark the reigns 
 of Philip the Fair in France, Edward II. in England, 
 and the confusion that overtook the Empire on the 
 death of Henry of Luxembourg, that last hope of 
 imperial ambition. Thus, taking the period between 
 the election of Innocent III., in 1198, and the removal 
 of the Papacy to Avignon, in 1308, we find a very 
 definite character in the thirteenth century. It would, 
 of course, be necessary to fix the view on Europe as a 
 whole, or rather on Latin Christendom, to obtain any 
 unity of conception ; and, obviously, the development 
 and decay of the Church must be the central point, for 
 this is at once the most general and the important 
 element in the common life of Christendom. 
 
 Within the limits of the thirteenth century, so 
 understood, a series of striking events and great names 
 
148 THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 is crowded the growth, culmination, extravagance, and 
 then the humiliation of the Papal See ; the eighteen 
 years' rule of Innocent ill., the fourteen years of 
 Gregory IX., the twenty-one of Innocent IV. ; the short 
 revival of Gregory X. ; the ambition, the pride, the 
 degradation, and shame of Boniface VIII. The great 
 experiment to organise Christendom under a single 
 spiritual sovereign had been made by some of the most 
 aspiring natures, and the most consummate politicians 
 who ever wore mitre had been made and failed. When 
 the popes returned from Avignon to Rome in 1378, 
 after the seventy years of exile from their capital, it was 
 to find the Catholic world rent with schism, a series of 
 anti-popes, heresy, and the seeds of the Reformation in 
 England and in Germany. Thus the secession to 
 Avignon in the opening of the fourteenth century was 
 the beginning of the end of spiritual unity for Latin 
 Christendom. 
 
 At the very opening of the thirteenth century, the 
 diversion of the Crusade to the capture of Constantinople 
 in 1 204, and all the incidents of that unholy war, prove 
 that, as a moral and spiritual movement, the era of 
 Godfrey and Tancred, of Peter the Hermit and Bernard 
 of Clairvaux was ended ; and though, for a century or 
 two, kings took the Cross, like St. Louis and our 
 Edward I., in the thirteenth century, or, like our 
 Henry V., in the fifteenth century, talked of so doing, 
 the hope of annihilating Islam was gone for ever, and 
 Christendom, for four centuries, had enough to do to 
 protect Europe itself from the Moslem. And within a 
 few years of this cynical prostitution of the Crusading 
 enthusiasm in the conquest of Byzantium, the Crusading 
 passion broke out in the dreadful persecution of the 
 Albigenses and the Crusade against heresy of Simon de 
 
A SURVEY OF THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY 149 
 
 Montfort. And hardly was the unity of Christendom 
 assured by blood and terror, when the spiritual Crusades 
 of Francis and Dominic begin, and the contagious zeal 
 of the Mendicant Friars restored the force of the Church, 
 and gave it a new era of moral and social vitality. 
 
 Now, whilst the Popes were making their last grand 
 rally to weld Christendom into spiritual unity, in 
 France, in England, in Spain, in North Italy, in South 
 Italy, in Southern Germany, in a minor degree through- 
 out central Europe, princes of great energy were 
 organising the germs of nations, and were founding 
 the institutions of complex civil administration. Mon- 
 archy, municipalities, nations, and organised government, 
 national constitutions, codes of law, a central police, 
 and international trade w r ere growing uniformly through- 
 out the entire century. Feudalism, strictly so called, 
 the baron's autocracy, baronial war, and the manor 
 court, were as rapidly dying down. Crushed between 
 the hammer of the kings and the anvil of the burghers, 
 the feudal chivalry suffered, in many a bloody field, a 
 series of shameful overthrows all through the fourteenth 
 century, until it ended in the murderous orgies of the 
 fifteenth century. But it was the thirteenth century 
 that established throughout Europe the two great forces 
 of the future which were to divide the inheritance of 
 feudalism a civilised and centralised monarchy on the 
 one hand, a rich, industrious, resolute people on the 
 other hand. 
 
 It was the thirteenth century, moreover, that saw 
 the great development of the manufacturing and trading 
 cities north of the Alps. Down to the expulsion of the 
 Christians from Palestine, at the close of the twelfth 
 century, there had been few cities in Europe of wealth 
 and importance outside Italy and the South of France 
 
150 THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 and of Spain. But the next hundred years founded the 
 greatness of cities like Paris and London, of Troyes, 
 Rouen, Lyons, Bordeaux, Bruges, Ghent, Cologne, Strass- 
 burg, Basle, Nuremberg, Bremen, Lubeck, Hamburg, 
 Dantzic, Winchester, Norwich, Exeter, Bristol. The 
 Crusades had brought Europe together, and had brought 
 the West face to face with the East. Mankind had 
 ceased to be ascriptus gleba, locally bound to a few 
 clearings on the earth. It had begun to understand 
 the breadth and variety of the planet, and the infinite 
 resources of its products. Industrial exchange on a 
 world-wide scale began again after a long interval of 
 ten centuries. 
 
 The latter half of this same century also saw the 
 birth of that characteristic feature of modern society 
 the control of political power by representative assem- 
 blies. For the first time in Europe deputies from the 
 towns take part in the national councils. In Spain this 
 may be traced even before the century begins. Early 
 in the century it is found in Sicily ; about the middle of 
 the century we trace it in England and Germany ; and 
 finally, in France. As every one knows, it was in 1264 
 that Simon de Montfort summoned to Parliament 
 knights of each shire, and two representatives from 
 boroughs and cities; and, in 1295, Edward I. called 
 together the first fully-constituted Parliament as now 
 understood in England. The States-General of France, 
 the last and the least memorable of all national Parlia- 
 ments, were only seven years subsequent to the formal 
 inauguration of the Parliament of England. The in- 
 troduction of Parliamentary representation would alone 
 suffice to make memorable the thirteenth century. 
 
 The same age, too, which was so fertile in new 
 political ideas and in grand spiritual effort, was no less 
 
A SURVEY OF THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY 151 
 
 rich in philosophy, in the germs of science, in reviving 
 the inheritance of ancient learning, in the scientific 
 study of law, in the foundation of the great Northern 
 universities, in the magnificent expansion of the archi- 
 tecture we call Gothic, in the beginnings of painting 
 and of sculpture, in the foundation of modern literature, 
 both in prose and verse, in the fullest development of 
 the Troubadours, the Romance poets, the lays, sonnets, 
 satires, and tales of Italy, Provence, and Flanders ; and 
 finally, in that stupendous poem, which we universally 
 accept as the greatest of modern epical works, wherein 
 the most splendid genius of the Middle Ages seemed to 
 chant its last majestic requiem, which he himself, as I 
 have said, emphatically dated in the year 1 300. Truly, 
 if we must use arbitrary numbers to help our memory, 
 that year 1300 may be taken as the resplendent 
 sunset of an epoch which had extended in one form 
 back for nearly one thousand years to the fall of the 
 Roman Empire, and equally as the broken and stormy 
 dawn of an epoch which has for six hundred years 
 since been passing through an amazing phantasmagoria 
 of change. 
 
 Now this great century, the last of the true Middle 
 Ages, which, as it drew to its own end, gave birth to 
 Modern Society, has a special character of its own, a 
 character that gives to it an abiding and enchanting 
 interest We find in it a harmony of power, a universality 
 of endowment, a glow, an aspiring ambition and con- 
 fidence, such as we never again find in later centuries, 
 at least so generally and so permanently diffused. At 
 the opening of the thirteenth century, Christendom, as 
 a whole, rested united in profound belief in one religious 
 faith. There had appeared in the age preceding teachers 
 of new doctrines, like Abailard, Gilbert de la Poree, 
 
152 THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 Arnold of Brescia, and others ; but their new ideas had 
 nqt at all penetrated to the body of the people. As a 
 whole, Christendom had still, as the century began, an 
 unquestioned and unquestionable creed, without schism, 
 heresy, doubts, or sects. And this creed still sufficed 
 to inspire the most profound thought, the most lofty 
 poetry, the widest culture, the freest art of the age : it 
 filled statesmen with awe, scholars with enthusiasm, and 
 consolidated society around uniform objects of reverence 
 and worship. It bound men together, from the Hebrides 
 to the Eastern Mediterranean, from the Atlantic to the 
 Baltic, as European men have never since been bound. 
 Great thinkers, like Albert of Cologne and Aquinas, 
 found it to be the stimulus of their meditations. Mighty 
 poets, like Dante, could not conceive poetry, unless 
 based on it and saturated with it. Creative artists, like 
 Giotto, found it an ever living well-spring of pure 
 beauty. The great cathedrals embodied it in a thousand 
 forms of glory and power. To statesman, artist, poet, 
 thinker, teacher, soldier, worker, chief, or follower, it 
 supplied at once inspiration and instrument. 
 
 This unity of creed had existed, it is true, for five or 
 six centuries in large parts of Europe, and, indeed, in a 
 shape even more uniform and intense. But not till the 
 thirteenth century did it co-exist with such acute 
 intellectual energy, with such philosophic power, with 
 such a free and superb art, with such sublime poetry, 
 with so much industry, culture, wealth, and so rich a 
 development of civic organisation. This thirteenth 
 century was the last in the history of mankind in Europe 
 when a high and complex civilisation has been saturated 
 with a uniform and unquestioned creed. As we all 
 know, since then, civilisation has had to advance with 
 ever-increasing multiplicity of creeds. What impresses 
 
A SURVEY OF THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY 153 
 
 us as the keynote of that century is the harmony of 
 power it displays. As in the Augustan age, or the 
 Periclean age, or the Homeric age, indeed, far more than 
 in any of them, men might fairly dream, in the age of 
 Innocent and St. Louis, that they had reached a normal 
 state, when human life might hope to see an ultimate 
 symmetry of existence. There have been since epochs 
 of singular intellectual expansion, of creative art, of 
 material progress, of moral earnestness, of practical 
 energy. Our nineteenth century has very much of all 
 of these in varying proportions. But we have long 
 ceased to expect that they will not clash with each 
 other ; we have abandoned hope of ever seeing them 
 work in organic harmony together. 
 
 Now the thirteenth century was an era of no one 
 special character. It was in nothing one-sided, and in 
 nothing discordant. It had great thinkers, great rulers, 
 great teachers, great poets, great artists, great moralists, 
 and great workers. It could not be called the material 
 age, the devotional age, the political age, or the poetic 
 age, in any special degree. It was equally poetic, 
 political, industrial, artistic, practical, intellectual, and 
 devotional. And these qualities acted in harmony on a 
 uniform conception of life, with a real symmetry of pur- 
 pose. There was one common creed, one ritual, one 
 worship, one sacred language, one Church, a single code 
 of manners, a uniform scheme of society, a common 
 system of education, an accepted type of beauty, a 
 universal art, something like a recognised standard of 
 the Good, the Beautiful, and the True. One half of the 
 world was not occupied in ridiculing or combating what 
 the other half was doing. Nor were men absorbed in 
 ideals of their own, whilst treating the ideals of their 
 neighbours as matters of indifference and waste of power. 
 
154 THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 Men as utterly different from each other as were Stephen 
 Langton, St. Francis, Thomas Aquinas, Roger Bacon, 
 Dante, Giotto, St. Louis, Edward I. all profoundly 
 accepted one common order of ideas, equally applying to 
 things of the intellect, of moral duty, of action, and of the 
 soul to public and private life at once and they could 
 all feel that they were together working out the same 
 task. It may be doubted if that has ever happened in 
 Europe since. 
 
 To point out the peculiar character of an age is not to 
 praise it without reserve : much less to ask men to 
 return to it now. No one can now be suspected of 
 sighing for the time of Innocent III., of St. Francis and 
 St. Louis ; nor do reasonable historians deny that their 
 simple beliefs and ideas are frankly incompatible with 
 all that to-day we call freedom, science, and progress. 
 Let us be neither reactionary, nor obscurantist, neither 
 Catholic nor absolutist in sympathy, but seek only to 
 understand an age in its own spirit, and from the field of 
 its own ideas. Nor need we forget how the uniform 
 creed of Christendom was shaken, even in the thirteenth 
 century, by fierce spasms which ended too often in blood 
 and horror. Their social system certainly was not with- 
 out struggles ; for the thirteenth century was no golden 
 era, nor did the lion lie down with the lamb or consent 
 to be led by a little child. We cannot forget either 
 Albigensian War or Runnymede, nor our Barons' War, 
 nor Guelphs and Ghibellines, nor the history of Frede- 
 rick II., Manfred, and Conradino, nor the fall of Boniface, 
 nor the Sicilian Vespers. And yet we may confidently 
 maintain that there was a real coherence of belief, 
 sentiment, manners, and life in the thirteenth century. 
 
 Perhaps we ought rather to say, in its earlier genera- 
 tions and for the great mass of its people and doings. 
 
A SURVEY OF THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY 155 
 
 For we may see the seed of divergences, heresies, insur- 
 rections, civil war, anarchy, discord, doubt, and rebellion 
 in Church, State, society, and habits, gathering up in the 
 thirteenth century, and especially definite in its stormy 
 and ominous close. In Roger Bacon, even in Aquinas, 
 nay, in Dante, there lie all the germs of the intellectual 
 dilemmas which shook Catholicism to its foundations. 
 Francis and Dominic, if they gave the Church a magni- 
 ficent rally, saved her by remedies which a cool judg- 
 ment must pronounce to be suicidal. Our Edward I., in 
 the thirteenth century, had to deal with the same 
 rebellious forces which made the reign of our Henry 
 VI., in the fifteenth century, a record of blood and 
 anarchy. Boniface, Philip the Fair, even Edward I., 
 did violent things in the thirteenth century, which 
 Churchmen and princes after them hardly exceeded. 
 And there are profanities and ribaldries in the thir- 
 teenth-century poetry which Rabelais, Voltaire, and 
 Diderot have not surpassed. But in judging an epoch 
 one has to weigh how far those things were common and 
 characteristic of it, how far they deeply and widely 
 affected it. Judged by these tests, we must say that 
 scepticism, anarchy, ribaldry, and hypocrisy, however 
 latent in the thirteenth century, had not yet eaten out 
 its soul. 
 
 It may surprise some readers to treat the thirteenth 
 century as the virtual close of the Middle Ages, an 
 epoch which is usually placed in the latter half of the 
 fifteenth century, in the age of Louis XL, Henry VII., 
 and Ferdinand of Arragon. But the true spirit of 
 Feudalism, the living soul of Catholicism, which together 
 make up the compound type of society we call medi- 
 aeval, were, in point of fact, waning all through the 
 thirteenth century. The hurly-burly of the fourteenth 
 
156 THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 and the first half of the fifteenth centuries was merely 
 one long and cruel death agony. Nay, the inner soul of 
 Catholic Feudalism quite ended in the first generation 
 of the thirteenth century with St. Dominic, St. 
 Francis, Innocent HI., Philip Augustus, and Otto IV., 
 Stephen Langton, and William, Earl Mareschal. The 
 truly characteristic period of mediaevalism is in the 
 twelfth, rather than the thirteenth, century, the period 
 covered by the first three Crusades from 1094, the date 
 of the Council of Clermont, to 1 192, when Cceur-de- 
 Lion withdrew from the Holy Land. Or, if we put it a 
 little wider in limits, we may date true medievalism 
 from the rise of Hildebrand about 1070 to the death of 
 Innocent III. in 1216, or just about a century and a 
 half. St. Louis himself, as we read Joinville's Memoirs, 
 seems to us a man belated, born too late, and almost 
 an anachronism in the second half of the thirteenth 
 century. 
 
 We know that in the slow evolution of society the 
 social brilliancy of a movement is seldom visible, and is 
 almost never ripe for poetic and artistic idealisation 
 until the energy of the movement itself is waning, or 
 even it may be, is demonstrably spent. Shakespeare 
 prolonged the Renascence of the fifteenth century, the 
 Renascence of Leonardo and Raphael, into the seven- 
 teenth century, when Puritanism was in full career ; 
 and Shakespeare it is deeply significant died on the 
 day when Oliver Cromwell entered college at Cam- 
 bridge. And so, when Dante, in his Vision of 1 300, saw 
 the heights and the depths of Catholic Feudalism, he 
 was looking back over great movements which were 
 mighty forces a hundred years earlier. Just so, though 
 the thirteenth century contained within its bosom the 
 plainest proofs that the mediaeval world was ending, the 
 
A SURVEY OF THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY 157 
 
 flower, the brilliancy, the variety, the poetry, the soul of 
 the mediaeval world were never seen in so rich a glow as 
 in the thirteenth century, its last great effort. 
 
 In a brief review of each of the dominant movements 
 which give so profound a character to the thirteenth 
 century as a whole, one begins naturally with the 
 central movement of all the Church. The thirteenth 
 century was the era of the culmination, the over-strain- 
 ing, and then the shameful defeat of the claim made by 
 the Church of Rome to a moral and spiritual autocracy 
 in Christendom. There are at least five Popes in that 
 one hundred years Innocent III., Gregory IX., 
 Innocent IV., Gregory X., and Boniface VIII. whose 
 characters impress us with a sense of power or of 
 astounding desire of power, whose lives are romances 
 and dreams, and whose careers are amongst the most 
 instructive in history. He who would understand the 
 Middle Ages must study from beginning to end the long 
 and crowded Pontificate of Innocent III. In genius, in 
 commanding nature, in intensity of character, in univer- 
 sal energy, in aspiring designs, Innocent III. has few 
 rivals in the fourteen centuries of the Roman Pontiffs, 
 and few superiors in any age on any throne in the 
 world. His eighteen years of rule, from 1198 to 1216, 
 were one long effort, for the moment successful, and in 
 part deserving success, to enforce on the kings and 
 peoples of Europe a higher morality, respect for the 
 spiritual mission of the Church, and a sense of their 
 common civilisation. We feel that he is truly a great 
 man with a noble cause, when the Pope forces Philip 
 Augustus to take back the wife he had so insolently 
 cast off, when the Pope forces John to respect the rights 
 of all his subjects, laymen or churchmen, when the Pope 
 gives to England the best of her Primates, Stephen 
 
158 THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 Langton, the principal author of our Great Charter, 
 when the Pope accepts the potent enthusiasm of the 
 New Friars and sends them forth on their mission of 
 revivalism. 
 
 It is not necessary to enter on one of the most diffi- 
 cult problems in history to decide how far the develop- 
 ment and organisation of the Catholic Church in the 
 Middle Ages were worth the price that civilisation paid 
 in moral, intellectual, and in material loss. Still less 
 can we attempt to justify such Crusades as that which 
 established the Latin kingdom in Constantinople, or 
 the Crusade to crush the revolt of the Albigensian 
 heretics, and all the enormous assumptions of Innocent 
 in things temporal and things spiritual. But before we 
 decide that in the thirteenth century civilisation would 
 have been the gainer, if there had been no central Church 
 at all, let us count up all the great brains of the time, 
 with Aquinas and Dante at their head, all the great 
 statesmen, St. Louis, Blanche of Castile, in France ; 
 Simon de Montfort and Edward I., in England, and 
 Ferdinand III., in Spain ; Frederic II. and Rudolph of 
 Hapsburg, in the Empire, who might in affairs of state 
 often oppose Churchmen, but who felt that society itself 
 reposed on a well-ordered Church. 
 
 If the great attempt failed in the hands of Innocent 
 III., surely one of the finest brains and noblest natures 
 that Rome ever sent forth and fail it did on the whole, 
 except as a temporary expedient it could not succeed 
 with smaller men, when every generation made the 
 conditions of success more hopeless. The superhuman 
 pride of Gregory IX., the venerable pontiff who for 
 fourteen years defied the whole strength of the Emperor 
 Frederick II., seems to us to-day, in spite of his lofty 
 spirit, but to parody that of Hildebrand, of Alexander 
 
A SURVEY OF THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY 159 
 
 III., and Innocent III. And when we come to Inno- 
 cent IV. (1243-1264), the disturber of the peace of the 
 Empire, he is almost a forecast of Boniface VIII. And 
 Boniface himself (1294-1303), though his words were 
 more haughty than those of the mightiest of his pre- 
 decessors, though insatiable ambition and audacious 
 intrigue gave him some moments of triumph, ended 
 after nine years of desperate struggle in what the poet 
 calls ' the mockery, the vinegar, the gall of a new cruci- 
 fixion of the Vicar of Christ.' Read Dante, and see all 
 that a great spirit in the Middle Ages could still hope 
 from the Church and its chiefs all that made such 
 dreams a mockery and a delusion. 
 
 When Dante wrote, the Popes were already settled at 
 Avignon and the Church had entered upon one of its 
 worst eras. And as we follow his scathing indignation, 
 in the nineteenth canto of the Inferno, or in the twenty- 
 seventh of the Paradiso, we feel how utterly the vision 
 of Peter had failed to be realised on earth. But for one 
 hundred years before, all through the thirteenth century, 
 the writing on the wall may now be read, in letters of 
 fire. When Saladin forced the allied kings of Europe 
 to abandon the conquest of the Holy Sepulchre, and 
 Lion-hearted Richard turned back in despair (1192), 
 the Crusades, as military movements, ended. The later 
 Crusades of the thirteenth century were splendid acts of 
 folly, of anachronism, even crime. They were ' magni- 
 ficent, but not war' in any rational sense. It was 
 Europe that had to be protected against the Moslem 
 not Asia or Africa that was to be conquered. All 
 through the thirteenth century European civilisation 
 was enjoying the vast material and intellectual results 
 of the Crusades of the twelfth century. But to sail for 
 Jerusalem, Egypt, or Tunis, had then become, as the 
 
l6o THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 wise Joinville told St. Louis, a cruel neglect of duty at 
 home. 
 
 It was not merely in the exhaustion of the Crusading 
 zeal that the waning of the Catholic fervour was shown. 
 In the twelfth century there had been learned or in- 
 genious heretics. But the mark of the thirteenth 
 century is the rise of heretic sects, schismatic churches, 
 religious reformations, spreading deep down amongst 
 the roots of the people. We have the three distinct 
 religious movements which began to sap the orthodox 
 citadel, and which afterwards took such vast proportions 
 Puritanism, Mysticism, Scepticism. All of them take 
 form in the thirteenth century Waldenses, Albigenses, 
 Petrobussians, Poor Men, Anti-Ritualists, Anti-Sacer- 
 dotalists, Manichaeans, Gospel Christians, Ouietists, 
 Flagellants, Pastoureaux, fanatics of all orders. All 
 through the thirteenth century we have an intense fer- 
 ment of the religious exaltation, culminating in the 
 orthodox mysticism, the rivalries, the missions, the re- 
 vivalism, of the new allies of the Church, the Franciscans 
 and Dominicans, the Friars, or Mendicant Orders. 
 
 The thirteenth century saw the romantic rise, the 
 marvellous growth, and then the inevitable decay of the 
 Friars, the two orders whose careers form one of the 
 most fascinating and impressive stories in modern 
 history. The Franciscans, or Grey Friars, founded in 
 121 2, the Dominicans, or Black Friars, founded in 1216, 
 by the middle of the century had infused new life 
 throughout the Catholic world. By the end of the 
 century their power was spent, and they had begun to 
 be absorbed in the general life of the Church. It was 
 one of the great rallies of the Papal Church, perhaps of 
 all the rallies the most important, certainly the most 
 brilliant, most pathetic, most fascinating, the most rich 
 
A SURVEY OF THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY l6l 
 
 in poetry, in art, in devotion. For the mediaeval Church 
 of Rome, like the Empire of the Caesars at Rome, like 
 the Eastern Empire of Constantinople, like the Empire 
 of the Khali fs, which succeeded that, seems to subsist 
 for centuries after its epoch of zenith by a long series 
 of rallies, revivals, and new births out of almost hopeless 
 disorganisation and decay. 
 
 But the thirteenth century is not less memorable for 
 its political than for its spiritual history. And in this 
 field the history is that of new organisations, not the 
 dissolution of the old. The thirteenth century gave 
 Europe the nations as we now know them. France, 
 England, Spain, large parts of North and South Ger- 
 many, became nations, where they were previously 
 counties, duchies, and fiefs. Compare the map of 
 Europe at the end of the twelfth century, when Philip 
 Augustus was struggling with Richard L, when the 
 King of England was a more powerful ruler in France 
 than the so-called King of France in Paris, when Spain 
 was held by various groups of petty kinglets facing the 
 solid power of the Moors, compare this with the map of 
 Europe at the end of the thirteenth century, with Spain 
 constituted a kingdom under Ferdinand III. and Alfonso 
 X., France under Philip the Fair, and England under 
 Edward I. 
 
 At the very opening of the thirteenth century John 
 did England the inestimable service of losing her French 
 possessions. At the close of the century the greatest 
 of the Plantagenets finally annexed Wales to England 
 and began the incorporation of Scotland and Ireland. 
 Of the creators of England as a sovereign power in the 
 world, from Alfred to Chatham, between the names of 
 the Conqueror and Cromwell, assuredly that of Edward 
 I. is the most important As to France, the petty 
 
 L 
 
162 THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 counties which Philip Augustus inherited in 1180 had 
 become, in the days of Philip the Fair (1286-1314), the 
 most powerful nation in Europe. As a great European 
 force, the French nation dates from the age of Philip 
 Augustus, Blanche of Castile, her son Louis IX. (the 
 Saint), and the two Philips (ill. and IV.), the son and 
 grandson of St. Louis. The monarchy of France was 
 indeed created in the thirteenth century. All that went 
 before was preparation : all that came afterwards was 
 development. Almost as much may be said for England 
 and for Spain. 
 
 It was an age of great rulers. Indeed, we may doubt 
 if any hundred years of European history has been so 
 crowded with great statesmen and kings. In England, 
 Stephen Langton and the authors of our Great Charter 
 in 1215 ; William, Earl Mareschal, Simon de Montfort, 
 Earl of Leicester, and above all Edward I., great as 
 soldier, as ruler, as legislator as great when he yielded 
 as when he compelled. In France, Philip Augustus, a 
 king curiously like our Edward I. in his virtues as in 
 his faults, though earlier by three generations ; Blanche, 
 his son's wife, Regent of France ; St. Louis, her son ; 
 and St. Louis' grandson, the terrible, fierce, subtle, and 
 adroit Philip the Fair. Then on the throne of the 
 Empire, from 1220 to 1250, Frederick II., 'the world's 
 wonder,' one of the most brilliant characters of the 
 Middle Ages, whose life is a long romance, whose many- 
 sided endowments seemed to promise everything but 
 real greatness and abiding results. Next, after a genera- 
 tion, his successor, less brilliant but far more truly 
 great, Rudolph of Hapsburg, emperor from 1273 to 1291, 
 the founder of the Austrian dynasty, the ancestor of its 
 sovereigns, the parallel, I had almost said the equal, of 
 our own Edward I. In Spain, Ferdinand III. and his 
 
A SURVEY OF THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY 163 
 
 son, Alfonso X., whose reigns united gave Spain peace 
 and prosperity for fifty-four years (1230-1284). 
 
 How comes it that in this epoch lands so different as 
 Italy, Spain, France, England, and Germany, produce 
 rulers who, in all essentials as statesmen, are so closely 
 parallel in act, whilst widely different in character? 
 Frederick II., in nature, seems the antithesis of St. Louis, 
 so does Philip Augustus of Ferdinand III., our cultured 
 Edward I. of his martial contemporary, Rudolph of 
 Hapsburg. Yet these men, differing so entirely in 
 nature and in gifts, ruling men so different as those of 
 Sicily and Austria, Castile and England, all exercise the 
 same functions in the same way : all are great generals, 
 administrators, legislators, statesmen, founders of nations, 
 authors of constitutions, supporters of the Church, pro- 
 moters of learning. Clearly it is that their time is the 
 golden age of kings, an age when the social conditions 
 forced forth all the manhood and the genius of the born 
 ruler ; when the ruled were by habit, religion, and by 
 necessity eager to welcome the great king and cheerfully 
 helped him in his "task. Of them all, St. Louis is 
 certainly the most beautiful nature, Frederick II. the 
 most interesting personality, our Simon de Montfort 
 the most genuine patriot, our own Edward I. the most 
 creative mind, and he and Philip Augustus the kings 
 whose work was the most pregnant with permanent 
 results ; but we may find in a much ruder nature, in 
 Rudolph of Hapsburg, the simple, unwearied, warrior 
 chief, who finally turned the German kings from Italy to 
 the North, who never quarrelled with the Church, who so 
 sternly asserted the arm of law, and whose whole life 
 was an unbroken series of well-won triumphs the most 
 truly typical king of the thirteenth century. Frederick 
 II. and Edward I. are really in advance of their age ; 
 
164 THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 and St. Louis and Ferdinand ill. are saints and church- 
 men more than kings. 
 
 Together with the kings must be kept always in view 
 the base on which the power of the kings was founded 
 the growing greatness of the towns. There were two 
 allied forces which divided the inheritance of Feudalism 
 the monarchs on the one hand, the burghers on the 
 other. The thirteenth century is eminently the era of 
 the foundation of the great towns north of the Alps. 
 In France, in Spain, in England, in Burgundy, in 
 Flanders, and even we may say in Germany, the princes 
 never became strong but by alliance with the wealth, 
 the intelligence, the energy, of the cities. To the burghers 
 the kings represented civilisation, internal peace, good 
 government : to the kings the towns represented the 
 sinews of war, the material and intellectual sources of 
 their splendour, of their armies, their civil organisation. 
 Hence, in the thirteenth century, there grew in greatness, 
 side by side and in friendly alliance, the two powers 
 which, in later centuries, have fought out such obstinate 
 battles the monarchies and the people. And out of this 
 alliance, at once its condition and its instrument, there 
 grew up Cortes, Diets, States -General, Parliaments, 
 Charters, constitutional laws, codes, and ordinances. 
 
 It is true that in Italy, Spain, Provence, and Langue- 
 doc, we find rich trading towns as early as the First 
 Crusade, but it was not until the thirteenth century that 
 we can call any northern city an independent power, 
 with a large, wealthy, and proud population, a muni- 
 cipal life of its own, and a widely extended commerce. 
 By the end of the thirteenth century Europe is covered 
 with such towns Paris, London, Strassburg, Cologne, 
 Ghent, Rouen, Bordeaux, in the first line, the great 
 wool cities of East England, the ports of the South and 
 
A SURVEY OF THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY 165 
 
 West, the great river cities of France along the Loire, 
 the Rhone, the Garonne, the Seine, the rich, artistic, 
 laborious, and crowded cities of Flanders, the rich and 
 powerful cities on the Rhine from Basle down to Arn- 
 heim, the cities of the Danube, the Elbe, and the Baltic. 
 This is the age of the great confederation of the Rhine, 
 and the rise of the Hanseatic League ; for in Germany 
 and in Flanders, where the towns could not count on 
 the protection of a friendly and central monarchy, the 
 towns formed mutual leagues for protection and support 
 amongst themselves. It would need a volume to work 
 out this complex development. But we may take it 
 that, for Northern Europe, the thirteenth century is 
 the era of the definite establishment of rich, free, self- 
 governing municipalities. It is the flourishing era of 
 town charters, of city leagues, and of the systematic 
 establishment of a European commerce, north of the 
 Mediterranean, both inter-provincial and inter-national. 
 And out of these rich and teeming cities arose that 
 social power destined to such a striking career in the 
 next six centuries the middle class, a new order in the 
 State, whose importance rests on wealth, intelligence, 
 and organisation, not on birth or on arms. And out of 
 that middle class rose popular representation, election 
 by the commons, i.e., by communes, or corporate con- 
 stituencies, the third estate. The history of popular 
 representation in Europe would occupy a volume, or 
 many volumes : its conception, birth, and youth, fall 
 within the thirteenth century. 
 
 The Great Charter, which the barons, as real repre- 
 sentatives of the whole nation, wrested from John in 
 1215, did not, it is true, contain any scheme of popular 
 representation ; but it asserted the principle, and it laid 
 down canons of public law which led directly to popular 
 
l66 THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 representation and a parliamentary constitution. The 
 Great Charter has been talked about for many centuries 
 in vague superlatives of praise, by those who had little 
 precise or accurate knowledge of it. But now that our 
 knowledge of it is full and exact, we see that its import- 
 ance was in no way exaggerated, and perhaps was hardly 
 understood ; and we find it hard adequately to express 
 our admiration of its wise, just, and momentous policy. 
 The Great Charter of 1215 led in a direct line to the 
 complete and developed Parliament of 1295. And 
 Bishop Stubbs has well named the interval between the 
 two, the eighty years of struggle for a political consti- 
 tution. The Charter of John contains the principle of 
 taxation through the common council of the realm. 
 From the very first year after it representative councils 
 appear; first from counties; then, in 1254, we have a 
 regular Parliament from shires ; in 1264, after the battle 
 of Lewes, Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester, sum- 
 moned two discreet representatives from towns and 
 cities by writ ; in 1273, Edward I. summoned what was 
 in effect a Parliament ; and, after several Parliaments 
 summoned in intervening years, we have the first com- 
 plete and finally constituted Parliament in 1295. 
 
 But our own, the greatest and most permanent of 
 Parliaments, was by no means the earliest. Represen- 
 tatives of cities and boroughs had come to the Cortes 
 of Castile and of Arragon in the twelfth century ; early 
 in the thirteenth century Frederick II. summoned them 
 to general courts in Sicily ; in the middle of the century 
 the towns sent deputies to the German Diets ; in 1277, 
 the commons and towns swear fealty to Rudolph of 
 Hapsburg ; in 1291 was founded in the mountains of 
 Schwytz that Swiss confederation which has just cele- 
 brated its 6ooth anniversary ; and, in 1 302, Philip the 
 
A SURVEY OF THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY 167 
 
 Fair summoned the States-General to back him in his 
 desperate duel with Boniface vm. Thus, seven years 
 after Edward I. had called to Westminster that first 
 true Parliament which has had there so great a history 
 over 600 years, Philip called together to Notre Dame 
 at Paris the three estates the clergy, the baronage, and 
 the commons. So clear is it that the thirteenth century 
 called into being that momentous element of modern 
 civilisation, the representation of the people in Parlia- 
 ment. 
 
 Side by side with Parliaments there grew up the 
 power of the law courts : along with constitutions, civil 
 jurisprudence. Our Edward I. is often called, and 
 called truly, the English Justinian. The authority of 
 the decisions of the courts, the development of law by 
 direct legislation i.e., case-law as we know it, legisla- 
 tive amendment of the law as we know it first begin 
 with the reign of Edward I. From that date to this' 
 hour we have an unbroken sequence of development in 
 our judicial, as much as in our parliamentary, history. 
 An even more momentous transformation of law took 
 place throughout France. There the kings created the 
 powerful order of the jurists, and ruled at home and 
 abroad through them. In the legislation of Philip 
 Augustus, the translation under him of the Corpus Juris 
 into French, the famous Etablissements of St. Louis, at 
 the middle of the century, the growing importance of 
 the Parlements, or judicial councils, under Philip the 
 Fair at the end of the century, we have the first resur- 
 rection of the Roman civil law to fight out its long con- 
 test with the feudal law, which has led to its ultimate 
 supremacy in the Civil Code of our day. 
 
 These, however, are but the external facts forming 
 the framework within which the moral and intellectual 
 
1 68 THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 ferment of the thirteenth century moved and worked ; 
 and in grouping in a few paragraphs the well-known 
 outlines of the political events of that age we are merely 
 tracing the skeleton of the living forces of the time. In 
 many ways the thirteenth century created by anticipa- 
 tion much of the Renascence that we associate with the 
 fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It was a revival or 
 new era, deeper, purer, more constructive than the latter 
 movement, which we commonly speak of as Renaissance. 
 This superfluous Gallicism is a term which we should 
 do well to drop ; for it suggests a national character to 
 a European movement ; it implies a new birth, in the 
 spirit of mendacious vanity, so characteristic of the age 
 of Cellinis and Aretinos ; and it expresses the negative 
 side of what was largely a mere evolution of the past. 
 As a creative movement, the profound uprising of 
 intellect and soul concentrated in Dante was a far 
 nobler and more potent effort than any form of classical 
 revival. The movement we associate with the epoch of 
 Leo X., of Francis I., and Charles V. was only one of the 
 series of European efforts to realise a more complete 
 type of moral and social life ; and of them all it was 
 the one most deeply tainted with the spirit of vanity, 
 of impurity, and of anarchy. Of all the epochs of effort 
 after a new life, that of the age of Aquinas, Roger Bacon, 
 St. Francis, St. Louis, Giotto, and Dante is the most 
 purely spiritual, the most really constructive, and indeed 
 the most truly philosophic. 
 
 Between the epoch of Charlemagne and the revolu- 
 tionary reconstruction of the present century we may 
 count at least four marked periods of concerted effort in 
 Western Europe to found a broader and higher type of 
 society. European civilisation advances, no doubt, in 
 a way which is most irregular, and yet in the long run 
 
A SURVEY OF THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY 169 
 
 continuous. But we may still trace very distinct periods 
 of special activity and common upheaval. One of these 
 periods is the age of Hildebrand, the great Norman 
 chiefs, Lanfranc, Anselm, and the first Crusade. The 
 second period is that which opens with Innocent III. 
 and closes with Dante. The third is the classical revival 
 from Louis XI. to Charles V. The fourth is the philo- 
 sophic and scientific movement of the age of Voltaire, 
 Diderot, and Hume, which preceded the great revolu- 
 tionary wars. The first two movements, in the golden 
 age of Popes and Crusades, were sincere attempts to 
 reform society on a Catholic and Feudal basis. They 
 did not succeed, but they were both inspired with great 
 and beautiful ideals. And the movement of the 
 thirteenth century was more humane, more intellectual, 
 more artistic, more original, and more poetic than that 
 of the eleventh century. The so-called Renaissance, or 
 Humanistic Revival, was a time of extraordinary bril- 
 liancy and energy ; but it was avowedly based on insur- 
 rection and destruction, and it was an utterly premature 
 attempt to found an intellectual humanism without either 
 real humanity or sound scientific knowledge. And the 
 age of Voltaire, though it had both humanity and science, 
 was even more destructive in its aim ; for it erected 
 negation into its own creed, and proposed to regenerate 
 mankind by ' stamping out the infamy ' (of religion). 
 
 It follows then that, if we are to select any special 
 period for the birth of a regenerate and developed 
 modern society, we may take the age of Dante, 1265- 
 1321, as that which witnessed the mighty transforma- 
 tion from a world which still trusted in the faith of a 
 Catholic and Feudal constitution of society to a world 
 which was teeming with ideas and wants incompatible 
 with Catholic or Feudal systems altogether. The whole 
 
170 THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 thirteenth century was crowded with creative forces in 
 philosophy, art, poetry, and statesmanship as rich as 
 those of the Humanist Renaissance. And if we are 
 accustomed to look on them as so much more limited 
 and rude, it is because we forget how very few and poor 
 were their resources and their instruments. In creative 
 genius, Giotto is the peer, if not the superior, of Raphael. 
 Dante had all the qualities of his three chief successors 
 and very much more besides. It is a tenable view 
 that, in pure inventive fertility and in imaginative range, 
 those vast composite creations the cathedrals of the 
 thirteenth century in all their wealth of architecture, 
 statuary, painted glass, enamels, embroideries, and inex- 
 haustible decorative work, may be set beside the entire 
 painting of the sixteenth century. Albert and Aquinas, 
 in philosophic range, had no peer until we come down 
 to Descartes. Nor was Roger Bacon surpassed in 
 versatile audacity of genius and in true encyclopaedic 
 grasp, by any thinker between him and his namesake, 
 the Chancellor. In statesmanship, and all the qualities 
 of the born leader of men, we can only match the great 
 chiefs of the thirteenth century by comparing them with 
 the greatest names three or even four centuries later. 
 
 The thirteenth century was indeed an abortive revival. 
 It was a failure : but a splendid failure. Men as great 
 as any the world has known in thought, in art, in action, 
 profoundly believed that society could be permanently 
 organised on Catholic and Feudal lines. It was an 
 illusion ; but it was neither an unworthy nor an inex- 
 cusable illusion ; for there were great resources, both in 
 Catholic and in Feudal powers. And it was not pos- 
 sible for the greatest minds, after the thousand years of 
 interval which had covered Europe since the age of the 
 Antonines, to understand how vast were the defects of 
 
A SURVEY OF THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY 17 1 
 
 their own age in knowledge, in the arts of life, and in 
 social organisation. They had no ancient world, or 
 what we call to-day, the Revival of Learning ; they had 
 no real science ; and even the ordinary commonplaces 
 of every Greek and Roman were to them a profound 
 mystery. What was even worse, they did not know 
 how much they needed to know : they had no measure 
 of their own ignorance. And thus even intellects like 
 those of Albert, Aquinas, and Dante could still dream 
 of a final co-ordination of human knowledge on the 
 lines of some subjective recasting of the Catholic 
 verities. And they naturally imagined that, after all, 
 society could be saved by some regeneration of the 
 Church though we now see that this was far less 
 possible than to expect Pope Boniface eventually to 
 turn out a saint, like Bernard of Clairvaux or Francis 
 of Assisi. 
 
 And just as the men of intellect still believed that it 
 was possible to recast the Catholic scheme, so men of 
 action still believed it possible to govern nations on the 
 Feudal scheme, and with the help of the feudal mag- 
 nates. For a time, all through the thirteenth century, 
 men of very noble character or of commanding genius 
 did manage to govern in this way, by the help first of 
 the churchmen, then of the growing townships, and by 
 constantly exhausting their own barons in foreign expe- 
 ditions. Philip Augustus, Blanche, St. Louis, and Philip 
 the Fair, held their own by a combination of high 
 qualities and fortunate conditions. In England the 
 infamous John and his foolish son forced the feudal 
 chiefs to become statesmen themselves. Edward I., 
 Rudolph of Hapsburg, Albert of Austria, Henry of 
 Luxemburg, succeeded in marshalling their fierce 
 baronial squadrons. But it could only be done by 
 
1/2 THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 extraordinary skill and fortune, and even then but for 
 a short time. After them, for nearly two hundred 
 years, Europe was delivered over to an orgie of feudal 
 anarchy. The dreadful Hundred Years' War between 
 France and England, the wars of succession, the Wars 
 of the Roses, the dismemberment of France, the con- 
 fusion of Spain, the decadence of the Empire ensued. 
 
 Thus the political history of the fourteenth and 
 fifteenth centuries is a record of bloodshed and anarchy, 
 until men like the grim Louis XL, Ferdinand V. and 
 Charles v., and the Tudors in England, finally succeeded 
 in mastering Feudalism by the aid of the middle classes 
 and middle-class statesmen. But, as neither middle 
 class nor middle-class statesmen existed in the thirteenth 
 century, the kings were forced to do the best they 
 could with their feudal resources. What they did was 
 often very good, and sometimes truly wonderful. It 
 could not permanently succeed ; but its very failure was 
 a grand experiment. And thus, whether in the spiritual 
 and intellectual world, or in the political and social 
 world, the thirteenth century the last great effort of 
 the Middle Ages was doomed to inevitable disappoint- 
 ment, because the preceding thousand years of history 
 had deprived it of the only means by which success was 
 possible. 
 
 The unmistakable sign that the real force of 
 Catholicism was exhausted may be read in the transfer 
 of the intellectual leadership from the monasteries to 
 the schools, from the churchmen to the doctors. And 
 this transfer was thoroughly effected in the thirteenth 
 century. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries the 
 spiritual and philosophic guidance of mankind was in 
 the hands of true monks. Clugny, Clairvaux, St. Denis, 
 Bee, Canterbury, Merton, Malmesbury, Glastonbury, and 
 
A SURVEY OF THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY 173 
 
 Croyland, sent out teachers and rulers. St. Bernard 
 managed to silence Abailard. But in the thirteenth 
 century it is not the monasteries but the universities 
 that hold up the torch. Paris, Oxford, Montpellier, 
 and the like, were wholly secular schools ; for, though 
 the leading doctors and professors of this age are still 
 nominally churchmen, and even monks, their whole 
 moral and mental attitude, and the atmosphere of their 
 schools, are strictly secular, and not monastic. Within 
 two generations the Dominican and Franciscan houses, 
 founded at the beginning of the century in such a whirl- 
 wind of ecstatic devotion, became celebrated schools of 
 learning and secular education, so that Aquinas has 
 almost as little of the missionary passion of St. Dominic 
 as Roger Bacon has of the mystic tenderness of St. 
 Francis. It is a fact of deep significance that, within a 
 generation of the foundation of the Mendicant Orders, 
 the Descartes and the Bacon of the thirteenth century 
 were both on the roll of the Friars. So rapidly did 
 mystic theology tend to develop into free inquiry. It 
 would be hard to find anything more utterly unlike the 
 saintly ideal of monasticism than were Paris and Oxford 
 at the end of the thirteenth century. Its whole in- 
 tellectual character may be measured by the light of 
 these two famous seminaries of the new thought. 
 
 It was the great age of the schools we call universities, 
 for though those of Italy belong to an earlier age, the 
 thirteenth century gave full stature to the universities 
 of Paris, and of Oxford, of Orleans, Toulouse, and 
 Montpellier, of Cordova, Seville, and Toledo. That of 
 Paris received from Philip Augustus in 1215 (the year 
 of our Great Charter) her formal constitution, and all 
 through the thirteenth century her ' nations ' of twenty 
 thousand students formed the main intellectual centre 
 
174 THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 of Europe. The University of Oxford was hardly 
 second to that of Paris ; and though the history of the 
 Oxford schools is in its origin obscure, and even local, 
 in the thirteenth century we can trace the definite 
 constitution of the university and the momentous founda- 
 tion of the colleges, when Walter de Merton, in the 
 reign of Edward I., gave statutes to Merton College. 
 Thus the origin of our great English university is almost 
 exactly coeval with the origin of our English Parlia- 
 ment. 
 
 The same age also witnessed the revival of rational 
 philosophy after its long sleep of a thousand years. 
 Intellects quite as powerful as those of the Greek 
 thinkers took up the task of constructing a harmony of 
 general ideas on the ground where it had been left by 
 the Alexandrine successors of Aristotle and Plato. 
 The best teachers of the thirteenth century had con- 
 ceptions and aims very far broader and more real than 
 those of Abailard, of William of Champeaux, or John 
 of Salisbury in the twelfth century, who were little 
 more than theological logicians. The thirteenth cen- 
 tury had an instrument of its own, at least as important 
 to human progress as the classical revival of the 
 fifteenth century. This was the recovery in substance 
 of the works of Aristotle. By the middle of the 
 thirteenth century the entire works of Aristotle were 
 more or less sufficiently known. For the most part 
 they were translated from the Arabic, where they had 
 lain hid for six centuries, like papyri discovered in an 
 Egyptian mummy case. They were made known by 
 Alexander Hales at Paris, by Albert the Great and 
 Aquinas, his pupil and successor. Albert of Cologne, 
 the ' Universal Doctor,' as they called him, might him- 
 self, by virtue of his encyclopaedic method, be styled 
 
A SURVEY OF THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY 175 
 
 the Aristotle of the thirteenth century, as St. Bona- 
 ventura, the ' Seraphic Doctor,' the mystical meta- 
 physician, may be called the Plato of the thirteenth 
 century. Roger Bacon, the Oxford Franciscan, is even 
 yet but imperfectly known to us, though he is often 
 compared, not unfavourably, with his famous namesake, 
 the author of the Novum Organum. But, in spite of 
 the amazing ingenuity of the founder of natural philo- 
 sophy in modern Europe, we can hardly hesitate to 
 place above all his contemporaries the ' Angelic 
 Doctor,' Thomas Aquinas, the Descartes of the 
 thirteenth century, and beyond doubt the greatest 
 philosophic mind between Aristotle and Descartes. 
 
 Albert, Roger, ' Thomas, combined, as did Aristotle 
 and Descartes, the science of nature with the philosophy 
 of thought ; and, though we look back to the Opus 
 Majus of Roger Bacon with wonder and admiration for 
 his marvellous anticipatory guesses of modern science, 
 we cannot doubt that Aquinas was truly the mightier 
 intellect. Roger Bacon was, indeed, four centuries in 
 advance of his age on his own age and on succeeding 
 ages he produced no influence at all. But Aquinas was 
 ' the master of those who know ' for all Christian 
 thinkers from his death, in 1274, until the age of 
 Francis Bacon and Descartes. Roger Bacon, like 
 Leonardo da Vinci, or Giordano Bruno, or Spinoza, 
 belongs to the order of intellectual pioneers, who are 
 too much in advance of their age and of its actual 
 resources to promote civilisation as they might do, or 
 even to make the most of their own extraordinary 
 powers. 
 
 An age which united aspiring intellect, passionate 
 devotion, and constructive power, naturally created a 
 new type of sacred art. The pointed architecture, that 
 
1/6 THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 we call Gothic, had its rise, its development, its highest 
 splendour in the thirteenth century, to which we owe 
 all that is most lovely in the churches of Chartres, 
 Amiens, Reims, Paris, Bourges, Strassburg, Cologne, 
 Burgos, Toledo, Westminster, Salisbury, and Lincoln. 
 It is true that there are some traces of the pointed style 
 in France in the twelfth century, at St. Denis, at Sens, 
 and at Laon ; but the true glories of this noble art 
 belong, in France, to the reigns of Philip Augustus and 
 of St. Louis ; in England, to those of Henry III. and 
 Edward I. In these two countries we must seek the 
 origin of this wonderful creation of human art, of which 
 Chartres, Amiens, and Westminster are the central 
 examples. These glorious fanes of the thirteenth century 
 were far more than works of art : they were at once 
 temples, national monuments, museums, schools, musical 
 academies, and parliament halls, where the whole people 
 gathered to be trained in every form of art, in all kinds 
 of knowledge, and in all modes of intellectual cultiva- 
 tion. They were the outgrowth of the whole civilisation 
 of their age, in a manner so complete and intense, that 
 its like was never before seen, except on the Acropolis 
 of Athens, in the age of ^ischylus and Pericles. It is 
 not enough to recall the names of the master masons 
 Robert de Luzarches, Robert de Coucy, Erwin of Stein- 
 bach, and Pierre de Montereau. These vast temples are 
 the creation of generations of men and the embodiment 
 of entire epochs ; and he who would know the Middle 
 Ages should study in detail every carved figure, every 
 painted window, each canopy, each relief, each portal 
 in Amiens, or Chartres, Reims, Bourges, Lincoln, or 
 Salisbury, and he will find revealed to him more than 
 he can read in a thousand books. 
 
 Obviously the thirteenth century is the great age of 
 
A SURVEY OF THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY 177 
 
 architecture the branch of art which of all the arts of 
 form is at once the most social, the most comprehensive, 
 and the most historic. Great buildings include sculpture, 
 painting, and all the decorative arts together ; they 
 require the co-operation of an entire people ; and they 
 are, in a peculiar manner, characteristic of their age. 
 The special arts of form are more associated with 
 individual genius. These, as was natural, belong to 
 centuries later than the thirteenth. But, even in the 
 thirteenth, sculpture gave us the peopled portals and the 
 exquisite canopies of our northern cathedrals, the early 
 palaces of Venice, and the carvings of Nicolas and John 
 of Pisa, which almost anticipate Ghiberti and Donatello. 
 And in painting, Cimabue opens in this century the 
 long roll of Italian masters, and Giotto was already 
 a youth of glorious promise, before the century was 
 closed. 
 
 The literature of the thirteenth century does not, in 
 the strict sense of the term, stand forth with such 
 special brillancy as its art, its thought, and its political 
 activity. As in most epochs of profound stirring of 
 new ideas and of great efforts after practical objects, 
 the energy of the age was not devoted to the composi- 
 tion of elaborate works. It was natural that Dante 
 should be a century later than Barbarossa and Innocent, 
 and that Petrarch of Vaucluse should be a century later 
 than Francis of Assisi. But the thirteenth century was 
 amply represented, both in poetry, romance, and prose 
 history. All of these trace their fountain-heads to an 
 earlier age, and all of them were fully developed in a 
 later age. But French prose may be said to have first 
 taken form in the chronicle of Villehardouin at the 
 opening of the century, and the chronicle of Joinville at 
 its close. The same century also added to the Catholic 
 
 M 
 
i;8 THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 Hymnal some of the most powerful pieces in that 
 glorious Anthology the Dies Irce, the Stabat Mater, 
 the grand hymns of Aquinas, of Bonaventura, and of 
 Thomas of Celano. It produced also that rich repertory 
 of devotional story, the Golden Legend of Voragine. It 
 was, moreover, the thirteenth century which produced 
 the main part of the Roman de la Rose, the favourite 
 reading of the Middle Ages, some of the best forms of 
 the Arthurian cycle, Rutebceuf and the French lyrists, 
 some of the most brilliant of the Troubadours, Sordello, 
 Brunetto Latini, Guido Cavalcanti, and the precursors 
 and associates of Dante. 
 
 As to Dante himself, it is not easy to place him in a 
 survey of the thirteenth century. In actual date and in 
 typical expression he belongs to it, and yet he does not 
 belong to it. The century itself has a transitional, an 
 ambiguous character. And Dante, like it, has a transi- 
 tional and double office. He is the poet, the prophet, 
 the painter of the Middle Ages. And yet, in so many 
 things, he anticipates the modern mind and modern 
 art. In actual date, the last year of the thirteenth 
 century is the 'middle term' of the poet's life, his 
 thirty-fifth year. Some of his most exquisite work was 
 already produced, and his whole mind was grown to 
 maturity. On the other hand, every line of the Divine 
 Comedy was actually written in the fourteenth century, 
 and the poet lived in it for twenty years. Nor was the 
 entire vision complete until near the poet's death in 
 1321. In spirit, in design, in form, this great creation 
 has throughout this double character. By memory, by 
 inner soul, by enthusiasm, Dante seems to dwell with 
 the imperial chiefs of Hohenstaufen, with Francis and 
 Dominic Bernard and Aquinas. He paints the Catholic 
 and Feudal world ; he seems saturated with the Catholic 
 
A SURVEY OF THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY 179 
 
 and Feudal sentiment. And yet he deals with popes, 
 bishops, Church, and conclaves with the audacious in- 
 tellectual freedom of a Paris dialectician or an Oxford 
 doctor. Between the lines of the great Catholic poem 
 we can read the death-sentence of Catholic Church and 
 Feudal hierarchy. Like all great artists, Dante paints 
 a world which only subsisted in ideal and in memory, 
 just as Spenser and Shakespeare transfigured in their 
 verse a humanistic and romantic society such as had 
 long disappeared from the region of fact. And for this 
 reason, and for others, it were better to regard the sub- 
 lime Dies Ir<z, which the Florentine wanderer chanted 
 in his latter years over the grave of the Middle Ages, 
 as belonging in its inner spirit to a later time, and as 
 being- in reality the dawn of modern poetry. 
 
 In Dante, as in Giotto, in Frederick II., in Edward I., 
 in Roger Bacon, we may hear the trumpet which sum- 
 moned the Middle Ages into the modern world. The 
 true spirits of the thirteenth century, still Catholic and 
 Feudal, are Innocent III., St. Francis, Stephen Langton, 
 Grossetete,Aquinas,Bonaventura,and Albert of Cologne; 
 Philip Augustus, St. Louis, the Barons of Runnymede, 
 and Simon de Montfort ; the authors of the Golden 
 Legend and the Catholic Hymns, the Doctors of Paris, 
 Oxford, and Bologna ; the builders of Amiens, Notre 
 Dame, Lincoln, and Westminster. 
 
CHAPTER VI 
 
 WHAT THE REVOLUTION OF 1789 DID 1 
 
 ' Tout ce que je vois, jette les semences d'une revolution qui arrivera iniman- 
 quablement. . . . Les Fran9ais arrivent tard 4 tout, mais cnfin ils arrivent. 
 . . . Alors, ce sera un beau tapage. Les jeunes gens sont bien heureux ; ils 
 verront de belles choses.' VOLTAIRE. 
 
 THE movement known as the Revolution of 1789 was 
 a transformation not a convulsion ; it was construc- 
 tive even more than destructive ; and if it was in out- 
 ward manifestation a chaotic revolution, in its inner 
 spirit it was an organic evolution. It was a movement 
 in no sense local, accidental, temporary, or partial ; it 
 was not simply, nor even mainly, a political movement. 
 It was an intellectual and religious, a moral, social, and 
 economic movement, before it was a political movement, 
 and even more than it was a political movement. 
 
 If it is French in form, it is European in essence. It 
 belongs to modern history as a whole quite as much as 
 to the eighteenth century in France. Its germs began 
 centuries earlier than the generation of 1789, and its 
 activity will long outlast the generation of 1889. It is 
 not an episode of frenzy in the life of a single nation. 
 In all its deeper elements it is a condensation of the 
 history of mankind, a repertory of all social and political 
 problems, the latest and most complex of all the great 
 crises through which our race has passed. 
 
 1 Fortnightly Review, vol. xlv. N.s. June 1889. 
 
WHAT THE REVOLUTION OF 1789 DID l8l 
 
 Let us avoid misunderstanding of what we are now 
 speaking. Most assuredly the close of the eighteenth 
 century in France displayed a convulsion, a frenzy, a 
 chaos such as the world's history has not often equalled. 
 There was folly, crime, waste, destruction, confusion, 
 and horror of stupendous proportions, and of all imagin- 
 able forms. There was the Terror, the Festival of 
 Reason, the Reaction, and all the delirium, the orgy, 
 the extravagance, which give brilliancy to small his- 
 torians and serve as rhetoric to petty politicians. 
 Assuredly the revolution closed in with most ghastly 
 surprises to the philanthropists and philosophers who 
 entered on it in 1789 with so light a heart. Assuredly 
 it has bequeathed to the statesmen and the people of 
 our century problems of portentous difficulty and 
 number. But we are speaking now neither of '93 nor 
 of '95, nor of '99, of no local or special incident, of no 
 single event, nor of political forms. We are in this 
 essay dealing exclusively with ' the ideas of '89,' with 
 the movement which at Versailles, on 5th May 1789, 
 took outward and visible shape. And we are about to 
 deal with it in its deeper, social, permanent, and human 
 side, not in its transitory and material side. The Seine, 
 the Loire, and the Rhone have washed away the blood 
 which once defiled their streams, the havoc caused by 
 the orgies of anarchy has been effaced, years make 
 fainter the memory of crimes and follies, of revenge 
 and jealousy. But the course of generations still 
 deepens the meaning of ' the ideas of '89,' of the social, 
 intellectual, economic new birth which then received 
 official recognition, opening in a conscious and popular 
 form the reformation that, in a spontaneous form, had 
 long been brooding in so many generous hearts and 
 profound brains. 
 
182 THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 No reading of merely French history, no study of the 
 reign of Louis XVI. by itself, can explain this great 
 movement no political history, no narrative of events, 
 no account of any special institution. Neither the 
 degeneration of the monarchy, nor the corruption of 
 the nobility, nor the disorder of the administration, nor 
 the barbarism of the feudal law, nor the decay of the 
 Church, nor the vices of society, nor the teaching of 
 any school, nor all of these together are adequate to 
 explain the revolution. They are enough to account 
 for the confusion, waste, conflict, and fury of the con- 
 test i.e. for the explosion. But they do not explain 
 how it is that hardly anything was set up in France 
 between 1789 and 1799 which had not been previously 
 discussed and prepared, that between 1789 and 1799 
 an immense body of new institutions and reformed 
 methods of social life were firmly planted in such a 
 way that they have borne fruit far and wide in France 
 and through Europe. Nor do any of these special 
 causes just enumerated suffice to explain the passion, 
 the contagious faith, the almost religious fanaticism 
 which was the inner strength of the revolution and the 
 source of its inexhaustible activity. What we call the 
 French Revolution of 1789, was really a new phase of 
 civilisation announcing its advent in form. It had the 
 character of religious zeal because it was a movement 
 of the human race towards a completer humanity. 
 
 Rhetoricians, poets, and preachers have accustomed 
 us too long to dwell on the lurid side of the movement, 
 on its follies, crimes, and failures ; they have overrated 
 the relative importance of the catastrophe, and by pro- 
 fuse pictures of the horrors, they have drawn off atten- 
 tion from its solid and enduring fruits. In the midst of 
 the agony it was natural that Burke, in the sunset of his 
 
WHAT THE REVOLUTION OF 1789 DID 1^3 
 
 judgment, should denounce it. But it was a misfortune 
 for the last generation that the purple mantle of Burke 
 should have fallen on a prophet, who was not a states- 
 man but a man of letters, who, with all Burke's passion 
 and prejudice, had but little of his philosophic power, 
 none of his practical sagacity, none of the great Whig's 
 experience of affairs and of men. The ' universal bon- 
 fire ' theory, the ' grand suicide ' view, the ' chaos-come- 
 again ' of a former generation, are seen to be ridiculous 
 in ours. The movement of 1789 was far less the final 
 crash of an effete system than it was the new birth of a 
 greater system, or rather of the irresistible germs of a 
 greater system. The contemporaries of Tacitus, Trajan, 
 and Marcus Aurelius could see nothing but ruin in the 
 superstition of the Galileans, just as the contemporaries 
 of Decius, Julian, and Justinian saw nothing but bar- 
 barism in the Goths, the Franks, and the Arabs. 
 
 The year 1789, more definitely than any other date 
 marks any other transition, marks the close of a society 
 which had existed for some thousands of years as a 
 consistent whole, a society more or less based upon 
 military force, intensely imbued with the spirit of heredi- 
 tary right, bound up with ideas of theological sanction, 
 sustained by a scheme of supramundane authority ; a 
 society based upon caste, on class, on local distinctions 
 and personal privilege, rooted in inequality, political, 
 social, material, and moral ; a society of which the hope 
 of salvation was the maintenance of the status quo, and 
 of which the Ten Commandments were Privilege. And 
 the same year, 1789, saw the official installation of a 
 society which was essentially based on peace, the creed 
 of which was industry, equality, progress ; a society 
 where change was the evidence of life, the end of which 
 was social welfare, and the means social co-operation 
 
1 84 THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 and human equity. Union, communion, equality, equity, 
 merit, labour, justice, consolidation, fraternity such 
 were the devices and symbols of the new era. It is 
 therefore with justice that modern Europe regards the 
 date 1789 as a date that marks a greater evolution in 
 human history more distinctly than, perhaps, any other 
 single date which could be named between the reign of 
 the first Pharaoh and the reign of Victoria. 
 
 One of the cardinal pivots in human history we call 
 this epoch, and not at all a French local crisis. The 
 proof of this is complete. All the nations of Europe, 
 and indeed the people of America, contributed their 
 share to the movement, and more or less partook in the 
 movement themselves. It was hailed as a new dispen- 
 sation by men of various race ; and each nation in turn 
 more or less added to the movement and adopted some 
 element of the movement. The intellectual and social 
 upheaval, which for generations had been preparing the 
 movement, was common to the enlightened spirits of 
 Europe and also to the Transatlantic Continent. The 
 effects of the movement have been shared by all Europe, 
 and the distant consequences of its action are visible 
 in Europe to the third and the fourth generations. And 
 lastly, all the cardinal features of the movement of 1789 
 are in no sense locally French, or of special national 
 value. They are equally applicable to Europe, and 
 indeed to advanced human societies everywhere. They 
 appeal to men primarily, and to Frenchmen secondarily. 
 They relate to the general society of Europe, and not 
 to specific national institutions. They concern the 
 transformation of a feudal, hereditary, privileged, 
 authoritative society, based on antique right, into a 
 republican, industrial, equalised, humanised society, 
 based on a scientific view of the Common Weal. But 
 
WHAT THE REVOLUTION OF 1789 DID 185 
 
 this is not a national idea, a French conception of local 
 application. It is European, or rather human. And 
 thus, however disastrous to France may have been the 
 travail of the movement officially proclaimed in 1789, 
 from a European and a human point of view it has 
 abiding and pregnant issues. May we profit by its good 
 whilst we are spared its evil. 
 
 Obviously, the salient form of the revolution was 
 French, ultra-French ; entirely unique and of inimitable 
 peculiarity in some of its worst as well as its best sides. 
 The delirium, the extravagances, the hysterics, and the 
 brutalities which succeeded one another in a series of 
 strange tragi-comic tableaux from 1789 till 1795, were 
 most intensely French, though even they, from Caps of 
 Liberty to Festival of Pikes, have had a singular fascina- 
 tion for the revolutionists of every race. But the 
 picturesque and melodramatic accessories of the re- 
 volution have been so copiously over-coloured by the 
 scene-painters and stage-carpenters of history, that we 
 are too often apt to forget how essentially European the 
 revolution was in all its deeper meanings. 
 
 A dozen kings and statesmen throughout Europe 
 were, in a way, endeavouring to enter on the same path 
 as Louis XVI. with Turgot and Necker. In spite of the 
 contrast between the government of England and the 
 government of France, between the condition of Eng- 
 lish industry and that of France, Walpole and Pitt offer 
 many striking points of analogy with Turgot and 
 Necker. The intellectual commerce between England 
 and France from (let us say) 1725 to 1790 is one of the 
 most memorable episodes in the history of the human 
 mind. The two generations which followed the visit of 
 Voltaire to England formed an intellectual alliance be- 
 tween the leading spirits of our two nations : an alliance 
 
1 86 THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 of amity, offensive and defensive, scientific, economic, 
 philosophical, social, and political, such as had not been 
 seen since the days of the Greco-Roman education or 
 the cosmopolitan fellowship of mediaeval universities. 
 Voltaire, Montesquieu, Hume, Adam Smith, Franklin, 
 Turgot, Quesnay, Diderot, Condorcet, d'Argenson, 
 Gibbon,Washington, Priestley,Bentham even Rousseau, 
 Mabli, Mirabeau, and Jefferson belonged to a Republic 
 of Ideas, where national character and local idiosyncrasy 
 could indeed be traced in each, but where the essential 
 patriotism of humanity is dominant and supreme. 
 
 In England, Pitt ; in Prussia, Frederick ; in Austria, 
 Joseph ; in Tuscany, Leopold ; in Portugal, Pombal ; 
 in Spain, d'Aranda ; all laboured to an end, essentially 
 similiar, in reforming the incoherent, unequal, and obso- 
 lete state of the law ; in rectifying abuses in finance ; 
 in bringing some order into administration, in abolishing 
 some of the burdens and chains on industry ; in im- 
 proving the material condition of their states ; in curb- 
 ing the more monstrous abuses of privilege ; and in 
 founding at least the germs of what we call modern 
 civilised government. Some of these things were done 
 ill, some well, most of them tentatively and with a 
 naYve ignorance of the tremendous forces they were 
 handling, with a strange childishness of conception, and 
 in all cases without a trace of suspicion that they were 
 changing the sources of power and their political con- 
 stitution. And in all this the rulers were led and 
 inspired by a crowd of economical and social reformers 
 who eagerly proclaimed Utopia at hand, and who mis- 
 took generous ideals for scientific knowledge. For 
 special causes the great social evolution concentrated 
 itself in France towards the latter half of the eighteenth 
 century ; but there was nothing about it exclusively 
 
WHAT THE REVOLUTION OF 1789 DID 187 
 
 French. Socially and economically viewed, it was 
 almost more English and Anglo-American than French; 
 intellectually and morally viewed, it was hardly more 
 French than it was English. Hume, Adam Smith, 
 Burke, and Priestley are as potent in the realm of thought 
 as Diderot, Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Condorcet. And 
 in the realm of social reform, Europe owes as much 
 to Bentham, Howard, Clarkson, Franklin, Washington, 
 Pitt, and Frederick, as it does to Turgot, Mirabeau, 
 Girondins, Cordeliers, or Jacobins. The 'ideas of '89' 
 were the ideas of the best brains and most humane 
 spirits in the advanced nations of mankind. All nations 
 bore their share in the labour, and all have shared in 
 the fruits. 
 
 But if the revolution were so general in its preparation, 
 why was the active manifestation of it concentrated in 
 France ? and why was France speedily attacked by all 
 the nations of Europe ? These two questions may be 
 answered in two words. In France only were the old 
 and the new elements ranged face to face without inter- 
 mixture or contact, with nothing between them but a 
 decrepit and demoralised autocracy. And no sooner 
 had the inevitable collision begun, than the governments 
 of Europe were seized with panic as they witnessed the 
 fury of the revolutionary forces. In England the Refor- 
 mation, the Civil War, the Revolution of 1689, and the 
 Hanoverian dynasty, had transferred the power of the 
 monarchy to a wealthy, energetic, popular aristocracy, 
 which had largely abandoned its feudal privileges, and 
 had closely allied itself with the interests of wealth. 
 During two centuries of continual struggle and partial 
 reform, a compromise had been effected in Church and 
 in State, wherein the claims of king, priest, noble, and 
 merchant had been fused into a tolerable modus vivendi. 
 
1 88 THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 In France the contrary was the case. During two 
 centuries the monarchy had steadily asserted itself as 
 the incarnation of the public,' claiming for itself all 
 public rights, and undertaking (in theory) all public 
 duties ; crushing out the feudal authorities from all 
 national duties, but guaranteeing to them intact the 
 whole of their personal privileges. As it had dealt 
 with the aristocracy so it dealt with the Church ; making 
 both its tool, rilling both with corruption, and giving 
 them in exchange nothing but license to exploit the lay 
 commonalty. The lay commonalty naturally expanded 
 in rooted hostility to the privileged orders, and to the 
 religious and hereditary ideas on which privilege rested. 
 It grew stronger every day, having no admixture with 
 the old orders, no points of contact, having no outlet 
 for its activity, harassed, insulted, pillaged, and rebuffed 
 at every turn, twenty-six millions strong against two 
 hundred thousand ; all distinctions, rivalries, and 
 authority, as amongst this tiers Mat, uniformly crushed 
 by the superincumbent weight of Monarchy, Church, 
 and Privilege. 
 
 The vast mass of the people thus grew consolidated, 
 without a single public outlet for its energies, or the 
 smallest opportunity for experience in affairs ; the whole 
 ability of the nation for politics, administration, law, or 
 war, was forced into abstract speculation and social 
 discussion ; conscious that it was the real force and 
 possessed the real wealth of the nation ; increasing its 
 resources day by day, amidst frightful extortion and 
 incredible barbarism, which it was bound to endure 
 without a murmur ; the thinking world, to whom action 
 was closed, kept watching the tremendous problems at 
 stake in their most naked and menacing aspect, without 
 any disguise, compromise, or alleviation. And in France, 
 
WHAT THE REVOLUTION OF 1789 DID 189 
 
 where the old feudal and ecclesiastical system was 
 concentrated in its most aggravated form, there it was 
 also the weakest, most corrupt, and most servile. And 
 there, too, in France the tiers etat was the most numerous, 
 the most consolidated, the most charged with ideas, 
 the most sharply separated off, the most conscious of 
 its power, the most exasperated by oppression. Thus 
 it came about that a European evolution broke out in 
 France into revolution. The social battle of the 
 eighteenth century began in the only nation which 
 was strictly marshalled in two opposing camps ; where 
 the oppressors were utterly enfeebled by corruption ; 
 where the oppressed were fermenting with ideas and 
 boiling with indignation. 
 
 The fourteenth and the fifteenth centuries saw the 
 silent universal but unobserved dissolution of the old 
 mediaeval society. For crusades the soldier took to 
 the puerilities of the tournament. The lordly castles 
 fell one by one before the strong hand of the king. 
 The humble village expanded into the great trading 
 town. The Church was torn by factions and assailed 
 by heresies. The musket-ball destroyed the supremacy 
 of the mailed knight. The printing-press made science 
 and thought the birthright of all. The sixteenth 
 century saw a temporary resettlement in a strong 
 dominant monarchy and a compromise in religion. 
 Whilst the seventeenth century in England gave power 
 to a transformed and modified aristocracy, in France it 
 concentrated the whole public forces in a monstrous 
 absolutism, whilst nobility and Church grew daily more 
 rife with obsolete oppression. Hence, in France, the 
 ancient monarchy stood alone as the centre of the old 
 system. Beside it stood the new elements unfettered 
 and untransformed. It was the simplicity of the 
 
190 THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 problem, the glaring nature of the contrast, which 
 caused the intensity of the explosion. The old system 
 stood with dry-rot in its heart ; the new was bursting 
 with incoherent hopes and undefined ideals. The 
 Bastille fell and a new era began. 
 
 Take a rapid survey of France in the closing years 
 of the Monarchy. She had not recovered the desolation 
 of the long wars of Louis XIV., the Revocation of the 
 Edict of Nantes, the banishment of the Protestants, 
 the monstrous extravagance of Versailles and the 
 corrupt system which was there concentrated. The 
 entire authority was practically absorbed by the Crown, 
 whilst the most incredible confusion and disorganisation 
 reigned throughout the administration. A network of in- 
 coherent authorities crossed, recrossed, and embarrassed 
 each other throughout the forty provinces. The law, 
 the customs, the organisation of the provinces, differed 
 from each other. Throughout them existed thousands 
 of hereditary offices without responsibility, and sinecures 
 cynically created for the sole purpose of being sold. 
 The administration of justice was as completely inco- 
 herent as the public service. Each province, and often 
 each district, city, or town, had special tribunals with 
 peculiar powers of its own and anomalous methods of 
 jurisdiction. There were nearly four hundred different 
 codes of customary law. There were civil tribunals, 
 military tribunals, commercial tribunals, exchequer 
 tribunals, ecclesiastical tribunals, and manorial tribunals. 
 A vast number of special causes could only be heard in 
 special courts : a vast body of privileged persons could 
 only be sued before special judges. If civil justice was 
 in a state of barbarous complication and confusion, 
 criminal justice was even more barbarous. Preliminary 
 torture before trial, mutilation, ferocious punishments, 
 
WHAT THE REVOLUTION OF 1789 DID IQI 
 
 a lingering death by torment, a penal code which had 
 death or bodily mutilation in every page, were dealt out 
 freely to the accused without the protection of counsel, 
 the right of appeal, or even a public statement of the 
 sentence. For ecclesiastical offences, and these were a 
 wide and vague field, the punishment was burning alive. 
 Loss of the tongue, of eyes, of limbs, and breaking on 
 the wheel, were common punishments for very moderate 
 crimes. Madame Roland tells us how the summer 
 night was made hideous by the yells of wretches dying 
 by inches after the torture of the wheel. With this 
 state of justice there went systematic corruption in the 
 judges, bribery of officials from the highest to the 
 lowest, and an infinite series of exactions and delays in 
 trial. To all but the rich and the privileged, a civil 
 cause portended ruin, a criminal accusation was a risk 
 of torture and death. 
 
 The public finances were in even more dreadful con- 
 fusion than public justice. The revenue was farmed to 
 companies and to persons who drew from it enormous 
 gains, in some cases, it is said, cent, per cent. The 
 deficit grew during the reign of Louis XV. at the rate of 
 four or five millions sterling each year ; and by the end 
 of the reign of Louis XVI. the deficit had grown to 
 eight or ten millions a year. But as to the exact deficit 
 for each year, or as to the total debt of the nation, no 
 man could speak. Louis XV. in one year personally 
 consumed eight millions sterling, and one of his 
 mistresses alone received during her reign a sum of 
 more than two millions. Just before the Revolution 
 the total taxation of all kinds amounted to some sixty 
 millions sterling. Of this not more than half was spent 
 in the public service. The rest was the plunder of 
 the privileged, in various degrees, from king to the 
 
192 THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 mistress's lackey. This enormous taxation was paid 
 mainly by the non-privileged, who were less than 
 twenty-six millions. The nobles, the clergy, were 
 exempt from property-tax, though they held between 
 them more than half of the entire land of France. The 
 State could only raise loans at a rate of twenty per cent. 
 
 With an army of less than 140,000 men, there were 
 60,000 officers, in active service or on half-pay, all of 
 them exclusively drawn from the privileged class. 
 Twelve thousand prelates and dignified clergy had a 
 revenue of more than two millions sterling. Four 
 millions more was divided amongst some 60,000 minor 
 priests. Altogether the privileged orders, having here- 
 ditary rank or ecclesiastical office, numbered more than 
 200,000 persons. Besides these, some 50,000 families 
 were entitled to hereditary office of a judicial sort, who 
 formed the ' nobility of the robe.' The trades and 
 merchants were organised in privileged gilds, and 
 every industry was bound by a network of corporate 
 and local restrictions. Membership of a gild was a 
 matter of purchase. Not only was each gild a privi- 
 leged corporation, but each province was fiscally a 
 separate state, with its local dues, local customs' tariff, 
 and special frontiers. In the south of France alone 
 there were some 4000 miles of internal customs' frontier. 
 An infinite series of dues were imposed in confusion 
 over districts selected by hazard or tradition. An 
 article would sell in one province for ten times the 
 price it would have in another province. The dues 
 chargeable on the navigation of a single river amounted, 
 we are told, to thirty per cent, of the value of the goods 
 carried. 
 
 But these abuses were trifling or at least endurable 
 when set beside the abuses which crushed the cultivation 
 
WHAT THE REVOLUTION OF 1789 DID 193 
 
 of the soil. About a fifth of the soil of France was in 
 mortmain, the inalienable property of the Church. 
 Nearly half the soil was held in big estates, and was 
 tilled on the metayer system. About one-third of 
 it was the property of the peasant. But though the 
 property of the peasant, it was bound, as he was bound, 
 by an endless list of restrictions. In the Middle Ages 
 each fief had been a kingdom of itself; each lord a 
 petty king ; the government, the taxation, the regulation 
 of each fief, was practically the national government, 
 the public taxation, and the social institutions. But in 
 France, whilst the national authority had passed from 
 the lord of the fief to the national Crown, the legal 
 privileges, the personal and local exemptions, were 
 preserved intact. The peasant remained for many 
 practical purposes a serf, even whilst he owned his own 
 farm. A series of dues were payable to the lord ; 
 personal services were still exacted ; special rights were 
 in full vigour. The peasant, proprietor as he was, still 
 delved the lord's land, carted his produce, paid his local 
 dues, made his roads. All this had to be done without 
 payment, as corvee, or forced labour tax. The peasants 
 were in the position of a people during a most op- 
 pressive state of siege, when a foreign army is in 
 occupation of a country. The foreign army was the 
 privileged order. Everything and every one outside of 
 this order was the subject of oppressive nquisition. 
 The lord paid no taxes on his lands, was not answerable 
 to the ordinary tribunals, was practically exempt from 
 the criminal law, had the sole right of sporting, could 
 alone serve as an officer in the army, could alone aspire 
 to any office under the Crown. In one province alone 
 during a single reign two thousand tolls were abolished. 
 There were tolls on bridges, on ferries, on paths, on 
 
 N 
 
194 THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 fairs, on markets. There were rights of warren, rights 
 of pigeon-houses, of chase, and fishing. There were 
 dues payable on the birth of an heir, on marriage, on 
 the acquisition of a new property by the lord, dues 
 payable for fire, for the passage of a flock, for pasture, 
 for wood. The peasant was compelled to bring his 
 corn to be ground in the lord's mill, to crush his grapes 
 at the lord's wine-press, to suffer his crops to be de- 
 voured by the lord's game and pigeons. A heavy fine 
 was payable on sale or transfer of the property ; on 
 every side were due quit-rents, rent-charges, fines, dues 
 in money and in kind, which could not be commuted 
 and could not be redeemed. After the lord's dues 
 came those of the Church, the tithes payable in kind, 
 and other dues and exactions of the spiritual army. 
 And even this was but the domestic side of the picture. 
 After the lord and the Church came the king's officers, 
 the king's taxes, the king's requisitions, with all the 
 multiform oppression, corruption, and peculation of 
 the farmers of the revenue and the intendants of the 
 province. 
 
 Under this manifold congeries of more than Turkish 
 misrule, it was not surprising that agriculture was 
 ruined and the country became desolate. A fearful 
 picture of that desolation has been drawn for us by 
 our economist, Arthur Young, in 1787, 1788, 1789. 
 Every one is familiar with the dreadful passages 
 wherein he speaks of haggard men and women wearily 
 tilling the soil, sustained on black bread, roots, and 
 water, and living in smoky hovels without windows ; 
 of the wilderness presented by the estates of absentee 
 grandees ; of the infinite tolls, dues, taxes, and im- 
 positions, of the cruel punishments on smugglers, on 
 the dealers in contraband salt, on poachers, and 
 
WHAT THE REVOLUTION OF 1789 DID 195 
 
 deserters. It was not surprising that famines were 
 incessant, that the revenue decreased, and that France 
 was sinking into the decrepitude of an Eastern ab- 
 solutism. ' For years,' said d'Argenson, ' I have watched 
 the ruin increasing. Men around me are now starving 
 like flies, or eating grass.' There were thirty thousand 
 beggars, and whole provinces living on occasional alms, 
 two thousand persons in prison for smuggling salt 
 alone. Men were imprisoned by lettres de cachet by the 
 thousand. 
 
 This state of things was only peculiar to France by 
 reason of the vast area over which it extended, of the 
 systematic scale on which it was worked, and the 
 intense concentration of the evil. In substance it was 
 common to Europe. It was the universal legacy of 
 the feudal system, and the general corruption of 
 hereditary government. In England, four great crises, 
 that of 1540, 1648, 1688, and 1714, had very largely 
 got rid of these evils. But they existed in even greater 
 intensity in Ireland and partly in Scotland ; they 
 flourished in the East of Europe in full force ; the 
 corruption of government was as great in the South of 
 Europe. The profligacy of Louis XV. was hardly worse 
 in spirit, though it was more disgusting than that of 
 Charles II. The feudalism of Germany and Austria 
 was quite as barbarous as that of France. And ' in 
 Italy and in Spain the Church was more intolerant, 
 more depraved, and more powerful. But in France, the 
 whole of the antique abuses were collected in their 
 most aggravated shape, in the most enormous volume, 
 and with the least of compensating check. In England, 
 the persons with hereditary rank hardly numbered more 
 than a few hundreds, and perhaps the entire families of 
 the noble class did not exceed two thousand ; in France 
 
196 THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 they exceeded one hundred thousand. In England the 
 prelates and dignified clergy hardly exceeded one or 
 two hundred ; in France they numbered twelve thou- 
 sand. In England the entire body of ecclesiastics did 
 not number twenty thousand ; in France they much 
 exceeded one hundred thousand. In England, no 
 single subject had any personal privilege, except the 
 trifling personal exemptions of a few hundred peers ; 
 no exemption from taxation was known to the law ; 
 and no land was free from the king's taxes. In France 
 more than half the soil, and two orders, amounting 
 together to over two hundred thousand persons, were 
 exempt. In England, with trifling exceptions, the old 
 feudal rights had become obsolete or nominal. The 
 legal rights of the lord had disappeared, along with 
 his castle, in the great Civil War. In France the lord 
 retained his social prerogatives after losing the whole 
 of his public functions. In Germany, in Italy, in Spain, 
 the lord still retained a large part of his real power, and 
 had been forced to surrender some definite portion of 
 his oppressive privilege. 
 
 But in France, where the whole of the ancient abuses 
 existed on a scale and with an organised completeness 
 that was seen nowhere else, there was also the most 
 numerous, the most enlightened, and the most ambitious 
 body of reformers. In presence of this portentous mis- 
 rule and this outrageous corruption, an army of ardent 
 spirits had been gathered together with a passionate 
 desire to correct it. It was an army recruited from all 
 classes from the ancient nobility, and even the royal 
 blood, from the lords of the soil, and the dignitaries of 
 the Church, from lawyers, physicians, merchants, arti- 
 ficers ; from sons of the petty tradesman, like Diderot ; 
 from sons of the notary, like Voltaire ; of the clock- 
 
WHAT THE REVOLUTION OF 1789 DID 197 
 
 maker, like Rousseau ; of the canoness, like d'Alembert ; 
 of the provost, like Turgot ; of the marquis, like 
 d'Argenson and Condorcet. This band of thinkers 
 belonged to no special class, and to no single country. 
 Intellectually speaking, its real source in the first half 
 of the century was in England, in English ideas of reli- 
 gious and political equality, in English institutions of 
 material good government and industry. In the two 
 generations preceding 1789, such Englishmen as Boling- 
 broke, Hume, Adam Smith, Priestley, Bentham, John 
 Howard (one might almost claim part, at least, of Burke 
 and of Pitt) ; such Americans as Franklin, Washington, 
 and Jefferson ; such Italians as Beccaria and Galiani ; 
 such Germans as Lessing, Goethe, Frederick the Great, 
 and Joseph II., had as much part in it as Voltaire, 
 Montesquieu, Turgot, Diderot, and Condorcet, and the 
 rest of the French thinkers who are specially associated 
 in our thoughts with the movement so ill-described as 
 the French Revolution. 
 
 By the efforts of such men every element of modern 
 society, and every political institution as we now know 
 it, had been reviewed and debated not, indeed, with 
 any coherent doctrine, and utterly without system or 
 method. The reformers differed much amongst them- 
 selves, and there were almost as many schemes of political 
 philosophy, of social economy, of practical organisation, 
 as there were writers and speakers. But in the result, 
 what we now call modern Europe emerged, recast 
 in State, in Church, in financial, commercial, and indus- 
 trial organisation, with a new legal system, a new fiscal 
 system, a humane code, and religious equality. Over 
 the whole of Europe the civil and criminal code was 
 entirely recast ; cruel punishments, barbarous sentences, 
 anomalies, and confusion were swept away ; the treat- 
 
198 THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 ment of criminals, of the sick, of the insane, and of the 
 destitute was subjected to a continuous and systematic 
 reform, of which we have as yet seen only the first instal- 
 ment. The whole range of fiscal taxation, local and 
 imperial, external and internal, direct and indirect, has 
 been in almost every part of Western Europe entirely 
 reformed. A new local administration on the principle 
 of departments, subdivided into districts, cantons, and 
 communes, has been established in France, and thence 
 copied in a large part of Europe. The old feudal system 
 of territorial law, which in England had been to a great 
 extent reformed at the Civil War, was recast not only in 
 France but in the greater part of Western Europe. 
 Protestants, Jews, and Dissenters of all orders practically 
 obtained full toleration and the right of worship. The 
 monstrous corruption and wealth of the remnants of the 
 mediaeval Church was reduced to manageable propor- 
 tions. Public education became one of the great functions 
 of the State. Public health, public morality, science, 
 art, industry, roads, posts, and trade, became the sub- 
 stantive business of government. These are ' the ideas 
 of '89 ' these are the ideas which for two generations 
 before '89 Europe had been preparing, and which for 
 three generations since '89 she has been systematically 
 working out. 
 
 We have just taken a rapid survey of France in its 
 political and material organisation down to 1789, let us 
 take an equally rapid survey of the new institutions which 
 1789 so loudly proclaimed, and so stormily introduced. 
 
 i. For the old patriarchal, proprietary, de jure theory 
 of rule, there was everywhere substituted on the Con- 
 tinent of Europe the popular, fiduciary, pro bono publico 
 notion of rule. Government ceased to be the privilege 
 of the ruler ; it became a trust imposed on the ruler for 
 
WHAT THE REVOLUTION OF 1789 DID 199 
 
 the common weal of the ruled. Long before 1789 this 
 general idea had been established in England and in the 
 United States. During the whole of the seventeenth 
 and eighteenth centuries English political struggles had 
 centred round this grand principle : the Declaration of 
 Independence in 1776 had formulated it in memorable 
 phrases. But how little the full meaning of this the 
 cardinal idea of 1789 was completely accepted even in 
 England, the whole history of the reign of George III. 
 may remind us, and the second and reactionary half of 
 the careers of William Pitt and Edmund Burke. Over 
 the continent of Europe, down to 1789, the proprietary 
 jure divino theory of privilege existed in full force, 
 except in some petty republics, which were of slight 
 practical consequence. The long war, the reactionary 
 Empire of Napoleon, and the royal reaction which fol- 
 lowed its overthrow, made a faint semblance of revival 
 for privilege. But, after the final extinction of the 
 Bourbons in 1830, the idea of privilege disappeared from 
 the conception of the State. In England, the Reform 
 Act of 1832, and finally the European movements of 
 1 848, completed the change. So that throughout Europe, 
 west of Russia and of Turkey, all governments alike 
 imperial, royal, aristocratic, or republican as they may 
 be in form, exist more or less in fact, and in profession 
 exist exclusively, for the general welfare of the nation. 
 This is the first and central idea of '89. 
 
 This idea is, in the deeper meaning of the word, 
 republican so far as republican implies the public good, 
 the common weal as contrasted with privilege, property, 
 or right. But it is not exclusively republican, in the 
 sense that it implies the absence of a single ruler ; nor 
 is it necessarily democratic, in the sense of being direct 
 government by numbers. It is an error to assume that 
 
200 THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 the Revolution of 1789 introduced as an abstract doctrine 
 the democratic republic pure and simple. Republics 
 and democracies of many forms grew out of the move- 
 ment. But the movement itself also threw up many 
 forms of government by a dictator, government by a 
 Council, constitutional monarchy, and democratic im- 
 perialism. All of these equally claim to be based on 
 the doctrine of the common weal, and to represent the 
 ideas of '89. And they have ample right to make that 
 claim. The movement of '89, based on the dominant 
 idea of the public good as opposed to privilege, took all 
 kinds of form in the mouths of those who proclaimed 
 it. Voltaire understood it in one way, Montesquieu in 
 another, Diderot in a third, and Rousseau in a fourth. 
 The democratic monarchy of d'Argenson, the constitu- 
 tional monarchy of Mirabeau, the democratic republic 
 of Marat, the plutocratic republic of Vergniaud, the 
 republican dictatorship of Danton, even the military 
 dictatorship of the First Consul were all alike different 
 readings of the Bible of '89. It means government by 
 capacity, not by hereditary title, with the welfare of the 
 whole people as its end, and the consent of the governed 
 as its sole legitimate title. 
 
 2. The next grand idea of '89 is the scientific consoli- 
 dation of law, administration, personal right, and local 
 responsibility. Out of the infinite confusion of inequality 
 that the lingering decay of Feudalism during four cen- 
 turies had left in Europe, France emerged in the nine- 
 teenth century with a scientific and uniform code of law, 
 a just and scientific system of land tenure, an admirable 
 system of local organisation, almost absolute equality of 
 persons before the law, and almost complete assimilation 
 of territorial right. The French peasant who in 1789 
 struck Arthur Young with horror and pity, as the 
 
WHAT THE REVOLUTION OF 1789 DID 2OI 
 
 scandal of Europe, is now the envy of the tillers of the 
 soil in most parts of the continent, and assuredly in 
 these islands. The most barbarous land tenure of the 
 eighteenth century, the most brutal criminal code, the 
 most complicated fabric ever raised by privilege, which 
 France in 1789 exhibited to the scorn of mankind, has 
 given way to the most advanced scheme of personal 
 equality, to the paradise of the peasant proprietor, and 
 to the least feudalised of all codes, which France can 
 exhibit at present. It would be far easier to show in 
 England to-day the unweeded remnants of feudal privi- 
 lege, of landlord law and landlord justice, and certainly 
 it is easier to show it in Ireland and in Scotland, than it 
 is in France. Territorial oppression, the injustice of the 
 land-laws, the burden of game, or the customary exac- 
 tions of the landlord, may be found in Ireland, may be 
 found in Scotland, may be found in England but they 
 have absolutely disappeared in France. Her eight 
 million peasants who own the soil are the masters of 
 their own destiny, for France has now eight million 
 kings, eight million lords of the soil. The 20,000 or 
 30,000, it may be, who in these islands own the rural 
 lands, should ponder when the turn of their labourers 
 will come to share in ' the ideas of '89.' 
 
 3. Down to 1789 France exhibited an amazing chaos 
 of local government institutions. In the nineteenth 
 century she possessed one that was perhaps the most 
 symmetrical, the most scientific, and the most adaptable 
 now extant. It may well be that under it centralisation 
 has been grossly exaggerated and local life suppressed. 
 That, however, is a legacy from the old monarchy, and 
 is not the work of the Revolution. The idea of '89 is 
 not centralisation, but decentralisation. The excessive 
 concentration of power in the hands of a prefect is part 
 
2O2 THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 of the ancient tradition of France. The aim of d'Argen- 
 son, of Turgot, of Mabli, of Malesherbes, was to give 
 free life to local energy, to restrain the abuses of bureau- 
 cracy. There is still in France an oppressive measure 
 of bureaucracy and a monstrous centralisation. But a 
 large part of the Continent has adopted from her the 
 organic arrangement of subordinate authorities which 
 the Revolution created, and which may be equally 
 adopted by monarchy, empire, or republic ; which may 
 be combined with local self-government as well as with 
 imperial autocracy. 
 
 4. Much the same may be said of the law which the 
 Revolution founded. The Civil Code of France, to which 
 so unfairly Napoleon contrived to give his name, was 
 neither the work of Bonaparte, nor of the Empire, nor 
 of the nineteenth century. It was in substance the work 
 of Pothier, of the great lawyers of the eighteenth century, 
 from whose writings four-fifths of it is textually taken ; 
 and Tronchet, its true author, is essentially a man of the 
 eighteenth century. It is true that, compared with some 
 modern codes, the Civil Code of France is visibly de- 
 fective. But, such as it is, it has made the tour of 
 Europe, and is the basis of half the codes now extant. 
 It was the earliest scientific code of modern law, for the 
 Code of Frederick belongs to the world of yesterday, 
 and not of to-day. The Civil Code of France remains 
 still, with all its shortcomings, the great type of a modern 
 code, and is a truly splendid fruit of the ideas of '89. 
 
 5. With the Code came in also a scientific recasting 
 of the entire system of justice civil, criminal, com- 
 mercial, and constitutional ; local and central, primary, 
 intermediate, and supreme. Within a generation at 
 most, to a great extent within a few years, France 
 passed from a system of justice the most complex, 
 
WHAT THE REVOLUTION OF 1789 DID 2O3 
 
 cruel, and obsolete, to a system the most symmetrical, 
 humane, and scientific. And that which in England, 
 and in many other countries of Europe, has been the 
 gradual work of a century, was reached in France 
 almost at a bound by the generation that saw '89. 
 
 6. With a new law there came in a new fiscal system, 
 a reform as important, as elaborate as that of the civil 
 code, and we must say quite as successful. The 
 financial condition of France during the whole of the 
 reigns of Louis XV. and Louis XVI. had presented 
 perhaps the most stupendous example of confusion and 
 corruption which could be found outside a Turkish or 
 Asiatic despotism. It was unquestionably the direct, 
 primary, material origin of the Revolution. It was the 
 main object of the labours of the truest reformers of the 
 age. D'Argenson, Turgot, Malesherbes, Necker, and 
 Mirabeau devoted to the appalling task the best of their 
 thoughts and efforts. Before all of them, and before all 
 the names of the century, the noble Turgot stands forth 
 as the very type of the financial reformer. The con- 
 ditions in which he sacrificed his life in vain efforts were 
 too utterly bad for even his genius and heroic honesty 
 to prevail. But the effort was not in vain. The idea 
 of '89 was to put an end to the monstrous injustice and 
 plunder of the old monarchic and feudal fisc, to establish 
 in its place an equal, just, scientific system of finance. 
 Compared with English finance, the great triumph of 
 parliamentary government, the financial system of 
 modern France seems often defective to us. But as 
 compared with the financial condition of the rest of 
 Europe, the reforms of '89 have practically accomplished 
 the end. 
 
 7. Along with a reformed finance came in a reformed 
 tariff, the entire sweeping away of the provincial 
 
204 THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 customs' frontier, that monstrous legacy of feudal dis- 
 integration, and a complete revision of the burdens on 
 industry. Political economy as a science may be said 
 to be one of the cardinal ideas of '89 ; the very con- 
 ception of a social science, vaguely and dimly perceived 
 by the great leaders of thought in the eighteenth cen- 
 tury, was itself one of the most potent causes, and in 
 some ways, one of the most striking effects of the 
 Revolution of '89. The great founders of the concep- 
 tion of a social science were all prominent chiefs of the 
 movement which culminated in that year. Voltaire, 
 Montesquieu, Diderot, d'Argenson, Turgot, Quesnay, 
 Condorcet, were at once social economists and pre- 
 cursors of the great crisis. Adam Smith was as much 
 an authority in France as he was in England. Political 
 economy and a scientific treatment of the national pro- 
 duction and consumption became with the Revolution a 
 cardinal idea of statesmen and publicists. We are apt 
 to think that our French friends are weak-kneed 
 economists at best, and perversely inclined to economic 
 heresy. It may be so. Our free-trade doctrines have 
 been preached to deaf ears, and our gospel of absolute 
 freedom makes but little progress in France. But it can 
 hardly be denied that the economic legislation of France 
 is entirely in accord with economic doctrine in France, 
 or that the political economy of the State is abreast of 
 the demands of public opinion. 
 
 8. To pass from purely material interests to moral, 
 social, and spiritual, we must never lose sight of the 
 splendid fact that national education is an idea of '89. 
 A crowd of the great names in the revolutionary move- 
 ment are honourably identified with this sacred cause. 
 Voltaire, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Diderot, Turgot, 
 Condorcet, d'Argenson, Mirabeau, Dan ton all felt to 
 
WHAT THE REVOLUTION OF 1789 DID 2O5 
 
 the depths of their soul that the New Commonwealth 
 could exist only by an enlightened people. Public 
 education was the inspiration of the Encyclopaedia ; it 
 was the gospel of '89, and the least tarnished of all its 
 legacies to our age. In the midst of the Terror and 
 the war, the Convention pursued its plans of founding 
 a public education. The idea was in no sense specially 
 French, in no sense the direct work of the revolutionary 
 assemblies. England, America, Germany, Europe as a 
 whole, partook of the new conception of the duties 
 of the State. It belongs to the second half of the 
 eighteenth century altogether. But of all the enthusiasts 
 for popular education, there are no names which will 
 survive longer in the roll of the benefactors of humanity 
 than those of Voltaire, Rousseau, Diderot, Turgot, and 
 Condorcet. 
 
 9. With popular education there went quite naturally 
 a series of social institutions of a philanthropic sort. 
 Hospitals, asylums, poor-houses, museums, libraries, 
 galleries of art and science, public parks, sanitary 
 appliances, and public edifices, were no longer matters 
 of royal caprice, or of casual benefaction : they became 
 the serious work of imperial and municipal government. 
 Almost everything which we know as modern civilisa- 
 tion in these social institutions has taken organic shape 
 and systematic form within these hundred years. Ex- 
 cept for its royal palaces, Paris in the opening of the 
 eighteenth century was a squalid, ill-ordered, second- 
 rate city. Marseilles, Lyons, Bordeaux, had neither 
 dignity, beauty, nor convenience. Except for a few 
 royal foundations, neither France, nor its capital, was 
 furnished with more than the meagrest appliances of 
 public health and charitable aid. The care of the sick, 
 of the weak, of the destitute, of children, of the people, 
 
206 THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 the emancipation of the negro all this is essentially an 
 idea of '89. 
 
 10. To sum up all these reforms we must conclude 
 with that of the Church. The Church of France in the 
 eighteenth century, if it were one of the most splendid 
 and the most able, was the most arrogant and oppressive 
 survival of the old Mediaeval Catholicism. With an 
 army of more than 50,000 priests, and some 50,000 
 persons in monasteries and bound by religious vows, 
 owning one-fifth of the soil of France, with a revenue 
 which, in the values of to-day, approached ten millions 
 sterling, with personal, territorial, and legal privileges 
 without number, the Gallican Church in the age of 
 Voltaire and Diderot was a portent of pride, tyranny, 
 and intolerance. A Church which, down to 1766, could 
 still put Protestants to death with revolting cruelty, 
 which is stained with the damning memories of Calas 
 and La Barre, which was almost as corrupt as the 
 nobility, almost as oppressive as the royalty, which 
 added to the barbarism of the ancien regime the savage 
 traditions of the Inquisition, which left undone all that 
 it ought to have done, and did all that it ought not to 
 have done such a Church cumbered the earth. It fell, 
 and loud and great was the crash, and fierce have been 
 the waitings which still fill the air over its ruins. The 
 world has heard enough and too much of Voltaire's 
 curse against rinfdme, of Diderot's ferocious distich, 
 how the entrails of the last priest should serve as halter 
 to the last king. No one to-day justifies the fury of 
 their diatribes, except by reminding the nineteenth 
 century what it was that, in the eighteenth century, was 
 called the Church of Christ. The Church fell, but it 
 returned again. It revived transformed, reformed, and 
 shorn of its pretensions. Its intolerance has been 
 
WHAT THE REVOLUTION OF 1789 DID 2O? 
 
 utterly stript off it. It is now but one of other endowed 
 sects. It has less than one-fifth of its old wealth, none 
 of its old intolerable prerogatives, and but a shadow of 
 its old pretensions and pride. 
 
 The present essay proposes to deal with the social 
 and political aspect of the movement of 1789, not with 
 the wide and subtle field of the intellectual and humani- 
 tarian movement which was its prelude and spiritual 
 director. But a short notice is needed of the principal 
 leaders of thought by whom the social and political 
 work was inspired. For practical purposes they may 
 be grouped under four general heads. There was the 
 work of destroying the old elements, and the work of 
 constructing the new. The work was intellectual and 
 religious on the one hand, social and political on the 
 other. This suggests a fourfold division : (i) the school 
 of thought whereby the old intellectual system was 
 discredited ; (2) that by which the old political system 
 was destroyed ; (3) those who laboured to construct 
 a new intellectual and moral basis of society ; and (4) 
 those who sought to construct a new social and political 
 system. These schools and teachers, writers and 
 politicians, cannot be rigidly separated from each other. 
 Each overlaps the other, and most of them combine the 
 characteristics of all in more or less degree. The most 
 pugnacious of the critics did something in the way of 
 reconstructing the intellectual basis. The most con- 
 structive spirits of the new world did much both directly 
 and indirectly to destroy the old. Critics of the 
 orthodox faith were really destroying the throne and the 
 ancient rule, even when they least designed it. Ortho- 
 dox supporters of radical reforms rung the knell of the 
 mediaeval faith as much as that of the mediaeval society. 
 The spiritual and temporal organisation of human life 
 
208 THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 had grown up together ; and in death it was not 
 divided. 
 
 All through the eighteenth century the intellectual 
 movement was gathering vitality and volume. From 
 the opening years of the epoch the genius of Leibnitz 
 saw the inevitable effect the movement must have upon 
 the old society ; and, in his memorable prophecy of the 
 Revolution at hand (1704), he warned the chiefs of that 
 society to prepare for the storm. For three generations 
 France seemed to live only in thought. Action 
 descended to the vilest and most petty level which her 
 history had ever reached. From the death of Colbert, 
 in 1683, until the ministry of Turgot, in 1774, France 
 seemed to have lost the race of great statesmen, and to 
 be delivered over to the intriguer and the sycophant. 
 Well may the historian say that in passing from the 
 politicians of the reign of Louis XV. to the thinkers of 
 the same epoch, we seem to be passing from the world 
 of the pigmies to that of the Titans. Into the world of 
 ideas France flung herself with passion and with hope. 
 The wonderful accumulation of scientific discoveries 
 which followed the achievements of Newton reacted 
 powerfully on religious thought, and even on practical 
 policy. Mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, 
 biology, began to assume the outlined proportion of 
 coherent sciences ; and some vague sense of their con- 
 nection and real unity filled the mind of all. Out of 
 the physical sciences there emerged a dim conception 
 of a crowning human science, which it was the grand 
 achievement of the eighteenth century to found. His- 
 tory ceased to be a branch of literature ; it began to 
 have practical uses for mankind of to-day ; and slowly 
 it was recognised as the momentous life-story of man, 
 the autobiography of the human race. Europe no 
 
2(X) 
 
 longer absorbed the interest of cultivated thought. The 
 unity of the planet, the community of all who dwell on 
 it, gave a new colour to the whole range of thought ; 
 and as the old dogmas of the supernatural Church 
 began to lose their hold on the mind, the new-born 
 enthusiasm of humanity began to fill all hearts. 
 
 The indefatigable genius who was the acknowledged 
 leader in the intellectual attack undoubtedly partook in 
 a measure of all the four elements just mentioned, and 
 his true glory is that, throughout the whole range of his 
 varied work, this enthusiasm of humanity glows con- 
 stantly aflame and warms his zeal. The almost unex- 
 ampled versatility and fecundity of Voltaire's mind gave 
 his contemporaries the impression of a far larger genius 
 than the test of time has been able to concede him. 
 His merit has been said to lie in a most extraordinary 
 combination of secondary powers, no one of which was 
 precisely of the highest class. He was neither one of 
 the great poets, or observers, or philosophers, or teachers 
 of men, though he wielded, and for a longer time, the 
 most potent literary power of which history tells. Al- 
 though of the four main schools into which the eighteenth 
 century movement may be grouped, Voltaire was espe- 
 cially marked out as the leading spirit of the intellectual 
 attack, he did not a little to stimulate the constructive 
 task, both in its philosophical and in its social side. It 
 is from Voltaire's visit to England in 1726 that we must 
 date the opening of the grand movement of '89. The 
 accumulating series of impulses which at last forced on 
 the opening of the States-General at Versailles began 
 with English ideas, English teachers, and English or 
 American traditions. 
 
 At the same time (1724-1731) was formed in the 
 Place Vendome with the aid of Lord Bolingbroke, the 
 
 o 
 
210 THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 confraternity of reformers, to whom he gave the English 
 name of club. This was the first appearance in France 
 of an institution which has played so large a part in the 
 history of Europe, which is destined yet to play an even 
 larger part. The Abb Alari, the Abbe Saint- Pierre, 
 the Marquis d'Argenson, and their companions in the 
 Club de 1'Entresol were already, sixty years before the 
 opening of Revolution, covering the ground of the social 
 ideas of '89, in a vague, timid, and tentative manner, it 
 may be, but withal in a spirit of enthusiastic zeal of the 
 better time they were not destined to see. 
 
 Of this group of premature reformers, of these pre- 
 cursors and heralds of '89, none is more illustrious than 
 the Marquis d'Argenson, nor is any book more memor- 
 able than his Reflections on the Government of France 
 (1739). Here we have the germ of the democratic 
 absolutism which has again and again reasserted its 
 strength in France : here are the germs of the local 
 administration ; here is the first proposal for the sym- 
 metrical system of eighty-six departments which since 
 1790 replaced the ancient provinces with all their ano- 
 malies. Here also is the repudiation by an illustrious 
 noble of the privileges of nobility, the condemnation of 
 local restrictions on trade, and the dream of a new 
 France where personal equality should reign, and where 
 the cultivator of the soil should be lord of the land he 
 tilled. 
 
 The chief spirit of the social and political destructives 
 was as obviously Rousseau as Voltaire had been the 
 chief spirit of the religious destructives. Our business 
 for the moment is with neither of these schools and with 
 neither of these famous men. As all heterodoxy seemed 
 to be latent in the mordant criticism of Voltaire, so all 
 subsequent political anarchy seems to be concentrated in 
 
WHAT THE REVOLUTION OF 1789 DID 211 
 
 the morbid passion of Rousseau. But though Rousseau 
 must be regarded as in all essentials a destructive, there 
 are many ways in which he had a share in the construc- 
 tive movement of '89. In the splendour of his pleading 
 for education, for respecting the dignity of the citizen, in 
 his passion for art, in his pathetic dreams of an ideal 
 simplicity of life, in his spiritual Utopia of a higher and 
 more humane humanity, prophet of anarchy as he was, 
 Rousseau has here and there added a stone to the edifice 
 we are still building to-day. 
 
 When we turn to the constructive schools, there we 
 find Diderot supreme in the intellectual world, Turgot 
 in the political ; whilst Condorcet is the disciple and 
 complement of both. With the purely philosophical 
 work of any of these three we are not now concerned. 
 Our interest is entirely with the social and political 
 question. And at first sight it may seem that Diderot 
 has no share in any but the philosophical. But this 
 most universal genius had a mind open to all sides of 
 the human problem. His grand task the Encyclopedic 
 (and we may remember that the first idea of it came from 
 an English Encyclopaedia, which it was proposed to 
 translate), the Encyclopedic is largely, and indeed mainly, 
 concerned with economic and social matters. Through- 
 out it runs the potent principle of the unity of man's 
 knowledge, of man's life, and of the whole human race. 
 Diderot does far more than discuss abstract questions of 
 science. He traces out the ramifications of science into 
 the minutest and humblest operations of industry. 
 In the Encyclopaedia we have installed for the first time 
 on authority that conception of modern times the 
 marriage of Science with Industry. Machines, trades, 
 manufactures, implements, tools, processes were each in 
 turn the object of Diderot's enthusiastic study. He and 
 
212 TIIK MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 his comrades, men like Turgot, d'Alembert, Condorcet, 
 felt that the true destiny of man was the industrial. They 
 strove to place labour on its right level, to dignify its 
 task, and to glorify its mission. Never had philosophy 
 been greater than when she girt up her robes, penetrated 
 into the workshop, and shed her light upon the patient toil 
 of the handicraftsman. For the first time in modern 
 history thought and science took labour to their arms. 
 Industry received its true honour, and was installed in a 
 new sphere. It was a momentous step in the progress 
 of society as much as in the progress of thought. 
 
 Chief of all the political reformers, in many things 
 the noblest type of the men of '89, is the great Turgot ; 
 he, who if France could have been spared a revolution, 
 was the one man that could have saved her. After him, 
 Necker, a much inferior man, though with equally good 
 intentions, attempted the same task ; and the years 
 from 1774-1781 sufficed to show that reform without 
 revolution was impossible. But the twenty years of 
 noble effort, from the hour when Turgot became intend- 
 ant of Limoges in 1761 until the fall of Necker's minis- 
 try in 1781, contained an almost complete rehearsal, 
 were a prelude and epitome, of the practical reforms 
 which the Revolution accomplished after so much blood 
 and such years of chaos. To give the official career of 
 Turgot would be a summary of the ideas of '89. The 
 suppression of the corvte, of the restrictions on industry, 
 on the resources of locomotion, the restoration of 
 agriculture, to reduce the finances to order, to diminish 
 public debt, to establish local municipal life, to reorgan- 
 ise the chaotic administration, to remove the exemptions 
 of the noble and ecclesiastical orders, to suppress the 
 monastic orders, to equalise the taxation, to establish a 
 scientific and uniform code of law, a scientific and uniform 
 
WHAT THE REVOLUTION OF 1789 DID 213 
 
 scale of weights and measures, to reform the feudal land 
 law, to abolish the feudal gilds and antiquated corpora- 
 tions whose obsolete pretensions crushed industry, to 
 recall the Protestants, to establish entire freedom of 
 conscience, to guarantee complete liberty of thought ; 
 lastly, to establish a truly national system of education 
 such were the plans of Turgot which for two short 
 years he struggled to accomplish with heroic tenacity 
 and elevation of spirit. Those two years, from 1774- 
 1776, are at once the brightest and the saddest in the 
 modern history of France. For almost the first time, 
 and certainly for the last time, a great philosopher, who 
 was also a great statesman, the last French statesman of 
 the old order, held for a moment almost absolute power. 
 It was a gigantic task, and a giant was called in to 
 accomplish it. But against folly even the gods contend 
 in vain. And before folly, combined with insatiable 
 selfishness, lust, greed, and arrogance, the heroic Turgot 
 fell. They refused him his bloodless, orderly, scientific 
 Revolution ; and the bloody, stormy, spasmodic Revolu- 
 tion began. 
 
 To recall Turgot is to recall Condorcet, the equal of 
 Turgot as thinker, if inferior to Turgot as statesman. 
 Around the mind and nature of Condorcet there lingers 
 the halo of a special grace. Sprung from an old baron- 
 ial family with bigoted prejudices of feudal right, the 
 young noble, from his youth, broke through the opposition 
 of his order to devote himself to a life of thought. Spot- 
 less in his life, calm, reserved, warm hearted and tender, 
 ' the volcano covered with snow ' that flamed in his 
 breast, had never betrayed him to an outburst of jeal- 
 ousy, vanity, ill-humour, or extravagance. The courtly 
 and polished aristocrat, without affectation and without 
 hysterics, bore himself as one of the simplest of the 
 
214 THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 people. The privileges of the old system, which were 
 his birthright, filled him with a sense of unmixed abhor- 
 rence. His scepticism, vehement as it was, did not 
 spring from intellectual pride or from turbulent vanity. 
 He disbelieves in orthodoxy out of genuine thirst for 
 truth, and denounces superstition out of no alloy of 
 feeling save that of burning indignation at its evil works. 
 The Life of Turgot by Condorcet, 1787, might serve 
 indeed as prologue to the memorable drama which opens 
 in 1789. It was most fitting that the mighty movement 
 should be heralded by the tale of the greatest statesman 
 of the age of Louis XVI., told by one of its chief thinkers. 
 And the fine lines of Lucan, which Condorcet placed as 
 a motto on the title-page of his Life of Turgot, may 
 serve as the device, not of Turgot alone, but of Condor- 
 cet himself, and indeed of the higher spirits of '89 
 together 
 
 ' Secta fuit servare modum, finemque tenere, 
 Naturamque sequi, patriaeque impendere vitam ; 
 Nee sibi, sed toti genitum se credere mundo.' 
 
 ' The only party they acknowledged was the rule of 
 good sense, and to keep firm to their purpose, to submit 
 to the teaching of Nature's law, and to offer up their 
 lives for their country holding that man is born not 
 for himself, but for humanity in the sum.' He who 
 would understand what men mean by ' the ideas of '89 ' 
 should mark, learn, and inwardly digest those two small 
 books of Condorcet, the Life of Turgot, 1787, and the 
 Historical Sketch of the Progress of the Human Mind, 
 
 1795- 
 
 The annals of literature have no more pathetic incident 
 than the history of this little book this still unfinished 
 vision of a brain prematurely cut off. In the midst of 
 
WHAT THE REVOLUTION OF 1789 DID 215 
 
 the struggle between Mountain and Gironde, Condorcet 
 who stood between both and who belonged to neither, 
 he who had the enthusiasm of the Mountain without its 
 ferocity, the virtues and culture of the Girondists without 
 their pedantic formalism, was denounced and condemned 
 to death, and dragged out a few weeks of life in a miser- 
 able concealment. There, with death hanging round 
 him, he calmly compiled the first true sketch of human 
 evolution. Amidst the chaos and bloodshed he reviews the 
 history of mankind. Not a word of pain, doubt, bitterness, 
 or reproach is wrung from him. He sees nothing but 
 visions of a happy and glorious future for the race, when 
 war shall cease, and the barriers shall fall down between 
 man and man, class and class, race and race, when man 
 shall pursue a regenerate life in human brotherhood and 
 confidence in truth. Industry there shall be the common 
 lot, and the noblest privilege. But it shall be brightened 
 to all by a common education, free, rational, and com- 
 prehensive, with a lightening of the burdens of labour by 
 scientific appliances of life and increased opportunity for 
 culture. ' Our hopes,' he writes, in that last lyric chapter 
 of the little sketch, ' our hopes as to the future of the 
 human race may be summed up in these three points : 
 the raising of all nations to a common level ; the pro- 
 gress towards equality in each separate people ; and, 
 lastly, the practical amelioration of the lot of man.' ' It 
 is in the contemplation of such a future,' he concludes, 
 ' that the philosopher may find a safe asylum in all 
 troubles, and may live in that true paradise, to which his 
 reason may look forward with confidence, and which his 
 sympathy with humanity may invest with a rapture of 
 the purest kind.' 
 
 The ink of these pages was hardly dry when the 
 writer by death escaped the guillotine to which repub- 
 
2l6 THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 licans condemned him in the name of liberty. How 
 many of us can repeat a hundred anecdotes of the 
 guillotine, of its victims, and its professors, yet how few 
 of us have seriously taken to heart the Sketch of Human 
 Progress \ The blood is dried up, but the book lives, 
 and human progress continues on the lines there so pro- 
 phetically traced. ' I have studied history long,' says de 
 Tocqueville, 'yet I have never read of any revolution 
 wherein there may be found men of patriotism so 
 sincere, of such true devotion of self, of more entire 
 grandeur of spirit.' 
 
CHAPTER VII 
 
 FRANCE IN 1789 AND 1889 l 
 
 THE year of centenaries has brought us no memento 
 more significant than the timely reissue of Arthur 
 Young's Travels in France in i/Sy-SQ. 2 Europe has 
 seen in this century nothing more striking, and hardly 
 any single thing more entirely blessed, than the trans- 
 figuration of rural France from its state under the 
 ancient monarchy to its state under the new republic. 
 By good luck an English traveller, with rare oppor- 
 tunities and almost a touch of genius, traversed every 
 province just on the eve of the great crisis, and left to 
 mankind a vivid picture of all he saw. ' Vehement, 
 plain-spoken Arthur Young,' says Carlyle, who, in his 
 lurid chapter on the ' General Overturn,' has made 
 household words out of several of Arthur's historic 
 sayings. 'That wise and honest traveller,' says John 
 Morley, perhaps, with rather excessive praise, ' with his 
 luminous criticism of the most important side of the 
 Revolution, worth a hundred times more than Burke, 
 Paine, and Mackintosh all put together.' 
 
 1 The Forum, New York, vol. ix. March 1890. 
 
 2 Travels in France, by Arthur Young, during the years 178/1 I 7^8, 
 1789, with an Introduction, Biographical Sketch, and Notes, by 
 M. Betham-Edwards. London: G. Bell and Sons, 1889. Bohn's 
 Standard Library, N.S. ; also France of To-day, a survey comparative 
 and retrospective, by M. Betham-Edwards. London : Rivingtons. 
 2 vols. 1892-94. 
 
2l8 THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 And now a lady who has seen more of France than 
 even Arthur Young, Miss Betham-Edwards, has given 
 us an excellent edition of the famous Travels, so long 
 practically inaccessible, with notes, illustrations, refer- 
 ences, and a vignette picture of rural France in 1889 
 such as old Arthur himself might have limned, had he 
 returned to earth and to France to see the great Exhi- 
 bition. The contrast, as we look first on this picture 
 and then on that, is the transition we find in a dream 
 or a fairy tale. It is as though one rose from the dead. 
 We see the sombre, haggard, crushed French peasant 
 of Languedoc, Poitou, or Franche Comt, that Lazarus 
 whom the old system swathed in cerecloth and en- 
 tombed, starting forth into life from his bonds, and 
 returning to his home, to activity, and to freedom. It 
 is the Revolution that has worked this miracle. This is 
 the only work of the Revolution that is wholly blessed. 
 Here, at any rate, it has destroyed almost nothing that 
 was good, and has founded little that is evil. ' The 
 Revolution,' says the editor of these Travels, ' in a few 
 years metamorphosed entire regions.' 
 
 What life, what heart, what ring there was in the 
 racy sayings of the fine old boy ! Every one knows 
 that sharp word wrung from him even while he was the 
 guest of the Duke de la Rochefoucauld : ' Whenever 
 you stumble on a grand seigneur, you are sure to find 
 his property a desert.' The signs of the greatness of a 
 grand seigneur are ' wastes, deserts, fern, ling.' ' Oh ! 
 if I was the legislator of France for a day, I would 
 make such great lords skip again.' ' The crop of this 
 country is princes of the blood ; that is to say, hares, 
 pheasants, deer, boars.' Schoolboys in France can 
 repeat the historic passage about the woman near Mars- 
 la-Tour, aged twenty-eight, but so bent and furrowed 
 
FRANCE IN 1789 AND 1889 219 
 
 and hardened by labour that she looked sixty or seventy, 
 as she groaned out : ' Sir, the taxes and the dues are 
 crushing us to death ! ' No one, says he, can imagine 
 what the French peasant woman has come to look 
 under grinding poverty. He tells of ' some things that 
 called themselves women, but in reality were walking 
 dunghills ' ; ' girls and women without shoes or stock- 
 ings.' ' The ploughmen at their work have neither 
 sabots, nor feet to their stockings. This is a poverty 
 that strikes at the root of national prosperity.' And 
 then comes that scathing phrase which rings in the ears 
 of Englishmen to-day : ' It reminds me of the misery of 
 Ireland.' 
 
 The poor people's habitations he finds in Brittany to 
 be ' miserable heaps of dirt.' There, as so often else- 
 where in France, no glass window, scarcely any light ; 
 the women furrowed without age by labour. ' One- 
 third of what I have seen of this province seems uncul- 
 tivated, and nearly all of it in misery.' ' Nothing but 
 privileges and poverty.' And every one remembers what 
 these privileges were ' these tortures of the peasantry ' 
 he calls them of which in one sentence he enumerates 
 twenty-eight. 
 
 And now, in 1889, turn to these same provinces, to 
 the third generation in descent from these very peasants. 
 ' The desert that saddened Arthur Young's eyes,' writes 
 Miss Betham-Edwards to-day, ' may now be described 
 as a land of Goshen, overflowing with milk and honey.' 
 ' The land was well stocked and cultivated, the people 
 were neatly and appropriately dressed, and the signs of 
 general contentment and well-being delightful to con- 
 template.' In one province, a million acres of waste 
 land have been brought into cultivation. In five or 
 six years, wrote the historian Mignet, 'the Revolution 
 
220 THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 quadrupled the resources of civilisation.' Where Arthur 
 Young saw the miserable peasant woman, Miss Betham- 
 Edwards tells us that to-day the farmers' daughters 
 have for portions 'several thousand pounds.' What 
 Arthur Young calls an ' unimproved, poor, and ugly 
 country,' Miss Betham-Edwards now finds to be ' one 
 vast garden.' In the landes, where the traveller saw 
 nearly a hundred miles of continuous waste, 700,000 
 acres have been fertilised by canals, and a very small 
 portion remains in the state in which he found it. 
 ' Maine and Anjou have the appearance of deserts,' 
 writes the traveller of 1789. 'Sunny, light-hearted, 
 dance-loving Anjou' appears to the traveller of 1889 a 
 model of prosperity and happiness. Where he found 
 the peasants living in caves underground, she finds 
 neat homesteads costing more than 6000 francs to 
 build. In Dauphine, where he finds, in 1789, moun- 
 tains waste or in a great measure useless, she finds, in 
 1889, choice vineyards that sell at 25,000 francs per 
 acre. 
 
 And what has done all this ? The prophetic soul of 
 Arthur Young can tell us, though a hundred years were 
 needed to make his hopes a reality. His words have 
 passed into a household phrase where the English 
 tongue reaches : ' The magic of property turns sand to 
 gold.' ' The inhabitants of this village deserve en- 
 couragement for their industry,' he writes of Sauve, 
 ' and if I was a French minister they should have it. 
 They would soon turn all the deserts around them into 
 gardens.' ' Give a man/ he adds, in a phrase which is 
 now a proverb, ' the secure possession of a bleak rock, 
 and he will turn it into a garden ; give him a nine- 
 years' lease of a garden, and he will convert it into a 
 desert.' What has made all this misery ? he cries again 
 
FRANCE IN 1789 AND 1889 221 
 
 and again ; what has blighted this magnificent country, 
 and crushed this noble people? Misgovernment, bad 
 laws, cruel customs, wanton selfishness of the rich, the 
 powerful, and the privileged. Nothing was ever said 
 more true. Arthur Young's good legislator came even 
 sooner than he dared to hope, armed with a force more 
 tremendous than he could conceive. It was a minister 
 greater than any Turgot, or Necker, or Mirabeau ; who 
 served a sovereign more powerful than Louis or 
 Napoleon. His sovereign was the Revolution ; the 
 minister was the new system. And the warm-hearted 
 English gentleman lived to see his 'great lords skip 
 again ' somewhat too painfully. The storm has passed, 
 the blood is washed out ; but the ' red fool-fury of the 
 Seine ' has made rural France the paradise of the 
 peasant. 
 
 Let us take a typical bit of the country here and 
 there and compare its state in 1789 arid in 1889. From 
 Paris and Orleans Arthur Young, in 1787, journeyed 
 southward through Berri and the Limousin to Toulouse. 
 His diary is one cry of pity. ' The fields are scenes 
 of pitiable management, as the houses are of misery.' 
 ' Heaven grant me patience while I see a country thus 
 neglected, and forgive me the oaths I swear at the 
 absence and ignorance of the possessors.' 'The hus- 
 bandry poor and the people miserable.' 'The poor 
 people who cultivate the soil here are metayers, that is, 
 men who hire the soil without ability to stock it a 
 miserable system that perpetuates poverty and excludes 
 instruction.' 
 
 Turn to our traveller of 1889. Berri, says Miss 
 Betham-Edwards, has been transformed under a sound 
 land system. It has indeed a poor soil ; but, even in 
 the ' triste Sologne', plantations, irrigation canals, and 
 
222 THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 improved methods of agriculture are transforming this 
 region. So rapid is the progress that George Sand, 
 who died but the other day, would hardly recognise the 
 country she has described so well. Here and there 
 may be seen, now used as an out-house, one of those 
 bare, windowless cabins which shocked Arthur Young, 
 and close at hand the ' neat, airy, solid dwellings ' the 
 peasant owners have built for themselves. Here Miss 
 Betham-Edwards visited newly-made farms, with their 
 spick-and-span buildings, the whole having the appear- 
 ance of a little settlement in the Far West. The hold- 
 ings vary from 6 to 30 acres, their owners possessing 
 a capital of 5000 to 8000 and even 25,000 francs, the 
 land well stocked and cultivated, the people well dressed, 
 and signs of general content and well-being delightful 
 to contemplate. And as to m^tayage^ 'that miserable 
 system which perpetuates poverty,' Miss Betham- 
 Edwards finds it now one of the chief factors of 
 the agricultural progress of France, creating cordial 
 relations between landlord and tenant. The secret 
 of this curious conflict between two most competent 
 observers is this : metayage the system under which 
 the owner of the soil finds land, stock, and implements, 
 the tiller of the farm finds manual labour, and all pro- 
 duce is equally shared depends for its fair working 
 upon just laws, equality before the law, absence of 
 any privilege in the owner, and good understanding 
 as between men who alike respect each other. With 
 these, it is an excellent system of farming, very favour- 
 able to the labourer ; without these, it may almost 
 reduce him to serfdom. It may thus be one of the 
 best, or one of the worst, of all systems of husbandry. 
 As Arthur Young saw it under the ancient system of 
 privileged orders, it was almost as bad as an Irish 
 
FRANCE IN 1789 AND 1889 223 
 
 tenancy at will. Under the new system of post- 
 revolutionary equality, it has given prosperity to large 
 tracts in France. 
 
 From Autun in Burgundy, Arthur Young travelled 
 across the Bourbonnais and the Nivernais, and he 
 found the country ' villainously cultivated ' ; when he 
 sees such a country ' in the hands of starving metayers, 
 instead of fat farmers,' he knows not how to pity 
 the seigneurs. To-day, his editor finds ' fat farmers ' 
 innumerable, for metayage has greatly advanced the 
 condition of the peasants. The country that lies 
 between the mouths of the Garonne and the Loire is 
 precisely that part of his journey which wrings from 
 Arthur Young his furious invective against the great 
 lords whom he wished he could make ' to skip again.' 
 Now, the Gironde, the Charente, and La Vendee are 
 thriving, rich districts, intersected with railways ; ' and, 
 owing to the indefatigable labours of peasant owners, 
 hundreds of thousands of acres of waste land have been 
 put under cultivation.' 
 
 Or turn to Brittany, which Arthur Young calls 'a 
 miserable province ' ; ' husbandry not much further 
 advanced than among the Hurons ' ; ' the people 
 almost as wild as their country ' ; ' mud houses, no 
 windows ' ; 'a hideous heap of wretchedness ' all 
 through ' the execrable maxims of despotism, or the 
 equally detestable prejudices of a feudal nobility.' 
 And this is the rich, thriving, laborious, and delightful 
 Brittany which our tourists love, where Miss Betham- 
 Edwards tells us of scientific farming, artificial manures, 
 machinery, 'the granary of Western France,' market 
 gardens, of fabulous value, and a great agricultural 
 college, one of the most important in Europe. 
 
 Maine and Anjou, through which the Loire flows 
 
224 THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 below Tours, were deserts to Arthur Young. Every 
 tourist knows that these provinces now look as rich 
 and prosperous as any spot in Europe. Miss Betham- 
 Edwards gives us an almost idyllic picture of an Angevin 
 farm-house, with its supper, merriment, and dance ; and 
 tells of Angevin peasants building themselves villas 
 with eight rooms, a flower garden, parlour, kitchen, 
 offices, and four airy bedrooms. ' The peasant wastes 
 nothing and spends little ; he possesses stores of home- 
 spun linen, home-made remedies, oil, vinegar, honey, 
 cider, and wine of his own producing.' ' The poorest 
 eat asparagus, green peas, and strawberries every day 
 in season ; and as everybody owns crops, nobody pilfers 
 his neighbours.' Universal ownership gives absolute 
 security to property, and pauperism is unknown. 
 
 As in Berri, as in the Limousin, Poitou, Anjou, and 
 Brittany, so elsewhere throughout France, we find the 
 same astounding contrast between the tale told by the 
 traveller of 1789 and the traveller of 1889. Paris amazes 
 Arthur Young by its dirtiness and discomfort, and the 
 silence and stagnation of life the instant he passes out 
 of its narrow crooked streets ! To those accustomed 
 to the animation and rapid movement of England, 
 says he, it is not possible to describe ' the dulness and 
 stupidity of France ! ' To read these words in the year 
 of the great Exhibition, 1889, with its 26,000,000 tickets 
 bought by sight-seers ! In Champagne he pronounces 
 his famous diatribe against government. Now, we all 
 know Champagne to be a thriving and wealthy country. 
 It was in Franche Comt that Arthur Young, being 
 surrounded by an angry crowd, made his famous speech 
 to them about French and English taxation, and ex- 
 plained the difference between a seigneur in France and 
 in England. On which side would the difference lie, if 
 
FRANCE IN 1/89 AND 1889 225 
 
 he rose to make his speech in the Doubs to-day ? Arthur 
 Young crosses France from Alsace to Auvergne before 
 he sees a field of clover ; but in France to-day clover is 
 as common as it is in England. Old Marseilles he 
 thinks close, ill-built, and dirty ; and ' the port itself is 
 a horse pond.' He cannot find a conveyance between 
 Marseilles and Nice. Such great cities in France, he 
 says, have not the hundredth part of the means of 
 communication common in much smaller places in 
 England. He passes into the mountain region of 
 Upper Savoy ; and there he finds the people at their 
 ease, and the land productive, in spite of the harsh 
 climate and the barren soil. He asks the reason, and 
 he learns that there are no seigneurs in Upper Savoy. 
 In Lower Savoy he finds the people poor and miserable, 
 for there stands a carcan, a seigneurial standard, with a 
 chain and a heavy collar, an emblem of the slavery of 
 the people. 
 
 At Lyons he meets the Rolands, though he failed to 
 recognise the romantic genius that lay still hidden in 
 the young and beautiful wife of the austere financier. 
 At Lyons he is assured that ' the state of manufacture 
 is melancholy to the last degree.' And, as the quarter 
 now known as Perrache did not yet exist, he finds the 
 city itself badly situated. As he passes along the 
 Riviera from Antibes to Nice, he is driven to walk, for 
 want of a conveyance, and a woman carries his baggage 
 on an ass. At Cannes there is no post-house, carriage, 
 horses, or mules, and he has to walk through nine miles 
 of waste ! And so he at last gets back to Paris. There 
 he hears Mirabeau thunder in the National Assembly ; 
 meets the King and Queen, La Fayette, Barnave, Sieyes, 
 Condorcet, and the chiefs of the , Revolution ; and is 
 taken to the Jacobin Club, of which he is duly installed 
 
 p 
 
226 THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 as a member. And this wonderful book ends with a 
 chapter of general reflections on the Revolution, which 
 go more deeply down to the root of the matter, John 
 Morley has said, than all that Burke, Paine, and 
 Mackintosh piled up in so many eloquent periods. 
 
 The Revolution as a whole would carry us far afield. 
 In these few pages we are dealing with the great trans- 
 formation that it wrought in the condition of the peasant. 
 It must not be forgotten that part of the wonderful 
 difference between the peasant of the last century and 
 the peasant of to-day is due to the vast material 
 advancement common to the civilised world. Railroads, 
 steam factories, telegraphs, the enormous increase in 
 population, in manufactures, commerce, and inventions 
 were not products of the ' principles of '89,' nor of the 
 Convention, nor of the Jacobin Club. All Europe has 
 grown, America has grown almost, miraculously, and 
 France has grown with both. But the political lesson 
 of Arthur Young's journey is this : the poverty and the 
 desolation which he saw in 1789 were directly due, as 
 he so keenly felt, not to the country, not to the 
 husbandmen, not to ignorance or to indolence in the 
 people, not to mere neglect, weakness, or stupidity in 
 the central government, but directly to bad laws, cruel 
 privileges, and an oppressive system of tyranny. Arthur 
 Young found an uncommonly rich soil, a glorious 
 climate, a thrifty, ingenious, and laborious people, a 
 strong central government that, in places and at times, 
 could make magnificent roads, bridges, canals, ports ; 
 and when a Turgot, or a Liancourt, or a de Turbilly 
 had a free hand, a country which could be made one of 
 the richest on the earth. What Arthur Young saw, 
 with the eye of true insight, was, that so soon as these 
 evil laws and this atrocious system of land tenure were 
 
FRANCE IN 1789 AND 1889 227 
 
 removed, France would be one of the finest countries in 
 the world. And Arthur Young, as we see, was right. 
 
 Another point is this : to Arthur Young, the Suffolk 
 farmer of 1789, everything he sees in the peasantry and 
 husbandry of France appears miserably inferior to the 
 peasantry and husbandry of England. France is a 
 country far worse cultivated than England, its agri- 
 cultural produce miserably less ; its life, animation, and 
 means of communication ludicrously inferior to those of 
 England ; its farmers in penury, its labourers starving, 
 its resources barbarous, compared with those of England. 
 In an English village more meat, he learns, is eaten in 
 a week, than in a French village in a year ; the clothing, 
 food, home, and intelligence of the English labourer are 
 far above those of the French labourer. The country 
 inns are infinitely better in England ; there is ten times 
 the circulation, the wealth, the comfort in an English 
 rural district ; the English labourer is a free man, the 
 French labourer little more than a serf. 
 
 Can we say the same thing of 1889? Obviously not. 
 The contrast to-day is reversed. It is the English 
 labourer who is worse housed, worse fed, clothed, 
 taught ; who has nothing of his own, who can never 
 save ; to whom the purchase of an acre of land is as 
 much an impossibility as of a diamond necklace, and 
 who may no more think to own a dairy than to own a 
 race horse ; who follows the plough for two shillings a 
 day, and ends, when he drops, in the workhouse. 
 England has increased in these hundred years far more 
 than France in population, in wealth, in commerce, in 
 manufactures, in dominion, in resources, in general 
 material prosperity in all but in the condition of her 
 rural labourer. In that she has gone back, perhaps 
 positively ; but relatively it is certain she has gone very 
 
228 THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 far back. The English traveller in France to-day is 
 amazed at the wealth, independence, and comfort of the 
 French peasant. To Miss Betham-Edwards, who knows 
 France well, it is a land of Goshen, flowing with milk 
 and honey ; the life of the peasant of Anjou, Brie, and 
 La Vendee is one of idyllic prosperity ' delightful to 
 behold.' The land tenure of England in 1789 was, as 
 Young told the mob in the Doubs, far in advance of 
 that of France as far as that of France of 1889 is in 
 advance of that of England now. Our English great 
 lords have not yet begun ' to skip again.' Land tenure 
 in England to-day is essentially the same as it was in 
 1789. In France it has been wholly transformed by 
 the Revolution. 
 
 There are in France now some eight million persons 
 who own the soil, the great mass of whom are peasants. 
 It is well known that the Revolution did not create 
 this peasant land-ownership, but that in part it goes 
 back to the earliest times of French history. Turgot, 
 Necker, de Tocqueville, and a succession of historians 
 have abundantly proved the fact. Arthur Young en- 
 tirely recognises the truth, and tells us that one-third 
 of the soil of France was already the property of the 
 peasant. This estimate has been adopted by good French 
 authorities ; but Miss Betham-Edwards considers it an 
 over-statement, and holds that the true proportion in 1789 
 was one-fourth. In any case it is now much more than 
 one-half. Not but that there is now in France a very 
 great number also of large estates, and some that are 
 immense when compared with the standard of England 
 proper. It has indeed i<een estimated that positively, 
 though not relatively, there are more great rural estates 
 in France to-day than there are in England. The 
 notion that the Revolution has extinguished great 
 
FRANCE IN 1789 AND 1889 229 
 
 properties in France, is as utterly mistaken as the 
 notion that the Revolution created the system of small 
 properties. The important point is that since the 
 Revolution every labourer has been able to acquire a 
 portion of the soil ; and a very large proportion of the 
 adult population has already so done. 
 
 It is also likely that Young overrated the depth of 
 the external discomfort that he saw. Under such a 
 brutal system of fiscal and manorial oppression as was 
 then rife, the farmer and the labourer carefully hide 
 what wealth they may have, and deliberately assume 
 the outer semblance of want, for fear of the tax-gatherer, 
 the tithe proctor, and the landlord's bailiff. That has 
 been seen in Ireland for centuries and may be still seen 
 to-day. So the French peasant was not always so poor 
 as he chose to appear in Arthur Young's eyes. 
 
 Another thing is that the French labouring man, 
 and still more the labouring woman, is a marvellously 
 penurious, patient, frugal creature who deliberately, for 
 the sake of thrift, endures hard fare, uncleanness, squalor, 
 such as no English or American freeman would stomach 
 except by necessity. The life led by a comfortable 
 English or American farmer would represent wicked 
 waste and shameful indulgence to a much richer French 
 peasant. I myself know a labourer on wages of less 
 than twenty shillings a week, who by thrift has bought 
 ten acres of the magnificent garden land between 
 Fontainebleau and the Seine, worth many thousand 
 pounds, on which grow all kinds of fruits and vegetables, 
 and the famous dessert grapes ; yet who, with all his 
 wealth and abundance, denies himself and his two 
 children meat on Sundays, and even a drink of the 
 wine which he grows and makes for the market. I 
 know a peasant family in Normandy, worth in houses 
 
230 THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 gardens, and farms, at least 500,000 francs, who will 
 live on the orts cast out as refuse by their own lodgers, 
 while the wife and mother hires herself out as a scullion 
 for two francs a day. The penuriousness of the French 
 peasant is to English eyes a thing savage, bestial, and 
 maniacal. 
 
 The French peasant has great virtues ; but he has the 
 defects of his virtues, and his home life is far from 
 idyllic. He is laborious, shrewd, enduring, frugal, self- 
 reliant, sober, honest, and capable of intense self-control 
 for a distant reward ; but that reward is property in 
 land, in pursuit of which he may become as pitiless as 
 a bloodhound. He is not chaste (indeed he is often 
 lecherous), but he relentlessly keeps down the popula- 
 tion, and can hardly bring himself to rear two children. 
 To give these two children a good heritage, he will 
 inflict great hardships on them and on all others whom 
 he controls. He has an intense passion for his own 
 immediate locality ; but he loves his own commune, and 
 still more his own terre, almost as much as France. 
 He is not indeed the monster that Zola paints in La 
 Terre ; but there is a certain vein of Zolaism in him, 
 and the type may be found in the criminal records of 
 France. He is intelligent ; but he is not nearly so well 
 educated as the Swiss, or the German, or the Hollander. 
 He is able to bear suffering without a murmur ; but he 
 has none of that imperturbable courage that Englishmen 
 and Americans show in a thousand new situations. He 
 is shrewd and far-seeing, and a tough hand in a bargain ; 
 but he has none of the inventive audacity of the 
 American citizen. He is self-reliant, but too cautious 
 to trust himself in a new field. He is independent, but 
 without the proud dignity of the Spanish peasant. He 
 has a love for the gay, the beautiful, and the graceful, 
 
FRANCE IN 1789 AND 1889 231 
 
 which, compared with that of the Englishman, is the 
 sense of art ; though he has nothing of the charm of the 
 Italian, or of the musical genius of the German. 
 
 Take him for all in all, he is a strong and noteworthy 
 force in modern civilisation. Though his country has 
 not the vast mineral wealth of England, nor her gigantic 
 development in manufactures and in commerce, he has 
 made France one of the richest, most solid, most pro- 
 gressive countries on earth. He is quite as frugal and 
 patient as the German, and is far more ingenious and 
 skilful. He has not the energy of the Englishman, or the 
 elastic spring of the American, but he is far more saving 
 and much more provident. He 'wastes nothing, and 
 spends little'; and thus, since his country comes next to 
 England and America in natural resources and national 
 energy, he has built up one of the strongest, most self- 
 contained, and most durable of modern peoples. 
 
 Since this essay appeared in 1890, Miss Betham- 
 Edwards has published her own most valuable and 
 interesting survey, her France of To-day, 2 vols., 1892-94. 
 This book is the result of her exhaustive study of French 
 agriculture, over twenty-five years. It forms the pendant 
 to Arthur Young, and as being a study exactly one 
 hundred years later, over the same ground and embody- 
 ing an even more extensive knowledge of France than 
 that of the old traveller, it becomes a work of rare value 
 to the student of history and of politics. Miss Betham- 
 Edwards is also the well-known author of several other 
 books of travel in France ; and her readers rejoice to 
 learn that her life-long labours have received most 
 honourable recognition from the Government of France 
 as well as that of England. 
 
 Fluctuat nee mergitur should be the motto not of 
 Paris but of France. The indomitable endurance of 
 
232 THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 her race has enabled her to surmount crushing disasters, 
 losses, and disappointments under which another race 
 would have sunk. She bears with ease a national debt 
 the annual charge of which is more than double that of 
 wealthy England, and a taxation nearly double that of 
 England, with almost the same population a permanent 
 taxation (exceeding 100 francs per head) greater than 
 has ever before been borne by any people. She loses, 
 over one war, a sum not much short of the whole national 
 debt of England, and she writes off, without a murmur, 
 a loss of 1,200,000,000 francs, thrown into the Panama 
 Canal. If France is thus strong, the backbone of her 
 strength is found in the marvellous industry and thrift 
 of her peasantry. And if her peasantry are industrious 
 and thrifty, it is because the Revolution of '89 has 
 secured to them a position more free and independent 
 than that presented by any monarchical country on the 
 continent of Europe. 
 
CHAPTER VIII 
 
 THE CITY : ANCIENT MEDIEVAL MODERN IDEAL 
 
 THE life that men live in the City gives the type and 
 measure of their civilisation. The word civilisation 
 means the manner of life of the civilised part of the 
 community: i.e. of the city-men, not of the country-men, 
 who are called rustics, and once were called pagans, or 
 the heathens of the villages. Hence, inasmuch as a 
 city is a highly organised and concentrated type of the 
 general life of an epoch or people, if we compare the 
 various types of the city, we are able to measure the 
 strength and weakness of different kinds of civilisation. 
 
 How enormous is the range over which city-life ex- 
 tends, from the first cave-men and dug-out wigwams in 
 pre- historic ages to the complex arrangements and 
 appliances of modern Paris (which we may take as the 
 type of the highly organised modern city of Europe). 
 How vast is the interval between one kind of town-life 
 and another kind! say comparing Bagdad with Chicago, 
 or Naples with Staleybridge. The differences in the 
 humblest forms of rural life are far less apparent, 
 whether we deal with different epochs or different races. 
 The ploughman and the shepherd to-day on the Cots- 
 wolds, or the Cheviots, certainly the tenants of mud- 
 cabins in Connemara or Skye, do not, in external modes 
 of material life, differ so greatly from their predecessors 
 
234 THE CITY IN HISTORY 
 
 in the days of the Crusades or even of the Heptarchy ; 
 and a herdsman of Anatolia, of La Mancha, or of Kerry, 
 eats, sleeps, and works in very similar ways. But how 
 vast is the interval between the habits and conditions of 
 the Londoners who built the Lake-village of Llyn-dyn, 
 or the Parisii who staked out the island of Loukhteith, 
 and the modern Londoner and the modern Parisian ! 
 
 The change began with the landing on the Thames, or 
 the Seine, of a few thousand men in armour from the 
 Tiber, led by the greatest genius known to history, who 
 introduced the language, law, institutions, and discipline 
 of the greatest City recorded in history. In old times 
 some of the most famous cities in the world were not so 
 large as one London parish, and not nearly so populous. 
 Entire states, which for centuries filled the page of the 
 main history of mankind, did not cover so much ground, 
 or contain so many inhabitants, as do London and Paris 
 to-day. The men of Athens, who passed their lives in 
 the midst of the noblest creations of art, at the broken 
 fragments of which we gaze in wonder and awe, men 
 who heard the most sublime tragedies, and took part in 
 the most imposing ceremonies ever devised by man, had 
 food, garments, and lodging so rough and plain that we 
 should hardly think it fit for a prison. On the other 
 hand, they had as much leisure, were as daintily fastidious 
 in their tastes, and regarded themselves as much lords 
 of creation, as if they were all officers in the Guards. 
 
 In the Middle Ages, the men who passed their lives 
 in these gorgeous cathedrals, of which we only see the 
 colourless shell to-day, and in that fantastic and chival- 
 rous art-life, of which we only catch glimpses in some 
 old corner of Verona, Nuremberg, or Florence, lived in 
 streets and houses so fetid, cramped, poisonous, and 
 gloomy, under conditions so dangerous to life and limb, 
 
THE ANCIENT CITY 235 
 
 so full of discomfort, that many a prisoner would prefer 
 his warm cell in Pentonville. And we, who have railways, 
 telephones, and newspapers, who make everything by 
 machinery, except beauty and happiness we who can- 
 not drink a glass of water, or teach children to read and 
 write without an army of inspectors, Acts of Parliament, 
 and amateur Professors of Social Science, to show us 
 how to do it we who, in a man's life-time, cover with 
 new bricks a whole province, in area bigger than the 
 Attica of Pericles, or the Roman State of Coriolanus : 
 we lead, in some of our huge manufacturing cities, lives 
 so dull and mechanical that Pericles or Coriolanus would 
 have preferred exile. 
 
 Out of a vast range of cities, old and new, it would be 
 instructive to compare four types : the Ancient city of 
 Greece and Italy the Mediaeval city of Catholic and 
 Feudal times the Modern city of England, France, 
 and America and then the Ideal city, as we can con- 
 ceive it to be, in the future. Each age has its strong 
 side, and its weak side. It would be impossible to bring 
 back any obsolete type of society : but things may be 
 learned from some of them. And, where we have 
 horrible evils of our own to conquer, it may be just as 
 well to reflect on a very different type of life, under 
 other conceptions of nature and of man. 
 
 I. The Ancient City 
 
 Let us imagine ourselves citizens of some famous city 
 of Greece or Italy in the earlier ages before the Roman 
 Empire such a city as Athens, Corinth, Syracuse, or 
 Rome some centuries before Christ. Our city would be 
 at once our Country, our Church, our Religion our 
 school, academy, and university, our museum, our 
 
236 THE CITY IN HISTORY 
 
 trade-gild, our play-ground, and our club. The city 
 would have been founded by some god or demi-god, 
 with mysterious and half-uttered legends about its 
 origin ; and the knowledge of these was thought to be 
 confined to a select few, who were quite unable or un- 
 willing to divulge it, legends preserved by quaint rites 
 and traditional ceremonials that all reverenced and 
 none could explain. The city would be, not only the 
 special creation but the favourite home of some great 
 god ; it would be also the chosen abode of a company 
 of minor gods and heroes whose images, altars, sanctu- 
 aries, groves, fountains, caves, or rocks, would lie thickly 
 around and be chiefly grouped about the citadel. There 
 would be the olive that sprang from the ground at the 
 stroke of Athene's spear, the water of some nymph, the 
 oracular cave of some prophet, the eternal fire, the stone 
 that fell from heaven, the lair of the sacred serpent, the 
 rude bronze or oaken fetish, and all the mysteries of the 
 Holy of Holies in the upper or inner city. 
 
 The citizen was born to the privilege of these gods : 
 his city and its worship and rites formed an inalienable 
 religion which no man could acquire, no man could put 
 ofif. A man could not change his city, except under 
 rare and difficult conditions; if he left this city he 
 became an outcast and an outlaw, a man without legal 
 rights or religious privileges, unless so far as he was 
 protected or adopted by some new household or gild. 
 To be banished from one's city was a sort of civil 
 death ; moral and spiritual degradation, with some of 
 the effects of excommunication and outlawry at once. 
 If a man came to a city not his own for pleasure or 
 business, he remained a sojourner and a foreigner, with- 
 out the rights of citizenship, in a state between a citizen 
 and a slave ; and his condition was less pleasant and 
 
THE ANCIENT CITY 237 
 
 secure than is that of a Chinese coolie in California or 
 Victoria. 
 
 To the free-born citizen, his City was his Church and 
 his Country, his home and his society. The worship of 
 the gods consisted in a constant succession of public 
 ceremonies which combined artistic display with civic 
 festival. To all of these the citizen was free, and no 
 business or work was allowed to interfere with the social 
 and religious duty of attending what was at once divine 
 service and patriotic function. The southern climate 
 usually enabled him to enjoy all these in the open air 
 or under a covered portico pictures, statues, proces- 
 sions, lectures, hymns, sacrifices, musical celebrations, 
 were all to be found in public places or open colonnades. 
 The piety and public spirit of the opulent noble filled 
 each market-place or street corner with a work of art, 
 a shrine, a statue, a fountain or a portico. There were 
 no museums, because the city, its temples, and forum, 
 were a continuous museum, open at all times and with- 
 out fee or ticket. The theatres were in buildings 
 hollowed out of the rock or open to the sky, and were 
 practically free of charge. Exhibitions of skill, dancing, 
 the singing in chorus of hymns, processions on horse 
 and foot, chariot races and horse races, even combats 
 with beasts and pantomimes were, in origin and in 
 theory, religious ceremonies, and as such were open and 
 gratuitous in practice. 
 
 It was a civic obligation of the rich and well-born to 
 offer these artistic displays and these means of religious 
 worship to their fellow-citizens ; and it was part of the 
 inheritance they derived from their ancestors and their 
 ancestral deities. These leitourgies were the tribute 
 that the rich paid to the state and to the patron gods of 
 their family and the shades of their forefathers. That 
 
238 THE CITY IN HISTORY 
 
 which began as a sacred duty to family and to the 
 Powers above and below gradually became a sort of 
 public tax or civic obligation to their countrymen. They 
 were expected to provide plays, festivals, illuminations, 
 races, concerts, fountains, baths, temples, and works of 
 art. At Rome they pleaded the causes of their clients 
 in the law-courts, protected them in difficulty, and 
 ultimately supported them in need, they threw open 
 their gardens, and often they bequeathed their mansions, 
 gardens, estates, and wealth to the city as their heirs. 
 The wealthy and the ambitious were expected to take the 
 lead in peace and in war, in matters sacred or profane, 
 in art and in law. On the great festivals and civic 
 gatherings they were called on to make what are called 
 in the States public ' orations ' in honour of the city, 
 its sons, and its deities. Public men in Europe, like 
 ' prominent citizens ' in America, are also accustomed 
 to make ' orations ' ; and Lord Rosebery or Mr. Balfour 
 can hardly play a game or eat a dinner without being 
 called on for a few words. But at Athens or at Rome, 
 it was a more serious and perhaps a more artistic per- 
 formance than our after-dinner witticisms. And those 
 who stood in the forum and listened to Pericles and to 
 Demosthenes, to Scipio and to Cicero, took home more 
 material for thought and a higher standard of public 
 debate than what we usually carry away with us from a 
 crowded town's-meeting. 
 
 Men did not make speeches in public meetings 
 in order ' to get into Parliament ' : because every adult 
 citizen was himself a member of Parliament, or at 
 least a legislator. At set times, the citizens were 
 gathered in the agora or forum round the bema or 
 rostrum, listened to those who addressed them, and 
 then and there voted decrees and made laws. In many 
 
THE ANCIENT CITY 239 
 
 Greek cities any citizen had a right to stand up and 
 propose a decree or a law or amendment ; and if he 
 could persuade his fellow-citizens, or such of them as 
 chose to attend the meeting, his proposition was at once 
 carried out. A citizen's trade or profession, if he had 
 one, was practically determined by custom ; and, as a 
 rule, it could not be exercised freely in any other way 
 or in other place. The public places, gardens, temples, 
 colonnades, and monuments were perpetually thronged 
 with citizens who knew each other by sight and name, 
 who spent their lives in a sort of open-air club, talking 
 politics, art, business, or scandal criticised Aristophanes' 
 last comic opera and Cicero's furious attack on Clodius. 
 And in the cool of the day they gathered to see the 
 young lads wrestle, race, leap, and box, cast the javelin 
 or the stone ; and the younger warriors practised feats 
 with their horses or with the spear and the shield. 
 
 Of course such a city was of moderate size. No city 
 in Greece proper exceeded in size such cities as Edin- 
 burgh or York ; and most of them were of smaller area 
 than Lincoln and Oxford. Even Rome, Syracuse, and 
 Alexandria, the largest cities of the ancient world, 
 were not so vast but what one could walk round their 
 outer walls in a summer afternoon. In Greece and 
 Italy, every considerable city was beautiful and set in 
 a beautiful site with a central citadel crowned with 
 porticoes, colonnades, and temples ; and in some cities, 
 such as Athens, Corinth, Ephesus, Byzantium, Sparta, 
 Corcyra, Naples, Ancona, Rome, with a panorama of 
 varied splendour. Within the walls there would be 
 ample space for gardens, groves, parks, and exercise 
 grounds ; and on issuing from the walls without, the 
 open country at once presented itself, where game could 
 be chased or the mountain-side could be roamed. 
 
240 THE CITY IN HISTORY 
 
 There were no leagues of dull and grimy suburbs, no 
 acres of factories and smoky furnaces, fetid streams, and 
 squalid wastes ; there was no drunkenness in the streets, 
 and practically no rates and taxes and no poor-houses. 
 
 Health was a matter of religion, and it was vastly 
 promoted by this, that cleanliness and sanitary discipline 
 was a religious duty as well as an affair of personal 
 pride. It remained a religious duty and a poetic senti- 
 ment after definite belief in local gods had become a 
 mere convention or a phrase. To defile the precincts 
 of the city, and almost every open corner of it was 
 consecrated to some deity or hero, was to outrage 
 the powers of heaven or of earth ; to cast refuse or 
 sewage into a stream was to incur the wrath of some 
 river-god ; to pollute one of the city fountains was to 
 offer sacrilege to some water-nymph. To bring disease 
 into some public gathering was to insult the gods 
 and demi-gods ; to place the dead within the precincts 
 of a temple, or to bury the dead within the city, or in 
 contact with human habitations, to leave the dead or 
 any human remains unburied or scattered about in 
 public places and abandoned as carrion, would have 
 seemed to a Greek or a Roman the last enormity of 
 blasphemous horror. 
 
 To wash, to shampoo the skin daily, to trim and 
 anoint the hair, to scour the clothes (and the Roman 
 toga was made of white wool which needed endless 
 scouring), to brush, paint, and limewash the walls and 
 floors, to cleanse the public thoroughfares, to get rid of 
 every form of uncleanness and refuse this was a 
 religious, social, domestic, and personal duty : to effect 
 which were concentrated almost all the impulses that 
 we know as obedience to the Deity, social decency, 
 family pride, and the being a gentleman and a lady. 
 
THE ANCIENT CITY 241 
 
 A Greek who should have submitted to live in the 
 bestial uncleanness, the fetid atmosphere, and the pol- 
 luted water supply to which we condemn such masses 
 of the labouring people of our vast cities, would have 
 felt himself a rebel against the gods above, and an out- 
 cast from the fellowship of decent citizens. The Greek 
 word for ' gentleman ' is Ka\oKaja06<j, which literally 
 means the ' beautiful and the good,' and which, perhaps, 
 came to mean in practice the clean and ' the nice,' as 
 we say, gens comme il faut, as the French say, ' the 
 well-washed ' and ' the respectable.' No Greek could 
 think himself ' respectable ' or ' nice,' unless he were 
 constantly scouring, scraping, washing, polishing, and 
 anointing his person, his clothes, his house, and his 
 utensils. And the women were almost as active as the 
 men in the daily use of the bath. 
 
 The habit of constant discussion and witnessing 
 shows grew on the Greeks, as the habit of bathing grew 
 on the Romans, until these things became a mania to 
 which their lives were given up. Whole rivers were 
 brought down from the mountains in aqueducts, and 
 ultimately in the Roman Empire the city population 
 spent a large part of their day in the public baths 
 buildings as big as St. Paul's Cathedral and of magni- 
 ficent materials and adornment where 5000 persons 
 could meet and take their air-bath in what was club, 
 play-ground, theatre, lecture-hall, and promenade at 
 once. Such was the classical religion of cleanliness, 
 of which the Musulman has inherited some traditions, 
 and of which Europe in our own generation is beginning 
 to revive the practice. The excess of this skin deep 
 purification of the body led to a melancholy reaction, 
 when Christianity denounced it as sinful, and recon- 
 secrated Dirt, the natural state of primitive man ; until 
 
 Q 
 
242 THE CITY IN HISTORY 
 
 at last in the ages of faith we had uncleanness of the 
 body regarded as the purity of the soul, and a man 
 was exalted to be saint when he was found to have 
 made himself a mass of vermin. 
 
 The obverse to the bright picture of the Ancient 
 City was dark enough. If the citizens engaged in war, 
 and war was always, until the consolidation of empire 
 by Rome, a possible event, defeat meant the risk of 
 having the city razed to the ground, or turned into an 
 open village ; sometimes a general massacre, or slavery 
 for man and woman. Or, if in domestic politics, a 
 crisis occurred, which with us means a change of govern- 
 ment, in Greece or Italy it might imply to the losers 
 at the ballot confiscation and exile ; and the defeated 
 party, be they democrat or aristocrat, lost home and 
 country, and became outcasts and outlaws until they 
 could get a reversal of the sentence. Furthermore, it 
 must be remembered that the full privileges of citizen 
 belonged only to a portion of the inhabitants of the 
 city a portion which might not exceed one-tenth, 
 whilst ninety per cent, of the actual dwellers within 
 the walls might be slaves, freedmen, aliens, strangers, 
 clients, and camp-followers. And the slaves in the 
 public service, in the mines and factories, or in the 
 farms, docks, ships, or warehouses, led a life too 
 often of appalling misery and toil. Even the house- 
 hold slaves who shared the intimacy of their master 
 or mistress, who were often their superiors in culture 
 and refinement, were liable to horrible punishments, 
 to bodily and moral degradation, and to any cruelty 
 or insult which brutality and caprice might inflict. 
 During the brilliant age at Greece, and at last under 
 the empire at Rome, domestic life in our modern sense 
 was stunted or corrupt. At Greece, the wife was too 
 
THE ANCIENT CITY 243 
 
 often the drudge or the appendage of the household ; 
 at Rome, she too often became the tyrant. Female 
 society in its higher meaning was unknown, unless in 
 a depraved sense. Vice, indolence, indecency, were not 
 only things not involving shame, but things which in 
 an elegant form were a matter of public pride. 
 
 Thus this apotheosis of the City had both black and 
 brilliant sides. But there is no essential connexion 
 between its bright and its dark aspect. This religious 
 veneration of the City, this worship of the City as the 
 practical type of religion, was extravagant, anti-social, 
 and inhuman in the wider sense of patriotism and 
 human duty. But it had elements of fixity, of dignity, 
 of reality, and of moral and religious fervour, that are 
 wholly unknown to our city life, inconceivable even by 
 us, elements to which our tepid Patriotism makes but 
 a feeble approach. The citizens were not indeed the 
 members of a great nation, but a very close, jealous, 
 and selfish civic aristocracy. Within their own order 
 they gave the world fine examples of equality, sim- 
 plicity, sociability, and public devotion, such as are 
 hardly intelligible to modern men, such as no re- 
 publican enthusiasm has ever in modern days attempted 
 to revive. In the horror of dirt and the religion of 
 personal health and perfection, they gave the world 
 inimitable examples at which we look back in wonder 
 and awe. For the love of beauty we have taken to 
 us the love of comfort ; for the profusion of art. we 
 have substituted material production ; for the religio 
 loci we prefer the vague immensities of the Universe ; 
 in place of public magnificence and social communion, 
 we make idols of our domestic privacy and private 
 luxuriousness. 
 
244 THE CITY IN HISTORY 
 
 II. The Mediceval City 
 
 We turn to imagine some city of the Middle Ages. 
 Here also would be, as in an ancient city, a long circuit 
 of walls, with gates and towers, a military and highly 
 organised society, a complex religious system, intense 
 civic pride and patriotism. And yet the differences are 
 vast. The grand difference of all is that the city is 
 no longer the State, except in some parts of Italy, 
 and even there not in the early Middle Ages. In the 
 early Middle Ages, the city is not the State or the 
 nation : it is only a stronghold, or fortified magazine in 
 the barony, duchy, kingdom, or empire. It is only a 
 big and very complicated castle, with its defensive 
 system exactly like any other castle, governed by a 
 mayor, bailiff, or prior, and the burgher council, and not 
 necessarily by a feudal lord. Except in Italy and a 
 few free towns along the Mediterranean at particular 
 periods, no city counted itself as wholly outside the 
 jurisdiction of some overlord, king, or emperor. 
 
 Apart from its political and legal privileges, a 
 mediaeval city was something like Windsor Castle or 
 the Tower of London, on a large scale and with many 
 subdivisions, governed by an elected corporation and 
 not by a baron or viceroy. The ancient city, however 
 much it had to fear war and opposition from its rival 
 cities or states, could feel safe within its own territories 
 from any attack on the part of its rural neighbours, 
 subjects, or fellow-citizens. There it was mistress, or 
 rather the city included the territory around it. No 
 Athenian ever dreamed of being invaded by the in- 
 habitants of Attica, or even of Boeotia. No Roman 
 troubled himself about Latians or Etruscans other than 
 the citizens of Latian or Tuscan cities. City life in the 
 
THE MEDI/EVAL CITY 245 
 
 Middle Ages was a very different thing. Until a 
 mediaeval city became very strong and had secured round 
 itself an ample territory, it was always in difficulties 
 with the lords of neighbouring fiefs and castles. Even 
 in Italy, before the great cities had crushed the feudal- 
 lords and had forced them to become citizens, the 
 mediaeval cities had constantly to fight for their exist- 
 ence against chiefs whose castles lay within sight. The 
 ancient city was a State the collective centre of an 
 organised territory, supreme within it, and owing no 
 fealty to any other sovereign, temporal or spiritual, 
 outside its own territory. The mediaeval city was only 
 a privileged town within a fief or kingdom, having 
 charters, rights, and fortifications of its own ; but, both 
 in religious and in political rank, bound in absolute duty 
 to far distant and much more exalted superiors. 
 
 Partly as a consequence of its being in constant 
 danger from its neighbours, it had a defensive system 
 vastly more elaborate than that of ancient cities. Its 
 outer walls were of enormous height, thickness, and 
 complexity. They were flanked with gigantic towers, 
 gates, posterns, and watch-towers ; it had a broad moat 
 round it and a complicated series of drawbridges, 
 stockades, barbicans, and outworks. We may see 
 something of it in the old city of Carcassonne in the 
 south of France, destroyed by St. Louis in 1262, in the 
 walls of Rome round the Vatican, and in the old walls 
 of Constantinople on the western side near the Gate of 
 St. Romanus. From without the Mediaeval City looked 
 like a vast castle. And the military discipline and 
 precautions were entirely those of a castle. In peace 
 or war, it was a fortress first, and a dwelling-place 
 afterwards. This vast apparatus of defence cramped 
 the space and shut out light, air, and prospect. Few 
 
246 THE CITY IN HISTORY 
 
 ancient cities would have looked from without like a 
 fortress ; for the walls were much lower and simpler, 
 in the absence of any elaborate system of artillery. But 
 the Mediaeval City with its far loftier walls, towers, gates, 
 and successive defences, looked more like a prison than 
 a town, and indeed to a great extent it was a prison. 
 There could seldom have been much prospect from 
 within it, except of its own walls and towers ; there 
 were few open spaces, usually there was one small 
 market-place, no public gardens or walks ; the city was 
 encumbered with castles, monasteries, and castellated 
 enclosures ; and the bridges and quays were crowded 
 with a confused pile of lofty wooden houses ; and, as 
 the walls necessarily ran along any sea or river frontage 
 that the city had, it was impossible to get any general 
 view of the town, or to look up or down the river for 
 the closely-packed buildings on the bridges. 
 
 As a rule there was no citadel as in the ancient cities, 
 though there was sometimes an upper and a lower 
 town, and often a castle in one corner or side of the city, 
 as the Tower is at London and the Bastille was at Paris, 
 St. Angelo at Rome, or Blachernae and the Seven 
 Towers at Constantinople. The place of citadel was 
 usually occupied by some vast central cathedral or abbey; 
 which, with its adjuncts, occupied nearly one-tenth of 
 the whole area in such cities as Lincoln, York, Amiens, 
 Reims, Orvieto ; and even in cities like Florence, Paris, 
 Rouen, London, Antwerp, and Cologne, stood out in 
 the far distance towering over the city as did the 
 Acropolis at Athens or the Capitol at Rome. Within 
 the walls, and around the walls for a distance of many 
 miles, was a profusion of churches, abbeys, nunneries, 
 chapels, oratories, varying from such enormous piles 
 as those of Westminster, of St. Germain des Pres, St. 
 
THE MEDIEVAL CITY 247 
 
 Peter's and the Vatican at Rome, to the smallest 
 chantry on the pier of a bridge where a benison could 
 be said. 
 
 Many of these churches were far larger than the 
 ancient temples ; and if their architecture had not the 
 stately and simple dignity of the Doric fane, they were 
 far richer in varied works of art, more gorgeous in 
 colour, and infinitely more charged with religious and 
 aesthetic impression. Painting, fresco, mosaic, stained 
 glass, gilding, carved statues, coloured marbles, images 
 and reliefs in thousands, chased gold and silver utensils, 
 bronzes, ivories, silks, velvets, tapestries, embroideries, 
 illuminated books, carved wood, bells, clocks, perfumes, 
 organs, instruments, choirs of singers every beautiful 
 and delightful thing was crowded together, with the 
 relics of saints, the tombs of great men, the graves 
 of citizens for centuries, wonder-working pictures, 
 miraculous images, lamps and candles on a thousand 
 altars, chapels, offerings and images dedicated to 
 countless saints, martyrs, and holy men. A mediaeval 
 Church, however much it lacked the austere simplicity 
 and faultless symmetry of a Greek temple, was as much 
 deeper and more full in its solemnity and power, as 
 the Catholic mythology was deeper and nobler than the 
 classical mythology. 
 
 So too the Church was morally a far nobler thing 
 than the Temple. It was no mere colonnade for pro- 
 cessions, lounging, and society. It was this, but much 
 more also. It was school, art-museum, music-hall, place 
 of personal prayer, of confession of sin, preaching, teach- 
 ing, and civilising. It combined what at Athens was to 
 be sought in Parthenon, Theseum, Theatre, Academus, 
 Stoa, and Agora and very much beside which was 
 never known at Athens at all sacrament, confession, 
 
248 THE CITY IN HISTORY 
 
 penance, sermon. A Mediaeval city was full of such 
 centres of moral and spiritual education ; and in and 
 around such cities as Rome, Paris, and London, the 
 religious edifices of all kinds were counted not by 
 hundreds, but by thousands. Every great mediaeval 
 city contained its monasteries, nunneries, hospices, and 
 colleges, vast ranges of foundations that were at once 
 schools, training colleges, hospitals, refuges, and poor- 
 houses. Here was the grand difference between the 
 ancient and the mediaeval city. Within the city, there 
 were now no slaves, no serfs, no abject and outlaw caste 
 of any kind, except the Jews who formed a separate city 
 of their own. All citizens were free : all without excep- 
 tion had rights of some kind. The churches, monas- 
 teries, hospitals, and schools existed, in original design, 
 mainly for the poor, the wretched, and the diseased. 
 Christ loved the weak and the suffering. And the doors 
 of His house stood ever open to the weak, the suffering, 
 the halt, the blind, and the lame. The church of the 
 Middle Ages suffered little children to come unto Him. 
 The poorest, the weakest, the most abject, were welcome 
 there. The Priest, the Monk, the Nun taught, clothed, 
 and nursed the children of the poor, and the suffering 
 poor. The leper was tended in lazar-houses, even it 
 might be by kings and princesses, with the devotion of 
 Christian self-sacrifice. For the first time in history 
 there were schools, hospitals, poor-houses, for the most 
 lowly, compassion for the most miserable, and consola- 
 tion in Heaven for those who had found earth a Hell. 
 
 The old Greek and Roman religion of external clean- 
 ness was turned into a sin. The outward and visible 
 sign of sanctity now was to be unclean. No one was 
 clean : but the devout Christian was unutterably foul. 
 The tone of the Middle Ages in the matter of dirt was a 
 
THE MEDLEVAL CITY 249 
 
 form of mental disease. Cooped up in castles and 
 walled cities, with narrow courts and sunless alleys, they 
 would pass day and night in the same clothes, within 
 the same airless, gloomy, windowless, and pestiferous 
 chambers, they would go to bed without night clothes, 
 and sleep under uncleansed sheepskins and frieze rugs ; 
 they would wear the same leather, fur, and woollen gar- 
 ments for a lifetime, and even for successive generations ; 
 they ate their meals without forks, and covered up the 
 orts with rushes ; they flung their refuse out of the 
 window into the street or piled it up in the back-yard ; 
 the streets were narrow, unpaved, crooked lanes through 
 which, under the very palace turrets, men and beasts 
 tramped knee-deep in noisome mire. This was at inter- 
 vals varied with fetid rivulets and open cesspools ; every 
 church was crammed with rotting corpses and sur- 
 rounded with graveyards, sodden with cadaveric liquids, 
 and strewn with disinterred bones. Round these char- 
 nel houses and pestiferous churches were piled old 
 decaying wooden houses, their sole air being these 
 deadly exhalations, and their sole water supply being 
 these polluted streams or wells dug in this reeking soil. 
 Even in the palaces and castles of the rich the same 
 bestial habits prevailed. Prisoners rotted in noisome 
 dungeons under the banqueting hall ; corpses were 
 buried under the floor of the private chapel ; scores of 
 soldiers and attendants slept in gangs for months to- 
 gether in the same hall or guard-room where they ate and 
 drank, played and fought. It is one of those problems 
 which still remain for historians to solve how the race 
 ever survived the insanitary conditions of the Middle 
 Ages, and still more how it was ever continued what was 
 the normal death-rate and the normal birth-rate of cities ? 
 The towns were no doubt maintained by immigration, 
 
250 THE CITY IN HISTORY 
 
 and the rural labourer had the best chance of life, if he 
 could manage to escape death by violence or famine. 
 
 With all this, there was about the great cities of the 
 Middle Ages a noble spirit of civic life and energy, an 
 ever-present love of Art, a zeal for good work as good 
 work, and a deep under-lying sense of social duty and 
 personal faithfulness. A real and sacred bond held the 
 master and his apprentices together, the master work- 
 man to his men, the craftsman to his gild-brethren, the 
 gildmen in the mass as a great aggregate corporation. 
 Each burgher's house was his factory and workshop, 
 each house, each parish, each gild, each town had its 
 own patron saint, its own special church, its own feudal 
 patron, its corporate life, its own privileges, traditions, and 
 emblems. Thus grew up for the whole range of the 
 artificer's life, for the civic life, for the commercial life, a 
 profound sense of consecrated rule which amounted to a 
 kind of religion of Industry, a sort of patriotism of 
 Industry, an Art of Industry, the like of which has never 
 existed before or since. It was in ideal and in aim 
 (though alas ! not often in fact) the highest form of 
 secular life that human society has yet reached. It rested 
 ultimately, though somewhat vaguely, on religious Duty. 
 And it produced a sense of mutual obligation between 
 master and man, employer and employed, old and 
 young, rich and poor, wise and ignorant. To restore the 
 place of this sense of social obligation in Industry, the 
 world has been seeking and experimenting now for these 
 four centuries past. 
 
 III. The Modern City 
 
 It is needless to describe the modern city : we all 
 know what it is, some of us too well. The first great fact 
 about the Modern City is that it is in a far lower stage 
 
THE MODERN CITY 251 
 
 of organic life. It is almost entirely bereft of any 
 religious, patriotic, or artistic character as a whole. 
 There is in modern cities a great deal of active religious 
 life, much public spirit, in certain parts a love of beauty, 
 taste, and cultivation of a special kind. But it is not 
 embodied in the city ; it is not associated with the city ; 
 it does not radiate from the city. The Modern City is 
 ever changing, loose in its organisation, casual in its form. 
 It grows up, or extends suddenly, no man knows how, in 
 a single generation in America in a single decade. Its 
 denizens come and go, pass on, changing every few years 
 and even months. Few families have lived in the same 
 city for three successive generations. An Athenian, 
 Syracusan, Roman family had dwelt in their city for 
 twenty generations. 
 
 A typical industrial city of modern times has no 
 founder, no traditional heroes, no patrons or saints, no 
 emblem, no history, no definite circuit. In a century, it 
 changes its population over and over again, and takes 
 on two or three different forms. In ten or twenty years 
 it evolves a vast new suburb, a mere wen of bricks or 
 stone, with no god or demigod for its founder, but a 
 speculative builder, a syndicate or a railway. The 
 speculative builder or the company want a quick return 
 for their money. The new suburb is occupied by people 
 who are so busy, and in such a hurry to get to work, 
 that in taking a house, their sole inquiry is how near is 
 it to the station, or where the tram-car puts you down. 
 
 The result is, that a Modern City is an amorphous 
 amoeba -like aggregate of buildings, wholly without 
 defined limits, form, permanence, organisation, or beauty 
 often infinitely dreary, monstrous, grimy, noisy, and 
 bewildering. In America and in parts of England, a 
 big town springs up in twenty or thirty years out of a 
 
252 THE CITY IN HISTORY 
 
 moor, or out of a village on a mill-stream. If you leave 
 your native town say to go to India, and return after 
 five-and-twenty years, you will not find your way about 
 it ; and a gasometer or a railway-siding will have occu- 
 pied the site of the family mansion. A modern city 
 is the embodiment of indefinite change, the unlimited 
 pursuit of new investments and quick returns, and of 
 everybody doing what he finds to pay best. The idea of 
 Patriotism, Art, Culture, Social Organisation, Religion 
 as identified with the city, springing out of it, 
 stimulated by it is an idea beyond the conception of 
 modern men. 
 
 There are certainly cities in Europe where some 
 remnant of the old civic patriotism and municipal life 
 survives, as it does in Paris, Rome, Venice, Genoa, 
 Florence, Hamburg, and Bern. In the British islands, 
 perhaps Edinburgh may be said to have retained a 
 sense of civic life, art, and history ; it is an organic and 
 historic city not too large, and of singular and striking 
 natural features. York, Lincoln, Nottingham, Leicester, 
 Oxford are historic cities with the sacred fire still 
 burning feebly in their ancient sanctuary. London, if 
 we limit London to one-fortieth of its area and one- 
 tenth of its inhabitants, has still the consciousness of the 
 culture, glory, and life of a great city. But for the rest 
 of its area and population, it is lost and buried under 
 the monotonous pile of streets, over an area as large as 
 a county without history, culture, or consciousness of 
 any organic life as an effective city. 
 
 The monstrous, oppressive, paralysing bulk of modern 
 London is becoming one of the great diseases of English 
 civilisation. It is a national calamity that one-sixth of 
 the entire population of England are, as Londoners, 
 cut off at once both from country life and from city 
 
THE MODERN CITY 253 
 
 life ; for those who dwell in the vast suburbs of London 
 are cut off from city life in any true sense. A country 
 covered with houses is not a City. Four or five millions 
 of people herded together do not make a body of 
 fellow-citizens. A mass of streets so endless that it 
 is hardly possible on foot to get out of them into the 
 open in a long day's tramp streets so monotonous 
 that, but for the names on the street corner, they can 
 hardly be distinguished one from the other with 
 suburbs so unorganised and mechanical that there is 
 nothing to recall the dignity and power of a great 
 city with a population so movable and so unsociable 
 that they are unknown to each other by sight or name, 
 have no interest in each other's lives, cannot be induced 
 to act in common, have no common sympathies, enjoy- 
 ments, or pride, who are perpetually hurrying each his 
 own way to catch his own train, omnibus, or tram-car, 
 eager to do a good day's business on the cheapest 
 terms, and then get to some distant home to a meal or 
 to rest. That is not life, nor is it society. These huge 
 barracks are not cities. Nor can an organic body of 
 citizens be made out of four millions of human crea- 
 tures individually grinding out a monotonous existence. 
 The bulk, ugliness, flabbiness of modern London 
 render city life, in the true and noble sense, impossible 
 or very rudimentary. It would be unjust to pronounce 
 Liverpool, Manchester, and Glasgow too big to make 
 true cities though they have hardly yet found how to 
 deal with their huge extent. But Paris, with four times 
 the area and the population of these, still has contrived 
 to remain an organic and mighty city. But Liverpool, 
 Manchester, Glasgow (and the same is more or less 
 true of Birmingham, Newcastle, Leeds, and Bristol), 
 have enlarged their boundaries so rapidly and so 
 
254 THE CITY IN HISTORY 
 
 entirely under the dominant passion of turning over 
 capital and increasing the output that beauty, dignity, 
 culture, and social life have been left to take care of 
 themselves, and the life of the labouring masses (for the 
 well-to-do protect themselves by living outside and 
 reducing their city life to ' works ' and an office) is 
 monotonous to all and to many almost bereft of 
 physical comfort and moral elevation. An Athenian 
 or a Roman who might have risen from his long sleep in 
 the Cerameicus or from beside the Appian Way to find 
 himself a denizen of one of our cotton or metal cities, 
 with its sooty air and its polluted streams, its mesquin 
 market-place, its dingy lanes, and monotonous factories, 
 with belching chimneys and steam 'hooters,' and the 
 endless hurrying to and fro of its melancholy ' hands,' 
 would have fancied himself in one of the regions of 
 Hades. The unregulated extension of the factory 
 system, of the steam and coal industry to modern cities, 
 has proved as destructive of comfort and in some places 
 and in some periods as dangerous- to health as anything 
 due to the defensive necessities and the unclean ignor- 
 ance of the Middle Ages. There have been cases where 
 it caused a worse pollution of water and of air. And it 
 certainly made life more dismal and far less available 
 for art and nobility of soul. 
 
 There is no occasion for pessimism : and none but a 
 reactionist or a madman could think of going back to 
 ancient times whether of Polytheism or Feudalism. 
 There are sides of modern city life, after all, far grander 
 than anything in the ancient or the mediaeval world, 
 though they are not so directly the outcome of the 
 organic city. Our civilisation has long been a national 
 rather than a civic growth ; and we look more to the 
 nation than we look to the city. In spite of steam, smoke, 
 
THE MODERN CITY 255 
 
 factories, and all the selfish recklessness that distorts 
 our industrial existence, many of our modern cities, by 
 zealous sanitary science, and by the passion for warring 
 on disease that so nobly marks our age, have attained a 
 death-rate unparalleled in the history of cities, often 
 reaching to half the death-rate common in mediaeval 
 and Oriental cities. It must be remembered that 
 London, considering its vast .size and its special condi- 
 tions, must be counted as standing at the head of the 
 civilised and uncivilised world, for its systematic efforts 
 and final success in reducing the death-rate. It is now 
 the least noxious to life of all great cities of the world, 
 with a mortality far below that of the other capitals of 
 Europe, and vastly below that of St. Petersburg or 
 Calcutta. That means that we save year by year some 
 hundred thousand souls in London alone. 
 
 Nor is this all. Our city schools, museums, libraries, 
 parks, hospitals, clubs, our charitable, social, and educa- 
 tional associations (though it must be said they are only 
 in part the outcome of any city life or city organisation) 
 surpass anything which the ancient or the mediaeval 
 world could show. Such cities as Glasgow and Man- 
 chester have at last a water supply that may fairly 
 compare with the Roman, and in many of our Midland 
 towns the water supply is pure, if not abundant. It is 
 obvious that the police, the paving, the lighting, and in 
 a few cities the sewage system far surpasses anything 
 ever known in history. Birmingham has done wonders 
 with great difficulties and unpromising materials. And 
 the gigantic and scientific organisation of municipal life 
 in such capitals as Berlin and Paris has begun to 
 impress even the conservative mind of the Londoner, 
 and may yet find rivals in our own mighty metropolis. 
 In towns like Birmingham, Nottingham, Leeds, Oxford, 
 
256 THE CITY IN HISTORY 
 
 Bradford, and Huddersfield, the means of education and 
 culture are high above the level of average English 
 civilisation. Some of our more moderate historic towns 
 retain or have regained the old spirit of civic life that 
 did so much in the Middle Ages. We will not despair. 
 Tremendous has been the revolution caused by modern 
 industry. We have lived through a moral earthquake. 
 But the energy and social sympathy which still beat in 
 the heart of the English people will at last bring us to a 
 nobler type. 
 
 IV. The Ideal City 
 
 Turn to the city as it might be. To deal first with 
 the primary physical condition of size. A city of four 
 millions of inhabitants covering an area of more than 
 one hundred square miles, is an impossible city. It is a 
 Wen, as Cobbett called it, which prevents all the real 
 uses of a city life. The concentrated smoke of a million 
 chimneys, the collective sewage of four millions of 
 souls, the interminable area they cover, the unmanage- 
 ableness of such a mass for all true social purposes is an 
 insuperable difficulty to a people who have not the 
 genius for city life that marks Parisians. A city where 
 one cannot walk of an evening into the open, wherein 
 millions live and die without seeing the spring flowers 
 and the June foliage and the autumn harvest, from 
 year's end to year's end, is an incubus on civilisation. 
 Paris, with its wonderful organisation and system of 
 lodging in vast and lofty blocks, is still, it is true, a city, 
 though one far too big and already becoming unmanage- 
 able. A population of a million would be extreme, 
 even for a capital. The best type of city would not 
 exceed a quarter or a fifth of that number. The 
 
THE IDEAL CITY 257 
 
 essential thing in a great city is the power and variety 
 that arises from the association of a very large body of 
 organised families living a common life and combining 
 for great social ends. A quarter of a million or less 
 gives that variety and that power. When the number 
 is extended to a million or to two or four millions the 
 result is monotony rather than variety and disorganisa- 
 tion rather than association. The root element of city 
 life is daily contact and common society, and the 
 numbers to whom daily contact is possible are deter- 
 mined by the physical conditions of the living man. 
 No machinery or inventions can do more than facilitate 
 physical contact in a moderate degree. But five mil- 
 lions can no more form a real city organism than they 
 could win the battle of Salamis. 
 
 It would be childish to expect that Acts of Parlia- 
 ment can limit the growth of cities. But the increasing 
 enormity of London, and indeed of Paris, is becoming 
 a national danger of the first rank to which legislation 
 may properly be addressed in an indirect and tentative 
 way. We have no place here to be discussing the laws 
 which affect the tenure of land. But if we find that 
 country folk are continuously over generations flocking 
 into cities, and that under all conditions and in spite of 
 the discomforts and crowding of cities, it must be that 
 country people do not find themselves happy in their 
 country homes. The well-to-do and the well educated 
 show no tendency to crowd into cities : but very much 
 the reverse. Hence we have the singular phenomenon 
 that whilst the rich townsmen are hurrying to pass their 
 lives in the country, the poor countrymen are hurrying 
 into the cities. It may well be that, however great the 
 drawbacks and discomforts of modern cities, and how- 
 ever poor the social life they afford, the modern country 
 
 R 
 
258 THE < ITV IN HISTORY 
 
 village may offer even less entertainment and fewer 
 opportunities of social life. If that is so, it is a thing 
 that can be remedied indirectly by legislation, and 
 mainly by a higher sense of social obligation on the 
 part of all who live in the country. If great landowners 
 had taken up the lead which in feudal times they 
 possessed and had proved themselves lords of the 
 manor in any but a pecuniary sense, the draining off of 
 the country population into the towns could never have 
 become the prominent fact of the nineteenth century. 
 
 A city ought to provide for its citizens air, water, 
 light absolutely pure, unlimited in quantity and gratu- 
 itous to all. There is no good reason why water should 
 be sold (at anyrate in public places) more than air, or 
 light, or highways. Air, light, highways, water, are the 
 primary conditions of civilisation. It is the interest 
 of all that every citizen should have as much of these 
 as he wants. There is no better reason to compel an 
 individual citizen to buy water for sanitary uses than to 
 compel him separately to pay for a walk in Hyde Park 
 or a passage across London Bridge. In feudal times 
 there were tolls upon everything. A high civilisation 
 abolishes tolls and furnishes the necessaries of life to all 
 equally. Now air, light, roads, and water stand on a 
 different footing from food and clothes. Food and 
 clothing are produced in separate pieces, are infinitely 
 varied, and are adapted to an infinite variety of personal 
 wants and tastes. A loaf of bread, a beef-steak, a jug 
 of beer, are individually produced and individually con- 
 sumed. They remain ear-marked, identifiable, trans- 
 ferable, and the subject of property, and of commerce. 
 Air, light, water, passage (in their public and collective 
 use), have not this character : and their public use 
 should be free to all citizens. 
 
THE IDEAL CITY 259 
 
 We need the Roman system of water supply. Abun- 
 dant and pure rivers from the mountains should be 
 carried into the city, with fountains, baths, wash-houses 
 free in every ward without stint. The Roman aqueducts 
 are one of the few features of material civilisation which 
 have never been revived by any later age. We are still 
 suffering under the mediaeval horror of washing. When 
 we had again adequate aqueducts we might hope to see 
 the rivers and brooks that pass through our cities bright 
 and clear like a trout stream, and ' silver Thames ' cease 
 to be a term of reproach. Every chimney would con- 
 sume its own smoke ; every sewer would be wholesome, 
 for all noxious gases would be pumped up into safe 
 spaces ; all refuse would be straightway disinfected and 
 consumed. To use a stream as a drain, to discharge 
 refuse into any public place or course, to emit noisome 
 odours or dangerous gases into any public thing, to do 
 or to suffer anything that could spread infection would 
 be high treason against humanity visited with the 
 extreme rigour of the law. 
 
 The whole conditions of our industrial life would be 
 reorganised ; till our factory and workshop habits would 
 be as repulsive to our descendants as a mediaeval charnel- 
 house is to us to-day. It is not merely in the matter 
 of hours that we need reform, but in the physical and 
 even moral conditions of work. A factory, or a work- 
 shop, wherein men, women, and children are employed 
 day by day, would be regarded as an outrage on civil- 
 isation, if its physical conditions were not as free from 
 anything that can endanger health as the drawing-room 
 of a wealthy family. And it would be a sort of public 
 scandal that it should remain as repulsive and depress- 
 ing as the average cotton-mill of Lancashire. 
 
 The entire treatment of sickness and of mortality 
 
200 THE CITY IN HISTORY 
 
 would be reorganised. Every house, or block of houses, 
 for the collective system of tenements must ultimately 
 obtain in cities, would be arranged with due provision 
 for the care of the sick and of the dead. Infirmaries, 
 disinfectants, ambulances, mortuaries on a large scale, 
 will have to be arranged, systematically and scientifi- 
 cally, both for public and for private use. Our houses 
 and blocks will be provided with appliances needful 
 in sickness, accident, birth, convalescence, and death. 
 Cremation will take the place of the ghastly system of 
 interment Cremation with facilities for the due dis- 
 posal of the ashes. Cremation has made but little way 
 yet in superseding the growing evils of interment, be- 
 cause it has not yet provided for the religio loci and the 
 cherished continuity of the ' remains ' of the departed. 
 Rightly understood, Cremation offers just the same 
 opportunities for the local consecration of these remains 
 as does burial the same opportunities and far better. 
 The ashes which are the residuum of cremation may be 
 treated with the same religious reverence that we have 
 been accustomed to show to the putrescent contents 
 of our hideous coffins the same reverence in far more 
 beautiful and familiar ways. We have made the fatal 
 mistake of assuming that the proper care of our dead 
 ends with the furnace of the Crematorium. No more so 
 than it ends with the undertaker's hearse. The pure 
 ashes of the beloved dead must be reverently inclosed 
 in urns or sarcophagi of any kind we choose : and these 
 urns with the innocent ashes within may be placed in 
 cemeteries, if we prefer, or better still in columbaria and 
 chapels in the beautiful Campo Santos that will arise in 
 the precincts and public places of the city itself. 
 
 The hospital system must be revised. Every hospital 
 would be strictly isolated placed in the purest air, 
 
THE IDEAL CITY 26 1 
 
 incapable of spreading infection, and arranged for con- 
 stant and radical disinfection. For many purposes, it 
 would consist mainly of movable iron sheds in some 
 open ground, continually removed, constantly purified, 
 and the consumable parts burnt. Into these infirmaries 
 the sick would be carried by railways, specially con- 
 structed on the ambulance system. A few accident or 
 special wards might be retained in isolated buildings, in 
 convenient spots in the city, for emergencies or definite 
 cases. But all men of science know the inevitable evils 
 of vast hospitals in the midst of crowded cities. The 
 system continues, not for the sake of the sick, but for 
 the convenience of the staff, and for facilities of access 
 generally. An abnormal death-rate in the hospital, and 
 continual infection around it, are still endured, in order 
 that the medical attendants and their pupils may have 
 their cases at hand, that the organisation of a complex 
 system of carriage may be avoided, and partly no doubt 
 that the world may have ever before their eyes, in 
 some conspicuous site in the city, a pompous and costly 
 edifice, which, on scientific grounds, should never be 
 placed any where at all, and least of all on that central 
 spot. To expose a family to infection, to spread con- 
 tagion in a district, by the treatment of the sick, or the 
 dead, or by any kind of refuse, to pollute open water, on 
 a public way or place, would be an act of ruffianism and 
 sacrilege at once. Sickness from all forms of infection 
 and contagion would be reduced to the minimum of 
 inevitable accident. The death-rate of such a city 
 would fall from 20 or 30 per thousand to 12 or 14 per 
 thousand. 
 
 Next to pure air, water, sunlight, free ways, and pro- 
 tection against blood-poisoning, human life needs exer- 
 cise and recreation for body and limb. The city of the 
 
262 THE CITY IN HISTORY 
 
 future will have its squares, gardens, parks, play-grounds, 
 and gymnastic courts, free to all, and within reach of all. 
 No child, boy, or girl will be forced to play in a gutter ; 
 no youths will be reduced to lounge about the street. 
 The play-ground will be open to all, and almost within 
 a mile of the house, or it will be almost useless. There 
 are two towns in England where that great institution, 
 the Play-ground, is adequately developed : these are 
 Oxford and Cambridge, where some think it is almost 
 overdone ; and Leicester, Derby, and some Midland and 
 Northern towns are not wholly unprovided. But the 
 opportunities which have long been secured to a few 
 rich students, and to some sportsmen elsewhere, will be 
 open to all citizens in the city of the future, as they were 
 at Athens, Sparta, Syracuse, or Rome. 
 
 A city, worthy of such a name, should offer to all its 
 citizens noble public buildings, and impressive monu- 
 ments within the reach of all. The ancient rule was to 
 live at home in simple lodgings, and in public to have 
 ever in view beautiful and stately public buildings 
 
 ' Privatus illis census erat brevis 
 Commune magnum.' 
 
 We reverse all this. We put the extreme of luxury that 
 we can command into our homes, and we starve our 
 public places. In the ancient world, to present noble 
 monuments continually to the eyes of the citizens, was 
 regarded as one of the main uses of a City. With us, 
 public monuments are too often suspected of being a 
 corporation job, the means of getting some obscure 
 artist a commission, or furnishing the Mayor with a 
 knighthood, when the Prince or Princess ' inaugurates ' 
 the opening ceremony. ' Inaugurate ' once meant a 
 solemn and auspicious religious act. In Athens, Rome, 
 
THE IDEAL CITY 263 
 
 Florence, Venice, Verona, Cologne, Rouen, or Winchester 
 that is in classical or in mediaeval ages the possession 
 of a noble city, crowded with splendid and historic 
 monuments, was the cherished birthright of the citizen 
 a potent source of civilisation. As it was once so it 
 will be again ! 
 
 The citizen of the future will live in a City, through 
 which silver streams will flow, in which the air will be 
 spotless of soot, when water will bubble forth in foun- 
 tains and reservoirs at every corner, where gardens, 
 promenades, open squares, flowers, green lawns, porticoes, 
 and noble monuments will abound ; the air and water 
 as fresh as at Bern, with gardens, statues as plentiful as 
 they are in Paris, and more beautiful in art. At Rome, 
 the citizen was reminded at every turn of his country's 
 history by some monument, shrine, bust, or statue. 
 There is but one city of the modern world the French 
 capital, where any attempt is made to develop this 
 noble instrument of city life. 
 
 Museums, statues, galleries, colleges, schools, and 
 public halls, will no longer be concentrated in overgrown 
 capitals ; they will be universal in every moderate town. 
 No town would be worth living in, if it does not offer a 
 free library, a good art-gallery, lecture and music halls, 
 baths, and gymnasia free to all and within reach of all. 
 To use all these, we shall need a day of rest in the 
 week, as well as a day of worship on Sunday. Every 
 citizen will be free of all the resources needed to cultivate 
 his body, his mind, his heart : his enjoyment of life, 
 health, skill, and grace, his sense of beauty, his desire 
 for society, his thirst for knowledge. If he does not use 
 these resources, the fault will be his. 
 
 These things are not to be had by Acts of Parlia- 
 ment, nor by multiplying Inspectors, nor perhaps by any 
 
264 THE CITY IN HISTORY 
 
 single machinery whatever. Ideals are realised slowly, 
 by long efforts, after many failures and constant mis- 
 takes. To reach ideals we have to reach a higher social 
 morality, an enlarged conception of human life, a more 
 humane type of religious duty. 
 
CHAPTER IX 
 
 ROME REVISITED 1 
 
 HE who revisits Rome to-day in these busy times of 
 King Umberto, having known the Eternal City of the 
 last generation in the torpid reign of Pio Nono, cannot 
 stifle the poignant sense of having lost one of the most 
 rare visions that this earth had ever to present. The 
 Colosseum, it is true, the Forum, the Vatican, and St. 
 Peter's are there still ; the antiquarians make constant 
 new discoveries fresh sites, statues, palaces, tombs, 
 and museums, are year by year revealed to the eager 
 tourist ; and many a cloister and chapel, once hermeti- 
 cally closed, is now a public show. But the light and 
 poetry have gone out of Rome for ever. Vast historic 
 convents are cold and silent as the grave, and the Papal 
 city is like a mediaeval town under interdict. French 
 boulevards are being driven through the embattled 
 strongholds of Colonnas and Orsinis, and omnibus and 
 tram-car roll through the Forum of Trajan, and by 
 the Golden House of Nero. The yellow Tiber now 
 peacefully flows between granite quays, but the 
 mouldering palaces and the festooned arches that 
 Piranesi loved have been improved away. 
 
 One who is neither codino, ultramontane, nor pessi- 
 mist, may still utter one groan of regret for the halo 
 that once enveloped Rome. We may know that it was 
 
 1 Fortnightly Review, May 1893, No. 317, vol. liii. 
 
266 THE CITY IN HISTORY 
 
 inevitable, that it was the price of a nation's life, and 
 yet feel the sorrow which is due to the passing away of 
 some majestic thing that the world can never see again. 
 It is now twenty years since the late Professor Freeman, 
 then visiting Rome for the first time, wrote as his fore- 
 cast that if Rome, as the capital of Italy, should grow 
 and flourish, a great part of its unique charm would be 
 lost, and the havoc to be wrought in its antiquities 
 would be frightful. The havoc is wrought ; the charm 
 is gone, in spite of startling discoveries and whole 
 museums full of new antiquities. It had to be. 
 
 In the space of some thirty years I have visited 
 Rome four times, at long intervals, and each time I 
 groan anew. I was Italianissimo in my hot youth, and 
 I am assuredly not Papalino in my maturer age. I 
 rejoice with the new life of the Italian people ; I know 
 that for the regenerated nation Rome is essential as its 
 capital ; I know that a growing modern city must wear 
 the aspect of modern civilisation. I repudiate the 
 whining of sentimentalists over the conditions of 
 modern progress ; and the advice which Napoleon's 
 creatures gave to the Romans, ' to be content with the 
 contemplation of their ruins,' has the true ring of an 
 oppressor. We acknowledge all that, and are no ob- 
 scurantists to shudder at a railroad with Ruskinian 
 affectation. But yet, to those who loved the poetry 
 of old Papal Rome, the prose of the modernised new 
 Rome is a sad and instructive memory. 
 
 When I first saw Rome, it was not connected by any 
 railway with Northern Italy. We had to travel by the 
 road, and I cannot forget the weird effect of that Roman 
 Maremma, purple and crimson with an autumn sunset ; 
 the buffaloes, and the wild cattlemen and pecorari in 
 sheepskins ; the old-world coaches and postilions ; the 
 
ROME REVISITED 267 
 
 desolate plain broken by ruins and castles ; the mediaeval 
 absurdities of Papal officialism ; the suffumigations and 
 the visas ; the cumbrous pomposity of some Roman 
 principi returning from villeggiatura it was as though 
 one had passed by enchantment into the seventeenth 
 century, with its picturesque barbarism, and one quite 
 expected a guerilla band of horsemen to issue from the 
 castle of Montalto. 
 
 And then Rome itself, so perfectly familiar that it 
 seemed like a mere returning to the old haunt of child- 
 hood, with its fern-clad ruins standing in open spaces, 
 gardens, or vineyards ; the huge solitudes within the 
 walls ; the cattle and the stalls beneath the trees on the 
 Campo Vaccino, forty feet above the spot where now 
 professors lecture to crowds in the recent excavations ; 
 the grotesque parade of cardinals and monsignori ; the 
 narrow, ill-lighted streets ; the swarm of monks, friars, 
 and prelates of every order and race ; the air of 
 mouldering* abandonment in the ancient city, as of 
 some corner of mediaeval Europe left forgotten and 
 untouched by modern progress, with all the historic 
 glamour, the pictorial squalor, the Turkish routine, all 
 the magnificence of obsolete forms of civilisation which 
 clung round the Vatican and were seen there only in 
 Western Europe. 
 
 It had to go, and it is gone ; and Rome, in twenty or 
 thirty years, has become like any other European city 
 big, noisy, vulgar, overgrown, Frenchified, and syndicate- 
 ridden, hardly to be distinguished from Lyons or Turin, 
 except that it has in the middle of its streets some 
 enormous masses of ruin, many huge, empty convents, 
 and some vast churches, apparently abandoned by the 
 Church. But the ruins, which used to stand in a rural 
 solitude like Stonehenge or Rievaulx, are now mere 
 
268 THE CITY IN HISTORY 
 
 piles of stone in crowded streets, like the Palais des 
 Thermes at Paris. The sacred sites of Forum and 
 Roma Quadrata are now objects in a museum. The 
 Cloaca are embedded in the new stone quay, and are 
 become a mere ' exhibit,' like York House Water-Gate 
 in our own embankment. The wild foliage and the 
 memorial altars have been torn out of the Colosseum, 
 and the JEllan Bridge is overshadowed by a new iron 
 enormity. Rome, which, thirty years ago, was a vision 
 of the past, is to-day a busy Italian town, with a dozen 
 museums, striving to become a third-rate Paris. 
 
 The mediaeval halo is gone, but the hard facts remain. 
 For to the historian Rome must always be the central 
 city of this earth the spot towards which all earlier 
 history of mankind must in the end converge from 
 which all modern history must issue. Rome is the true 
 microcosm, wherein the vast panorama of human 
 civilisation is reflected as on a mirror. It is this 
 diversity, continuity, and world-wide range of interest 
 which place it apart above all other cities of men. 
 This one is more lovely, that one is more complete ; 
 another city is vaster, or another has some unique and 
 special glory. But no other city of the world approaches 
 Rome in the enormous span of its history, and in this 
 character of being the centre, as the Greeks said the 
 ofjL<f)d\6<;, if not of this planet, at least of Europe. 
 
 From this point of view, it cannot be denied that the 
 recent changes which have destroyed the poetry of 
 Rome have greatly enlarged its antiquarian interest. 
 What the poet and the painter have lost the historian 
 has gained. Regarded as a museum of archaeology, 
 the city is far richer to the student. And that not 
 merely by multiplication of remains, statues, and 
 carvings, similar to what we had, but by new dis- 
 
ROME REVISITED 269 
 
 coveries which have modified our knowledge of the 
 history of the city. The continually growing mass of 
 pre-historic relics, the Etruscan tombs and foundations 
 on the Aventine and the Esquiline, the early fortifica- 
 tions of the Palatine, the remains of regal Rome, the 
 systematic exploration of the Forum and the Palatine, 
 the house of the vestals, the contents of the Kircher 
 Museum, and of the new Museum in the baths of 
 Diocletian, the excavation of the Colosseum, and of the 
 palace of Nero, the complete tracing of the Servian 
 circumvallation, and all that has been done to reopen 
 cemeteries and tombs have given a new range and 
 distinctness to the history of Rome as a whole. 
 
 We must now extend that history backwards by 
 centuries before the mythical age of Romulus and his 
 tribesmen on the Palatine ; and we know that some- 
 where on the Seven Hills there once dwelt one of the 
 most ancient pre-historic races of Europe. Even the 
 speculative builder and the hated railroads have en- 
 riched the museums and opened unexpected treasures 
 to the antiquarian. One is forced to confess that .to 
 historical research new fields have been opened, even 
 whilst the unique vision of the Eternal City faded away 
 as quickly as a winter sunset. The Caesars found 
 Rome of brick, and left it of marble. The House of 
 Savoy found it a majestic ruin ; they have made it an 
 inexhaustible museum. 
 
 Compare Rome with other famous cities, which far 
 surpass it in mediaeval associations with Florence, 
 Venice, Rouen, Oxford, Prague. They present at most 
 four or five centuries of the Middle Ages with vivid 
 power and charm : but this is only one chapter in the 
 history of Rome. Athens, Constantinople, Venice, are 
 more beautiful. And if Constantinople surpasses Rome 
 
2/0 THE CITY IN HISTORY 
 
 in the dramatic contrast of Asia and Europe, and the 
 secular combat between the East and the West, Byzan- 
 tium was but a late imitation of Rome, and the tremen- 
 dous scenes which the Bosphorus has witnessed seem 
 but episodes when compared with the long annals of 
 the Tiber. Constantinople, indeed, was a Rome trans- 
 ported bodily to the East. Paris and London certainly 
 surpass Rome in that they record a thousand years of 
 the destiny of nations still growing, and that we can 
 hear in their streets the surging of a mighty life to 
 which that of Rome is now a poor provincial copy. 
 But the thousand years of Paris and of London are but 
 a span in the countless years of the Eternal City. All 
 roads lead to Rome : all capitals aim at reviving the 
 image and effect of the Imperial City : all history ends 
 with Rome, or begins with Rome. 
 
 There are three elements wherein the historical value 
 of Rome surpasses that of any extant city : first, the 
 enormous continuity of its history ; next, the diver- 
 sity of that interest ; and lastly, the cosmopolitan range 
 of its associations. These hill-crests beside the Tiber 
 have been the home of a disciplined people (we must 
 now believe) for some three thousand years, and it may 
 well be much more ; and during the whole of that vast 
 period there has been no absolute or prolonged break. 
 Athens, Jerusalem, Antioch, Damascus, Alexandria, 
 Syracuse, Marseilles, and York, whatever they may once 
 have been, whatever they may have recently become, 
 fell out of the vision of history for long centuries 
 together, like some variable star out of heaven, and 
 sank into insignificance and oblivion. To very many 
 the city of David and of the Passion has absorbing 
 interests, such as no other spot on earth can approach ; 
 just as to the scholar the scene from the Pnyx at 
 
ROME REVISITED 2/1 
 
 Athens calls up a sum of memories of unique intensity 
 and delight. But the four transcendent centuries, when 
 Athens was the eye of Greece, the eye of the thinking 
 world, were followed by a thousand years when Athens 
 was an obscure village ; and if the ancient history of 
 Jerusalem was longer than that of Athens, it has been 
 followed by a still more overwhelming fall. 
 
 All other famous cities of the ancient world have waned 
 and fallen, in some cases, as with Athens, Alexandria, 
 and Marseilles, to rise again out of a sleep of ages. Or 
 if, like Paris and London, they are growing still, it is 
 during some four or five centuries only that they have 
 been the foremost cities of the world. But for two 
 thousand years Rome has enjoyed an unbroken pre- 
 eminence, for five centuries as the temporal mistress of 
 the civilised world, and for some fifteen centuries as 
 the spiritual head of the Catholic world. This dominant 
 place in human evolution, prolonged over such immense 
 periods of time in unbroken continuity, makes Rome 
 the spot on earth where the story of civilisation can be 
 locally centred and visibly recorded. 
 
 This is the real power and the true lesson of Rome ; 
 and in a dim way, it was felt by our ancestors who in 
 the olden days made the ' grand tour ' to enrich their 
 galleries and to confer with virtuosi, or who in a later 
 age followed the footsteps of Corinne, Goethe, and 
 Byron. Something of the kind remained down to the 
 time of Pio Nono. There was still a certain unity of 
 effect in Rome; and even the more frivolous tourists 
 had some sense of that over-mastering human destiny 
 which caused Byron to break forth 
 
 ' O Rome, my country, city of the soul ! ' 
 But all that has happened in the last twenty years has 
 
2/2 THE CITY IN HISTORY 
 
 destroyed that visual impression. The sudden swelling 
 forth of the city into a modern busy town three or four 
 times larger than the old sleepy city of the popes, the 
 suppression of the convents and the external ceremonial, 
 and the sullen withdrawal of the Papacy, the deadly 
 war between modern democracy and ultramontane 
 ecclesiasticism, the flooding of the old city with the 
 triumphs of the modern builder, and the Haussmanni- 
 sation of the most romantic of European cities all this 
 has made it an effort of the abstract mind to look on 
 Rome as the historic capital ; and as to the ' city of the 
 soul,' one might as easily imagine it at Lyons, Milan, 
 or indeed Chicago. And thus, the recent modernisation 
 of Rome has destroyed the sense of historical con- 
 tinuity, that unique effect of Rome as ' mother of dead 
 empires,' and all that Byron poured out with his pas- 
 sionate imagination and his scrambling rhymes. In 
 the days of Byron, Goethe, and Shelley, as it had been 
 in the days of Claude, of Piranesi, of Madame de Stael, 
 and Gibbon, as it still was down to the days of Andersen, 
 Hawthorne, and Browning, Rome was itself a poem : a 
 sombre, majestic, most moving dirge but an artistic 
 whole a poem. The Italian kingdom and modern 
 progress have made it a capital up-to-date, with a most 
 voluminous Dictionary of Antiquities. 
 
 But the new edition of the Dictionary of Antiquities, 
 as edited by the House of Savoy, from 1870 to 1893, 
 is immensely enlarged and almost rewritten. The 
 brain may still recover more than the eye has lost. 
 But it has become a strain on the imagination in the 
 last decade of this century to revive in the mind's eye 
 that historic continuity of the Eternal City, which till 
 past the middle of this century was vividly presented 
 even to the uninstructed eye. And the melancholy 
 
ROME REVISITED 273 
 
 result is this that Rome to-day is parcelled out into 
 heterogeneous and discordant sections, which of old 
 were simply impressive contrasts in the same picture ; 
 and they who visit Rome with some special interest 
 find nothing to attract them to the rival interests and 
 the antagonistic worlds. 
 
 They who go to Rome for the same reasons that they 
 go to Paris or Vienna, see little at Rome more than in 
 any other European capital, unless it be a few masses 
 of ruins, and some enormous palaces and churches. 
 The scholar and the antiquarian buries himself in 
 museums, libraries, or excavations ; and to-day it hardly 
 strikes him at all that he is in the palpitating heart of 
 Christendom, or that he is passing blindfold amidst 
 some of the most poetic scenes in the world. Of old 
 this pathos and charm pierced even the dullest pedant's 
 heart ; but now, with avenues, tram-cars, electric light- 
 ing, and miles of American hotels, he does not notice 
 in modern Rome the rare glimpses of mediaeval Rome. 
 And the Catholic pilgrim is so hot with rage and fore- 
 boding that to ask him to acknowledge either beauty or 
 interest outside the cause of the Vatican, is a heartless 
 mockery of all that he holds highest. And thus Rome, 
 which to our fathers had the soothing effect of a 
 Mass by Palestrina or a glowing sunset after storm, 
 now fills us with the sense of deadly passions, coarse 
 desecration of what man has long held sacred, the in- 
 congruous mixture of irreconcilable ideas and mutual 
 scorn. Bruno and Mazzini jostle Loyola and the 
 Bambino. Tramways and iron bridges override basilicas 
 and temples. 
 
 It is all the more needful then for those who love the 
 great historic cities and their lessons to strive against 
 the sectional aspects of Rome and to insist on its 
 
 S 
 
2/4 THE CITY IN HISTORY 
 
 historic unity, in spite of the ravages of modern pro- 
 gress. Many, of course, will still go to Rome for its 
 picnics or the court balls of Queen Margherita, to hunt 
 the fox or to pick up a curio, to copy a manuscript or a 
 Guido, to catch a glimpse of the Pope, or to crawl up 
 the Scala Santa. But the truth remains that, for those 
 who have eyes to see, the pre-eminence of Rome as a 
 city consists in the combination and succession of all 
 its varied interests. And although the continuity of its 
 history is now far less directly conspicuous, and although 
 on the surface Rome has now been promoted (or de- 
 graded) to the level of any other European capital, the 
 record of the past is becoming far richer and more 
 legible for those who with patience continue to read it ; 
 and it is still possible to forget ambitious municipalism 
 and the pandemonium of the jerry-builder, even whilst 
 accepting the mosaics and the bronzes their workmen 
 have turned up, and the walls of the kings which they 
 have laid bare and pierced. 
 
 The various interests all group themselves under 
 three heads : the Rome of antiquity, the Rome of the 
 Church, the Rome of poetry, romance, architecture, 
 painting, sculpture, music. Down to the middle of 
 this century, these were blended unconsciously into a 
 certain harmony ; and it was the mysterious unison of 
 these separate chords which has inspired so much 
 poetry and art from the age of the Farnesina down 
 to that of Transformation. Since the middle of the 
 century and the tremendous events of 1849, it has 
 been an effort of the imagination to catch the harmony 
 rather than discord. And in the last twenty years, 
 since the entrance of the king of Italy, the effort has 
 become year by year more difficult. But with patience 
 it may still be done. And we may yet venture to plead 
 
ROME REVISITED 275 
 
 for Rome that, shorn as she is of her old unique magic 
 and power, she remains still the greatest historical 
 school in the world, and has not even yet descended 
 to the level of Nice or Homburg. 
 
 The visible record of antiquity is continuous for at 
 least a thousand years indeed between the Column of 
 Phocas and the earliest tombs we may possibly count 
 an interval far longer. For five centuries at least, down 
 to the final completion of the Rome of the East, Rome 
 of the West was the spot where the whole force of the 
 ancient world was concentrated its wealth, its art, its 
 science, its material, intellectual, and moral power. This 
 planet has never witnessed before or since such con- 
 centration on one spot of the earth as took place about 
 the age of Trajan, and let us trust it will never witness 
 it again. From the Clyde to the Euphrates, from the 
 Caucasus to the Sahara, the earth was ransacked for all 
 that was pleasant, beautiful, or useful, whether in the 
 produce of nature or in the arts of man. And it was 
 flung down together on the banks of the Tiber with a 
 wild profusion and with a lavish magnificence which has 
 never been equalled, though sometimes imitated. 
 
 To that dazzling world of power, beauty, luxury, and 
 vice, there succeeded the Christian Church with its 
 fifteen centuries of unbroken organic life. This far 
 the longest and most important movement in the history 
 of mankind yet forms but one element in the history 
 of the Eternal City, and the one element which to most 
 Protestant tourists is the least conspicuous, if not almost 
 forgotten. But the succession of spiritual empire to 
 the inheritance of temporal empire in Rome is perhaps 
 of all phenomena in history the most fascinating and 
 the most profound, with its subtle analogies and infinite 
 contrasts, with its sublime profession of disdain and its 
 
276 TIIK CITY IN HISTORY 
 
 irresistible instinct for adaptation, its savage spirit of 
 destruction combined with an unconscious genius of 
 imitation. For the Church took the classical form for 
 its model, and ended by setting it up as a revelation, 
 even whilst engaged in cursing it in words and de- 
 molishing it in act. 
 
 That New Birth of free life which we call Humanism, 
 or the Revival, or Renascence, was soon drawn towards 
 Rome, and indeed for a time had its inspiration from 
 the Papal world itself. Though Rome was not its 
 birthplace nor in any sense its natural home, yet Rome 
 drew to herself the Tuscan and Lombard genius as she 
 had drawn the Attic and the Alexandrian genius to 
 her before ; and thus Rome became at last the great 
 theatre for the Renascence, the stage whence its most 
 potent influence over Europe was manifested and shed 
 abroad. Not that any Roman approached in genius 
 the great Florentines or Venetians, or that Rome was 
 at any time so noble a school of imagination as Florence 
 or Venice, or even Siena or Verona. But the vast 
 resources collected in Rome, the fabulous power of her 
 great ecclesiastics, and the central and European posi- 
 tion she held, made Rome for some three centuries one 
 of the main adopted cradles of the Renascence. And 
 if we include all the work and influence of Bramante, 
 Michael Angelo, Raphael, Bembo, Cellini, Palestrina, 
 Guido, Bernini, the architecture, the painting, the sculp- 
 ture, the mosaics, the engraving, the drama, the music, 
 the scholarship, the poetry, Rome must be counted as 
 the most influential centre of the Renascence. 
 
 It was not effected by native Romans, nor was it the 
 offspring of a local school. Much of its influence was 
 meretricious, and much of it was essentially debasing. 
 But it governed, by its evil as much as by its strength, 
 
ROME REVISITED 
 
 the thought of Europe ; and if we take the whole range 
 of art, thought, and culture, Rome became at last its 
 most prolific, most active, and most varied centre. 
 Rome was the destined resort of artists in all fields for 
 some five hundred years, from Giotto to Mozart, and 
 the magic of Rome as an artistic paradise has hardly 
 yet passed away in Europe. Nay, if we consider the 
 vast influence over all subsequent building and all sub- 
 sequent painting of St. Peter's Church and Raphael's 
 designs, and of church ceremonial and music, of the 
 classical mania and of romantic poetry, if we add such 
 minor influences as those of Poussin, Claude Lorrain, 
 Metastasio, Piranesi, Winckelmann, Niebuhr, Canova, 
 and Thorwaldsen, we see at once how largely Rome has 
 been the clearing-house for the popularisation of art in 
 the last three centuries. 
 
 Much of it was artificial, theatrical and feeble. But 
 historically its development is curiously full of interest, 
 as its influence over the modern mind has been almost 
 without a limit. Why do Catholic worshippers from 
 Warsaw to Cadiz, in Santiago, in Mexico, or Manilla, 
 admire churches with a rococo jumble of gilded domes 
 and pirouetting saints ? Because the great cinque-cento 
 artists built up St. Peter's as we see it to-day ; and 
 Jesuit demagogues developed that type into the gilt 
 pot-pourri which attracts the ignorant Catholic in every 
 corner of the planet. Florence was doubtless the birth- 
 place and nursery of Renascent art. But directly that the 
 Renascence was captured and transformed by Jesuitism, 
 Rome became its official seat. And in the evolution of 
 human art, there is no record more instructive than that 
 still stamped on the churches and palaces of the Eternal 
 City. 
 
 The Rome of antiquity, the Rome of the Church, the 
 
2/8 THE CITY IN HISTORY 
 
 Rome of modern art are indeed three separate worlds ; 
 and it is their contrast, their juxtaposition, their curious 
 blending of mutual hate and mutual reaction, which 
 forms the most instructive page of all history. Each of 
 the three worlds may be seen in a more intense form 
 elsewhere. The valley of the Rhone and the shores 
 of the Adriatic have still a greater mass of imperial 
 remains than the city itself. The Apennine hill towns, 
 and perhaps mediaeval Paris, have a truer record of the 
 Church. And Florence is the true cradle of modern 
 art. But in Rome all three are combined, and their 
 continual reaction, one on the other, is matter for inex- 
 haustible thought. 
 
 Rome, as a city, is thus a visible embodiment, type, 
 or summary of human history, and, in these days of 
 special interests or tastes, the traveller at Rome too 
 often forgets this world-wide range and complexity. 
 To the scholar the vast world of Christian Rome is 
 usually as utter a blank as to the Catholic pilgrim 
 is the story of Republic and Empire. To the artist 
 both are an ancient tale of little meaning, though the 
 words are strong. He who loves ' curios ' is blind too 
 often to the sunsets on the Campagna. And he who 
 copies inscriptions is deaf to the music of the people in 
 the Piazza. Navona, or the evening Angelus rung out 
 from a hundred steeples. All nations, all professions, 
 all creeds jostle each other in Rome, as they did in the 
 age of Horace and Juvenal ; and they pass by on the 
 other side with mutual contempt for each other's 
 interests and pursuits. But to the historical mind all 
 have their interest, almost an equal interest, and their 
 combination and contrasts form the most instructive 
 lesson which Europe can present. 
 
 We have had whole libraries about Rome pictorial, 
 
ROME REVISITED 279 
 
 Rome ecclesiastical, Rome artistic, Rome antiquarian ; 
 about classical, mediaeval, papal, cinque-cento, rococo, 
 modern Rome. There is still room for a book about 
 the city of Rome as a manual of history ; about the 
 infinite variety of the lessons graven on its stones and 
 its soil ; about its contrasts, its contradictions; its 
 immensity, its continuity ; the exquisite pathos, the 
 appalling waste, folly, cruelty, recorded in that roll of 
 memories and symbols. Such a book would gather up 
 the thoughts which, as he strolls about the Eternal City, 
 throng on the mind of every student of human nature, 
 and of any historian who is willing to read as one tale 
 the history of man from the Stone Age down to Pope 
 Leo XIII. 
 
 Of all places on earth, Rome is the city of contrasts 
 and paradox. Nowhere else can we see memorials of 
 such pomp alongside of such squalor. The insolence of 
 wealth jostles disease, filth, and penury. Devoutness, 
 which holds whole continents spell-bound, goes hand in 
 hand with hypocrisy and corruption. What sublime 
 piety, what tender charity, what ideal purity, what 
 bigotry, what brutality, what grossness ! Over this con- 
 vent garden pensive mysticism has thrown a halo of 
 saintliness : it is overshadowed by a palace which has 
 one black record of arrogance. There, some tomb 
 breathes the very soul of spiritual art ; beside it stands 
 another which is a typical monument of ostentation. 
 Here is a fragment worthy of Praxiteles, buried under 
 costly masses of rococo inanity. Works that testify to 
 stupendous concentration of power stand in a chaos 
 which testifies to nothing but savagery and ruin. The 
 very demon of destruction seems to have run riot over 
 the spot that the very genius of beauty has chosen for 
 his home. 
 
28O THE CITY IN HISTORY 
 
 The eternal lesson of Rome is the war which each 
 phase of human civilisation, each type of art, of manners, 
 of religion, has waged against its immediate prede- 
 cessor : the fury with which it sought to blot out its 
 very record. When Rome became Greek in thought, 
 art, -and habits, it destroyed almost every vestige of the 
 old Italian civilisation which was the source of its own 
 strength ; and recent excavations alone have unearthed 
 the massive walls, the pottery, bronze and gold work 
 of the ages before Rome was, and also of the ages of 
 Servius, Camillus, and Cincinnatus. Imperial Rome 
 pillaged Greece, Asia, Africa, and heaped up between 
 the Quirinal and the Vatican priceless treasures of an 
 art which it only understood well enough to covet and 
 to rob. When the Gospel triumphed over Imperial 
 Rome, it treated the palaces of the Caesars as dens of 
 infamy, and their monuments as blasphemous idols and 
 offences to God. When the Anti-Christian Revival was 
 in all the heyday of its immoral rage after beauty, it 
 treated the Catholicism of the Middle Ages as a barbar- 
 ous superstition. Popes and cardinals destroyed more 
 immortal works of beauty than the worst scourges of 
 God ; and the most terrible Goths and Vandals that 
 the stones of Rome ever knew were sceptical priests 
 and learned virtuosi. Nay, in twenty years the reformers 
 of the Italian kingdom have wrought greater havoc in 
 the aspect of Papal Rome than, in the four centuries 
 since Julius II., popes and cardinals ever wrought on 
 Classical and Mediaeval Rome. 
 
 At every turn we come on some new crime against 
 humanity done by fanaticism or greed. Into Imperial 
 Rome there was swept, as into the museum of the world, 
 the marbles, the statues, the bronzes, the ivories, the 
 paintings and carvings, the precious works of human 
 
ROME REVISITED 28 1 
 
 genius for some six or seven centuries everything of 
 rarity and loveliness that could be found between Cadiz 
 and the Black Sea. There were tens of thousands of 
 statues in Greek marble, and as many in bronze ; there 
 were marble columns, monoliths, friezes, reliefs, obelisks, 
 colossi, fountains. Halls, porticoes, temples, theatres, 
 baths, were crowded with the spoils of the world, rich 
 enough to furnish forth ten such cities as London, Paris, 
 or New York. It is all gone. There are but a few 
 fragments now that chance has spared. Twenty sieges, 
 stormings, pillages, a hundred conflagrations, the bar- 
 barous greed of the invading hordes, the barbarous 
 fanaticism of the first Christians, the incessant wars, 
 revolutions, riots, and faction fights of the Middle Ages, 
 the brutal greediness of popes, cardinals, their nephews 
 and their favourites worst of all, perhaps, modern in- 
 dustrial iconoclasm have swept away all but a few 
 chance fragments. 
 
 In the time of Pliny there must have been still extant 
 thousands of works of the purest Greek art of the great 
 age. There is now not one surviving intact in the whole 
 world ; and there are but two the Hermes of Olympia 
 and the Aphrodite of Melos of which even fragments 
 remain in sufficient preservation to enable us to judge 
 them. Every other work of the greatest age is either, 
 like the Parthenon relics, a mere ruin, or is known to us 
 only by a later imitation. Of the bronzes not a single 
 complete specimen of the great age survives. And this 
 loss is irreparable. Even if such genius of art were 
 ever to return to this earth again, it is certain that the 
 same passion for physical beauty, the same habit of 
 displaying the form, can never again be universal with 
 any civilised people. And thus by the wanton destruc- 
 tiveness of successive ages, one of the most original 
 
282 THE CITY IN HISTORY 
 
 types of human genius has become extinct on this 
 earth, even as the mastodon or the dodo are extinct 
 
 But masterpieces of marble and bronze were dross in 
 comparison with the masterpieces of the human soul, of 
 intellect, purity, and love, that have been mangled on 
 this same spot and in sight of these supreme works of 
 genius. The Christian pilgrim from some Irish or 
 American monastery, from Santiago in Chile, from 
 Armenia or Warsaw the Catholic missionary on his 
 way to die in China, or Polynesia, or Uganda pro- 
 strates himself in the dust where Paul was beheaded 
 and Peter crucified, where Gregory and Augustine 
 prayed, and in the Colosseum he sees nothing but a 
 monstrous black ruin ; but he kneels in the arena where 
 the blood of martyrs was poured forth like water, which 
 has witnessed such heroic deaths, such revolting crimes. 
 Each zealot Catholic, Protestant, or sceptic remem- 
 bers only his own martyrs. Romans massacred Gaul 
 and Goth ; Polytheists martyred Christians ; Papal 
 creatures tortured Republicans, Protestants, and Re- 
 formers ; emperors' men slew popes' men, and popes' 
 men slew the emperors' men ; Colonnas and Orsinis, 
 Borgias and Cencis, Borgheses and Barberinis have 
 poured out blood upon blood, and piled up crime on 
 crime, till every stone records some inhuman act, and 
 witnesses also to courage and faith as memorable and 
 quite as human. 
 
 The fanaticism of these same priests and missionaries 
 has its own reaction. As the Catholic pilgrim to-day 
 prostrates himself on the spot where for eighteen 
 centuries Christian pilgrims from all parts of the earth 
 have prostrated themselves, the followers of Garibaldi 
 and Mazzini glare on them with hatred and contempt ; 
 so that, but for soldiers and police, no priest in his 
 
ROME REVISITED 283 
 
 robes would be safe in Rome. The death-struggle 
 between Papacy and Free Thought was never more 
 acute. Hundreds of churches are bare, deserted, with- 
 out the semblance of a congregation. Of late years, 
 one may visit famous churches, known throughout the 
 Catholic world, and find one's self, for hours together, 
 absolutely alone ; and sometimes we may notice how 
 they serve as the resort of a pair of lovers, who choose 
 the church as a place to meet undisturbed in perfect 
 solitude. Vast monasteries, which for centuries have 
 peopled Christendom with priests and teachers, are 
 now empty, or converted to secular uses. The Pope 
 is ' the prisoner of the Vatican,' and the Papal world 
 has withdrawn from public view. 
 
 Nowhere else in the world are we brought so close 
 face to face with the great battles of religion and 
 politics, and with the destruction wrought by successive 
 phases of human civilisation. This destruction is more 
 visible in Rome, because fragments remain to witness 
 to each phase ; but the destruction is not so great as 
 elsewhere, where the very ruins have been destroyed. 
 At Paris, Lyons, London, York, Cologne, and Milan, 
 the Roman city has been all but obliterated, and the 
 mediaeval city also, and the Renascence city after that; 
 so that, for the most part, in all these ancient centres 
 of successive civilisations, we see little to-day but the 
 monotony of modern convenience, and the triumphs of 
 the speculative builder. But at Rome enough remains 
 to remind us of the unbroken roll of some three thousand 
 years. 
 
 At Rome we see the wreckage. At Paris and London 
 it has been covered fathoms deep by the rising tide. 
 They are finding now the tombs, arms, ornaments, 
 and structures of the primitive races who dwelt on the 
 
284 THE CITY IN HISTORY 
 
 Seven Hills before history was. We may now see the 
 walls which rose when the history of Rome began, the 
 fortress of the early kings, and their vast subterranean 
 works. We can still stand on the spot where Horatius 
 defended the bridge, and where Virginius slew his 
 daughter. We still see the tombs and temples, the 
 treasure-house of the Republic. We see the might 
 and glory of Rome when she was the mistress of the 
 world and the centre of the world. We see the walls 
 which long defied the barbarians of the North ; we see 
 the tombs of the Christian martyrs, and trace the foot- 
 steps of the great Apostles ; we see the rise, the growth, 
 the culmination and the death-struggles of the Catholic 
 Papacy. We see the Middle Ages piled up on the 
 ruins of the ancient world, and the modern world piled 
 on the ruins of the mediaeval world. At Rome we can 
 see in ruins, fragments, or, it may be, merely in certain 
 sites, spots, and subterranean vaults, that revolving 
 picture of history, which elsewhere our. modern life 
 has blotted out from our view. 
 
 Take the Pantheon in some ways the central, the 
 most ancient, the most historic building in the world. 
 For more than 1900 years it has been a temple first 
 of the gods of the old world, and since of the Christian 
 God. It is the only great extant building of which 
 that can now be said. It is certainly the oldest build- 
 ing in continuous use on earth, for it was a temple of 
 the pagan deities one hundred years before the preach- 
 ing of the Gospel at Rome ; dedicated by the minister 
 and son-in-law of Augustus in the first splendour of the 
 Empire ; converted after six centuries into a Christian 
 church and burial-place, when it was filled with the 
 bones of the martyrs removed from the catacombs. 
 The festival of All Saints thereupon instituted is the 
 
ROME REVISITED 285 
 
 one Christian festival which modern scepticism concurs 
 in honouring. In the Revival, the Pantheon became 
 the type of all the domed buildings of Europe first 
 as the parent of the dome of Florence, thence of the 
 dome of St. Peter's, through St. Peter's of our own St. 
 Paul's, and so the parent of all the spherical domes of 
 the Old and the New World. As such a type, it was 
 the especial study of the humanist artists of the 
 Revival, and so perhaps it was chosen for the tomb 
 of Raphael. There, amidst a company of painters, 
 scholars, and artists, his sacred ashes lie in perfect 
 preservation ; and but lately he has been joined in 
 death by the first king of United Italy, who lies in 
 a noble monument, round which Catholic and Liberals 
 are still glaring at each other in hate. Plundered by 
 Christian emperors, plundered by popes and cardinals, 
 the Pantheon still remains, to my eyes, the most im- 
 pressive, original, and most perfect building extant. 
 
 Imagine the Pantheon in its glory, before it was 
 stripped of its gold, its bronze, marbles, and statues 
 by emperors and popes. Conceive that vast, solid 
 dome, still the largest span in the world nearly one 
 half more than the diameter of St. Paul's the first 
 great dome ever raised by man, the grand invention 
 of Romans, of which the Greeks in all their art never 
 dreamed. The dome, with the round arch out of which 
 it sprang, is the most fertile conception in the whole 
 history of building. The Pantheon became the parent 
 of all subsequent domes, and so of that of The Holy 
 Wisdom at Constantinople, which was the parent of 
 the Byzantine oblate domes of Europe and of Asia. 
 
 We can recall to the mind's eye its roof of solid 
 concrete, moulded and plated within, and covered 
 with gilt bronze plates without ; with its statues, the 
 
286 THE CITY IN HISTORY 
 
 enormous columns of rare marbles and granite, its 
 upper story of porphyry and serpentine, lit only by 
 one great circle thirty feet in diameter, through which 
 the open sky by day and the stars by night look down 
 on the marble pavement. To this wonderful building, 
 the one relic of the ancient world in its entirety, the 
 builders of all after ages turned. For five centuries 
 the Roman world turned to it ; till out of it arose a new- 
 art in Constantinople. Then in the fifteenth century 
 at the Revival the humanist artists turned again to 
 this same great work ; it gave rise first to the dome 
 of Florence, and then one hundred and fifty years later, 
 to the dome of St. Peter's ; from St. Peter's the dome 
 spread over the world the Pantheon and the Invalides 
 at Paris, St. Paul's in London, the Capitol at Washington, 
 the Isaac Church at St. Petersburg are mere imitations 
 of St. Peter's. And thus from the Pantheon has sprung 
 the architecture which from Chile to Chicago, from the 
 British Islands to the Turkish Empire, from St. Peters- 
 burg to Sicily, is seen in a thousand varieties, and in 
 ten thousand examples. 
 
 But it is not the Pantheon, nor indeed any ancient 
 temple, which served as the original type for the Gothic 
 churches of Europe down to the ascendency of the 
 Petrine type at the end of the sixteenth century. 
 Nothing in the history of architecture is better estab- 
 lished than the evolution of the Gothic Cathedral out 
 of the civil basilicas of the ancient world. The whole 
 course of that evolution can be traced step by step at 
 Rome, in Santa Maria Maggiore, St. Paul's without 
 the walls, St. John Lateran, St. Clement's, St. Agnes', 
 St. Lawrence, and the older churches of the basilican 
 type. Thus with the basilicas, extant, converted, or 
 recently destroyed, as the matrix of the Gothic churches 
 
ROME REVISITED 287 
 
 from the fifth to the fifteenth centuries, and the Pantheon 
 as the matrix of the neo-classical churches from the 
 fifteenth to the nineteenth century, we feel ourselves 
 at Rome in the head-waters from which we can trace 
 the flow of all modern architecture. 
 
 If the Pantheon be historically the central building 
 in Rome, it is by no means amongst the oldest monu- 
 ments. Nor are the walls of Roma quadrata, nor the 
 first structures of the Palatine. The Egyptian obelisks 
 carry us back to a time almost as remote from the 
 Pantheon as the Pantheon is from us. The oldest, 
 perhaps, date from the Pharaohs who built the Pyramids, 
 and they were made to adorn the temple of the Sun 
 on the banks of the Nile, thence were brought by the 
 first Caesars to adorn a circus, or to give majesty to 
 a mausoleum, then thrown down and cast aside in 
 Christian ages as monuments of heathendom and 
 savage shows. Again they were restored in the classical 
 revival after a thousand years of neglect, and set up 
 to witness to the pride of popes and adorn the capital 
 of Christendom. 
 
 What an epitome of human history in those vast 
 monoliths, the largest of which is thirty-six feet higher 
 than Cleopatra's needle on the Thames, and is more 
 than three times it weight ; for a thousand years wit- 
 nessing the processions of Egyptian festivals, then for 
 some centuries witnesses of the spectacles and luxury 
 of the Imperial city, then for a thousand years cast 
 down into the dust, but too vast to be destroyed, and 
 then set up again, with the blessings of popes and the 
 ceremonies of the Church, crowned with the symbol of 
 the Cross, to witness to the grandeur of the successor 
 of St. Peter. They have looked down these eternal 
 stones on Moses and Aaron, on Pharaohs and Greeks 
 
288 THE CITY IN HISTORY 
 
 and Persians, on Alexander and Julius, on Peter and 
 Paul, on Charlemagne and Dante, on Michael Angelo 
 and Raphael. These stones were venerable objects 
 before history began ; they have been objects of wonder 
 to the three great religions, three races, and three epochs 
 of civilisation. 
 
 One can forgive destructive municipalism much for 
 at last rescuing from ignoble uses the burial-places of 
 the Caesars. There are no edifices in Rome more 
 interesting to the historian than those vast mausolea 
 the grandest and most imposing tombs that exist 
 the mausoleum of Augustus, that of Hadrian, of 
 Caecilia Metella, the Pyramid of Cestius. That of 
 Augustus, for a hundred years the burial-place of the 
 Caesars and their families, then a castle of the Colonnas, 
 the scene of endless civil wars, afterwards a common 
 theatre for open-air plays, is now at last recovered, to 
 be preserved as a monument of antiquity. The yet 
 vaster mausoleum of Hadrian, for another hundred 
 years the burial-place of the later Caesars, a huge tower 
 of 240 feet in diameter, and rising to 160 feet in height ; 
 once a dazzling mass of statuary, marble, columns, 
 bronze and gilding ; then a fortress that bore the brunt 
 of countless sieges, the citadel of the popes, their prison- 
 house, their refuge, and their treasure-house, adorned 
 with frescoes by pupils of Raphael, and famous in the 
 anecdotes of Cellini, with cells, halls, and chambers 
 crowded with anecdotes : at last a barrack of the Pope 
 and then of the King of Italy. 
 
 This too, as one of the buildings of antiquity which 
 has been in use continuously since the Empire, wit- 
 nesses at once to the grandeur of the Caesars, to the 
 tempest-tossed history of Rome in her Decline and 
 Fall, to the robber bands of the Middle Ages, to the 
 
ROME REVISITED 289 
 
 infamies of the Papacy of the tenth century and of 
 the sixteenth century. The history of Rome from 
 Theodoric to Victor Emmanuel, the sieges, the wars 
 of the popes, the whole story of their temporal power, 
 seem to group round the Castle of the Angel who 
 stayed the Pestilence at the prayers of Saint Gregory. 
 Within it was the porphyry sarcophagus which once 
 held the dust of Hadrian. Strange is the story of that 
 stately coffin. After a thousand years it was carried 
 off to St. Peter's by Innocent II. for his own body, 
 and it was burnt in a conflagration two centuries later. 
 The porphyry lid of it was used in the tenth century 
 for the coffin of the Emperor Otho II. Seven centuries 
 later his ashes were ejected by a pope, and it was con- 
 verted into the baptismal font of St. Peter's, where it 
 now rests. What an epitome of the history of Rome ! 
 This precious marble of the East, made to cover the 
 dust of the Roman master of the world in the grandest 
 tomb of Europe, desecrated and cast aside by bar- 
 barous invaders, one half of it was used as his coffin 
 by the Emperor the successor of Charlemagne, the 
 other is adopted for his own coffin by the Pope, the 
 friend and protege of St. Bernard. This half is destroyed 
 by fire ; the other half is still the font in the central 
 Church of Christendom. The Empire of the Caesars, 
 the Empire of Charlemagne, the mediaeval Papacy, 
 the modern Papacy, all are recorded in that historic 
 marble. 
 
 In spite of disfigurement, the recent ' improvements ' 
 have rather accentuated that peculiar quality of the 
 monuments of Rome, that they thus witness to the 
 successive revolutions in human destiny. The anti- 
 quarian who excavates in the valley of the Nile, the 
 Seine, or the Mississippi, the geologist who explores in 
 
 T 
 
THE CITY IX IlI.sTORY 
 
 the strata of some estuary, comes upon layer after layer 
 of successive ages, the remains of ^historic ages, then of 
 pre-historic ages, of the bronze age, of the bone im- 
 plements, of the flint implements, the neolithic, and the 
 palaeolithic age, until he comes to the glacial epoch, and 
 so forth. That is the character of the Roman remains. 
 With us Stonehenge records the Druids and nothing 
 else, the White Tower records the Norman Kings, the 
 Abbey the Plantagenets, St. Paul's the Stuarts, and no 
 more. But at Rome each monument bears visible 
 marks of four, five, or six successive ages over some 
 two thousand years or a yet longer span. 
 
 St. Peter has displaced Trajan on his column, as St. 
 Paul has superseded Antoninus. The Mamertine prison 
 was first perhaps an Etruscan waterwork of the early 
 kings, then the state prison of the Republic, the scene 
 of the execution of Jugurtha, and the conspirators of 
 Catiline, of Vercingetorix, and many another captive 
 chief, of Sejanus ; then it was believed to be the prison 
 of St. Paul and St. Peter, from whence their last epistles 
 were written, and since then it has become for the 
 Catholic world a centre of pilgrimage, adoration, and 
 miracle. So the churches round the Forum are partly 
 formed of Roman temples and basilicas, one of them 
 being the seat of the Senate. So the Colosseum was 
 built by Titus after the capture of Jerusalem, largely by 
 captive Jews ; for three centuries it continued the scene 
 of the most amazing and wonderful spectacles the world 
 ever saw ; then it was a fortress of the feudal barons, 
 the refuge or the terror of popes, then the quarry from 
 which cardinals and families of popes built their palaces, 
 then a deserted ruin, then a factory, next a sacred place 
 of pilgrimage, of preaching, and of reverential worship, 
 and now again secularised into a mere antiquarian 
 
ROME REVISITED 29 1 
 
 museum, from which Nature and God have been driven 
 as with a pitchfork. So, too, out of one vast hall in the 
 Baths of Diocletian, Michael Angelo constructed for a 
 pope a stately modern church. The columns, the marble 
 floors, the sarcophagi, the fonts, and the pulpits in the 
 older churches have each a long and varied history. A 
 column of Grecian marble has been oddly inscribed, 
 ' From the bed-chamber of the Caesars.' A sculptured 
 coffin first held a Roman senator, was next converted to 
 the use of a martyred saint, was then cast aside as a 
 worthless bit of stone on a heap of rubbish, and at 
 length appropriated by an aesthetic churchman for his 
 own pompous monument. 
 
 There is one feature of Rome which even the rage of 
 ' improvement' has spared as yet the feature which of 
 all others is the most suggestive to the historical mind 
 the ancient city walls : the whole series of walls, with 
 their towers, gates, ramparts, and barbicans, with the 
 twelve miles of circuit, the fragments of the early kings, 
 the walls of Romulus and of Servius, the walls of 
 Aurelian and of Belisarius and Theodoric, the walls of 
 Pope Leo, of Pope Sixtus, of Urban, of Pio Nono. 
 What a vast procession of events has passed in the 
 sixteen centuries since Aurelian made the circuit that 
 we see ! As we stand on those ramparts in the Pincian 
 or in the Medici garden, or beside the Lateran Terrace, 
 or near the grave of Shelley, what visions we may still 
 recall what victorious armies from east and west, north 
 and south, coming home in triumph under Diocletian 
 and Constantine, Julian and Theodosius, with the eagles 
 glancing in the sun, and the legionaries tramping on in 
 serried ranks ; what hordes of northern and southern 
 invaders, Vandals, Goths, Lombards, Franks, Normans, 
 and Saracens, the ever victorious armies of Charles the 
 
THE CITY IN HISTORY 
 
 Great, of the Othos, of the Norman Guiscard ; what 
 battles ; what sackings and conflagrations ; or again, 
 what long processions of pilgrims from all parts of the 
 earth ; what bands of monks led by Francis, Dominic, 
 Loyola, and Xavier ; what companies of men-at-arms 
 led by Colonnas, Orsinis, Frangipanis, Contis, and 
 Crescentii ; and then in the sixteenth and seventeenth 
 centuries what clash of arms, what pompous ceremonies, 
 what historic meetings, down to the time of Napoleon 
 and Garibaldi, and Pio Nono and Victor Emmanuel, 
 and the latest breach of all, through which the Italian 
 kingdom entered and displaced the Pope. These walls 
 and gates, themselves of all ages, bear stamped on 
 them the history of Europe during sixteen centuries. 
 Few edifices of man's hand on this earth have a record 
 so great, and of such central interest. 
 
 Of the Catholic memorials of Rome, though the 
 Church has almost disappeared from sight, nothing is 
 destroyed and little is changed. To the Protestant 
 tourist, with his Murray and his Baedeker, now that the 
 public papal ceremonies have practically ceased, this 
 Catholic world is for the most part a blank. He passes 
 from the Caesars to Raphael and Michael Angelo, 
 Bernini and Guido, from the Forum to St. Peter's ac- 
 cording to his taste, without a thought of the vast 
 world of history, of legend, of poetry, of art, of religion, 
 that fills up the twelve centuries between the days of 
 Constantine and the days of Leo X. The British 
 tourist is but one out of many. To the tens of 
 thousands of Catholic pilgrims who visit Rome from 
 all parts of the world, this city of St. Peter is all in 
 all ; ruins and pictures to them are worldly trifles. To 
 them Christian Rome is everything, and heathen Rome 
 and modern Rome are less than nothing. And to the 
 
ROME REVISITED 293 
 
 impartial mind of history, this Christian Rome is a very 
 solid third part nay, perhaps, a real half of Rome 
 historic Rome in its entirety. 
 
 But it is a thorny topic to the mere historian, is this 
 Christian Rome ; for every corner of its story is en- 
 crusted with vague legend, unsupported guesses, usually 
 passing into palpable imposture. Miracle, tradition, 
 superstition, and fraud have got inextricably woven 
 into the texture of each record. As the tourist mocks 
 at the footprints of the Apostles in the Mamertine rock, 
 at the miraculous Bambino of Ara Cceli ; so the learned 
 antiquary shakes his head at the sacred image of St. 
 Peter, and at the tomb and cell of St. Cecilia. But 
 the scepticism of tourist and antiquarian is somewhat 
 overdone. There is a legendary, perhaps a fraudulent, 
 element in many of the lives and martyrdoms, nay, in 
 most of them. Strict historical criticism can accept no 
 one in its entirety. But there is a vast substructure of 
 fact, most difficult to disentangle, and impossible now 
 to prove. For my part, I would as soon believe that 
 nothing of the Golden House of Nero still exists under 
 the Baths of Titus, that no fragment of Roma quadrata 
 remains embedded in the palaces of the Caesars, as I 
 would believe that the legends of St. Clement and St. 
 Lawrence, of Cecilia and Agnes, of Martina and Bibiana, 
 were mere poetic inventions with no basis of fact. It 
 is for the historical mind a hopeless task to analyse this 
 element of fact ; and where superstition has piled up 
 fables, and scepticism retorts with wholesale ridicule, 
 a lifetime would hardly suffice to separate truth and 
 fiction. 
 
 Let us, then, be content to grope in the labyrinthine 
 passages and silent vaults of the catacombs, to view the 
 mouldering bones in their narrow cribs, the lamps, and 
 
294 THE CITY IN HISTORY 
 
 circlets, and fragments of pottery and metal, the rude 
 and smoky frescoes, the inscriptions, the epitaphs, the 
 emblems of the faith ; let us descend into the lower 
 churches of St. Clement and St. Agnes and St. Lawrence, 
 St. Cosmas and St. Martina ; let us visit the baptistry 
 and cloisters of the Lateran, even the Scala Santa and 
 the crypt of St. Peter's ; let us ponder over S. Gregorio 
 and its remains of the great Gregory, S. Sabina, with its 
 record of Dominic and Aquinas ; let us meditate in the 
 convent gardens of the Esquiline and the Aventine, and 
 feel that we are truly in touch with scenes historically 
 consecrated by some of the greatest souls who have 
 ever dignified humanity, with spots hallowed as some of 
 the turning points in human civilisation, and certainly 
 consecrated by the tears and prayers of believers during 
 eighteen centuries. We neither surrender our critical 
 judgment nor give way to a ribald scepticism. What 
 parts of this mighty and pathetic pageantry of Christian 
 legend are real, and what parts are pious fiction or 
 unholy fraud, we cannot tell. Let us forbear to probe 
 further where the task is vain. But this we know : that 
 in that enormous mass of legend, relic, ceremonial, 
 tradition and art, there is a basis of profound reality, 
 and a world of imagery, emotion, sacrifice, such as 
 man's brain and heart have never surpassed. 
 
 It is a melancholy reflection how often our critical 
 and sceptical habits make us blind to the true historic 
 significance of such a monument as St. Peter's. The 
 tourist and the student of art decry its rococo saints 
 and extravagant pomposity, the waste of power, the 
 manifest hollowness of its peculiar relics. Put aside 
 antiquarian and aesthetic criticism, and still a marvellous 
 record remains. Grant that the Cathedra Petri, the 
 miraculous bronze image and the bones of the apostle, 
 
ROME REVISITED 295 
 
 the column at which Christ was scourged, are all pious 
 fictions, there remains still in the very site, in the tombs 
 of the early Leos, of Matilda, the great countess, in the 
 antique Madonnas, in the font, in the crypt and sub- 
 terranean vaults, in the sacristy and the cemetery of 
 Constantine, in the tomb of Junius Bassus, and in the 
 Navicella of Giotto, above all, in the long annals of that 
 venerated spot from the circus of Nero down to its final 
 consecration by Urban VIII., enough to fill the thirteen 
 centuries between Constantine and the Borgheses. 
 
 To visit Rome which even in the last generation 
 had on most minds a sobering effect, as a visit to a 
 cemetery must have, however beautiful be the spot where 
 the departed sleep has grown to be of mournful in- 
 terest to those who remember it of old. There is to 
 them a new meaning in the peasant's song, ' Roma, 
 Roma, non e piu com' era prima ! ' We can see no 
 longer the Salvator Rosa ruins and rocks, the Piranesi 
 colonnades and arches, the quaint old Papal pageantry, 
 and the pensive landscape from garden and terrace. 
 Bits of it remain here and there amidst acres of building 
 speculations and American caravanserais. But for the 
 mere student of antiquity there is ample compensation. 
 And it is perhaps the truth that the deepest interest of 
 Rome still is not in its art, in its Vatican galleries, Sistine 
 frescoes, or dome of St. Peter's, not in its churches, 
 cloisters, relics, and tombs, but in its record of the 
 ancient world. Rome never was a centre of art even 
 in the days of Raphael, she never was a centre of 
 Christianity even in the twelfth and the thirteenth 
 century, as she was a centre of civilisation in the ages 
 of Julius, Augustus, Vespasian, and Trajan. 
 
 We may still stand on the tower of the Capitol and 
 survey that glorious panorama bounded by Tuscan, 
 
296 THE CITY IN HISTORY 
 
 Sabine, and Alban hills, and dream what that scene 
 was some seventeen or eighteen hundred years ago. 
 The Forum below was one radiant avenue of temples, 
 triumphal arches, triumphal columns, colossal statues, 
 monuments, and votive shrines the senate-house, 
 the rostra, the sacred way on one side the circular 
 temple of Vesta, the temple of Castor and the basilica 
 of Julius on the other ; above, on the right, the temple 
 of Jove, on the left that of Juno, and the towering 
 palaces of the Palatine and the Circus Maximus 
 beyond the valley. Far as the eye can reach would 
 be vast theatres, enormous baths, colossal sepulchres, 
 obelisks, columns, fountains, equestrian statues in marble 
 or in bronze. The walls of these sumptuous edifices 
 are all of dazzling brilliance in Oriental marbles, bright 
 with mosaic and with frescoes, and their roofs are 
 covered with plates of hammered gold. In the far 
 distance, across terraces and gardens shady with the 
 dark foliage of cypress and stone pine, might be seen 
 the aqueducts which bring from the mountains whole 
 rivers into the city, to fill its thousand baths and its 
 hundred fountains. And between the aqueducts and 
 the porticoes, far as the eye can reach to the hills 
 beyond, villas gleam in the sun with their terraces, 
 gardens, statues, and shrines, each a little city in itself. 
 
 This earth has never seen before or since so prodigious 
 an accumulation of all that is beautiful and rare. The 
 quarries of the world had been emptied to find precious 
 marbles. Forests of exquisite columns met the gaze, 
 porphyry, purple and green, polished granite, streaked 
 marbles, in the hues of a tropical bird, yellow, orange, 
 rosy, and carnation, ten thousand statues, groups and 
 colossi of dazzling Parian or of golden bronze, the work 
 of Greek genius, of myriads of slaves, of unlimited 
 
ROME REVISITED 297 
 
 wealth and absolute command. Power so colossal, 
 centralisation so ruthless, luxury so frantic, the world 
 had never seen, and we trust can never see again. 
 
 Strangely enough this portentous accumulation of 
 riches and splendour lay open to all comers. The one 
 thing that could not be seen (till the Empire was nearing 
 its close) was a wall, a fortress, a defence of any kind. 
 Rome of the Caesars was as free from any military look 
 as London to-day. It had neither wall nor citadel nor 
 forts. It was guarded only by a few thousand soldiers 
 and a few thousand police. For four centuries or so it 
 flourished in all its glory. There followed some ten 
 centuries of ruin, waste, desolation, and chaos, until its 
 restoration began a restoration sometimes that was a 
 new and worse ruin. The broken fragments only can be 
 seen to-day. Here and there a few mutilated columns, 
 cornices, staircases, and pavements, the foundations of 
 vast temples, theatres, and porticoes, the skeleton of a few 
 buildings too vast to be destroyed, a few half-ruined 
 arches, a number of broken statues in marble, and one 
 complete in bronze, rescued because it was wrongly 
 supposed to be a Christian sovereign. All else is dust 
 and endless tantalising dreams. But that dust draws 
 men to it as no other dust ever can. And he who begins 
 to dream longs to dream again and again. 
 
CHAPTER X 
 
 IMPRESSIONS OF ATHENS 
 
 ON a recent visit to Athens, I was introduced to a 
 beautiful and patriotic Athenian lady, the wife of an 
 official of rank, who begged me to write about Athens 
 on my return home (this, I may say, is an ordinary 
 form of politeness in that capital). When I promised 
 rather rashly that I would try to do something, she 
 took my breath away by asking if I meant to write 
 about ancient or modern Athens ? This question did 
 seem to me one of startling natvett \ and I helplessly 
 replied that, whatever I said, should be about Athens 
 one and indivisible. My daring paradox was rewarded 
 with a gracious smile. 
 
 My answer was, however, not at all so extravagant as 
 at first sight might appear. It is true that of all cities 
 of the world of any pretensions, Athens is the one of 
 which the ancient history (and the ancient history of a 
 very short period) is all absorbing. We all dream of 
 having seen Athens, or dream of one day seeing Athens, 
 for the sake of the overpowering memories of some two 
 or three centuries at most. When we are at Athens, 
 our eyes and our thoughts are filled with the sublime 
 and up-soaring remnants of that brief epoch in the great 
 age of the Republic. From that epoch until our own 
 lifetime, the history of Athens, except for a few trivial 
 scuffles and isolated notices, has been a mere blank, 
 
IMPRESSIONS OF ATHENS 299 
 
 almost as much as if it had been another Pompeii 
 buried under the dust of a volcano and recently dis- 
 interred. 
 
 But, within the last thirty or forty years, we may say, 
 Athens has risen up out of its tomb : not like Pompeii, 
 dead, silent, deaf, and voiceless, but eagerly revivifying 
 the city of Pericles after some 2300 years ; reproducing 
 the language, the political habits, the names, the intel- 
 lectual peculiarities, even the architecture and the tastes 
 of the ancient city rising up, like Lazarus, after all 
 these centuries, talking and living, as if the death of 
 twenty-three centuries had been a trance. This fact, 
 however superficial and artificial it may be in many 
 ways, however little the modern city can compare with 
 the art and thought of the ancient city, is a striking 
 fact psychological, social, and historical. And hence, 
 there is a strong tendency to consider Athens as it is, 
 even whilst studying what Athens was. At Rome, or 
 at Alexandria, there is almost nothing but the stones 
 and the sites, to remind one of the ancient people. At 
 Athens, the first impression is a sort of serio-comic 
 fancy revival of the old city. We stand in the Forum 
 or the Piazza Navona at Rome without imagining 
 that the cab-drivers or the fruit-sellers have anything 
 in common with Coriolanus or Camillus. They do 
 not speak the language, or use the names, or imitate 
 the forms of the Republic. But as one walks along 
 the oSo? 'Ep/ioy in full view of the Acropolis, or listens 
 to Tricoupi addressing the S^io? 'Adyvalos in the open 
 air in 'a language which Thucydides could understand, 
 and which he would have rejoiced to cast into stately 
 epigrams, as we pass under the Doric colonnades, in 
 dazzling Pentelic marble, of the Academy, and the 
 Museum it is difficult to be quite indifferent to the 
 
300 THE CITY IN HISTORY 
 
 revival as some say, the scenic revival but, in any 
 case, a most suggestive historical renascence. As Byron 
 felt, as competent historians feel, it is impossible to be 
 wholly blind to the living Athens of to-day. 
 
 My own two visits to Greece were too short to allow 
 anything that can be called research, and these pages 
 will aim at nothing but the recalling a few first im- 
 pressions. When one arrives in Greece, the first thing 
 that strikes us is that we have left Europe behind. It is 
 true that Greece is not in Asia or in Africa, and hardly 
 in the East ; but in spite of the maps, it is only con- 
 ventionally in Europe. Greece is something between 
 Europe and the East, with a certain dash of the South. 
 The climate, the continuous blaze of the sun, the long 
 months of complete drought, the dusty plains and dry 
 water-courses, the aloes, the date palms, the cotton, the 
 indigo, the currant-grape, the jackal, the chamaeleon, 
 and the small crocodile even the camel which has 
 been seen in use are Eastern and Southern rather than 
 European. When we land in Greece, we find ourselves 
 in the middle of the week before last, that is to say, 
 they still use the Calendar of the Eastern Church, and 
 are twelve days behind us in Europe. And in A.D. 1900 
 this will have become thirteen days, for in the West we 
 shall omit that leap-year and gain another day. In 
 Greece they talk of the post coming in from Europe, 
 which it only does when a ship arrives, and they speak 
 of European things, in the sense of foreign. In spite of 
 the conventional statements of the geographers, Greece 
 is not in Europe ; but a half-way house between Europe 
 and Asia. 
 
 Another important fact, which the geographers ignore, 
 is this that Greece is an island for any practical 
 purpose or rather an interminable string of islands 
 
IMPRESSIONS OF ATHENS 30 1 
 
 scattered along the Eastern Mediterranean over a space 
 of sea that may measure some 500 miles, both north 
 and south, east and west. The maps may show Greece 
 as a prolongation of the Balkan Peninsula ; but it would 
 not be practicable for an ordinary traveller to reach 
 Greece except by sea. Athens, though it is a capital city 
 of Europe, cannot be reached by the continental railways. 
 The train will carry us direct from Calais to the furthest 
 extremities of the Spanish, Italian, Austrian, Russian, 
 and even Turkish dominions in Europe. But railways 
 do not reach in the Balkan Peninsula south of Salonica, 
 in Turkey. The Romans and the Turks had roads 
 into Greece proper ; but it is now unsafe, very fatiguing, 
 and costly, to travel by land from Salonica to Athens, 
 and nobody does so. Hence, practically, socially, 
 politically, and economically speaking, Greece is an 
 island, a vast cluster of islands placed in the ^Egean 
 Sea, very far East and very far South. Athens lies 
 east of Poland and of Hungary. The whole of Greece 
 lies south of Naples and Taranto ; and Crete lies south 
 of the Algerian coast and of any point of Europe. 
 
 We must go to Greece by sea : and the sea voyage 
 is most instructive. There is a long, lonely, restless 
 stretch of sea, some 400 miles broad between the coast 
 of Sicily and sight of the mountains of Attica. When 
 the vast pinnacle of Aetna, with its trailing pennon of 
 smoke, a pinnacle which, hour after hour seems to rise 
 in the sky, at last fades out of sight in the west, a long 
 reach of unbroken sea has to be ploughed. Long 
 before we sight the mountains of Taygetus or the head- 
 lands of Taenarum or Malea, between which lies the 
 vale of ' Hollow Lacedaemon,' one has come to realise 
 that we have left Europe far behind and are entering 
 on the land of the rising sun. The old saw ran 
 
302 THE CITY IN HISTORY 
 
 4 When you have passed Cape Malea, make your will 
 and say farewell to your kindred.' That is no longer 
 necessary or even prudent. But by the time that \ve 
 have rounded Cape Malea and are steering north-east 
 instead of south-east, it breaks upon us that we have 
 left Europe some distance behind us. 
 
 Whatever geographers may pretend, there is not any 
 such country as Greece and there never was. There 
 is no definitely marked portion of Europe inhabited 
 by a people politically and socially one, with national 
 traditions and habits. There is not now, and there 
 never has been in ancient or in modern times. If we 
 take a list of the illustrious Greeks of antiquity, we 
 shall find that far the larger part of them belonged 
 not to continental Greece proper, but to Greek com- 
 munities spread out over the world from the coast of 
 Spain to the banks of the Euphrates, from the Euxinc 
 to the coast of Africa. There is now a Greek language, 
 a Greek church, a Greek nationality, possibly to some 
 degree, but very doubtfully, a Greek race, spread over 
 many countries, over a thousand islands, mingled with 
 other races, languages, and countries ; subdivided, dis- 
 persed, and scattered over more than a thousand miles, 
 though the population of the entire Greek kingdom is 
 not half that of London. All good Greeks would be 
 scandalised if Crete was not included in Greece Crete 
 where they say true Hellenes survive. And if Crete, 
 why not Rhodes, why not Cyprus, why not Smyrna, 
 Chios, Lesbos, and the other islands of the Archi- 
 pelago? Till Athens lately became populous, there 
 were more Greeks in Constantinople than in Athens, 
 and it is always said of a purer Hellenic descent. And 
 no other Greek town except Athens and Piraeus contains 
 as many Greeks as there are in Smyrna, or Alexandria, 
 
IMPRESSIONS OF ATHENS 303 
 
 perhaps in Trieste, or London. Where does Greece 
 begin and end? All genuine Greeks deny with in- 
 dignation that Greece is limited by the present frontiers 
 of the actual kingdom. What are its local limits? 
 Every true Hellene, and every Philhellene states them 
 in a different way. A Greek orator addressing the 
 people of Athens talks not of their country, but of 
 Hellenismus or Panhellenism, that is, the common 
 aspirations of the so-called Greek race. Greece may 
 mean a nation ; it cannot mean a country. 
 
 Until we see Greece we hardly realise that Greece 
 is practically all mountains, tremendous bare precipitous 
 mountains, with hardly any real plains of any size 
 except at extreme points. The islands are so numerous 
 and so close to the mainland that they practically 
 form part of it. They are mere tops of mountains 
 rising out of the sea. And it is much easier to 
 pass from one island to another, than from one point 
 of the mainland to another a few miles off. In 
 sailing across the ygean Sea, from the time we 
 sight Cape Taenarum (Matapan) until we reach the 
 Bosphorus, some 500 miles, we never lose sight of 
 mountains towering out of the sea. From Taenarum 
 we can see the mountains of Crete 100 miles off; and 
 in passing up the Archipelago, we see on one side the 
 islands and mainland of Asia Minor on the East, and 
 the islands and mainland of European Greece on the 
 West. Hence, the whole of Greece, mainland and 
 islands together, looks not like a definite country such 
 as Italy, Spain, France, or England, but a long chain 
 of Alps or Andes, half submerged in the Eastern 
 Mediterranean, and thrusting a thousand bare and 
 jagged peaks to form islands in the sea. 
 
 The mountains are themselves lofty ; and since they 
 
304 THE CITY IN HISTORY 
 
 are usually seen as if they rose straight up out of the 
 sea, they look stupendous, even to eyes familiar with the 
 Alps, the Pyrenees, and the Apennines. The principal 
 mountains in Greece are more than twice the height 
 of Snowdon. Olympus, the loftiest of all, is more than 
 twice the height of Ben Nevis with Arthur's Seat at 
 Edinburgh on the top of that. The mountains which 
 gird Athens round like a crown (Mr. Symonds thinks 
 they form what the poet calls ' the crown of purple ') 
 are loftier than Snowdon and Ben Nevis, and yet they 
 are all within a day's walk of the city. Thus from 
 every point of view, Greece is not so much a country 
 as a vast mountain chain half submerged in the sea. 
 And owing to the multiplicity and height of the moun- 
 tains, the small area in which they are concentrated, 
 the singular transparency of the air, and the degree 
 to which the land is indented and intersected by sea, 
 Greece appears to be strangely small, even smaller 
 than it really is. It is hardly any where more than 
 two hundred miles deep, or one hundred miles broad. 
 So that from almost any elevated point, the greater 
 part of Greece can be seen at once. Attica, the 
 Peloponnesus, the Eastern islands, the mountains of 
 Bceotia, Argolis, Arcadia and Euboea, are all to be 
 seen together. Attica is hardly bigger than the Isle 
 of Wight, and infinitely less open to cultivation and 
 transit. And ancient Athens would easily stand in 
 the area of Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens. 
 
 When we see it, we realise how small Greece is, in 
 one sense ; and yet how widely spread out over the 
 Eastern Mediterranean. Continental Greece is merely 
 one vast mountain mass, into whose lateral valleys 
 and gorges the sea has forced a channel. And yet, 
 in another sense, Greece with its interminable chain 
 
IMPRESSIONS OF ATHENS 305 
 
 of rocky islets, from Corcyra to Crete, from Crete to the 
 Propontis, seems to lead on in a continuous land for 
 a thousand miles. The mainland is severed by nature 
 into small segments, each hardly able by itself to feed 
 a thousand families. All Attica can hardly grow as 
 much food as a single great estate in England, France, 
 or Russia. Eleusis, which Athens ultimately subdued 
 and incorporated, is not so far from Athens as is 
 Shepherd's Bush from Woolwich ; and these famous 
 towns are separated from each other by a steep and 
 difficult mountain pass, which a regiment could hold 
 against an army corps. Megara, which was a thorn 
 in the side of Athens at the time of her imperial glory, 
 was not much further from her than is Gravesend from 
 London. Corinth, the deadly enemy of Athens, could 
 be seen from the Acropolis. ^Egina, which Themistocles 
 so earnestly advised the Athenians to incorporate, looks 
 as near to Athens as Harrow looks to Notting Hill ; 
 and a single oarsman might row himself across the 
 gulf in any open boat. 
 
 The mighty statue in bronze of Athene Promachos, 
 the famous work of Pheidias, which, with its pedestal, 
 towered some sixty feet on the summit of the Acropolis, 
 could be seen from the coast of Argolis or from any 
 of the heights of Corinth, Megara, yEgina, or Bceotia. 
 Thence they could behold Athene keeping watch night 
 and day over her beloved city. One used to doubt if 
 this famous image could escape the charge of obtrusive 
 monstrosity which is the note of colossal statues. But 
 when we stand on the spot, and remember how this 
 resplendent figure of the Patron Goddess ever faced 
 the enemies of Athens, as each sunrise and sunset tipped 
 with golden fire the point of her spear and the crest 
 of her helm, we may conceive how this Palladium 
 
 U 
 
306 THE CITY IN HISTORY 
 
 sank into the popular imagination. And \ve sec fresh 
 meaning in the tale how, eight hundred years after the 
 date of its erection, Alaric and his Goths had been 
 scared from their raid on the Acropolis by the vision of 
 the Goddess keeping ward over her city in arms. 
 
 As the traveller for the first time in his life sails up 
 the Gulf of JEgina., and his straining eyes at last behold 
 Attica and Athens, the impression is always the same. 
 How magnificent is the amphitheatre in the centre of 
 which stands the Acropolis ; how majestic and up- 
 soaring is the grandest of all ruins on its immortal steep ; 
 how incredibly near together are placed these mighty 
 memorials and historic sites ; how marvellously small is 
 the stage on which these undying dramas were played ! 
 How sublime is ancient Athens in its loneliness : how in- 
 finitesimally small is the space it occupied on the earth ! 
 
 The situation of Athens is far grander than that of 
 Rome, or Florence, perhaps even that of Naples, and of 
 any city in Europe except Constantinople, which is 
 a wholly different thing. The nearness and the con- 
 tinuity of the mountain amphitheatre round Athens, 
 the great height and grand form of the mountains, 
 the splendid mass and elevation of the Acropolis in 
 the centre, produce an impression more strange, simple, 
 and imposing than any city of the West. From the 
 distance at sea, what we behold is a vast ruin on a 
 noble cliff. If we do not so much consider beauty and 
 picturesque charm such as that of Naples, Palermo, 
 Verona, and Venice, but mass, unity, and weight of 
 stroke in the impression, we may well feel that in 
 simple, and it may be almost painful, majesty, nothing 
 in Western Europe can equal the first sight of Athens. 
 And what a mere shelf of rock it looks, buttressed 
 round by mountains on all sides but towards the sea ! 
 
IMPRESSIONS OF ATHENS 307 
 
 Like the rock of Gibraltar, Athens stands an imposing 
 mass towering out of the sea, lonely, unapproachable 
 by landward, and hardly habitable apart from the sea ; 
 suggesting at first sight far off empire across the sea, 
 useless and unintelligible, except as the impregnable 
 fastness of a sea-born race. 
 
 Attica itself is a mere rocky shelf opening down to 
 the sea, but with nothing around it or behind it land- 
 wards, except jagged mountain peaks, defiles, and 
 citadels held by her enemies and rivals. As we stand 
 on the Propylaea and survey the magnificent panorama 
 of rock, promontory, crags, gorges, and mountain ranges 
 one beyond the other, rising into the sky, 5000, 6000, 
 even 8000 feet, we are looking on soil trodden by the 
 fiercest enemies of Athens in the days of her greatest 
 strength, by Boeotians, Argives, Corinthians, Achaeans, 
 and Arcadians. An Athenian thus lived ever in full 
 view of the home of his enemies, and could behold 
 some of the most memorable scenes in his own history, 
 and also the birthplace and the tombs of some of his 
 most famous chiefs. The history of Athens, its triumphs 
 and its weakness, had for its cradle one single rocky 
 amphitheatre. And yet, as Comte has finely put it, it 
 was easier for her to conquer a wide empire on the seas, 
 than it was to subdue a neighbouring state within a day's 
 march of her citadel. She could plant her trophies, 
 her colonies, and her subject cities all over the Medi- 
 terranean, from Sicily in the West to the Propontis on 
 the North, and to Crete and Rhodes in the East ; but 
 she never could subdue many a petty republic, whose 
 territory could be seen as the citizens climbed the great 
 staircase to the shrine of Athene. 
 
 Let every traveller hasten to reach the top of Mount 
 Pentelicus. It is loftier than Snowdon ; but it is only 
 
308 THE CITY IN HISTORY 
 
 some twelve miles from Athens, a morning walk for the 
 average hill-climber. In the hollow which seems to lie 
 beneath our feet, as we gaze on the wonderful scene 
 from the summit, the Acropolis, with the Parthenon 
 and Propylasa portico, dominates the basin of Athens. 
 It is easy to mark the Pnyx where Themistocles and 
 Pericles, Alcibiades and Demosthenes addressed the 
 people ; there is the agora where Socrates stood and 
 questioned all who cared to answer ; there is Mars' Hill 
 where Paul spoke to philosophers and idlers about 
 the Unknown God. One can almost make out the 
 olive grove which still seems to mark the site of Plato's 
 Academy, and not far from it the knoll which marks 
 Colonos, the birthplace of Sophocles, the scene of his 
 exquisite drama of the exiled CEdipus. In the two 
 hundred years that sever the age of Pisistratus from 
 that of Demosthenes, what a harvest of genius in all 
 forms of human power in war, art, poetry, policy, 
 philosophy has been gathered from that little field, 
 which from our mountain top looks like a few bare, 
 barren, sun-baked acres ! What an outburst of human 
 activity and invention in that dazzling light and purity 
 of atmosphere, where, as their poet says, they passed 
 their days ' in dainty delight, in most pellucid air,' or as 
 our own poet has said 
 
 ' Where, on the ^tgean shore, a city stands 
 Built nobly, pure the air and light the soil.' 
 
 The atmosphere of Athens still seems to be light rather 
 than air : its soil seems to be not earth, but the dust of 
 white marble. 
 
 Still standing on Pentelicus, we may see a little 
 further Piraeus and the three ports beside the blue gulf, 
 from whence some thousand fleets of triremes have set 
 
IMPRESSIONS OF ATHENS 309 
 
 sail for all parts of the Mediterranean. And just across 
 the thin streak of blue rises the island of Salamis. The 
 water beneath it is the scene of the most famous sea- 
 fight in history : beyond, the hills look down on the 
 birthplace of ^Eschylus : in the distance rise up the 
 the crag of Aero-Corinth and the mountains of Argolis, 
 Cithaeron, Helicon, Parnes, and Hymettus. To the 
 west and south, half Greece can be outlined, or traced 
 by its topmost peaks and distant islands. If we turn 
 northwards, beneath our feet, an hour or two on foot 
 below us, lies a quiet drowsy plain along the sea-coast, 
 sheltered by the vast ranges of Eubcea. That quiet 
 drowsy plain is Marathon, where Greeks first met the 
 Mede in arms in the great day of the Athenian glory. 
 The tumulus still to be seen was always known as the 
 sepulchre of the Athenian warriors. Along the reedy 
 shore ^Eschylus and his brothers fought in the desperate 
 embarcation of the Persians. And in the northern 
 distance we see the mountains which tower above 
 Thermopylae. This union of magnificent scenery with 
 so large a prospect over historic scenes, this vast pano- 
 rama over the memorials of events commemorated in 
 the greatest poetry and prose of the world, makes the 
 view from Pentelicus live in the memory with that 
 other prospect from the campanile of the Capitol at 
 Rome. 
 
 The nearness of every one of these historic scenes, 
 the infinitely petty stage which these immortal men of 
 genius trod in life, the brief moment of human history 
 into which they were crowded, takes away the breath. 
 Here in a town of very moderate size and population, 
 within the span of one human life, there lived and 
 worked Miltiades, Themistocles, Pericles, Alcibiades, 
 ^schylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, Pheidias, 
 
3IO THE CITY IN HISTORY 
 
 Thucydides, Socrates, Plato, some of the most brilliant 
 generals, statesmen, politicians known to universal 
 history, the greatest tragic genius, the greatest comic 
 genius, the supreme art genius recorded in the annals 
 of mankind, the great master of philosophic history, 
 two out of the three great chiefs of ancient philosophy. 
 All of these were born and bred within walking dis- 
 tance of this unique spot, and all of them within little 
 more than a hundred years. There is nothing like this 
 in the whole history of mankind. Even in Florence, 
 Giotto, Dante, Leonardo, Michael Angelo, and Galileo, 
 were separated by nearly four centuries ; and in Judita, 
 from Samuel to Ezekiel, we may possibly count some 
 six centuries. It is this sudden blazing up of supreme 
 genius on this mere speck of rock for one short period 
 and then utter silence which makes the undying 
 charm of this magic spot of earth. 
 
 What a light this throws on ancient history ! As 
 we stand on Pentelicus, with the Acropolis, Marathon, 
 Salamis, Piraeus, and Eleusis at our feet, we behold 
 bays, plains, and hills, the dwellers wherein were ever 
 .strangers and enemies of Athens. No Megarian, no 
 Argive, no Corinthian, no Boeotian, ever could become 
 a citizen or share in the political and religious privi- 
 leges of Athens. Homer, Sappho, Pindar, Theocritus, 
 Pythagoras, Aristotle, Archimedes, and Hipparchus 
 were mere foreigners at Athens, aliens and sojourners 
 amongst the lawful citizens. Let him cross that narrow 
 streak of blue sea, and the Corinthian at Athens, or the 
 Athenian at Corinth, was what the Parisian is at Berlin, 
 or the Prussian in Paris. What would England be, if 
 a Kent man were an alien in Essex, if, from the hill at 
 Sydenham, the Londoner looked on a people with 
 whom he could neither trade, nor worship, nor inter- 
 
IMPRESSIONS OF ATHENS 311 
 
 marry, nor hold civil or military relations? What, if 
 from the dome of St. Paul's the Londoner looked down 
 on the city wherein were born and passed their whole 
 lives Alfred, Edward, Cromwell, Shakespeare, Milton, 
 Bacon, Newton, and Scott, Byron, Shelley, and Words- 
 worth ; if from Primrose Hill, he could look down on 
 the fields of Azincourt and Blenheim, of Trafalgar and 
 Waterloo. Now at Athens, the Athenian looked day 
 by day on the home of his national heroes, on the 
 scenes of his national glory, and the works of his 
 greatest artists, and also on the frowning strongholds 
 of his deadly enemies. 
 
 It requires an effort to bring home to the mind the 
 small scale of ancient Athens. It does not seem within 
 the old walls to have exceeded a square mile, about the 
 area of Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens, and one- 
 hundredth part of London. Out of this space, the 
 Acropolis, wholly devoted to public buildings, the 
 Areopagus, the Pnyx, and the Agora must have occu- 
 pied at least one-tenth. But a few hundred acres, or 
 the area of one of the large London parks remained for 
 private houses. These were mainly of wood and plaster, 
 principally used at night. Of mansions for private 
 citizens, of a permanent kind, there is no vestige nor 
 any reference in classical times. The normal popula- 
 tion could hardly have exceeded 25,000 full citizens ; 
 and we cannot believe that the city and the ports 
 together could ever have contained 200,000 souls, even 
 counting slaves, strangers, women, and children. 
 
 Their whole life was public : their main life was spent 
 in the open air. Their homes were shelters at night, 
 with harems for the women and children. The climate 
 of Athens is such that nothing to be called winter cold 
 occurs between the end of February and the middle of 
 
312 THE CITY IN HISTORY 
 
 December, and rain seldom falls between May and the 
 end of October. We must imagine the Athenians of 
 the great age as a very small class of free and privileged 
 men, personally known to each other, living on terms of 
 absolute equality, passing their lives in public, mainly 
 in the porticoes, colonnades, temples, and market-places, 
 having little serious work except in time of war, with 
 strong civic patriotism, and intense local superstitions, 
 lounging about with a noble sense of superiority like 
 the officers of the guard in some military capital. They 
 were educated in certain things and in certain modes 
 beyond the wildest dream of modern culture, with all 
 hard work committed to slaves, all cares of the house- 
 hold to women : passionately keen about grace, beauty, 
 wit, and intellect. Their culture consisted of poetry, 
 mythology, music, gymnastics, arithmetic, the art of 
 conversation, infinite subtlety in the use of their own 
 language, and abnormal sensitiveness to rhythm, grace 
 of expression, wit, and all forms of beauty. So they 
 lived daintily, as their poet said, in a balmy flood of 
 light, surrounded by temples, statues, porticoes, shrines, 
 and paintings, and at every corner of their city domi- 
 nated by the radiant majesty of the Acropolis and its 
 divine Guardian. 
 
 It is not easy to conceive the effect of a building of 
 Pentelic marble in that atmosphere until one has seen it 
 on the spot. But when we behold a new marble colon- 
 nade in that pellucid air, sparkling like the Silberhorn 
 peak of the Jungfrau in the early morning light, we 
 instantly comprehend the peculiarities of that style. A 
 Doric pediment in London no more enables us to under- 
 stand a temple at Athens than the bronze Achilles of 
 Hyde Park recalls to us the Athene Promachos of 
 Pheidias. The Vestry of the Church of St. Pancras in 
 
IMPRESSIONS OF ATHENS 313 
 
 Euston Square is not more like the Erechtheum than the 
 pediment of St. Martin's in the Fields is like the Par- 
 thenon. The British Museum, the only tolerable Greek 
 building in London, looks somewhat as a Greek temple 
 might look during the eruption of a volcano. Two 
 thousand three hundred and twenty-five years have 
 tinged the Parthenon and the Propylaea, a deep orange 
 or russet. But a new building of Pentelic marble in the 
 sky of Athens stands out soft, white, and dazzling with 
 light. In the modern edifices of new Athens, built from 
 the same quarry, we see the pearly radiance of the 
 marble, the need and the uses of colour, the repose and 
 coolness of these spacious colonnades and that which 
 has been the puzzle of antiquarians the entire absence 
 of window. We are quite unable to conceive buildings 
 without windows : we cannot work windows into Greek 
 designs. At Athens we see that a colonnade of Pentelic 
 marble lights itself, and in the sweetest way. The 
 marble is semi-transparent. It diffuses, reflects, and 
 harmonises sunlight in so mysterious a manner that a 
 marble hall is bathed in a subdued and delicious glow. 
 
 If we revive in imagination the Acropolis as it stood 
 in its perfection, we see with new force the undoubted 
 historic truth, that the Athenians, in spite of their rest- 
 lessness, audacity, and individuality, were intensely con- 
 servative in ideas, slavishly superstitious about spiritual 
 evils, and as St. Paul told them on Mars' Hill, too much 
 bound by obsolete scruples. The condemnation to 
 death of Socrates and of Aristotle, the extreme timidity 
 of Aristotle's utterances, the panic about the Hermae, 
 the mob-fury after the battle of Arginusae prove it 
 historically. But it is equally patent in their art. It is 
 obvious that a Doric temple was slowly developed out 
 of a small shrine having beams and pillars of wood. 
 
314 THE CITY IN HISTORY 
 
 The form was rigidly maintained when the material and 
 the scale were changed ; and, when temples were built 
 of a vast size, they were still ornamented and designed 
 on the old methods, however inapplicable these had 
 become. As we stand beneath the peristyle and pedi- 
 ment of the Parthenon, we cannot fail to see that, in a 
 building of those grand dimensions and towering posi- 
 tion, the lovely frieze and even the majestic figures of 
 the pediment must have been sacrificed, so far as they 
 never could be properly seen. Pheidias could not have 
 been blind to this cruel result of antique convention. 
 But neither he nor Pericles would have dared to trans- 
 gress the sacred canons in which art was bound. 
 
 The superstitious bigotry of the Athenians appears in 
 their history, their habits, their institutions, their lan- 
 guage, and the uniformity of their architecture. Stand 
 on the spot and recall the Acropolis in its glory, and 
 you will feel that there must have been after all a pro- 
 found monotony and rigidity in those eternal colonnades 
 and unvarying architraves. The arch was unknown in 
 the fine age ; the temples were all built on one or two 
 uniform patterns ; it was left to Rome to develop all 
 the uses of arch, tower, dome, the column supporting the 
 arch, the successive stories, the hemicycle, and groined 
 roof all the intricate combinations which Rome sug- 
 gested to modern architecture. Greece remained the 
 slave of its traditions and canons of art. It is true that 
 it avoided the incongruities and coarse realism of later 
 Roman art. But it was left to Rome to make art 
 progressive even in its corruption. Like the drama of 
 Racine, Attic art remained perfect in its conventions. 
 But its conventions were iron chains. 
 
 Accepting its traditional conventions, we cannot doubt 
 that the Acropolis must have displayed in its splendour 
 
IMPRESSIONS OF ATHENS 315 
 
 the most imposing mass of buildings ever raised by man. 
 With Pheidias we feel in presence of the supreme artist 
 (he was far more than sculptor) the one perfect master 
 in the history of art, of whose faultless genius no single 
 side was weaker or less noble than the rest. He remains 
 alone of men (or if not alone then it may be with 
 Homer, Shakespeare, Mozart) one whose unerring 
 instinct transmuted into beauty every form of the world 
 around him. 
 
 There is one aspect of Attic art, and one of its most 
 impressive types, which can be properly seen only in 
 Athens itself. This is the monuments of the dead : of 
 which many stand in the ancient cemetery of Cerameiais, 
 and many are collected in the National Museum. In 
 their pensive and exquisite pathos, in their reserve, in their 
 dignity and human affection, in their manly simplicity 
 in frank, pure, social, and humane acceptance of death 
 in all its pathos and all its solemnity, these Athenian 
 monuments may be taken as the highest type of funeral 
 emblems that the world possesses. They present an 
 aspect of Death pensive, affectionate, social, peaceful, 
 and beautiful. There is nothing of the ghastly and 
 cruel symbolism of the Middle Ages, nothing of the 
 stately and pompous mausoleums dear to Roman pride, 
 nothing of the impersonal fatuity of our modern grave- 
 stones. The family group is gathered to take its last 
 farewell of the departing. He or she is not stretched on 
 a bed or bier, not sleeping, not wasted by sickness, not 
 ecstatically transfigured. They sit or recline in all their 
 health and beauty, sweetly smiling, as a loved one who 
 is about to take a distant voyage. The family grouped 
 around are thoughtful, serious, not sad, loving and tender, 
 but not overcome with grief; they too take a long fare- 
 well of the traveller about to depart. At his feet lies a 
 
3i6 THE CITY i\ HISTORY 
 
 favourite dog, some bird or cherished pet, and sometimes 
 in an obscure corner a little slave may be seen howling 
 for his master. But only slaves are allowed to weep. 
 Sometimes the young warrior is mounted on his steed, 
 sometimes is seen charging in the midst of battle. But, 
 for the most part, all is ideal beauty, peace, and love. 
 
 There is here no vain pomp, no arrogance of wealth 
 and power, heraldic emblems, swords, coronets, and 
 robes of state. Neither is there the horror or the ecstasy, 
 the impossible angels, the grotesque demons, the skulls 
 or the palm branches with which we moderns have been- 
 wont to bedizen our funeral monuments. It recalls to 
 us our poet's In Meinoriain a work too of calm and 
 ideal art towards the latest phase of the poet's bereav- 
 ment. It seems as if the sculptor spoke to us in the 
 words of the late Laureate : 
 
 ' No longer caring to embalm 
 In dying songs a dead regret, 
 But like a statue solid set, 
 And moulded in colossal calm.' 
 
 Impressions first impressions of Athens throng on 
 the mind so closely and so vividly, that they are not 
 easily reduced to order. A visit to Athens is worth the 
 study of a hundred books, whether classical or recent. 
 Any man who has sailed round Greece from the Ionian 
 sea to the ^Egean, and up the Gulf of Corinth, and 
 thence to that of ^Egina and Eleusis, at once perceives 
 that Greece was destined by nature to be, not so much 
 the country of a settled nation, as the mere pied-a-terre 
 of a wonderful race whose mission was to penetrate over 
 the whole Mediterranean and its shores. These so-called 
 Greek states, celebrated in the immortal pages of Thucy- 
 dides, were but petty cock-pits wherein, like game birds 
 
IMPRESSIONS OF ATHENS 317 
 
 these historic republics crowed, strutted, and fought each 
 other. Greek war, from the point of view of modern 
 armies, was but the playing at soldiers like the people 
 of Lilliput and Blefuscu. An army which could not 
 defend such a country as Attica from invaders, or the 
 army which having got beneath the Long-walls could 
 not take Athens, can hardly be classed amongst soldiers 
 at all. Scipio or Julius Caesar with one legion would 
 have settled the Peloponnesian war in a few months. 
 As we behold it from a near height, we see that Athens 
 always was, and always must be, an artificial city, resting 
 entirely on its control of the sea and territory beyond 
 sea. There is nothing behind Athens to support a 
 population and there never can be anything. Indeed in 
 continental Greece itself, with its interminable barren 
 rocks, there is no room for anything but a few herds, 
 and sundry patches of olives, vines, currants, fruits, and 
 tobacco. Continental Greece is in truth a mere moun- 
 tain rising out of the sea, with a total population less 
 than that of the city of Berlin. 
 
 Greece was therefore destined to be a sea power 
 only, and, in recounting its achievements on land, her 
 historians are liable to mislead us altogether. The 
 Spartans no doubt remained for many centuries in- 
 dividually, like Soudanese, ' first-class fighting men.' 
 But they knew nothing of scientific war, and seem 
 throughout their history to have been commanded 
 by mere drill-sergeants. They were, as a Frenchman 
 irreverently remarked of another brave army, ' lions led 
 by asses.' Their stupidity, slowness, incapacity to de- 
 velop the art of war, their slavish adherence to routine 
 and tradition, prevented them for ever being really effec- 
 tive ; and, though they were a race of mere soldiers, 
 they never became a really warlike race. The Athenians 
 
318 THE CITY IN HISTORY 
 
 however good at sea, were on land untrustworthy, 
 excitable, undisciplined crowds of civilians. They had 
 hours of heroism, as at Marathon ; but, after all, Mara- 
 thon was rather a moral victory, won by genius, Man, and 
 a sort of spasmodic patriotism which astonished the 
 victors as much as the defeated. It was hardly a great 
 battle fought out on a regular plan. And, after Mara- 
 thon, the Athenians did nothing very great on land. 
 Their campaigns were unworthy of notice, and their 
 conduct in the field has that character of unsteadiness 
 which belongs to citizen levies. The Macedonians 
 under Alexander were trained and excellent troops 
 equal perhaps to anything in ancient war ; but the 
 Macedonians were not Greeks. It is melancholy to 
 think how largely the attention of academies and schools 
 is absorbed in these trumpery scuffles which have no 
 scientific interest of their own, and which, from the 
 historical point of view, could have no serious result. 
 
 It is the wonderful literary and poetic genius of Greece 
 which has given a halo to these petty mancEuvres. 
 And to the same cause may be traced the singular 
 phenomenon of the revival of Hellenism in the pre- 
 sent century, by a people who, as a whole, have but 
 a tincture of Hellenic blood. The process of reviving 
 ancient Greece is still proceeding with immense rapidity, 
 and in curious modes. Seventy years ago, Greek (or 
 Romaic as it was called) was a tongue only spoken by 
 certain classes in certain places ; and it was in no sense 
 the language of Xenophon or even Plutarch. None but 
 a few scholars were familiar with the term Hellenes, or 
 with anything of Hellenic history or literature. The 
 cultivated men of Greece have now placed the current 
 Hellenic tongue much nearer to that of Plutarch than 
 our English is like that of Chaucer ; and newspapers, 
 
IMPRESSIONS OF ATHENS 319 
 
 written in a language which Herodotus could easily 
 follow, are circulated as far as Trieste and Constanti- 
 nople. After two thousand years, a language, which is 
 practically the Greek of literature, is again paramount 
 from Corfu to Crete, from Larissa to Cerigo, from the 
 Ionian islands to the Sporades. The ancient names, the 
 ancient architecture, the ancient taste for reading, are 
 revived. The effect is that of an illusion. One's guide 
 is Sophocles, and the cab-driver is Themistocles ; one 
 drives along the 'OSo? 'E/o/ioO, and at every street corner 
 one sees a name familiar to us in Thucydides and Aris- 
 tophanes, and many an absurd compound, such as 
 iTnrocri&rjpoSpofAos, or tramway. Of course much of all 
 this is artificial, and irresistibly comic, like the solemn 
 revival of Olympian Games. But there is enough below 
 the surface to be counted as one of the most curious 
 examples of the subjective filiation of ideas to be met 
 with in modern times. And it is a truly pathetic illus- 
 tration of the imperishable fascination exerted over all 
 after ages, by the genius of ancient Hellas. 
 
 The revival is the more interesting, since few com- 
 petent observers believe in the survival of Hellenic blood. 
 It is needless here to touch on the obstinate dispute as to 
 how much of the blood of the Hellenes runs in the veins 
 of the modern Greek people. In certain islands, in parts 
 of Peloponnesus, in certain mountain districts, it may 
 do so to a qualified extent. In some parts of the main- 
 land, it is perhaps almost wholly extinct, and Attica 
 is one of the districts where the immortal fluid is the 
 thinnest of all. When we consider how greatly Athens, 
 its ports, mines, and territories, was even in ancient 
 times peopled with alien blood ; how that, from Chris- 
 tian times until the present generation, the population 
 of Athens had sunk to that of a village ; when we read 
 
320 THE CITY IN HISTORY 
 
 Gibbon's scathing picture of what Athens was a hundred 
 years ago, or even Byron's prose account of it eighty 
 years ago ; when we learn that sixty years ago, when it 
 became a capital, it had only 300 houses, and a mixed 
 population it is physically certain that the 130,0x30 
 inhabitants of Athens and the Piraeus must be mainly 
 an immigrant people. 
 
 . The fact that the recrudescence of the old Attic salt, 
 even in its peculiarities and foibles, must be due to some 
 intellectual filiation of ideals and habits, and not at all 
 to race inheritance, makes the sight of the re-Hellenisa- 
 tion of Hellas the more interesting as a study. If we 
 read Byron's melancholy picture of Athens and the 
 Athenians, whilst we roam in the bright and ambitious 
 city of King George to-day, we may note one of the 
 most singular transformations that modern history can 
 show us. Where the poet found only a few abject slaves, 
 we may now see one of the most busy political towns 
 in Europe. To see pure democracy, as described by 
 Aristophanes, we should go, not to New York, Paris, or 
 East London, but to Athens ; and there watch Demos 
 in his native cradle, under the sky of Athene, and in full 
 view of Propylaea and Pnyx, listening with passionate 
 keenness to his favourite orator, who, in the language of 
 Pericles or Cleon, is extolling the future of the Hellenic 
 idea. It may be that in its indigenous soil the art of 
 ochlocratic Bunkum has developed with unusual pro- 
 fusion ; and perhaps the Pan-Hellenic idea has given rise 
 to nonsense even worse than that of the Pan- Britannic 
 or Pan-Slavonic idea. But the habit of treating the 
 aspirations of an ambitious young nation with super- 
 cilious patronage, and of ridiculing their really wonderful 
 material progress, is not reasonable or even decent. 
 The extravagances of Hellenic vanity are hardly greater 
 
IMPRESSIONS OF ATHENS ' 321 
 
 than the extravagances of national vanity in many parts 
 of the Old and New World. And the progress that has 
 been made by Greece in sixty years, under great diffi- 
 culties, and with very narrow resources, is a fact that 
 cannot be denied. 
 
 Greece is a country more keenly proud and more 
 fiercely jealous of her memorials of the past than any 
 people on the face of the earth. The remnants of the 
 great age are all that she has to recall the history out of 
 which her renewed existence as a nation is built. They 
 are to Greece her Magna Charta, her Statute Book, her 
 Westminster Abbey, her St. Stephen's in one. She is 
 making sacrifices to recover, preserve, and display every 
 fragment of ancient art. Her Museums and National 
 Collections are quite as well kept as ours, and quite as 
 adequate for their purpose. They fill a far larger part 
 of the nation's interest and .the business of the State 
 than do ours. They are quite as safe as those of Berlin, 
 Paris, or Rome, and are far less exposed to soot and 
 damp than those of London. The only danger that 
 could threaten them would be from the navy of some 
 Western power. The time then has come, on grounds 
 of international morality, to restore the sublime frag- 
 ments which seventy years ago an English ambassador 
 tore away from the Parthenon. English literature con- 
 tains an enduring protest against this Vandalism, which 
 Lord Byron denounced as ' the last poor plunder of a 
 bleeding land,' 
 
 ' Curst be the hour when from their isle they roved, 
 And once again thy hapless bosom gored, 
 And snatch'd thy shrinking gods to northern climes abhorred.' 
 
 The removal of these stones from Athens would be 
 impossible in our age, and was only made possible by 
 
 X 
 
322 THE CITY IN HISTORY 
 
 their happening to be within the power of an Oriental 
 despot. Their acquisition can reflect nothing but dis- 
 honour on our name : as Byron said, ' the honour of 
 England is not advanced by plunder.' But the conditions 
 of the case have changed : and the ' Elgin marbles ' 
 stand on a footing wholly different from the other 
 treasures that our Museums possess. These collective 
 works of art, of which our Museum has a part, still 
 remain in situ where they were placed, and they form 
 part of the very structure of the temple which still 
 stands there as a majestic ruin. The Greek people have 
 raised on the Acropolis itself a national museum, where 
 every fragment of the ancient work that once adorned 
 it, is religiously preserved. The collection is unique, 
 incomparable, of inestimable value, and is constantly 
 being increased. It derives its peculiar impress! veness 
 from the fact that these priceless relics still remain 
 on the sacred citadel of Athene, under the shadow of 
 the mighty temple of which they formed part. The 
 Parthenon gains a new charm by their presence ; whilst 
 the statues gain a fresh power by being within its pre- 
 cinct. Pheidias, Ictinus, Pericles, acquire each a new 
 dignity in our eyes, as we contemplate the ruin and its 
 adornments on the ever-consecrated spot where such 
 amazing genius laboured and thought. 
 
 We go to our own Museum, and we are wont to plume 
 ourselves on the diplomacy and taste of the eminent 
 personage who secured these treasures. We say they 
 are now safe, carefully preserved, and accessible to every 
 one. Perhaps it was wrong to steal them, but now that 
 it is done, it cannot be mended. In the meantime the 
 British public can study High Art at its leisure. But 
 there is something above High Art, and that is national 
 honour, and international morality. And when, in the 
 
IMPRESSIONS OF ATHENS 323 
 
 enthusiasm of a first visit to the city of Plato, Sophocles, 
 and Pheidias, we behold the empty pediments which we 
 have wrecked, and the blank spaces out of which our 
 national representative tore metopes and frieze, when 
 we see the terra-cotta Caryatid, which is forced to do 
 duty for her whom we have ravished from the temple 
 of Erechtheus it is not so easy to repeat the robber 
 sophism : having plundered, it is best to keep the 
 plunder. One day the conscience of England will 
 revive, and she will rejoice to restore the outraged 
 emblems of Hellenic art to the glorious sky, where only 
 they are at home, on that immortal rock, and beneath 
 the shadow of the sublime temple, which a supreme 
 genius made them to ennoble. And our eloquent dis- 
 courses about Art will gain by being sweetened with 
 honesty and good manners. 
 
CHAPTER XI 
 
 CONSTANTINOPLE AS AN HISTORIC CITY 1 
 
 I. Byzantine History 
 
 OF all the cities of Europe the New Rome of the 
 Bosphorus, in its power over the imagination of men, 
 can yield the first place to none save to its own mother, 
 the Old Rome of the Tiber. And of all cities of the 
 world she stands foremost in beauty of situation, in the 
 marvel of her geographical position, as the eternal link 
 between the East and the West. We may almost add 
 that she is foremost in the vast continuity and gorgeous 
 multiplicity of her historic interests. For if Constanti- 
 nople can present us with nothing that can vie in 
 sublimity and pathos with the memories of Rome, 
 Athens, Jerusalem, it has for the historic mind a peculiar 
 fascination of its own, in the enormous persistence of 
 imperial power concentrated under varied forms in one 
 unique spot of our earthly globe. 
 
 Byzantium, to use that which has been the ordinary 
 name with all Greek writers from Herodotus down to 
 Paspates in our own day, is one of the oldest cities of 
 Europe : historically speaking, if we neglect mere pre- 
 historic legend, little younger than Athens or Rome. 
 Like them, Byzantium appears to have been founded on 
 a pre-historic fort. Hardly any of the ancient towns of 
 
 1 Fortnightly Reviw, April, 1894, No. 328, vol. 55. 
 
CONSTANTINOPLE AS AN HISTORIC CITY 325 
 
 Italy and Southern Europe can show so authentic and 
 venerable a record. There is no reason to doubt that 
 Byzantium has been a historic city for some 2550 years : 
 during the whole of that period, with no real break in 
 her life, it has been the scene of events recorded in the 
 annals of mankind ; it has been fought for and held by 
 men famous in world history, it has played a substantive 
 part in the drama of civilisation. So singular a sequence 
 of historic interest can hardly be claimed for any city in 
 Europe, except for Rome herself. 
 
 For nearly a thousand years before it became the 
 capital of an empire, Byzantium was a Greek city of 
 much importance, the prize of contending nations, and 
 with striking prescience even then chosen out by philo- 
 sophic historians for its commanding position and im- 
 mense capabilities. After the lapse of nearly a thousand 
 years, Byzantium became Constantinople, the centre of 
 the Roman Empire. Since then it has been the capital 
 city of an empire for exactly 1564 years and that in a 
 manner and for a period such as no other imperial city 
 has been in the annals of civilised man. There is no 
 actual break ; although, for the dynasty of the Palseologi, 
 from the Latin Empire down to the capture by the 
 Ottomans, the empire outside the capital had a shrunken 
 and almost phantom dominion. But it is yet true, that 
 for 1564 years Constantinople has ever been, and still is, 
 the sole regular residence of Emperors and Sultans, the 
 sole and continuous centre of civil and military adminis- 
 tration, the supreme court of law and justice, and the 
 official centre of the imperial religion. 
 
 During all this period, the life of the empire has been 
 concentrated in that most wonderful peninsula, as its heart 
 and its head. It has been concentrated for a far longer 
 period, and in a more definite way, than even it was in 
 
326 THE CITY IN HISTORY 
 
 the original Seven Hills ; for Rome herself was the local 
 seat of empire for scarcely four centuries, and even for 
 that in an intermittent form ; and vast as has been the 
 continuity of the Roman Church for at least thirteen 
 centuries, its life, and even its official government, have 
 had many seats and continual movements. But from 
 the days of Constantine, Constantinople has been, both 
 in the temporal and spiritual domains, the centre, 
 the home, the palladium of the empire of the East. 
 For fifteen centuries the Lord of Constantinople has 
 never ceased to be the Lord of the contiguous 
 East ; and, whilst sea and rock hold in their ac- 
 customed places, the Lord of Constantinople must 
 continue to be Lord of South-Eastern Europe and of 
 North- Western Asia. 
 
 This continuity and concentration of imperial rule in 
 an imperial city have no parallel in the history of man- 
 kind. Rome was the local centre of empire for barely 
 four centuries, and for sixteen centuries she has wholly 
 lost that claim. The royal cities that once flourished in 
 the valleys of the Ganges, the Euphrates, or the Nile, 
 were all abandoned after some centuries of splendour, 
 and have long lost their imperial rank. Memphis, 
 Babylon, Tyre, Carthage, Alexandria, Syracuse, Athens, 
 had periods of glory, but no great continuity of empire. 
 London and Paris have been great capitals for at most 
 a few centuries ; and Madrid, Berlin, Vienna, and St. 
 Petersburg are things of yesterday in the long roll of 
 human civilisation. There is but one city of the world 
 of which it can be said that, for fifteen centuries and a 
 half, it has been the continuous seat of empire, under all 
 the changes of race, institutions, customs, and religion. 
 And this may be ultimately traced to its incomparable 
 physical and geographical capabilities. 
 
CONSTANTINOPLE AS AN HISTORIC CITY 327 
 
 Mere duration of imperial power and variety of his- 
 torical interest are indeed far different from true greatness 
 or national dignity. But as an object of the historical 
 imagination, the richness of the record, in the local 
 annals of some world-famous spot, cannot fail to kindle 
 our thoughts. History, alas ! is not the record of pure 
 virtue and peaceful happiness : it is the record of deeds 
 big with fate to races of men, of passions, crimes, follies, 
 heroisms, and martyrdoms in the mysterious labyrinth 
 of human destiny. The stage whereon, over so vast a 
 period of man's memory, ten thousand of such tragedies 
 have been enacted, holds with a spell the mind of every 
 man who is in sympathy with human nature, and 
 who loves to meditate on the problems of human 
 progress. 
 
 History and European opinion have been until lately 
 most unjust to the Byzantine empire, whether in its 
 Roman, its Greek, or in its Ottoman form. By a singular 
 fatality its annals and its true place have been grossly mis- 
 understood. Foreign scholars, German, French, Russian, 
 and Greek, have done much in recent years to repair this 
 error ; and English historians, though late in the field, 
 are beginning to atone for neglect in the past. Finlay 
 worthily led the way, in spite of sympathies and anti- 
 pathies which almost incapacitate an historian from fully 
 grasping Byzantine history ; Professor Freeman struck 
 the true note in some of his most weighty and pregnant 
 pieces, perhaps the most original and brilliant of his 
 essays ; and now Professor Bury, of Dublin, has under- 
 taken the task of casting into a scientific and systematic 
 history those wonderful narratives of which Gibbon gave 
 us detached and superb sketches, albeit with limited 
 resources and incomplete knowledge. Edwin Pears, in 
 a fine monograph, has given us very much more than the 
 
328 THE CITY IN HISTORY 
 
 history of the Fourth Crusade. 1 And the incessant 
 labours of foreign scholars are beginning to filter even 
 into the ideas of the general reader. Russian and Greek 
 monasteries have preserved unknown and precious 
 chronicles ; and Armenian, Saracen, and Persian manu- 
 scripts have lately been added to our annals. The 
 terrible Corpus of Byzantine histories becomes less heart- 
 breaking in its dryness and its affectation, with all the 
 light that modern scholarship has thrown upon that 
 record of romantic and tremendous events, too often 
 told by official annalists with pedantic dulness and cold- 
 blooded commonplace. Krause, Hopf, Heyd, Gfrorer, 
 in Germany ; Sabatier, Rambaud, Schlumberger, Dra- 
 peyron, Bayet, in France ; Byzantios, and Paspates, in 
 Greece, have given a new life to this vast repertory of a 
 thousand years of varying fortune. 2 
 
 At the same time, the local archaeology of Constanti- 
 nople has received a new impulse. The political and 
 economic changes which resulted from the course of 
 events, from the Crimean War of 1853 to the Treaty of 
 San Stefano in 1878, have opened Constantinople much 
 as Japan was opened thirty years ago. European 
 scholars and resident Greeks have been enabled to study 
 the remains ; the Sultan has formed a most interesting 
 museum under Hamdi Bey, a Turkish archaeologist ; and 
 
 1 History of Greece, from 146 B.C. to A.D. 1864, by George Finlay, ed. 
 by H. F. Tozer, 7 vols. ; Historical Essays, by E. A. Freeman, third series, 
 1879; The Later Roman Empire, from 395 A.D. to 800 A. D., by J. B. 
 Bury, 1'rin. Coll. Dub., 2 vols., 1889 ; '1 he Fall of Constantinople in the 
 Fourth Crusade, by Ed* in Fears, LL.D., 1885; The History of tht 
 Byzantine Empire, by C. Oman, 1893. 
 
 3 Sabatier, Monnaies Byzantines, 1862 ; Rambaud, V Empire Grec au 
 Xme. Siecle, 1870; Drapeyron, L'Empereur Heraclius, 1869; Schlum- 
 berger, Un Empereur Byzantin, 1890 ; Krause, Die Byzantiner des 
 Mittelalters, 1869 ; Gfrorer, Byzanlinische Geschichten, 1872-77. 
 
CONSTANTINOPLE AS AN HISTORIC CITY 329 
 
 Dr. Paspates, a Greek antiquarian, has attempted, in the 
 cuttings and works of the new railway, almost wholly 
 to reconstruct Byzantine topography. The vague and 
 somewhat traditional localisation repeated by Banduri, 
 Ducange, Gyllius, Busbecq, and the rest, has now been 
 corrected by scientific inspection of ruins and partial 
 excavation. The ingenious labours of Labarte, Salzen- 
 berg, Schlumberger, Bayet, Mordtmann, Riant, and 
 others, 1 have been tested by some new excavations 
 on the spot. No one could well deal with Byzan- 
 tine antiquities without examining the works of the late 
 Dr. Paspates, especially of the Byzantine Palaces, which 
 is now accessible to the English reader in the new 
 translation of Mr. Metcalfe (1893). 
 
 We have all been unjust to this Byzantine empire ; 
 and its restoration to its true place in the story of human 
 civilisation is beyond doubt the great lacuna of our 
 current histories. What they tell us is mainly the story 
 of its last four hundred years when the Eastern empire 
 was dying under the mortal blows inflicted on it as it 
 stood between the fanaticism of the East and the jeal- 
 ousy of the West. Of the seven centuries from Theo- 
 dosius to the Crusades we hear little save Palace intrigues, 
 though these years were the true years of glory in Byzan- 
 tine history. This was the period when she handed 
 down, and handed down alone, the ancient world to 
 the modern ; when Constantinople was the greatest and 
 
 1 Banduri, Imperium Orientate, 1711, 2 vols. fol. ; Ducange, Con- 
 stantinopolis Christiana ; Gyllius, De Topogr. Constantin. ; Busbecq, 
 Letters, tr. by Forster and Daniel, 2 vols., 1881 ; Salzenberg, Alt-Christ- 
 liche Baudenkmale, 1854, fol. ; Labarte, Le Palais Imperial de Con- 
 stantinople, 410, 1861 ; Paspates, Evfavrivai MeXercu, 1877 ; Bv?avru>& 
 'AvaKTOpa, 1885 ; IIoXto/DKta /ecu dXwcrts, 1890 ; Professor van Millingen, in 
 Murray's Handbook, new ed., 1893; Byzantios, KuvaravTivoviroXis, 1851-59, 
 3 vols. 
 
330 THE CITY IN HISTORY 
 
 most civilised city in Europe, the last refuge of law, arts, 
 and learning, the precursor of the Crusades in defending 
 Christian civilisation by four centuries. Before the 
 Crusades were undertaken by Europe, the Eastern 
 empire was falling into corruption and decay. But 
 down to the middle of the eleventh century, more or 
 less continuously from the opening of the seventh, the 
 history of the Eastern Romans may honourably com- 
 pare with the history of Western Europe, whilst in cer- 
 tain essential elements of civilisation, they stood not 
 merely first in Europe, but practically alone. If Chos- 
 roes, or Muaviah, or Haroun, or Crumn, had succeeded 
 in blotting out the empire of the Bosphorus, it is diffi- 
 cult to imagine from whence we should have been able 
 to recover either Roman law, or Hellenic art, or ancient 
 poetry and learning, or the complex art of organised 
 government, or the traditions and manufactures of cul- 
 tured civilisation. At any rate, the whole history of 
 mankind would have taken a different course. 
 
 Neither under Roman, Greek, or Ottoman has the 
 empire been, except at intervals, the abyss of corrup- 
 tion, servility, and vice that Western prejudice has too 
 long imagined. Horrors, follies, meanness, and pedantry 
 abound ; but there is still a record rich in heroism, in- 
 tellectual energy, courage, skill, and perseverance, which 
 are as memorable as any in the world. Neither the 
 intellect, nor the art, nor the religion are those of Western 
 Europe ; nor have we there the story of a great people, 
 or a purifying Church, of a profound philosophy, or a 
 progressive civilisation. Constantinople is, and always 
 has been, as much Eastern as Western yet with much 
 that is neither of the East nor of the West but special 
 to itself. It is a type of Conservatism, of persistency 
 and constancy unparalleled, amidst change, decay, and 
 
CONSTANTINOPLE AS AN HISTORIC CITY 331 
 
 defeat. This miraculous longevity and recuperative power 
 seem to go counter to all the lessons of Western Europe; 
 or in the West they are to be matched only by the 
 recuperative power of the Catholic Church. The city and 
 the Church, which date from Constantine, have both in 
 these fifteen centuries shown a strange power of recovery 
 from mortal maladies and hopeless difficulties. But 
 the recovery of temporal dominion is always more rare 
 than the revival of spiritual ideas. And in recuperative 
 energy and tenacity of life, the empire of the Bosphorus, 
 from Constantine to Abdul Hamid, is one long paradox. 
 The continuity of empire in Constantinople suffered, 
 it is true, a tremendous breach in dynasty, in race, and 
 in religion, by the conquest of the Turks ; and, if it were 
 a Christian, and Roman, or Latin, or Greek empire for 
 1 123 years, it has been a Moslem and Ottoman empire for 
 441 years. To many historians these 441 years have been 
 a period of Babylonish captivity for the chosen people. 
 But those who are not especially Philhellene or Philortho- 
 dox, in any absolute sense, will view this great problem 
 without race or sectarian animosities. Before the im- 
 partial judgment- seat of history the lesson of the past 
 lies in the unfolding of genius in government and in 
 war, in organising nations, and in moulding their 
 destinies ; and where these great capacities exist, there 
 is no room to indulge the prejudices of a partisan. The 
 two centuries of Stamboul which follow the conquest of 
 Mohammed the Second, in 1453, are greatly superior in 
 interest and in teaching to the two centuries of Byzan- 
 tine empire which precede it, and the miserable tale of 
 the Latin usurpation. Nor has the whole Ottoman rule 
 of four centuries and a half been less brilliant, less rich in 
 great intellects and great characters, than the Byzantine 
 empire from the time of the Crusades till its fall perhaps 
 
332 THE CITY IN HISTORY 
 
 even not more oppressive to its subjects, nor more 
 antagonistic to moral and social progress. The marvel- 
 lous city that Constantine created in 330 A.D. has been 
 ever since that day the effective seat of such government 
 as the Eastern regions around it could maintain, of such 
 civilisation as they could evolve, and of such religious 
 union as -they were able to receive. That empire, that 
 type of society, seem preparing to-day for an ultimate 
 withdrawal into Asia. But with such a record of per- 
 sistence and revival, such tenacity of hold on a sacred 
 and imperial centre, few can forecast the issue with 
 confidence. And that future is assuredly amongst the 
 most fascinating enigmas which can engage the medita- 
 tions of thinking men. 
 
 It is an acute remark of the late Professor Freeman 
 that the history of the empire is the history of the 
 capital. The imperial, religious, legal, and commercial 
 energy of the Eastern empire has always centred in 
 Constantinople, by whomsoever held, in a way that can 
 hardly be paralleled in European history. The Italian 
 successors of Julius and Augustus for the most part 
 spent their lives and carried on their government very 
 largely, and at last almost wholly, away from Rome. 
 Neither had the Western Emperors, nor the chiefs of 
 the Holy Roman Empire, any permanent and continu- 
 ous seat. The history of England and that of France 
 are associated with many historic towns and many royal 
 residences far from London and from Paris. Nor do the 
 histories of Spain, Italy, or Germany, offer us any con- 
 stant capital or any single centre of government, religion, 
 law, commerce, and art. But of the nearly one hundred 
 sovereigns of the Eastern empire, and of the twenty- 
 eight Caliphs who have succeeded them in Byzantium, 
 during that long epoch of 1 564 years, from the day of 
 
CONSTANTINOPLE AS AN HISTORIC CITY 333 
 
 its foundation, Constantinople has been the uniform 
 residence of the sovereign, except when on actual cam- 
 paign in time of war or on some imperial progress ; and 
 in peace and in war under all dynasties, races, and 
 creeds, it has never ceased to be the seat of official 
 government, the supreme tribunal, and the metropolis of 
 the religious system. 
 
 From the age of Theodosius down to the opening of 
 the Crusades a period of seven centuries whilst Rome 
 itself and every ancient city in Europe was stormed, 
 sacked, burnt, more or less abandoned, and almost 
 blotted out by a succession of invaders, Constantinople 
 remained untouched, impregnable, never decayed, never 
 abandoned always the most populous, the most wealthy, 
 the most cultivated, the most artistic city in Europe 
 always the seat of a great empire, the refuge of those 
 who sought peace and protection for their culture or 
 their wealth, a busy centre of a vast commerce, the one 
 home of ancient art, the one school of ancient law and 
 learning left undespoiled and undeserted. From the 
 eighth century to the thirteenth a succession of travellers 
 have described its size, wealth, and magnificence. 1 In 
 the middle of the twelfth century, the Jew Benjamin of 
 Tudela, coming from Spain to Palestine, declares that 
 ' these riches and buildings are equalled nowhere in the 
 world ' ; ' that merchants resort thither from all parts of 
 the world.' From about the eleventh century the down- 
 fall of the city began. It was ruined by the political 
 jealousy of the Western empire, by the religious hostility 
 of the Roman Church, and by the commercial rivalry of 
 
 1 Early Travels in Palestine, ed. T. Wright, 1868; Krause, Die 
 Byzantiner des Mittelalters, 1869; Heyd, Levantehandel, 1879; French 
 ed. 1885; Riant, Exuvice sacra Constant., 1877; Hopf, Chroniques 
 Greco- Romanes inedites, 1873. 
 
334 THE CITY IN HISTORY 
 
 the Italian republics. Placed between these irreconcil- 
 able enemies on the west, the incessant attacks of the 
 Slavonic races on the north, and the aspiring fanaticism 
 of Musulman races from the east and the south, the 
 Byzantine empire slowly bled to death, and its capital 
 became, for some three centuries, little more than a 
 besieged fortress filled with a helpless population and 
 vast treasures and relics it could no longer protect. 
 
 But whether the empire was in glory or in decay, into 
 whatever race it passed, and whatever was the official 
 creed, Constantinople never failed to attract to itself 
 whatever of genius and ambition the Eastern empire 
 contained, nor did it ever cease, nor has it ceased, to be 
 a great mart of commerce, and clearing-house of all 
 that the East and the West desired to exchange. It is 
 still to the Greek priest, as it is to the Musulman imam, 
 what Rome is to the Catholic. And to the Greek from 
 Alexandria to New York it is still what Rome is to the 
 Italian, and what Paris is to the Frenchman. In a sense, 
 it is almost still the traditional metropolis of the Ortho- 
 dox Greek, of the Armenian, and almost of the Levan- 
 tine Jew, as well as of the Moslem. Its history is the 
 history of the Balkan peninsula, for its twenty famous 
 sieges have been the turning-points in the rise and fall 
 of the empire. The inner history of the thrones of the 
 East has been uniformly transacted within those walls 
 and upon the buried stones and fragments whereon we 
 may still stand to-day and ponder on the vicissitudes of 
 fifteen centuries and a half. 
 
 1 1. Topographical Conditions 
 
 A large part of this strange radiation of Eastern 
 history from the new Eternal City is unquestionably 
 
CONSTANTINOPLE AS AN HISTORIC CITY 335 
 
 due to its unique local conditions. From Herodotus 
 and Polybius down to Gibbon and Freeman, historians, 
 ancient and modern, have expatiated on the unrivalled 
 situation of Byzantium on the Bosphorus. There is no 
 other so apt to become the seat of a great city on the 
 habitable globe. Standing on the extreme easternmost 
 point of the Balkan peninsula, it is within easy voyage 
 of the entire coast-line of Asia Minor on its northern, 
 western, and southern faces. As an early traveller 
 pointed out, Constantinople ' is a city which Nature 
 herself has designed to be the mistress of the world. 
 It stands in Europe, looks upon Asia, and is within 
 reach by sea of Egypt and the Levant on the south 
 and of the Black Sea and its European and Asiatic 
 shores on the north.' l Something of the kind might be 
 said for such cities as Corinth, or Thessalonica, Smyrna, 
 or Athens ; but the extraordinary feature of Byzan- 
 tium, which confers on it so peculiar a power of defence 
 and attack is this that whilst having ample and secure 
 roadsteads and ports all round it, it has both on the 
 north and the south, a long, narrow, but navigable sea 
 channel, of such a kind that, in ancient or in modern 
 warfare, it can be made impregnable against any invad- 
 ing fleet. 
 
 Constantinople was thus protected by two marine 
 gates which could be absolutely closed to any hostile ship, 
 whether coming from the Black Sea or from the ^Egean, 
 but which can be instantly opened to its own or any 
 friendly ship coming or going over the whole area of 
 the Euxine or the Mediterranean. Whilst thus im- 
 pregnably defended by sea, she could bar invasion by 
 land by her vast rampart running from sea to sea, and 
 
 1 Busbecq's Letters, translated by Forster and Daniel, 1881, vol. i. 
 p. 123. 
 
336 THE CITY IN HISTORY 
 
 not more than four miles in length. And at a distance 
 of some thirty miles further west, a second wall, twenty 
 feet wide and about forty miles long, shut off from north 
 and west the main peninsula and ran from the Propontis 
 to the Euxine. Constantinople in ancient times thus 
 held what, with an adequate sea and land force, was the 
 strongest defensive position in Europe, if not in the 
 world. For by sea she could bar all approach from 
 east, north, or south ; whilst on the west, the only land- 
 ward approach, she was protected by a double rampart, 
 placed upon a double peninsula, to say nothing of the 
 natural bulwark of the Balkan mountains. 
 
 To this incomparable position of security we must 
 add that, whilst one side of the city faces an inland sea 
 of wonderful beauty, which is rather a lake than a sea, 
 another side of the city looks across the Bosphorus to 
 Asia ; on the third side of the city is her own secure 
 port of the Golden Horn, about four miles long and 
 more than half a mile wide. Here a thousand ships 
 can ride in safety, and the channel is so deep that in 
 places the biggest vessels can lie beside the quays. The 
 country round is diversified with hills, valleys, and 
 tableland, broken by bays and gulfs, and crowned with 
 distant mountains. The Propontis and its shores teem 
 with fish, fruit, vines, woods, and marbles, whilst in the 
 far horizon the snowy folds of the Bithynian Olympus 
 float as a dim but radiant vision in the distance. 
 
 The extension of modern artillery has reduced and 
 almost destroyed the defensive capacities of the city on 
 the landward. But from the time of Xerxes until the 
 present century, its power of defence was almost perfect 
 so long as Byzantium could command the sea. She 
 possessed nearly all the advantages of an island ; but of 
 an island placed in a sheltered island sea, an island 
 
CONSTANTINOPLE AS AN HISTORIC CITY 337 
 
 from which rich districts both of Asia and Europe could 
 be instantly reached in open boats, or by a few hours' 
 sail in any kind of ship. A city, having magnificent har- 
 bours and roadsteads and abundant waterways in every 
 direction, had all the peculiar features which have gone 
 to create the power of Syracuse, Alexandria, Venice, 
 Amsterdam, London, or New York. But Byzantium 
 had this additional security that, with all the facilities 
 of an island, she could close her marine gates against 
 any hostile fleet and forbid their approach within sight. 
 Tyre, Carthage, Athens, Syracuse, Alexandria we may 
 say all famous seaports throughout the Mediterranean 
 (except Venice, which lay safe in her lagoons), were 
 exposed to a hostile fleet ; and all of them have been 
 more than once invested by invaders from the sea. But 
 so long as Byzantium had forces enough at sea to close 
 the gate of the Bosphorus and also that of the Helles- 
 pont, she was unassailable by any hostile fleet. And so 
 long as she had forces enough on land to man the long 
 wall across the great peninsula, and also to defend her 
 great inner fortifications across the smaller peninsula, 
 she was impregnable to any invading army. 
 
 It would be unwise in a civilian to express any 
 opinion of his own on the very important problem of 
 the degree in which modern appliances of war have 
 deprived Constantinople of her peculiar powers of de- 
 fence. We are told that, so far as the closing of the 
 Bosphorus and the Hellespont extend, the resources 
 of the artillerist and the submarine engineer have 
 greatly increased their defensive capacity. Constanti- 
 nople is, of course, no longer safe from an enemy posted 
 on the heights, either above Pera, Scutari, or Eyub; and 
 obviously her ancient walls and fortification are useless. 
 But with first-class forts to protect both Scutari and 
 
 Y 
 
338 THE CITY IN HISTORY 
 
 Pera, and also the heights to the west of the city 
 which together might require some four complete corps 
 a armies and with a first-class fleet in the Marmora, 
 Constantinople would, even to-day, be far stronger for 
 defence than any existing capital in Europe, perhaps 
 stronger than any great city in the world. 
 
 The peculiar position of Byzantium was alike fitted 
 for offence or for defence. It was essentially a maritime 
 position, the full resources of which could only be used 
 by a power strong at sea. If it issued northwards, 
 through its gate on the Bosphorus, it could send a fleet 
 to any point of the Black Sea a vast expanse of 
 172,000 square miles, having one of the greatest drain- 
 age areas in the world. Thus, in a few days, armies 
 and munitions could be carried to the mouths either of 
 the Danube, the Dnieper, or the Don, to the shores of 
 the Crimea, or else eastward to the foot of the Caucasus, 
 or to any point on the north coast of Asia Minor. 
 If it issued south through the Propontis and the 
 Hellespont, a few days would carry its armies to the 
 teeming shores of Bithynia, or to the rich coasts and 
 islands of the ./Egean Sea, or to Greece, or to any point 
 on the western or the southern coast of Asia Minor. 
 And a few days more would bring its fleets to the coast 
 of Syria, or of Egypt, or to Italy, Spain, Africa, and the 
 Western Mediterranean. Thus, the largest army could 
 be safely transported in a few days, so as to descend at 
 will upon the vast plains of Southern Russia, or into the 
 heart of Central Asia, within a short march of the head 
 waters of the Euphrates or they might descend south- 
 wards to the gates of Syria, near Issus, or else to the 
 mouths of the Nile, or to the islands and bays of Greece 
 or Italy. 
 
 And these wide alternatives in objective point could 
 
CONSTANTINOPLE AS AN HISTORIC CITY 339 
 
 be kept for ultimate decision unknown to an enemy up 
 to the last moment. When the great Heraclius, in 622, 
 opened his memorable war with Chosroes, which ended 
 in the ruin of the Persian dynasty, no man in either 
 host knew till the hour of his sailing whether the 
 Byzantine hero intended to descend upon Armenia 
 by the Euxine, or upon Syria by the Gulf of Issus. 
 And until they issued from the Hellespont into the 
 JEgean, the Emperor's army and fleet w r ere absolutely 
 protected not only from molestation, but even from 
 observation. To a power which commanded the sea 
 and had ample supplies of troopships, Constantinople 
 combined the maximum power of defence with the 
 maximum range of attack. And this extraordinary 
 combination she will retain in the future in competent 
 hands. 
 
 That wonderfully rapid and mobile force, which an 
 eminent American expert has named the ' Sea Power/ 
 the power discovered by Cromwell and Blake, of which 
 England is still the great example and mistress, was 
 placed by the founders of Byzantium in that spot of 
 earth which, at any rate in its anciently-peopled dis- 
 tricts, combined the greatest resources. Byzantium, 
 from the days of the Persian and the Peloponnesian wars, 
 had always been a prize to be coveted by a naval power. 
 From the time of Constantine down to the Crusades, or 
 for nearly eight centuries, the rulers of Constantinople 
 could usually command large and well-manned fleets. 
 And this was enough to account for her imperial place 
 in history. As an imperial city she must rise, decline, 
 or fall, by her naval strength. She fell before the 
 Crusaders in a naval attack ; and she was crippled to a 
 great extent by the naval attack of Mohammed the 
 Conqueror. During the zenith of the Moslem Conquest, 
 
34 THE CITY IN HISTORY 
 
 she was great by sea. Her decline in this century has 
 been far greater on sea than on land. When her fleet 
 was shattered at Sinope, in 1853, tne en d was not far 
 off. And when to-day we see in the Golden Horn the 
 hulls of her ironclads moored motionless, and they say, 
 unable to move, men know that Stamboul is no longer 
 the queen of the Levant. 
 
 As a maritime city, also, Constantinople presents this 
 striking problem. For fifteen centuries, with moderate 
 intervals, this city of the Bosphorus and the Propontis 
 has held imperial rule. No other seaport city, either in 
 the ancient or in the modern world, has ever maintained 
 an empire for a period approaching to this in length. 
 Tyre, Carthage, Athens, Alexandria, Venice, Genoa, 
 Amsterdam, have held proud dependencies by their 
 fleets for a space, but for rarely more than a few 
 generations or centuries. The supremacy of the seas, 
 of which Englishmen boast, can hardly be said to have 
 had more than two centuries of trial. The city of the 
 Bosphorus has been tried by fifteen centuries of fierce 
 rivalry and obstinate war ; and for long periods together 
 she saw powerful enemies permanently encamped almost 
 within sight of her towers. Yet she still commands the 
 gates of the Euxine and the Hellespont, just as Hero- 
 dotus and Polybius tell us that she did two thousand 
 years ago. Nor can any man who has studied that 
 marvellous peninsula fail to see that, so soon as Con- 
 stantinople again falls into the hands of a great naval 
 power, she must recover her paramount control over 
 the whole shore of South-Eastern Europe and North- 
 Western Asia. 
 
 Herodotus tells us how Darius' general, in the sixth 
 century B.C., judged its position, in the well-known 
 saying that Chalcedon, the city on the Asiatic shore 
 
CONSTANTINOPLE AS AN HISTORIC CITY 341 
 
 opposite, must have been founded by blind men, for 
 they overlooked the superior situation on which 
 Byzantium was soon after placed. Thucydides records 
 the part played by the city in the Peloponnesian war ; 
 and Polybius, the scientific historian of the second 
 century B.C., describes it with singular insight. ' Of all 
 cities in the world,' he says, ' it is the most happy in its 
 position on the sea ; being not only secure on that side 
 from all enemies, but possessed of the means of obtain- 
 ing every kind of necessaries in the greatest plenty.' 
 And he enlarges on its extraordinary command of the 
 commercial route from the Euxine to the Mediterranean. 
 He explains the disadvantages of its position on the 
 land side, and the reasons which hindered Byzantium 
 from becoming a commanding city in Greece. The 
 main reason was the proximity of the barbarous and 
 irrepressible Thracians ; for the old Byzantium was 
 never strong enough to wall in and defend the whole 
 peninsula by the wall of Anastasius, nor was it rich 
 enough to maintain such an army as would overawe the 
 tribes of the Balkan. 
 
 No doubt the founders of Chalcedon on the Asian 
 side were not blind, but they feared the Thracians of 
 the European side, and were not able to dispossess 
 the tribe settled on the peninsula. But a problem 
 arises. Why, if the situation -of Byzantium were so pre- 
 dominant, did it remain for a thousand years a second- 
 class commercial city of Greece ? and then, why, in the 
 fourth century, did it become the natural .capital of 
 Eastern Europe? The answer is plain. The magnifi- 
 cent maritime position of Byzantium was neutralised 
 so long as the Balkan peninsula and the valley of 
 the Danube was filled with barbarous nomads. The 
 great wars of Trajan and his successors, in the first and 
 
34 2 THE CITY IN HISTORY 
 
 second centuries, for the first time brought the whole 
 basin of the Danube into the limits of the empire. 
 Thus, when Constantinople was founded, it was secure 
 by land as well as by sea. When, in the fifth and sixth 
 centuries, Italy, Spain, Gaul, and Africa were swept by 
 a succession of Northern invaders, the Empire had com- 
 mand of great armies, ample to man the vast system of 
 fortifications across her double peninsula. And thus she 
 resisted the torrent which submerged and devastated 
 Western Europe. 
 
 The part played by Byzantium down to the time of 
 Constantine was subordinate, but significant. It is fre- 
 quently mentioned by almost all the ancient historians ; 
 and of famous chiefs who were concerned with it we 
 have Pausanias the victor of Plataea, Cimon, the son 
 of Miltiades, Alcibiades, Epaminondas, Demosthenes, 
 Philip of Macedon, many Roman generals, the Em- 
 perors Claudius, Vespasian, Severus, Licinius, and Con- 
 stantine. It is a strange accident that the city of the 
 later empire and of the Sultans was the city wherein 
 Pausanias, the victor of Plataea, was seized with the 
 mania for assuming an Oriental tyranny, and that it was 
 where the Seraglio now stands that the infatuated king 
 perpetrated the horrid deed of lust and blood, which 
 our poet introduces in his Manfred. Is there something 
 in the air of that hill where we now stare at the 
 ' Sublime Porte,' which fires the blood of tyrants to 
 savage and mysterious crime ? 
 
 The removal of the imperial capital from Rome to 
 Byzantium was one of the most decisive acts on record 
 a signal monument of foresight, genius, and will. 
 Madrid, St. Petersburg, Berlin, are also capital cities 
 created by the act of a powerful ruler. But none of 
 these foundations can compare in scale and in import- 
 
CONSTANTINOPLE AS AN HISTORIC CITY 343 
 
 ance with the tremendous task of moving the seat of 
 empire a thousand miles to the East, from the centre of 
 Italy to the coast of Asia, from a Latin to a Greek city, 
 from a pagan to a Christian population. The motives 
 which impelled Constantine to this momentous step 
 were doubtless complex. Since the time of Trajan, 
 Rome had not been the constant residence of the Em- 
 perors, except of Antoninus Pius, nor the regular seat 
 of government. Since the time of Diocletian, Rome 
 had been abandoned as the official centre of the empire. 
 Many places east of it had been tried ; and Constan- 
 tine, when resolved on the great change, seriously con- 
 templated two, if not three, other sites. It had long 
 been agreed that the imperial seat must be transferred 
 towards the East ; and there was an instinctive sense 
 that the valley of the Tiber was no longer safe from 
 the incessant onward march of the Teutonic nations 
 in arms. 
 
 The tendency was to get somewhere south of the 
 Danube, and within reach of Asia Minor and the 
 Euphrates. The greater chiefs had all felt that the 
 empire must be recast, both politically and spiritually. 
 By the fourth century it was clear that the empire must 
 break with the rooted prejudices that surrounded the 
 Senate of Rome and the gods of the Capitol. And 
 Constantine, the half-conscious and half-convinced agent 
 of the great change the change from the ancient world 
 to the modern world, from polytheism to Christianity 
 saw in the Church and Bishop of Rome a power 
 which would never be his creature. Dante tells us that 
 ' Caesar became a Greek in order to give place to the 
 Roman pastor.' There is much in this : but it is not the 
 whole truth, for Caesar might have become a Spaniard, 
 or a Gaul, or an Illyrian. Dante might have added 
 
344 THE CITY IN HISTORY 
 
 that Caesar became an Oriental, in order to give place 
 to the Goth. Constantinople from the first was a 
 Christian city, with an orthodox Church ; but it was a 
 Church that was, from the first, a department of the 
 State. 
 
 The topography, apart from the geography of Con- 
 stantinople, may demand some words ; for the history 
 of the city from Constantine to Abdul Hamid is based 
 on its physical characters. We cannot doubt that 
 the many delights of this spot, the varied resources of 
 the surrounding country, the combination of sea, bay, 
 mountain, valley, terrace, and garden, as these rise one 
 beyond the other, have made Constantinople for fifteen 
 centuries the residence of Emperors and Caliphs, the 
 dream and pride of nations, and the crown of imperial 
 ambition. 
 
 Those who approach Constantinople from Greece, as 
 all men should, have sailed through that long panorama 
 of island, mountain, and headland which the ./Egean 
 Sea presents, past ' Troy town ' and the unknown home 
 of its minstrel ; and every rock recalls some tale or 
 poem for the three thousand years since European 
 thought and arts rose into being across those waters. 
 The Hellespont has been passed with its legends and 
 histories, and the sea of Marmora with its islands of 
 marble, its rich shores and distant ranges of mountain 
 and as the morning sun touches the crescents on her 
 domes, the eternal city of New Rome bursts into view, 
 looking on the East and the South across the blue 
 waters of Propontis and Bosphorus, with her seven hills 
 rising towards Europe one behind the other, each 
 crowned with cupola and minaret, amidst arcaded ter- 
 races, and groves of acacia, myrtle, and cypress. 
 
 This glorious vision, if not the most beautiful, is the 
 
CONSTANTINOPLE AS AN HISTORIC CITY 345 
 
 most varied and fascinating of its kind in Europe. 
 Some prefer the bay of Naples, or the bay of Salamis, 
 or of Genoa ; but neither Naples, nor Athens, nor Rome, 
 nor Genoa, nor Venice, have, as cities, anything of the 
 extent, variety, and complexity of Constantinople, if we 
 include its four or five suburbs, its magnificent sea land- 
 scape, its bays, islands, and mountains, in the distance. 
 For Constantinople does not stand upon an open sea 
 like Naples, or Genoa, but on a great marine lake with 
 its shores, vine-clad hills, headlands, and pearly moun- 
 tain ranges in the far horizon. Like Athens or Venice, 
 it has a sea-port without an open sea outside. And as 
 a city, it is vastly more grand and varied than Venice, 
 Athens, Florence, or Edinburgh. Hence, Constanti- 
 nople combines such sea views as we find round the 
 Western islands of Scotland or of Greece, with the 
 summer sky and vegetation of Italy, and the mountain 
 ranges which fill the horizon from the plains of Lom- 
 bardy. 
 
 Was it more beautiful in the age of the Empire than 
 it is to-day? Perhaps from a distance, from the sea, 
 the Stamboul of to-day is a far more striking sight than 
 the Byzantium of the Caesars. The minarets, an Eastern 
 and Moslem feature, are the distinctive mark of the 
 modern city, and do much to break the monotony of 
 the Byzantine cupolas. There are four or five mosques 
 which repeat and rival the church of the Holy Wisdom, 
 and some of them have nobler sites. Nor were the 
 towers and battlements of ancient architecture to be 
 compared in beauty and in scale with those of Mediaeval 
 and Moslem builders. But the city, as seen within, in 
 the I saurian and Basilian dynasties, we may assume in 
 the five centuries which separate Justinian from the 
 First Crusade, must have greatly surpassed in noble art, 
 
346 THE CITY IN HISTORY 
 
 if not in pictorial effect, the Ottoman city that we see. 
 The enormous palace and hippodrome, the basilicas, 
 churches, halls, and porticoes, with their profusion of 
 marble, mosaic, bronzes, and paintings, their colossal 
 figures, obelisks, and columns, the choicest relics of 
 Greek sculpture, the memorial statues, baths, theatres, 
 and forums must have far surpassed the decaying 
 remnant of Stamboul which so often disenchants the 
 traveller when he disembarks from the Golden Horn. 
 
 III. Antiquities of Constantinople 
 
 Constantine created his New Rome in 330, as never 
 ruler before or since created a city. It \vas made a 
 mighty and resplendent capital within a single decade. 
 Italy, Greece, Asia Minor, Syria, Egypt, Mauritania 
 were despoiled of their treasures to adorn the new 
 metropolis. Constantine built churches, theatres, forums, 
 baths, porticoes, palaces, monuments, and aqueducts. 
 He built, adorned, and peopled a great capital all at a 
 stroke, and made it, after Rome and Athens, the most 
 splendid city of the ancient world. Two centuries later, 
 Justinian became the second founder of the city. And 
 from Constantine down to the capture by the Crusaders, 
 for nearly nine centuries, a succession of Emperors con- 
 tinued to raise great sacred and lay buildings. Of the 
 city before Constantine little remains above the ground, 
 except some sculptures in the museum, and foundations 
 of some walls, which Dr. Paspates believes that he can 
 trace. Of Constantine and his immediate successors 
 there remain parts of the hippodrome, of walls, aque- 
 ducts, cisterns, and forums, some columns and monu- 
 ments. Of the Emperors from Theodosius to the 
 Crusades we still have, little injured, the grand church 
 
CONSTANTINOPLE AS AN HISTORIC CITY 347 
 
 of Sophia, some twenty churches much altered and 
 mostly late in date, the foundations of palaces, and one 
 still standing in ruins, and lastly the twelve miles of 
 walls with their gates and towers. The museums con- 
 tain sarcophagi, statues, inscriptions of the Roman age. 
 But we can hardly doubt that an immense body of 
 Byzantine relics and buildings still lie buried some ten 
 or twenty feet below the ground whereon stand to-day 
 the serails, khans, mosques, and houses of Stamboul, 
 a soil which the Ottoman is loth to disturb. When the 
 day comes that such scientific excavations are possible 
 as have been made in the Forum and the Palatine at 
 Rome, we may yet look to unveil many monuments of 
 rare historical interest, and, it might be, a few of high 
 artistic value. As yet, the cuttings for the railway have 
 given almost the only opportunity that antiquarians 
 have had of investigating below the surface of the actual 
 city, which stands upon a deep stratum of debris. 
 
 One monument, eight centuries older than Constan- 
 tine himself, has been recently disinterred, and curiously 
 enough by English hands. It is one of the oldest, most 
 historic, most venerable relics of the ancient world. 
 The Serpent Column of bronze from Delphi, set up by 
 the Greeks as base for the golden tripod to com- 
 memorate the final defeat of Xerxes, an object of 
 pilgrimage for Greeks for eight centuries, stands still 
 in the spot where a Roman emperor placed it in the 
 hippodrome ; and after 2373 years, it still bears wit- 
 ness to the first great victory of the West over the East. 
 When the East triumphed over the West nearly 2000 
 years later, the conqueror left this secular monument 
 on its base ; and during the Crimean war English 
 soldiers dug it out of the surrounding debris and re- 
 vealed the rude inscription of the thirty confederate 
 
348 THE CITY IN HISTORY 
 
 states exactly as Herodotus and Pausanias record. 
 With the bronze Wolf of the Capitol, it may count as 
 the most precious metal relic which remains from the 
 ancient world ; for the Crusaders melted down into 
 pence every piece of bronze statuary they could seize, 
 and carried off to St. Mark's, at Venice, the four horses 
 that bear the name of Lysippus. 
 
 Constantinople is rich, not in works of art, for those 
 of the city have been wantonly destroyed, but in historic 
 sites, which appeal to the scholar rather than to the 
 public ; but in so singular a conformation of sea and 
 land, the sites can often be fixed with some precision. 
 We may still note the spot where daring pioneers from 
 Megara set up their Acropolis a century and a half 
 before the battle of Marathon ; we can trace the original 
 harbour, the position of some temples, and the line of 
 the walls. We can stand beside the burial-place of a 
 long line of emperors, and trace the plan of the forums, 
 palaces, and hippodrome where so vast a succession of 
 stirring scenes took place, some of the earlier monu- 
 ments and churches, the hall where Justinian promul- 
 gated the Corpus Juris which has served the greater 
 part of Europe for thirteen centuries and a half. And, 
 above all, we have the great Church in something like 
 its original glory, less injured by time and man than 
 almost any remaining mediaeval cathedral. 
 
 The Church of S. Sophia is, next to the Pantheon at 
 Rome, the most central and historic edifice still standing 
 erect. It is now in its fourteenth century of continuous 
 and unbroken use ; and during the whole of that vast 
 epoch, it has never ceased to be the imperial fane of the 
 Eastern world, nor has it ever, as the Pantheon, been 
 desolate and despoiled. Its influence over Eastern 
 architecture has been as wide as that of the Pantheon 
 
CONSTANTINOPLE AS AN HISTORIC CITY 349 
 
 over Western architecture, and it has been far more 
 continuous. It was one of the most original, daring, 
 and triumphant conceptions in the whole record of 
 human building ; and Mr. Fergusson declares it to be 
 internally ' the most perfect and beautiful church ever 
 yet erected by any Christian people.' Its interior is 
 certainly the most harmonious, most complete, and least 
 faulty of all the great domed and round-arched temples. 
 It unites sublimity of construction with grace of detail, 
 splendour of decoration with indestructible material. It 
 avoids the conspicuous faults of the great temples of 
 Rome and of Florence, whilst it is far richer in decora- 
 tive effect within than our own St. Paul's or the 
 Pantheon of Paris. Its glorious vesture of marble, 
 mosaic, carving, and cast metal, is unsurpassed by the 
 richest of the Gothic cathedrals, and is far more endur- 
 ing. Though twice as old as Westminster Abbey, it 
 has suffered less dilapidation, and will long outlast it. 
 Its constructive mass and its internal ornamentation far 
 exceed in solidity the slender shafts, the paintings, and 
 the stained glass of the Gothic churches. In this 
 masterly type the mind is aroused by the infinite 
 subtlety of the construction, and the eye is delighted 
 with the inexhaustible harmonies of a superb design 
 worked out in most gorgeous materials. 
 
 For Justinian and his successors ransacked the empire 
 to find the most precious materials for the ' Great 
 Church.' The interior is still one vast pile of marble, 
 porphyry, and polished granite, white marbles with rosy 
 streaks, green marbles, blue and black, starred or veined 
 with white. The pagan temples were stripped of their 
 columns and capitals ; monoliths and colossal slabs 
 were transported from Rome, and from the Nile, from 
 Syria, Asia Minor, and Greece, so that, with the 
 
350 THE CITY IN HISTORY 
 
 Pantheon at Rome, this is the one example of a grand 
 structure of ancient art which still remains unruined. 
 The gilded portals, the jewels, pearls, and gold of the 
 altar, the choir adornment of cedar, amber, ivory, and 
 silver, have been long destroyed by the greedy soldiers 
 of the Cross ; and the mosaics above with seraphim, 
 apostles, prophets, and Christ in glory have been 
 covered up, but not destroyed, by the fierce soldiers 
 of Mahomet. 
 
 It is -a fact, almost without parallel in the history of 
 religion, that the Musulman conquerors adopted the 
 Christian cathedral as their own fane, without injuring 
 it, with very little alteration within, and even without 
 changing its name. The Greeks did not adopt the 
 form of Egyptian or Syrian temples ; Christians took 
 for the model of their churches the law-courts, but not 
 the temples of Polytheism ; Protestants have never 
 found a practical use for the cruciform churches of 
 Catholicism. But Islam accepted the Holy Wisdom 
 as the type of its mosque ; partially concealed the 
 Christian emblems and sacred mosaics, added without 
 some courts and the four beautiful minarets, but made 
 no structural change within. And thus the oldest 
 cathedral in Christendom is the type of a thousand 
 mosques ; and the figures of Christ and his saints, that 
 a Roman emperor set up in his imperial dome, look 
 down to-day after fifteen centuries on the Westminster 
 Abbey of the Ottoman Caliphs. What a dazzling 
 panorama of stirring, pathetic, and terrific scenes press 
 on the mind of the student of Byzantine history as he 
 recalls all which that vast fane has witnessed in the 
 thousand years that separate the age of Justinian from 
 that of Suleiman the Magnificent : from the day when 
 the great emperor cried out, ' I have surpassed thee, O 
 
CONSTANTINOPLE AS AN HISTORIC CITY 351 
 
 Solomon ! ' to the days when Ottoman conquerors gave 
 thanks for a hundred victories over the Cross. Has 
 any building in the world been witness to so vast a 
 series of memorable events ? 
 
 In historic memories, the walls of Constantinople can 
 compare with her great Church ; for the ruined walls 
 are still the most colossal and pathetic relics of the 
 ancient world that remain in Europe. Except the walls 
 round Rome, there is no scene in Europe so strange, so 
 desolate, and mantled with such annals of battle, crime, 
 despair, and heroism. Though the sea walls have been 
 partly removed and much injured by man, the vast 
 rampart on the west which stretches from Blachernae on 
 the Golden Horn to the Seven Towers on the Marmora, 
 a distance of nearly four miles, is still, but for natural 
 decay and disturbance, in the state in which it was left 
 by Sultan Mohammed the Conqueror in the fifteenth 
 century. It was then more than a thousand years old ; 
 and during the whole of that period it had been in- 
 creased, repaired, strengthened, doubled, and tripled. 
 It is still a museum or vast catacomb of Byzantine 
 history. More fortunate than the walls of Rome and 
 other ancient cities, the western walls of Constantinople 
 have hardly been touched by the hand of man since the 
 Turks entered. This complicated scheme of circum- 
 vallation, far stronger than the walls of Rome or of any 
 other ancient or mediaeval city, made an impenetrable 
 barrier, whilst adequately manned and defended, down 
 to the invention of the heavy cannon. We can still 
 trace the plan and form of the triple line of wall, of the 
 moat, of the two causeways, of the fourteen gates, and 
 the one hundred and ninety-four towers, and the ruined 
 palace of the later emperors. 
 
 Here and there the massive towers are riven and 
 
352 THE CITY IN HISTORY 
 
 tottering, torn by cannon, earthquake, and centuries of 
 neglect and decay. The shrunken city of Stamboul 
 does not now touch them, and no populous suburbs 
 have grown round them. Cemeteries with cypress and 
 tombstones, the cupola of a small oratory, or the roof of 
 a hospital, alone break the view. But the crumbling 
 walls and towers stand in solitude amidst orchards 
 and gardens, and nothing disturbs the student who 
 deciphers inscriptions set up by Constantines, Leos, 
 Basils, Comneni, and Palaeologi, and here and there a 
 Roman eagle and a Greek cross. 1 The Golden Gate, 
 with its two marble towers, prisons, palace halls, the 
 famous Castle of Blachernae and the Seven Towers, 
 carry us through a thousand years of history but most 
 of all we linger near the breach hard by the gate of 
 S. Romanus, where the last Constantine met the Otto- 
 man Mohammed in deadly grip, redeeming by his death 
 four centuries of feebleness in his ancestors, as he fell 
 amidst heaps of slain : 
 
 'With his face up to Heaven, in that red monument 
 Which his good sword had digg'd.' 
 
 Of all cities of the world Constantinople is memor- 
 able for its sieges, the most numerous and the most 
 momentous in the records of history. For long centuries 
 together the city was a besieged fortress, and during 
 nearly eight centuries her vast fortifications resisted the 
 efforts of all foreign invaders. Goths, Huns, Avars, 
 Slaves, Persians, Saracens, Bulgarians, Hungarians, 
 Turks, and Russians, have continually assailed and 
 menaced them in vain. Great conquerors, such as 
 Zabergan, Chosroes, Muaviah, Omar, Moslemah, Crumn, 
 
 1 They have been collected and explained by Dr. Paspates in his 
 'Bva.vTival MeX^reu. 
 
CONSTANTINOPLE AS AN HISTORIC CITY 353 
 
 Haroun-al-Raschid, Bayazid, failed to shake them. For 
 ten years a Persian camp stood in arms at Chalcedon 
 across the Bosphorus ; for years the Saracens assailed 
 it year by year in vain (674-677, and 717-718). 
 These sieges were not mere expeditions against a single 
 stronghold ; they involved the fate of an empire and a 
 religion. Had pagans, fire-worshippers, or Musulmans, 
 nomad hordes, or devastating Mongols succeeded in 
 piercing these walls before the fifteenth century, the 
 course of civilisation would have been seriously changed. 
 For a thousand years these crumbling ramparts, which 
 to-day we see in such pathetic desolation, were the 
 bulwark of European civilisation, of the traditions of 
 Rome, of the Christendom of the East, and in no small 
 degree of learning, arts, and commerce, until the great 
 mediaeval reconstruction was ready to appear. 
 
 It is a striking proof of the enormous persistency of 
 Byzantine history that the Bulgarians and Russians, 
 both of whom are still pressing eagerly onwards with 
 longing eyes set on the city of the Bosphorus, have been 
 from time to time renewing these attacks for more than 
 a thousand years. It was in 813 that Crumn, the great 
 king of the Bulgarians, opened his terrible onslaught ; 
 and it was nearly two centuries later that Basil, ' the 
 slayer of the Bulgarians,' began his triumphant campaign 
 against that secular foe. The first siege of Constanti- 
 nople by Moslems, that of the Saracen Muaviah in 673, 
 began nearly eight centuries before the last Moslem 
 siege, that under the Ottoman conqueror in 1453. And 
 the first attack on Constantinople by Russians, in 865, 
 was separated by more than a thousand years from 
 their last attack, when they reached San Stefano within 
 sight of the minarets. For all this thousand years 
 the Russian has hungered and thirsted for the ' Sacred 
 
 z 
 
354 THE ^ ITY IN HISTORY 
 
 City,' whether it were held by Romans, Greeks, Latins, 
 or Ottomans and hitherto he has hungered and 
 thirsted in vain. 
 
 They count more than twenty sieges in all ; but the 
 most memorable are undoubtedly the triumphant re- 
 pulse of Persians and Avars in the reign of Heraclius 
 in 616, and again in 626; the glorious defeat of the 
 Saracens in 673, in the reign of Constantine IV., and 
 again in 717, in the reign of Leo III.; and lastly, the two 
 successful sieges when Constantinople was captured 
 by the Venetians and Crusaders in 1203-4; and again 
 when it was stormed by Mohammed the Conqueror in 
 1453. Of all memorable and romantic sieges on record, 
 these two are the most impressive to the historic 
 imagination, by virtue of the crowding of dramatic 
 incidents, the singular energy and wonderful resources 
 they display, and the vast issues which hung on the 
 event. The siege of Tyre by Alexander, of Syracuse 
 by Nicias, of Carthage by Scipio, the two sieges of 
 Jerusalem by Titus and by Godfrey, the successive 
 sackings of Rome, the defence of Rhodes and Malta 
 against the Turks none of these can quite equal in 
 vivid colour and breathless interest the two great 
 captures of Constantinople, and certainly the last. It 
 stands out on the canvas of history by the magnitude 
 of the issues involved to religion, to nations, to civilisa- 
 tion, in the glowing incidents of the struggle, in the 
 heroism of the defence and of the attack, in the dramatic 
 catastrophe and personal contrast of two typical chiefs, 
 one at the head of the conquerors and the other of the 
 defeated. And by a singular fortune, this thrilling 
 drama, in a great turning-point of human civilisation, 
 has been told in the most splendid chapter of the most 
 consummate history which our language has produced. 
 
CONSTANTINOPLE AS AN HISTORIC CITY 355 
 
 The storming and sack of Constantinople in the Fourth 
 Crusade by a mixed host of Venetian, Flemish, Italian, 
 and French filibusters, a story so well told by Mr. E. 
 Pears in his excellent monograph, was not only one of 
 the most extraordinary adventures of the Middle Ages, 
 but one of the most wanton crimes against civilisation 
 committed by feudal lawlessness and religious bigotry, 
 at a time of confusion and superstition. It is a dark 
 blot on the record of the Church, and on the memory of 
 Innocent III., and a standing monument of the anarchy 
 and rapacity to which Feudalism was liable to de- 
 generate. The sack of Constantinople by the so-called 
 soldiers of the cross in the thirteenth century was far 
 more bloodthirsty, more wanton, more destructive than 
 the storming of Constantinople by the followers of 
 Mahomet in the fifteenth century. It had far less 
 historic justification, it had more disastrous effects on 
 human progress, and it introduced a less valuable and 
 less enduring type of civilised life. The Crusaders, who 
 had no serious aim but plunder, effected nothing but 
 destruction. They practically annihilated the East 
 Roman Empire, which never recovered from this fatal 
 blow. It is true that the Byzantine Empire had been 
 rapidly decaying for more than a century, and that its 
 indispensable service to civilisation was completed. But 
 the crusading buccaneers burned down a great part of the 
 richest city of Europe, which was a museum and remnant 
 of antiquity ; they wantonly destroyed priceless works 
 of art, buildings, books, records, and documents. They 
 effected nothing of their own purpose ; and what they 
 indirectly caused was a stimulus to Italian commerce, the 
 dispersion through Europe of some arts, and the removal 
 of the last barrier against the entrance of the Moslem 
 into Europe. 
 
356 THE CITY IN HISTORY 
 
 The conquest by the Ottomans in the fifteenth century 
 was a very different thing a problem too complex to be 
 hastily touched. Europe, as we have seen, was by that 
 time strong enough to win in the long and tremendous 
 struggle with Islam ; it was ready to receive and use the 
 profound intellectual and artistic impulse which was 
 caused by the dispersion of the Byzantine Greeks. The 
 Ottoman conquest was no mere raid, but the foundation 
 of a. European Empire, now in the fifth century of its 
 existence. The wonderful tale of the rise, zenith, wane, 
 and decay of the European Empire of the Padishah of 
 Roum one of the least familiar to the general reader 
 is borne in upon the traveller to Stamboul in the series 
 of magnificent mosques of the conquering sultans of the 
 fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, in the 
 exquisite fountains, the mausoleums, the khans and 
 fortresses, minarets and towers, and the strange city of 
 kiosques, palaces, gates, gardens, and terraces, known to 
 us as the Seraglio. In these vast and stately mosques, 
 in the profusion of glowing ornament, porcelains, tiles, 
 and carvings, in the incongruous jumble of styles, in the 
 waste, squalor, and tawdry remnants of the abandoned 
 palace of the Padishahs, we read the history of the Otto- 
 man Turks for the last five centuries splendour beside 
 ruin, exquisite art beside clumsy imitation, courage and 
 pride beside apathy and despair, a magnificent soldiery 
 as of old with a dogged persistency that dies hard, a 
 patient submission to inevitable destiny beside fervour, 
 loyalty, dignity, and a race patriotism which are not to 
 be found in the rank and file of European capitals. 
 
 But Stamboul is not only a school of Byzantine his- 
 tory ; it has rich lessons of European history. We see 
 the Middle Ages living there still unreformed the 
 Middle Ages with their colour and their squalor, their 
 
CONSTANTINOPLE AS AN HISTORIC CITY 357 
 
 ignorance and credulity, their heroism and self-devotion, 
 their traditions, resignation, patience, and passionate faith. 
 We can imagine ourselves in some city of the early 
 Middle Ages, the meeting-place of nations, Venice or 
 Genoa, Paris or Rome, or even old Rome in the age of 
 Trajan, where races, religions, costumes, ideas, and 
 occupations meet side by side but do not mix. The 
 Moslem, the Armenian, the Greek, the Jew, the Catholic, 
 have their own quarters, dress, language, worship, occu- 
 pation, law, and government. They pass as if invisible 
 to each other, and will neither eat, pray, work, trade, or 
 converse with each other. Stand upon the bridge across 
 the Golden Horn, or in the lovely cloister of Bayazid, 
 and watch the green-turbaned hadjis, the softas, hammals, 
 itinerant vendors, soldiers and sailors, boatmen and 
 mendicants, Roumelian and Anatolian peasants, with all 
 the cosmopolitan collection of the busy and the idle, 
 from the Danube to the Euphrates. It is the East and 
 the West on their one neutral meeting-ground, the one 
 Oriental spot still left in Europe, the one mediaeval 
 capital that has survived into the nineteenth century. 
 
CHAPTER XII 
 
 THE PROBLEM OF CONSTANTINOPLE T 
 
 THE city of the Seven Hills upon the Golden Horn 
 is at once the paradox of mediaeval history, and the 
 dilemma of European statesmen. In the historical field 
 it presents a set of problems which no historian has 
 adequately solved, the full difficulties of which have been 
 duly grasped only in our own age. In the political world 
 it presents the great crux, over which former generations 
 laboured, fought, and bled ; which our own generation 
 seems willing to give up as insoluble, to ignore and to 
 intrust to chance. 
 
 There is danger that, in the minute research into local 
 institutions that is now in vogue, the true historical 
 importance of Byzantine story may be forgotten ; and 
 danger also that, in the roar of battle round our demo- 
 cratic issues, the political importance of Constantinople 
 as an eternal factor in the European balance of power 
 may be quite lost to sight. Mediaeval and modern 
 annals offer to the student no subjects of meditation 
 more fascinating and more mysterious than are the 
 fifteen centuries of New Rome. And the dilemma of 
 what is to be the ultimate fate of Constantinople is 
 as urgent as ever, as perplexing as ever : nay, it is 
 much more urgent, more perplexing than ever. The 
 ignorant prejudice of conventional historians about the 
 J Fortnightly Kevie-u', May 1894, No. 329, vol. 55. 
 
THE PROBLEM OF CONSTANTINOPLE 359 
 
 rottenness of the ' Lower Empire ' may be set against 
 the purblind commonplace of conventional politicians 
 about the Turkish question having been solved by the 
 British occupation of Egypt. 
 
 I. The Historical Problem 
 
 Since the works on Byzantine history, produced 
 within the last thirty years by European scholars, it is no 
 longer possible to repeat the stock phrases of the last 
 century about the puerility and impotence of the 'Lower 
 Empire.' By far the most important contribution to this 
 task by English students, is the Later Roman Empire 
 of Professor Bury, whose two solid octavos bring the 
 history of the Roman Empire of the East down to the 
 foundation of the Roman Empire of the West, in 800 A.D. 
 When he has completed his work down to the capture of 
 Constantinople by the Turks, or at least to its capture by 
 the Crusaders of 1204 A.D., it will be evident how much 
 the history of the Later Empire has been distorted by 
 jealousy, pedantry, and fanaticism. Even the genius of 
 Gibbon could not wholly emancipate him from current 
 prejudices; and he necessarily worked without the essen- 
 tial materials which the industry of the last hundred 
 years has collected. What has to be explained is the 
 problem how a political fabric, built on such foun- 
 dations of vice and chaos, maintained the longest 
 succession recorded in history : how a state of such 
 discordant elements overcame such a combination of 
 attacks : what was it that made Constantinople, for 
 some five or six centuries after the capture of Rome, 
 the intellectual, artistic, and commercial metropolis of 
 mediaeval Europe : by what resources did she, during 
 eight centuries, resist the torrent of Asiatic and Musulman 
 
360 THE CITY IN HISTORY 
 
 soldiery, before which the feudal chivalry of the \\Vst 
 was so frequently baffled and crushed. 
 
 The origin of these prejudices and of such falsification 
 of history is plain enough. The judgment of Western 
 Europe on the Eastern Empire was mainly derived 
 from, and coloured by, that of Catholic churchmen ; and 
 during the eleven centuries which divide the first Con- 
 stantine from the last, the Catholic Church has borne an 
 irreconcilable jealousy towards the Orthodox Church. 
 Their very official titles the first claiming universal 
 obedience, the second claiming absolute truth involved 
 them in a war wherein there could be neither victory 
 nor truce. The chiefs who claimed to rule as repre- 
 sentatives of Charlemagne, and all who depended upon 
 them, or held title under them (that is, the greater part 
 of Western Europe), were bound to treat the claims of 
 the Eastern Empire as preposterous insolence. The 
 traders of the Mediterranean regarded the Byzantine 
 wealth and commerce much as the navigators of the 
 sixteenth century regarded the wealth and trade of the 
 Indies as the lawful prize of the strongest. And lastly, 
 the scholars, the poets, the chroniclers of the West, from 
 the age of the Crusades to the age of Gibbon, have dis- 
 dained a literature, in which, as they said, spiritless and 
 obsequious annalists recorded the doings of their masters 
 in a bastard Greek. Western genius, Western Chris- 
 tianity, Western heroism and civilisation much surpass 
 the Eastern type; but, with such a combination of causes 
 for hostility and contempt, the West could not fail to be 
 grossly unjust to the record of the East. 
 
 The root of the injustice is the treating of a thousand 
 years of continuous history as one uniform piece, and 
 attributing to the noblest periods and the greatest chiefs 
 the infamies and crimes which belong to the worst. 
 
THE PROBLEM OF CONSTANTINOPLE 361 
 
 Unfortunately, we are much more familiar with the 
 periods of rottenness and decline than with the ages of 
 heroism and glory ; every one knows something of the 
 Theodoras, Zoes, and Irenes, and, too often, very little 
 of Heraclius, Leo, and Basil. The five centuries which 
 intervene from Justinian to the Comnenian house a 
 period as long as that which separates Camillus from 
 Marcus Aurelius is the important part of the Roman 
 Empire of the East ; and the really grand epochs are 
 in the seventh, eighth, and tenth centuries whose heroes, 
 Heraclius, Leo III., and Basil II., may hold their own with 
 the greatest rulers of ancient or of modern story. 
 
 The most urgent problem of all is to find an adequate 
 name to describe the Empire of which Constantinople 
 was the capital for at least a thousand years. Every 
 one of the conventional names involves a confusion or 
 misrepresentation, great or small. ' Lower Empire '- 
 'Greek Empire' 'Byzantine Empire' 'Eastern Empire' 
 ' Later Empire ' ' Roman Empire ' either suggest a 
 wrong idea, or fail to express the true idea in full. In 
 what sense was the empire at Constantinople ' Lower ' ? 
 It certainly regarded itself as' infinitely higher ; an ad- 
 vance even upon the classical Roman Empire. Justinian 
 with justice holds his rule to be above that of Aurelian 
 and Diocletian ; and from his day to the age of the 
 great Charles, there was no power in Europe which could 
 compare for a moment with the Roman Empire of 
 the Bosphorus. The Empire was not ' Greek,' even in 
 tongue, until the seventh century ; it was not Greek in 
 spirit until the twelfth century ; till then hardly any of 
 its emperors, soldiers, or chiefs had been Greek ; and it 
 was never quite Greek by race. If we say ' Byzantine ' 
 Empire, we are localising a power which was curiously 
 composite in race, nationality, character, and tradition ; 
 
362 TIIF. CITY IN HISTORY 
 
 and the term ' Byzantine ' has a sense too directly 
 contrary to Roman, and also has acquired a derogatory 
 meaning. The great heroes of the empire arc utterly 
 unlike what men now understand by ' Byzantine' ; and 
 there could hardly be a more violent contrast than that 
 between the Alexius or Bryennius of Sir Walter Scott's 
 romance and the Nicephorus Phocas or Basil n. of actual 
 history. ' Eastern Empire ' is erroneous and ambiguous ; 
 for it suggests a break with Rome, and it applies to the 
 kingdoms of Persians, Saracens, or Ottomans, to the 
 Sultan of Roum, or the Emperors of Nicaea and Trebi- 
 zond. ' Roman Empire ' is accurate in a sense. But 
 in the fourth and fifth centuries there were often two 
 co-ordinate governments ; and after the coronation of 
 Charlemagne, in 800 A.D., there were always two Roman 
 Empires, and sometimes more. The term, ' Later 
 Roman Empire,' which Mr. Bury adopts, is far better ; 
 but it might be applied to Valentinian III., or to Romulus 
 Augustulus ; and it fails to suggest the continuance of 
 the Empire for a thousand years. After the coronation 
 of Charles, the term ' Later Roman Empire ' is inade- 
 quate ; and yet that event marks no essential break in 
 the Empire at Constantinople. 
 
 What we want is a term which will describe the con- 
 tinuity of the Roman Empire, after its seat had been 
 permanently removed to the Bosphorus, and yet dis- 
 tinguish it from the revived Empire of Charles, the 
 Holy Roman Empire, and all other powers which claimed 
 a title from Rome. The features to be connoted are 
 the prolongation and evolution of the vast political 
 organism of Augustus and Trajan, its unbroken con- 
 tinuity, at any rate, down to the thirteenth century, and 
 the dominant material fact that its permanent centre of 
 government was transferred to the Bosphorus : that it 
 
THE PROBLEM OF CONSTANTINOPLE 363 
 
 had become Christian, but not Catholic. We go wrong 
 if we drop the title 'Roman' ; we go wrong if we ignore 
 the fact of the transfer of sovereignty to Constantinople ; 
 we go wrong if we fail to mark how much this implied, 
 both in the spiritual and the political sphere. Under 
 the conditions, the proper title is, ' The Roman Empire 
 at Constantinople.' This is strictly accurate and fairly 
 complete. It denotes the whole period of eleven cen- 
 turies which separates the first Constantine from the 
 last. It is impossible to suppose it applied either to 
 Romulus Augustulus, Charlemagne, or Otto. And it 
 defines the unbroken continuity of government from its 
 permanent seat on the Bosphorus. A simpler equivalent 
 would be the Empire of New Rome. 
 
 The next problem is to group the epochs of this 
 immense succession of eleven centuries ; to show their 
 diversity in the midst of continuity ; to distinguish the 
 true periods of greatness and of growth, and the real 
 eras of corruption and decay. Unfortunately this is 
 what Gibbon has omitted to do, what he has even done 
 not a little to make difficult. Of his eight octavo 
 volumes five are devoted to the history of about five 
 centuries, and three only are given to the remaining 
 eight centuries. He himself was struck with the 
 apparent paradox, which he seems to excuse (at the 
 opening of his 48th chapter) by his own and the 
 reader's fatigue in the melancholy task of recording 
 the annals of the Eastern Empire. The genius of the 
 greatest of historians has been betrayed into no error 
 more capital than that which led him to describe the 
 annals of the Empire from Heraclius to the last Con- 
 stantine as 'a tedious and uniform tale of weakness 
 and misery.' Gibbon, it is plain, was partly misled by 
 the dearth of writings, and partly overwhelmed by the 
 
364 THE CITY IN HISTORY 
 
 enormous scale of his ever-enlarging survey. But with 
 all that we now have at hand, it is wonderful to think- 
 that he was ever tempted to abandon ' the Greek slaves 
 and their servile historians.' If this is a description of 
 the Iconoclasts and the Basils, Leo the Deacon and 
 Nicetas, language must have a new meaning. In truth, 
 ' a tedious tale of weakness ' would be as aptly applied 
 to the lives of William the Conqueror and the Plan- 
 tagenet kings as to the exploits and adventures of 
 Leo III., Constantine V., the two Basils, Nicephorus 
 Phocas, John Zimisces, Kalo-Joannes, and Manuel. 
 
 Even in the matter of literary culture and pure Greek, 
 we are apt to compare the Byzantine historians with 
 classical or with our modern authors. Clearly we ought 
 to compare them with their contemporaries in Europe. 
 The iambics in which George of Pisidia celebrated the 
 exploits of Heraclius, or those in which the Deacon 
 Theodosius sang the recovery of Crete by Nicephorus 
 Phocas, are not classical, but rather frigid as poetry ; 
 yet they are far less barbarous than any Latin poetry 
 of the seventh and tenth centuries. The Greek of Leo 
 the Deacon in the tenth century does not differ from 
 Xenophon's, from whom he is separated by more than 
 thirteen centuries, so much as the English of Langland 
 differs from that of Milton. The prolongation of the 
 Greek language over 2800 years from Homer to Tri- 
 coupi, its continual epochs of revival, purification, and 
 ultimate return upon its own classical type, are among 
 the most extraordinary facts in the evolution of human 
 thought. And the persistence of the same written litera- 
 ture at Constantinople for at least twenty centuries is 
 without parallel, at least in Europe. 
 
 Happily our most recent historians are in the main 
 agreed as to the essential epochs and the true heroes of 
 
THE PROBLEM OF CONSTANTINOPLE 365 
 
 Byzantine history. It is agreed that from the age of 
 Justinian to the Crusades the traditions of law, adminis- 
 tration, Greek literature, commerce, and artistic manu- 
 factures were mainly preserved to Europe by the 
 Roman Empire of the Bosphorus. It is agreed that 
 for all active ends the Empire was extinguished by the 
 Fourth Crusade, and had long been in an exhausted 
 condition even at the opening of the First Crusade. 
 The Isaurian and Basilian dynasties, that is the eighth, 
 ninth, tenth, and part of the eleventh centuries, were 
 epochs on the whole of valour, able government, pros- 
 perity, and civilisation, if compared with the condition 
 of what used to be called the dark ages of Europe. 
 These centuries, with the reigns of Justinian and Hera- 
 clius in the sixth and seventh centuries, constitute an 
 epoch which is worthy to rank with the Roman Empire 
 from Julius to Theodosius on the one hand, and on the 
 other with the Holy Roman Empire from Otto the Great 
 to Frederick II. The Roman Empire of Charlemagne, 
 the Holy Roman Empire of Otto, both in substance 
 and in ceremonial, were much more truly imitations 
 and rivals of the Roman Empire of the Bosphorus 
 than they were revivals of the State of Augustus and 
 Trajan ; of whom all real memory was entirely lost in 
 the eighth century, whom, as heathens without the 
 semblance of Church or Patriarch, it was impossible 
 that Franks and Saxons should imitate or approve. 
 
 At the close of his second volume Professor Bury 
 sums up the function of the later Roman Empire under 
 the five following heads, of which his whole work is an 
 illustration and commentary : 
 
 I. It was the bulwark of Europe against the Asiatic 
 danger ; 
 
366 Till-; CITY IN HISTORY 
 
 2. It kept alive Greek and Roman culture ; 
 
 3. It maintained European commerce ; 
 
 4. It preserved the idea of the Roman Empire ; 
 
 5. It embodied a principle of permanence. 
 
 To these may be added the following : 
 
 (a) It was the direct source of civilisation to the 
 
 whole of the Balkan peninsula, and to all Europe 
 east of the Vistula and the Carpathians ; 
 
 (b) It was the type of a State Church a spiritual 
 
 power dependent on and co-operating with the 
 sovereign power, and not, like the Catholic 
 Church, independent and often antagonistic. 
 
 The Empire of New Rome did much more than pre- 
 serve the idea of the Roman Empire. It prolonged the 
 Roman Empire itself in a new, and even in some 
 respects, a more developed form. As Mr. Freeman 
 well puts it, ' the Eastern Empire is the surest witness 
 to the unity of history,' the most complete answer to 
 the conventional opposition between 'ancient' and 
 ' modern ' history. That mysterious gulf that unex- 
 plained paralysis which, we are told, occurred in the 
 history of European civilisation about the fifth century, 
 and was hardly removed by the ninth or tenth, has no 
 existence whatever if we trace the internal condition 
 of New Rome from the age of Theodosius to the age of 
 Basil II. 
 
 We are so greatly influenced by literary standards 
 and classical art that we hasten to condemn an age in 
 which we find these decay. It is quite true that pure 
 Latinity, elegant Greek, and Attic art were not to be 
 found in New Rome, and seemed to have perished with 
 the coming of the Huns and the Goths. But this did 
 
THE PROBLEM OF CONSTANTINOPLE 367 
 
 not form the whole of civilisation or even the bulk of it. 
 In many things the civilisation of the Byzantine Empire 
 was far higher than the civilisation of the Augustan 
 Empire. The Court of Justinian or of Leo III., or of 
 Irene, of Theophilus, of Basil I., or Constantine Porphy- 
 rogennetus, would have been considered in the Middle 
 Ages far more like civilised life than the courts of Nero, 
 Hadrian, or Diocletian. In many of the most essential 
 features of civil administration, the governments of 
 Justinian, of the Iconoclast and Macedonian dynasties, 
 were really (in spite of barbarous punishments, tyranny, 
 and extortion) a great improvement on the imperialism 
 of the Caesars on the Tiber. 
 
 Obviously the religious, moral, and domestic life 
 bad as it was from our standard was better than that 
 which is described by Juvenal and Tacitus, and was 
 better than that of the greater part of Europe in the 
 centuries between the fifth and the tenth. And in 
 matters of taste, it is plain that those only can speak 
 of the ' servile debasement ' of Byzantine art who have 
 never traced the influence upon Europe of the in- 
 dustries, manufactures, inventions, and arts, which had 
 their seat in Constantinople, who have not studied 
 descriptions of the great Palace beside the Hippo- 
 drome, of the Boucoleon and Blachernae, and who 
 know nothing of S. Sophia, S. Irene, SS. Sergius and 
 Bacchus, the Church Tes Choras, and all the remains 
 of architectural and decorative skill that extend in 
 unbroken series from the age of Justinian to the 
 Crusades. The vast administrative, legal, and military 
 organisation of Augustus and Trajan no more perished 
 in the sack of Rome than did the language, the culture, 
 and the aesthetic aptitude of the Greco-Roman world. 
 Both took new forms ; they did not perish. 
 
368 THE CITY IN HISTORY 
 
 After all that has been done by Finlay, Freeman, 
 Bury, and Pears within the last generation, as well as 
 by scholars in other countries, it is impossible to doubt 
 that this is henceforth one of the cardinal truths of 
 European history. Mr. Bury's five propositions as to 
 the functions of the later Roman Empire are perfectly 
 true, and may be emphasised and extended rather than 
 qualified or diminished. What we now especially need 
 is to have it explained in detail how these results came 
 about. We want the inner, economic, social, bureau- 
 cratic, industrial, and ecclesiastical history of the Empire 
 not so much its court annals or its dynastic revolu- 
 tions. We have had the imperial and political history 
 traced in sufficient fulness ; the administrative and 
 organic life of the society is what we now need to 
 grasp and explore. This is obviously a most complex 
 and difficult task, only to be achieved by indirect means 
 and the study of a variety of sources. The art, the 
 industry, the trade, the manners, the statistics, the law, 
 the theology, the political and civic institutions of the 
 Roman Empire from the age of Heraclius to that of 
 the Comneni is what we now need to explore. And it 
 is a field in which English scholars, apart from Finlay, 
 Bury, and some theologians, have done little. 
 
 Especially we need a History of Byzantine Chris- 
 tianity, written in the spirit of Milman from the point 
 of view of an enlightened historian and not of an official 
 Churchman. Almost everything that we have yet got 
 on the subject of the Byzantine Church is insensibly 
 coloured by the Catholic or anti-Catholic bias. A 
 history of Byzantine art, of Byzantine literature and 
 language, of Byzantine manners, commerce, law, and 
 municipal organisation as these existed between Justi- 
 nian and Basil, 'the slayer of Bulgarians' a period 
 
THE PROBLEM OF CONSTANTINOPLE 369 
 
 of five centuries would enable us to answer the enigma 
 of Constantinople. On the continent Krause, Heyd, 
 Hopf, Gfrorer, Salzenburg, Mordtmann, Rambaud, 
 Sabatier, de Saulcy, Labarte, Schlumberger, Bayet, 
 Drapeyron, De Muralt, Riant, as well as many Greek, 
 Russian, and Oriental scholars, have worked in these 
 mines. Mr. Oman has given us a useful summary of 
 Byzantine history in the series called The Story of the 
 Nations. But in England, since Finlay, we have had 
 little of original work except from Mr. Bury, who has 
 yet not gone further than the eighth century. The 
 most interesting and perhaps the most obscure period 
 of all is the Basilian dynasty, from A.D. 867-1057. And 
 on this we sorely need accessible guidance. All that 
 Gibbon has to tell us of these two hundred years is 
 contained in about one hundred pages, and Finlay has 
 compressed his narrative into rather more than twice 
 that space. 
 
 When we have completely explored these various 
 subjects we may be able to answer the problems : 
 (i) How did the Roman Empire maintain itself at 
 Constantinople for eleven centuries? (2) Why was it 
 able for eight centuries to .resist not only the Western 
 but the Eastern invasions, before which every other city 
 and kingdom fell ? (3) Why was Constantinople for 
 five centuries the most populous, wealthy, and civilised 
 city in Europe ? 
 
 The answer in general is a somewhat complicated one 
 of several terms. First, the Roman Empire removed 
 itself to the strongest and most dominant spot in all 
 Europe. Next, it evolved a wholly new organisation : 
 centralised, legalised, and industrial. It founded the most 
 wonderful bureaucracy ever known. It developed a 
 maritime ascendency, and a world-wide commerce. It 
 
 2 A 
 
370 THE CITY IN HISTORY 
 
 eliminated every vestige of provincial, national, and 
 race prejudice, and called every subject man from Sicily 
 to the Euphrates a Roman and nothing else. And 
 lastly, and perhaps mainly, it became the first, and for 
 ages the only, Christian Empire, having a powerful 
 Church, which was its faithful and loyal instrument, 
 on whose mysterious prestige it rested, and which it 
 always treated as part of itself. 
 
 1. Nothing further need be said as to the unique 
 source of strength, both for offence and for defence, which 
 the genius of Constantine discovered on the Bosphorus. 
 The removal of the seat of empire from the Tiber to 
 the Bosphorus was the only mode in which the Empire 
 could have been preserved, whilst, at the same time, 
 this made possible its political, religious, and moral 
 transformation. The exact steps, details, and ultimate 
 type of this transformation are precisely the points on 
 which we need light. We see the stupendous machine 
 which this bureaucracy and State Church became, but 
 we know very little about its actual working and its 
 inner life. We judge its power by results only, and by 
 the startling paradox that the machinery of a most 
 disparate organism goes on working undisturbed by 
 fatuity, strife, and anarchy in the supreme centre. 
 Whatever the vices and follies which raged in the 
 imperial palaces for generations together, disciplined 
 and well-armed troops, powerful navies, military engines 
 and stores, skilful generals, able governors, and expert 
 diplomatists, rise up time after time in infinite succession 
 to save the empire, hold it together, restore its losses, 
 and increase its wealth, and this over the whole period 
 of eight centuries from Theodosius to Isaac Angelus. 
 
 2. The material source of this strength in the empire 
 was primarily its sea-power and its command for five 
 
THE PROBLEM OF CONSTANTINOPLE 371 
 
 centuries of the commerce of the whole Mediterranean. 
 When we study the campaigns of Heraclius and of 
 Nicephorus, when we follow in Leo the Deacon the 
 great expedition to recover Crete, we are struck with 
 the vast maritime resources, the engines and ships of 
 scientific war which the empire possessed in the seventh 
 and tenth centuries. Nothing in Europe at that date 
 could produce any such sea-power. As Nicephorus 
 Phocas very fairly told the angry envoy of Otto, he 
 could lay in ashes any sea-board town of the Medi- 
 terranean. When the cities of Italy succeeded to the 
 commerce of Constantinople, they held it in shares and 
 fought for it amongst themselves. But until the rise 
 of Venice, Pisa, and Palermo, Constantinople ruled the 
 seas from Sicily to Rhodes, and relatively to her con- 
 temporaries with a far more complete supremacy. 
 
 3. It was this maritime ascendency, this central 
 position in the Bosphorus, and this vast Mediterranean 
 commerce which was the foundation of the wealth of 
 the empire a wealth which, relatively to its age, ex- 
 ceeded even the wealth and maritime ascendency of 
 England in our day, which for eight centuries hardly 
 ever suffered a collapse, and was continually being 
 renewed. We must discount the petulant sneers of the 
 irritable Bishop Luitprand, when baffled by the fierce 
 Nicephorus. The silk industry, the embroidery, the 
 mosaic, the enamel, the metal work, the ivory carving, 
 the architecture, the military engineering, the artillery, 
 the marine appliances, the shipbuilding art ; the trade 
 in corn, spices, oil, and wine ; the manuscripts, the 
 illuminations of Byzantium, far surpassed anything else 
 in Europe to be found in the epoch between the reign 
 of Justinian and the rise of the Italian cities. Much of 
 what we call mediaeval art decoration and art fabrics 
 
372 THE CITY IN HISTORY 
 
 had their real origin, both industrial and aesthetic, on 
 the Bosphorus, or were carried on there as their metro- 
 politan centre. 
 
 Nowhere else in Europe under the successors of 
 Clovis and Charlemagne could such churches have been 
 raised as those of the Holy Wisdom and Irene, such 
 palaces as that beside the Hippodrome or the Boucoleon, 
 such mighty fortifications as those which stretched 
 from Blachernae to the Propontis. Nowhere could 
 Europe in the ninth and tenth centuries produce such 
 enormous wealth as that possessed by Theophilus, 
 Basil I., or Constantine Porphyrogennetus, or equip 
 such fleets and armies as those of Nicephorus, John 
 Zimisces, and Basil II. We are accustomed to compare 
 the art and the civilisation of the Byzantine Empire 
 with those of much later ages than its own, mainly 
 because we have nothing else wherewith to compare it 
 of its own epoch. If we honestly set it against the 
 contemporary state of Europe, from the era of Justinian 
 to that of the Crusades, it will be seen to be not only 
 supreme in the traditions of civilisation, but almost to 
 stand alone. In the eleventh century, without doubt, 
 Western Europe was organised, and began its triumphant 
 career, with the Catholic Church and the feudal organism 
 in full development ; and from that date the Byzantine 
 Empire ceased to be pre-eminent. But its vast re- 
 sources and the splendour and civilised arts of Con- 
 stantinople still continued to amaze the Crusaders, even 
 down to the thirteenth century. 
 
 The fact is that, for the five centuries from Justinian 
 to Isaac Comnenus, the attacks on the empire, from the 
 European side, at any rate, were the attacks of nomad, 
 unorganised, and uncivilised races on a civilised and 
 highly-organised empire. And in spite of anarchy, 
 
THE PROBLEM OF CONSTANTINOPLE 373 
 
 corruption, and effeminacy at the Byzantine court, 
 civilisation and wealth told in every contest. Greek 
 fire, military science, enormous resources, and the 
 prestige of empire always bore down wild valour and 
 predatory enthusiasm. Just as Russia dominates the 
 Turkoman tribes of Central Asia, as Turkey holds back 
 the valiant Arabs of her eastern frontier, as Egyptian 
 natives with British officers easily master the heroic 
 Ghazis of the Soudan so the Roman Empire on the 
 Bosphorus beat back Huns, Avars, Persians, Slaves, 
 Bulgarians, Patzinaks, and Russians. We need only to 
 study the history of Russia and of Turkey to learn how 
 the organising ability, the resources, and material arts 
 of great empires outweigh folly, vice, and corruption in 
 the palace. 
 
 4. Of course a succession of victorious campaigns 
 implies a succession of valiant armies ; and there is 
 nothing on which we need more light than on the exact 
 organisation and national constituents of those Roman 
 armies which crushed Chosroes, Muaviah, Crumn, 
 Samuel, and Hamdanids. They are called convention- 
 ally ' Greeks ' ; but during the Heraclian, Isaurian, and 
 Basilian dynasties there seem to have been no Greeks 
 at all in the land forces. The armies were always 
 composed of a strange collection of races, with different 
 languages, arms, methods of fighting, and types of 
 civilisation. They were often magnificent and cour- 
 ageous barbarians, conspicuous amongst whom were 
 Scandinavians and English, and with them some of 
 the most warlike braves of Asia and of Europe. The 
 empire made no attempt to destroy their national 
 characteristics, to discourage their native language, 
 religion, or habits. Each force was told off to the service 
 which suited it best, and was trained in the use of 
 
374 THE CITY IN HISTORY 
 
 its proper weapons. They remained distinct from each 
 other, and wholly distinct from the civil population. 
 But as they could not unite, they seldom became so 
 great a danger to the empire as the Praetorian guard of 
 the Roman army. The organisation and management 
 of such a heterogeneous body of mercenary braves 
 required extraordinary skill ; but it was just this skill 
 which the rulers of Byzantium possessed. The bond of 
 the whole was the tradition of discipline and the con- 
 sciousness of serving the Roman Emperor. 
 
 The modern history of Russia, and still more the 
 native armies of the British Empire, will enable us to 
 understand how the work of consolidation was effected. 
 The Queen's dominions are at this hour defended by 
 men of almost every race, colour, language, religion, 
 costume, and habits. And we may imagine the com- 
 posite character of the Byzantine armies, if we reflect 
 how distant wars are carried on in the name of Victoria 
 by Hindoos, Musulmans, Pathans, Ghoorkas, Afghans, 
 Egyptians, Soudanese, Zanzibaris, Negroes, Nubians, 
 Zulus, Kaffirs, and West Indians, using their native 
 languages, retaining their national habits, and, to a 
 great extent, their native costume. The Roman Empire 
 was maintained from its centre on the Bosphorus, some- 
 what as the British Empire is maintained from its centre 
 on the Thames, by wealth, maritime ascendency, the 
 traditions of empire, and organising capacity always 
 with the great difference that there was no purely Roman 
 nucleus as there is a purely British nucleus, and also 
 that the soldiery of the Roman Empire had no common 
 armament, and was not officered by men of the 
 dominant race, but by capable leaders indifferently 
 picked from any race, except the Latin or the Greek. 
 Dominant race there was none ; nation there was none. 
 
THE PROBLEM OF CONSTANTINOPLE 375 
 
 Roman meant subject of the Emperor ; Emperor meant 
 the chief in the vermilion buskins, installed in the 
 Palace on the Bosphorus, and duly crowned by the 
 Orthodox Patriarch in the Church of the Holy Wisdom. 
 5. Here we reach the last, as I venture to think, 
 the main element of strength in the Empire of New 
 Rome its alliance with, or rather its possession of, the 
 Orthodox Church. The Roman Empire at Constanti- 
 nople was really, if not in style, a Holy Roman Empire. 
 The Patriarch was one of its officials. The venerable 
 Church of the Holy Wisdom was almost the private 
 chapel of the Emperor ; the Emperor's palace may 
 almost be described as the Vatican of Byzantium. 
 The relations between the Emperor and the Patriarch 
 were wholly different from the relations between the 
 Emperor at Aachen and the Pope. Instead of being 
 separated by a thousand miles and many tribes and 
 peoples, the Emperor of the Bosphorus resided in the 
 same group of buildings, worshipped, and was adored 
 in the same metropolitan temple, and sat in the same 
 council-hall with his Patriarch, who was practically one 
 of his great officers of State. All students of the 
 Carolingian or of the Holy Roman Empire know how 
 immensely Pipin, Charles, the Henrys, and the Ottos 
 were strengthened by the support of the Popes from 
 Zacharias to Victor II. But the Papacy was a very 
 intermittent,, uncertain, and exacting bulwark of the 
 Empire, and after the advent of Hildebrand, in the 
 eleventh century, it was usually the open or secret 
 enemy of the Empire. The Catholic Church was 
 always the co-equal, usually the jealous rival, often the 
 irreconcilable foe of the Emperor. It never was a State 
 Church, and rarely, until the fourteenth century, was an 
 official and obsequious minister of any emperor or king. 
 
376 THE CITY IN HISTOK\ 
 
 But the Orthodox Church of Constantinople, from 
 first to last, was a State Church, part of the State, 
 servant of the State. There were, of course, rebel 
 patriarchs, ambitious, independent, factious, and deeply 
 spiritual patriarchs. There were whole reigns and 
 dynasties when Emperor and Patriarch represented op- 
 posite opinions. But all this was trifling compared with 
 the independent and hostile attitude of the Papacy to 
 the Temporal Power. The Catholic Church represented 
 a Spiritual Power independent of any sovereign, with 
 a range of influence not conterminous with that of any 
 sovereign. That was its strength, its glory, its menace 
 to the Temporal Power. The Orthodox Church repre- 
 sented a spiritual authority, the minister of the sove- 
 reign, directing the conscience of the subjects of the 
 sovereign, and in theory of no others. The Orthodox 
 Church was the ideal State Church, and for a thousand 
 years it deeply affected the history of the Byzantine 
 Empire for evil and for good. It more than realised 
 Dante's dream in the De Monarchici, a dream which 
 the essence of Catholicism and the traditions of the 
 Papacy made impossible in the West. It constituted 
 a real and not a titular Holy Roman Empire in the 
 East 
 
 Ruinous to religion, morality, and freedom as was 
 this dependence of Church on the sovereign, it gave 
 the sovereign an immense and permanent strength. 
 We can see to-day what overwhelming force is given 
 to the rulers of the two great empires of Eastern 
 Europe, who are both absolute heads of the religious 
 organisation of their respective dominions. Now the 
 Orthodox Church of the Byzantine Empire was a more 
 powerful spiritual authority than the Russian Church, 
 if not quite so abject a servant of the Roman Emperor 
 
THE PROBLEM OF CONSTANTINOPLE 377 
 
 as the Russian Church is of the Czar. And it was 
 no doubt much more completely under the control of 
 the Emperor than the imams and softas of Stamboul are 
 under the control of the Padishah. The Roman Emperor, 
 in spite of his vices, origin, or character, even in the midst 
 of the Iconoclast struggle, was invested in the eyes of 
 his Orthodox subjects with that sacred halo which 
 still surrounds Czar and Sultan, and which is the main 
 source of their autocratic power. It was this sacred 
 character, a character which the de facto Emperor 
 possessed from the hour of his coronation in St. Sophia 
 until the day when he died, was deposed, or blinded, 
 which held together an empire of such strangely hetero- 
 geneous elements, permeated with such forces of anarchy 
 and confusion. Christians in the West contemn, and 
 perhaps with justice, the servility, idolatry, and formal- 
 ism of the Greek priesthood. They may be right when 
 they tell us that the essence of Greek ritualism is only 
 a debased kind of paganism. But the Orthodox Church 
 is still a great political force ; and in the Byzantine 
 Empire it was a political force perhaps greater than 
 any other of which we have extant examples. 
 
 If, then, we have to answer the historical problem 
 how was it that the Roman Empire succeeded in pro- 
 longing its existence for a thousand years after its final 
 transfer to the Bosphorus, in the face of tremendous and, 
 it seemed, insurmountable difficulties? the answer is, 
 by a happy combination of three concurrent forces. 
 The first was the prestige of the name and traditions 
 of Rome. The second was the wonderful language of 
 Hellas, and the versatility and astuteness of the Greek 
 genius. The third was the organisation of an Orthodox 
 Church, which, on the one hand, had a hold over the 
 mass of the people hardly ever acquired even by the 
 
3/8 THE CITY IN HISTORY 
 
 Church Catholic, which, on the other hand, was willing 
 to become the faithful minister of an empire that it 
 consecrated and venerated as its supreme master on 
 earth. In one sense the empire was not strictly Roman, 
 not Greek, not Holy. But by a marvellous combina- 
 tion of Roman tradition, Greek genius, and Orthodox 
 sanctity it maintained itself erect for a thousand years. 
 
 II. The Political Problem 
 
 The modern political problem presented by Con- 
 stantinople is not in the least yet solved ; time has not 
 removed it ; and recent events have not made it easier. 
 Constantinople still remains, and ever must remain, one of 
 the most important ports in the whole world. In the 
 hands of a great military and naval power, it must always 
 be one of the most dominant capital cities in the whole 
 world. All that Cronstadt is in the Baltic, or Gibraltar 
 in the Western, or Toulon in the Northern, or Malta 
 in the Southern, Mediterranean all these together and 
 more Constantinople might be made by a first-class 
 power. Colonel F. V. Greene, of the United States 
 Army, in his Russian Campaigns in Turkey, 1877-78, 
 speaking of the first lines of Turkish defence, between 
 the Black Sea at Lake Derkos and the Sea of Marmora, 
 calls this position (nearly that of the wall of Anastasius 
 in the fifth century) ' a place of vastly greater strength 
 than Plevna.' He adds : ' No other capital in the 
 world possesses such a line of defence, and when 
 completed, armed, and garrisoned in sufficient strength 
 (about seventy-five thousand men), it may fairly be 
 deemed impregnable, except to a nation possessing a 
 navy capable of controlling the Black Sea and Sea of 
 Marmora, and a fleet of transports sufficient to land 
 
THE PROBLEM OF CONSTANTINOPLE 379 
 
 troops in rear of its flanks.' (Pp. 427, 428.) That is 
 to say, in the opinion of one of the first of living 
 authorities, who followed the Russian staff in the last 
 war, Constantinople is practically impregnable in the 
 hands of a first-class military and naval power. 
 
 But Constantinople is not merely impregnable on 
 the defensive side, in the hands of such a power, but 
 if adequately manned and equipped, it is equally strong 
 for offensive purposes ; and. with the Bosphorus and 
 the Hellespont duly fortified, it would command the 
 Black Sea, the Sea of Marmora, and the ^gean Sea. 
 Much more than this : it would practically dominate 
 Asia Minor ; for, as old Busbecq says, ' Constantinople 
 stands in Europe, but it faces Asia.' It faces Asia, 
 and it dominates Asia Minor ; and, if possessed by a 
 first-class military and naval power of ambitious and 
 aggressive spirit, the possession of Constantinople in- 
 volves the practical control of Asia Minor, of the entire 
 Levant, and, but for Cyprus and Malta, of North Africa 
 and the whole Syrian coast. 
 
 Nor is this all. In the hands of a first-class military 
 and naval power, Constantinople must dominate the 
 Balkan peninsula and the whole of Greece. With an 
 impregnable capital, and the powerful navy which the 
 wonderful marine opportunities of Constantinople render 
 an inevitable possession to any great power, the rival 
 races and petty kingdoms of the peninsula would all 
 alike become mere dependencies or provinces. Here, 
 then, we reach the full limit of the possible issue. 
 Turkey is now no longer a maritime power of any 
 account. Her magnificent soldiery forms no longer a 
 menace to any European power, however small ; and, 
 if it suffices to hold the lines of Constantinople on 
 the Balkan side (which is not absolutely certain), it 
 
380 THE CITY IN HISTORY 
 
 is liable at any moment to be paralysed by an enemy 
 on the flank who could command the Black Sea or 
 the Sea of Marmora. Of course, the Bosphorus has 
 lost its ancient importance as a defence ; for a northern 
 invader commanding the Black Sea could easily descend 
 on the heights above Pera, and with Pera in the hands 
 of an enemy, Stamboul is now indefensible. That is 
 to say, Constantinople is no longer impregnable, or 
 even defensible, without a first-class fleet. Therefore 
 neither Turkey, nor Bulgaria, nor Greece, nor any other 
 small power, could have any but a precarious hold on 
 it, in the absence of a very powerful fleet of some ally. 
 
 From these conditions the following consequences 
 result. Turkey can hold Constantinople as her capital 
 with absolute security against any minor power. She 
 could not hold it against Russia having a predominant 
 fleet in the Black Sea, unless she received by alliance 
 the support of a powerful navy. With the support of 
 a powerful fleet, and her own reconstituted army and 
 restored financial and administrative condition, she 
 might hold Constantinople indefinitely against all the 
 resources of Russia. It is perfectly plain that no minor 
 power, even if placed in Stamboul, could hold it except 
 by sufferance ; certainly neither Bulgaria, nor Greece, 
 nor Servia, perhaps hardly Austria, unless she enor- 
 mously developed her fleet, and transformed her entire 
 empire. Turkey, as planted at present on the Bos- 
 phorus, is not a menace to any other power. The 
 powers with which she is surrounded are intensely 
 jealous of each other ; and by race, religion, traditions, 
 and aspirations, incapable of permanent amalgamation. 
 
 From the national and religious side the problem 
 is most complex and menacing. Even in Constanti- 
 nople the Moslems are a minority of the population ; 
 
THE PROBLEM OF CONSTANTINOPLE 381 
 
 and still more decidedly so in the other European 
 provinces. But in most of the Asiatic provinces, 
 Moslems are a majority, and in almost all they are 
 enormously superior in effective strength to any other 
 single community. To put aside Syrians, Arabs, 
 Egyptians, Jews, and other non-Christian populations, 
 there are, within the more western parts of the Turkish 
 Empire, Bulgarians, Greeks, Albanians, various Sla- 
 vonian peoples, Armenians, and Levantine Catholics, 
 not so very unequally balanced in effective force and 
 national ambition ; all intensely averse to submit to 
 the control of any one amongst the rest, and unwilling 
 to combine with each other. Each watches the other 
 with jealousy, suspicion, antipathy, and insatiable desire 
 to domineer. 
 
 The habit of five centuries and the hope of ultimate 
 triumph lead all of them to submit, with continual out- 
 breaks and outcries, to the qualified rule of the Turk. 
 But place any one of this motley throng of nationalities 
 in the place of the Sultan, and a general confusion would 
 arise. The Greek would not accept the Bulgarian as 
 his master, nor the Bulgarian the Greek ; the Albanians 
 would submit to neither ; the Armenians would seize 
 the first moment of striking in for themselves ; and the 
 Italian and Levantine Catholics would certainly assert 
 their claims. No one of all those rival nationalities, 
 creeds, and populations could for a moment maintain 
 their ascendency. No one of them has the smallest 
 title either from tradition, numbers, or proved capacity, 
 to pretend to the sceptre of the Bosphorus and not 
 one of them could hold it for a day against Russia, if 
 she chose to take it. 
 
 Assume that Russia has succeeded Turkey in posses- 
 sion of Constantinople, the Bosphorus, and the Helles- 
 
382 Till CITY IX HISTORY 
 
 pont. What is the result? She would immediately 
 make her southern capital impregnable, as Colonel 
 Greene says, ' with a line of defence such as no other 
 capital in the world possesses.' She would make it 
 stronger than Cronstadt or Sebastopol, and place there 
 one of the most powerful arsenals in the world. With 
 a great navy in sole command of the Euxine, the Bos- 
 phorus, the Marmora, and the Hellespont, with a vast 
 expanse of inland waters within which she could be 
 neither invested nor approached for nothing would be 
 easier than to make the Hellespont absolutely impass- 
 able Russia would possess a marine base such as 
 nothing else in Europe presents, such as nothing in 
 European history records, except in the days of the 
 Basilian dynasty and the Ottoman Caliphs of the six- 
 teenth century. With such an unequalled naval base 
 she would certainly require and easily secure a further 
 marine arsenal in the Archipelago. It is of no conse- 
 quence whether this was found on the Greek or on the 
 Asiatic side. There are a score of suitable points. An 
 island or a port situated somewhere in the fiLgean Sea 
 between Besika Bay and the Cyclades would be a 
 necessary adjunct and an easy acquisition. With Russia 
 having the sole command of the seas that wash South- 
 Eastern Europe, dominating the whole south-eastern 
 seaboard from a chain of arsenals stretching from Sebas- 
 topol to the Greek Archipelago, the entire condition of 
 the Mediterranean would be transformed let us say at 
 once the entire condition of Europe would be trans- 
 formed. 
 
 Has the British public fully realised the enormous 
 change in the political conditions of the whole Levant 
 and of Europe involved in the installation of Russia on 
 the Bosphorus ? We are accustomed to treat the settle- 
 
THE PROBLEM OF CONSTANTINOPLE 383 
 
 ment of the Ottoman in Stamboul as a matter which is 
 no\v of very minor importance. Why so ? Because the 
 Turk is powerless for anything but precarious defence, 
 under the preponderant menace of Russia on the north, 
 whilst he is hemmed in by ambitious and restless neigh- 
 bours in his last ditch in the Balkan peninsula. He 
 cannot fortify the Bosphorus without Russian interfer- 
 ence ; he cannot maintain his government in Crete with- 
 out a roar of indignation from Greece. He is constantly 
 harried by Bulgarians, Servians, Albanians, Montene- 
 grins, and Epirots. He lives for ever on the defensive, 
 he menaces no one ; and no one is afraid of him in 
 Europe because he has nothing in Europe but a 
 shrunken province, and practically no fleet. 
 
 We are accustomed, again, to treat the position of 
 Russia in the Balkan peninsula as one of influence more 
 or less continuous, but as not practically affecting the 
 Eastern Mediterranean and its lands. Russia has not 
 yet effected any real footing on the peninsula. She 
 finds it occupied by Roumania, Bulgaria, Servia, Austria, 
 Turkey, and Greece. Over these Russia exercises an 
 intermittent influence, but never controls them all at the 
 same time ; and she often finds one or more of them in 
 direct opposition. Accordingly, we do not regard the 
 Muscovite as dominant in the Balkan peninsula, much 
 less in the Archipelago. But place Russia on the 
 wonderful throne of the Bosphorus, with the inevitable 
 addition of Adrianople and the Maritza Valley, at the 
 very least, in Southern Roumelia, and the whole situa- 
 tion is transformed. The possession of Constantinople 
 by Russia, with her enormous resources and grand navy, 
 means the control by Russia of the Bosphorus, the 
 Marmora, the Hellespont, and, at least, of South-Eastern 
 Roumelia. 
 
384 THE CITY IN HISTORY 
 
 Could it stop there? Would the absolute chief of an 
 army of two millions and a half, with the third great 
 navy of the world, fall into slumber in his new and 
 resplendent capital, rebuild the Seraglio, or amuse him- 
 self in Yildiz Kiosk ? He would immediately create the 
 second great navy of the world, and for all Mediterra- 
 nean purposes his navy would be at least the rival of the 
 first. How long would Roumania and Bulgaria remain 
 their own masters when they found themselves between 
 his countless legions on the Pruth and his great fleet in 
 the Golden Horn ? What would Servia say to the 
 change or Austria ? Would the Albanians be content ? 
 And what would become of the Musulmans in Rou- 
 melia ? The prospect opens at least five or six inter- 
 national imbroglios with knotty problems of race, 
 religion, patriotism, and political sympathies and anti- 
 pathies. Any one of these is enough to cause a Euro- 
 pean crisis and even an embittered war. 
 
 In the long run, though it might be a struggle pro- 
 longed for a century, Russia would in some form or 
 other command or control the entire peninsula from the 
 Danube to Cape Matapan ; not, perhaps, counting it all 
 strictly in Russian territory, but being dominant therein 
 as is Victoria in the Indian peninsula. The geographical 
 conditions of Constantinople are so extraordinary ; they 
 offer such boundless opportunities to a first-class military 
 and naval power ; they lie so curiously ready to promote 
 the ambition of Russia, that the advent of the Czar to 
 the capital of the Sultan would produce a change in 
 Europe greater than any witnessed in the nineteenth 
 century. The absolute monarch of a hundred millions, 
 with an army of two and a half millions, possessing sole 
 command of the Black Sea, Bosphorus, Marmora, and 
 Hellespont, together with the incomparable naval basis 
 
THE PROBLEM OF CONSTANTINOPLE 385 
 
 which is afforded by this chain of four inland seas, would 
 unquestionably be supreme master of the whole of 
 Eastern Europe, which would then extend under one 
 sceptre from the Arctic Ocean to the Greek Archipelago. 
 
 But this is only one-half of the political problem, and 
 perhaps the less difficult half. There is the Asiatic side 
 to the problem, as well as the European side. Place the 
 Czar in the Seraglio and what is to become of the 
 Padishah ? Is he to retire to Scutari in his barge, and 
 to restore the palace of Selim, which we know as hospital 
 and barracks ? Is he to withdraw to Brusa or Smyrna, 
 or retire at once to Aleppo or Damascus ? How long 
 will the Russian be content to watch across the sea the 
 minarets in Bithynia and the mountains of Anatolia, to 
 look upon Abydos from Sestos without a desire to pay 
 a visit to his secular rival ? Politicians talk with a light 
 heart of hastening the departure of the Moslem from 
 Europe. But what do they propose for him when he is 
 withdrawn into Asia? With the Czar at Kars, and under 
 Ararat, at Constantinople and Gallipoli, commanding 
 the whole northern coast of Asia Minor from Batum to 
 Besika Bay, with the Armenians raging on the East and 
 the Greeks and Levantine Christians on the West, the 
 Sultan will hardly rest more tranquilly in Brusa than 
 he does to-day in Yildiz Kiosk. Are the millions of 
 Musulmans in Asia Minor to be exterminated or driven 
 across the Euphrates ? What is to be the end of this 
 interminable Turkish problem, and is the twentieth 
 century to install a new crusade ? 
 
 All these things are, no doubt, very distant and 
 entirely uncertain. But they are possible enough, and 
 would give the statesmen of the future a series of insol- 
 uble problems. It would be needless to enlarge on the 
 endless complications they involve. They may serve to 
 
 2 B 
 
386 THE CITY IN HISTORY 
 
 convince us that there is no finality in this Turkish ques- 
 tion. The expulsion of the Turk from Europe leaves 
 the dilemma more acute than ever. The enthronement of 
 the Russian on the Bosphorus settles nothing, concludes 
 nothing, and can satisfy no one. It offers, on the con- 
 trary, a new set of difficulties and contests, more ominous 
 and bitter than those which have raged for a hundred 
 years since Catherine II. 
 
CHAPTER XIII 
 
 PARIS AS AN HISTORIC CITY 
 
 OF historic cities in Europe of the first rank we can 
 count but four : Rome, Constantinople, Paris, London. 
 For in the first rank of historic cities we can only place 
 those capitals which have been, continuously and over a 
 long succession of ages, the seats of national movements 
 dominating the history of Europe : cities which have 
 been conspicuous in mass, in central place, and in vast 
 extent of time. Rome first, Constantinople next, stand 
 far before all other European cities in fulfilling these 
 conditions : but after them come Paris and London. 
 Such fascinating cities as Athens, Florence, Venice, 
 Rouen, Cologne, Treves, Prague, or Oxford are all 
 either far inferior in size and national importance, or 
 else have known their epochs of glory only to die away 
 for ages into small and local pre-eminence. Of all great 
 capitals in the world, London has perhaps, during twelve 
 centuries, suffered the least from violent shocks, from 
 war and breaks in its history ; and it may be said to 
 retain the most complete and continuous monumental 
 record for that period. 
 
 In the modern world, Paris is the only capital which 
 can be placed beside London as an historic city of the 
 first rank. The modern transformation of Paris has 
 been even more destructive of the past than the modern 
 transformation of London, and, at the same time, it is 
 
388 THE CITY IN HISTORY 
 
 much more brilliant: so that what remains of the historic 
 city is much more completely screened and overpowered 
 in Paris than it is in London. Nor has Paris any ancient 
 monuments which appeal to the popular imagination, 
 with such direct voice as do our Abbey, and our great 
 Hall at Westminster, our Tower, our Temple Church, 
 Lambeth Palace, and the Guildhall. Yet withal it may 
 be said that, in a larger sense of the term, Paris is a city 
 of even richer historic memories than London itself: 
 richer, that is, to the thoughtful student of its history, 
 though certainly not to the incurious tourist. If we take 
 into account sites as well as extant monuments, if we 
 call to our aid topography as well as archaeology ; if we 
 follow up the early history of buildings which have been 
 replaced, or are now transformed or removed ; if we 
 study the local biography of Paris from the days of Julius 
 Caesar to the days of Jules GreVy and Sadi Carnot 
 especially, if we include in the history of Paris that of its 
 suburbs St. Denis, Vincennes, St. Cloud, St. Germain, 
 Versailles, then the history of Paris is even richer, more 
 dramatic, more continuous than that of London itself. 
 
 Paris is by at least a century older than London in 
 the historical record ; for it now has almost two thousand 
 years of continuous annals. Paris was a more important 
 Roman city than London. It has far more extensive 
 Roman remains. The history of its first thousand years, 
 from the first century to the eleventh, of its early foun- 
 dations, churches, palaces, and walls, is far more com- 
 plete and trustworthy than anything we know of London. 
 It did not suffer any such gap or blank in its history, 
 such as that which befell London, from the time of the 
 Romans until the settlement of the Saxons. The fathers 
 of men still living have seen at Paris, in its Bastille, at 
 St. Denis, in Notre Dame, and the other churches, in the 
 
PARIS AS AN HISTORIC CITY 389 
 
 Tuileries, in Versailles, and old Hotel de Ville, relics of 
 the past, records, works of art, tombs, and statues, before 
 which the great record of our Abbey and our Tower 
 can hardly hold their own. 
 
 The great era of destruction began little more than a 
 century ago : the great era of restoration little more than 
 half a century ago. Paris, too, has been the scene of 
 events more tremendous and more extraordinary than 
 any other city of the world, if we except Constantinople 
 and Rome. London never endured any very serious or 
 regular siege. Paris has endured a dozen famous sieges, 
 culminating in what is, perhaps, the biggest siege re- 
 corded in history. London has never known an autocrat 
 with a passion for building, has had but one great con- 
 flagration, and but one serious insurrection. Paris has 
 had in Louis XIV., and the first and second Empires of 
 the Napoleons, three of the most ambitious despots ever 
 known ; and in a hundred years has had four most 
 sanguinary and destructive revolutions. Battles, sieges, 
 massacres, conflagrations, civil wars, rebellions, revolu- 
 tions make up the history of Paris from the days of the 
 Caesars and the Franks to the days of the Terror and 
 the Commune. 
 
 All this makes the topographical history of Paris far 
 more copious and more stirring than the history of 
 London, and indeed of any other modern city what- 
 ever. And the history of Paris has been far better told 
 than the history of any other city. There is a perfect 
 library about the history of Paris, with a special Museum, 
 and a collection of 80,000 volumes and 70,000 engravings, 
 devoted to that one subject. The histories reach over 
 six centuries, from the work of Jean de Jandun, the 
 contemporary of Dante, who begins his work about Paris 
 by saying ' that it is more like Paradise than any other 
 
390 THE CITY IN HISTORY 
 
 spot on earth' (an opinion, by the way, said to be 
 shared by many Americans and some English) and 
 they go on to the splendid volumes by Hoffbauer, 
 Fournier, and others, called Paris a travers les Ages : a 
 book, I may say, only to be found in the British Museum 
 and a few public libraries. Till the appearance of Mr. 
 Loftie's History of London (2 vols. 1883), we had not a 
 single scholarly history of our great city. But for more 
 than two centuries there have been produced a long 
 series of works on the topography and monuments of 
 Paris. And we have now a splendid series of treatises 
 issued by the Municipal Council, the Histoire Generate 
 de Paris, begun in 1865. When I was on the London 
 County Council, I endeavoured to induce the Council to 
 undertake a similar work for London ; but I found that, 
 with an annual expenditure of some two millions, the 
 Municipality of London had no power to expend a 
 penny on such an object. 1 
 
 1 Amongst other valuable books of history and illustration are : 
 Androuet du Cerceau, Les plus excellent! Bastimcnts de France, 2 vols. fol. 
 Paris, 1576. 
 
 Israel Silvestre, Views in old Paris, fol. Paris, 1665. 
 
 Perelle, Les delices de Paris, fol. Paris, 1763. 
 
 Piganiol, Description de Paris. Paris, 1742. 
 
 Dulaure, Histoire de Paris, 10 vols. 8vo. Paris (2nd ed.), 1823, with 
 views and maps. 
 
 De Guilhermy, Itineraire archtologique de Paris, 1855. 
 
 Lacroix, Curiosites de la Ville de Paris. 
 
 Pernot, Le Vieux Paris, fol. 1838. 
 
 A. P. Martial, Ancien Paris, a series of 300 etchings, Paris, fol. 1866. 
 
 D. R. Rochette, Souvenirs du Vieux Paris. Paris, 1836, fol. 
 
 Destailleurs (Hippolyte), Recueil d' Estampes. Paris, fol. 1863, repro- 
 ductions. 
 
 C. Chastillon, Topographic Fran$aise, 1612. 
 
 J. B. Rigaud, Recueil Choisi, 1750. 
 
 P. G. Hamerton, Paris, Old and New, 410, 1885. 
 
 All>ert Lenoir, Statistique Monttmentale de Paris, 1861-1875. 
 
PARIS AS AN HISTORIC CITY 39! 
 
 With all this prodigious wealth of historic record 
 beneath our feet as we tread over old Paris, how little 
 do we think of any part of it, as we stroll about new 
 Paris of to-day. We lounge along the boulevards, the 
 quays and ' places,' with thoughts intent on galleries and 
 gardens, theatres and shops, thinking as little of the 
 past history of the ground we tread as a fly crawling 
 over a picture by Raphael thinks of high art. Hauss- 
 mann, and the galleries, the Boulevards, and the opera 
 smother up the story of Paris, much as a fair with its 
 booth, scaffoldings, and advertisements masks the old 
 buildings round some mediaeval market-place. Ceci 
 tuera cela, said Victor Hugo of the book and the 
 Cathedral. No ! it is not the book which has killed old 
 Paris. It is Haussmann and his imitators, the archi- 
 tectural destroyers, restorers, and aesthetic Huns and 
 Vandals. Not that we deny to Haussmannised Paris 
 some delightful visions, many brilliant, some even 
 beautiful effects. But to most foreign visitors, and per- 
 haps to most modern Parisians, Haussmann has buried 
 old Paris both actually and morally hiding it behind a 
 screen, disguising it with new imitation work, or dazzling 
 the eye till it loses all sense of beauty in the old work. 
 
 The effort to recall old Paris when we stand in new 
 Paris certainly imposes a strain on the imagination. 
 When we stand on some bright morning in early 
 summer in the Place de la Concorde whilst all is gaiety 
 and life, children playing in the gardens, the fountains 
 
 S. Sophia Beale, The Churches of Paris from Clovis to Charles X, 8vo, 
 1893- 
 
 The Publications of the Societe de Thistoire de Paris, annual volumes, 
 1874-1894. 
 
 For purely popular books there are, Old and New Paris, by Sutherland 
 Edwards, now publishing by Cassell and Co. in parts, 1893-94. 
 
 A. Hare, Paris 1887 ; and, lastly, there is a fair historical account in 
 Joanne's illustrated popular Guide to Paris. 
 
392 THE CITY IN HISTORY 
 
 sparkling in the sun, and long vistas of white stone glisten- 
 ing in the light, with towers, spires, terraces, and bridges 
 in long perspective, and the golden cross high over the 
 dome of the Invalides, it is not easy to recall the aspect 
 of the spot we stand on when it was soaked with the 
 blood of the victims of the guillotine from King and 
 Queen to Madame Roland and Charlotte Corday ; we 
 forget that every tower and terrace we look on has 
 resounded to the roar of cannon and the shouts of 
 battle, with fire and smoke, with all the forces of 
 destruction and all the passions of hell not once or 
 twice but repeatedly for a century ; nay, how the same 
 scenes of carnage and of battle have raged through 
 Revolution and Fronde, League and St. Bartholomew, 
 and English wars and feudal faction fights back to the 
 days of Counts of Paris, and Franks, Huns, Gauls, and 
 Romans. And after all these storms, the city still 
 smiles on us as a miracle of gaiety, brightness, industry, 
 and culture, keeping some scar, or remnant, or sign of 
 every tempest it has witnessed. 
 
 It has happened to us at times to stand on some 
 beautiful coast on one of those lovely days which 
 succeed a storm, when ripples dance along the blue and 
 waveless sea, whilst the glassy water gently laps the 
 pebbled beach, and yet but a few hours before we have 
 seen that same coast lashed into foam, whilst wild 
 billows swept into the abyss precious things and price- 
 less lives of men. So I often think Paris looks in its 
 brightness and calm a few short years after one of her 
 convulsions ; fulfilling her ancient motto fluctuat nee 
 mergitur. Her bark rides upon every billow and does 
 not sink. Fresh triumphs of industry and art and 
 knowledge follow upon her wildest storm. 
 
 It is the history, not the present aspect of Paris, that 
 
PARIS AS AN HISTORIC CITY 393 
 
 is my present subject. I can remember Paris before the 
 second empire began, before the new Boulevards, the 
 strategical avenues, the interminable strait lines and the 
 mechanical restorations of the last forty years ; I can 
 recall Paris in the days when it was for the most part a 
 labyrinth of narrow, short, and often winding streets, 
 with the sombre impasses, the irregular courts, and vistas 
 of gable, attic, cornice, and turret that Meryon loved so 
 well, and which Israel Silvestre has recorded with such 
 patient care, and here and there a Gothic fragment in 
 the simple state of natural decay and gradual incrusta- 
 tion. Since then I have watched for forty years the 
 process of demolition and of restoration the destruc- 
 tion, construction, reconstruction, on which such enor- 
 mous sums, so much energy and skill, have been 
 bestowed. I will try to avoid the dangerous field of 
 art, of archaeology, of criticism and taste, treading my 
 way warily per ignes suppositos cineri doloso. I will offer 
 no opinion on these high matters of aesthetic judgment. 
 Let every man and woman judge for himself and her- 
 self whether new Paris be more beautiful than old 
 Paris, if Haussmann had a finer genius than Pierre de 
 Montereau and Philibert Delorme, if symmetrical boule- 
 vards and spacious avenues are a nobler sight than 
 picturesque alleys how far old buildings in decay 
 should be ' restored,' and if it is good to sweep away 
 whole parishes, churches, halls, mansions, and streets by 
 the dozen, in order to make a barrack or a 'place.' 
 There is much to be said on both sides of the question : 
 but I shall hold my peace on these profound aesthetic 
 problems, for it is safer to interfere as arbiter in a dog- 
 fight than to venture as umpire into the battle of the 
 styles. My task is the plainer and humbler one of 
 topography and the historic record. And my historic 
 
394 THE CITY IN HISTORY 
 
 interests are impartial. I am seeking only to identify 
 all memorable events of the past with their true local 
 association. To my mind, the historic record covers all 
 memorable things, all conspicuous names in the long 
 evolution of the ages. 
 
 I have in Paris an old and learned friend who for 
 fifty years has lived in Paris, studied Paris, loved Paris, 
 as only a Parisian can love his own city. His habit 
 is to read every book he can meet with that relates to 
 the topography of Paris, and then he walks about and 
 verifies what he reads on the spot. I often stroll about 
 the city with my friend and listen to him as he pours 
 out volumes of topographic lore. We pass through the 
 modern screen of Haussmannic Paris : we leave the 
 boulevards and their roar, and in a moment we are 
 again in the old world of the eighteenth or seventeenth 
 century ; just as when we turn out from Victoria Street 
 into Dean's Yard and the Abbey Cloister. So in Paris 
 we pass swiftly beneath a portal and the roar ceases. 
 The modern streets, to which our tourists confine their 
 walks, form after all only a gigantic screen behind 
 which much of old Paris still remains untouched. 
 
 ' Here,' said my old friend to me but a few years 
 ago, 'in this quiet street, the Rue cT Argenteuil, with the 
 rickety cour d'honneur, the bit of greenery and the bust, 
 is the house where Corneille lived and died ; close by, 
 in the Rue St. Anne, is the house where Bossuet died.' 
 Both houses lay in streets between the Rue St. Honort 
 and the new Avenue de I' Opera : both have now dis- 
 appeared. ' Come,' said he, ' into St. Rock. Here is the 
 simple tomb of Corneille who lies beneath our feet ; a 
 medallion is all his monument ; a little further on is an 
 inscription to the memory of Bossuet.' And as we pass 
 down the steps of the church, ' Here, 1 he says, ' was the 
 
PARIS AS AN HISTORIC CITY 395 
 
 famous battle between Bonaparte, the young soldier of 
 the Convention, and the sections of Lepelletier, the 
 counter Revolution of 1/95.' It was Carlyle's famous 
 ' whiff of grapeshot/ which he oddly enough supposed 
 to have closed the Revolution. Carlyle declares that 
 the traces of the balls are visible on the facade of the 
 church : but they seem to have disappeared now. 
 
 ' And now,' he would say, ' come and see the fruit in 
 the Marche St. Honore. On that spot opposite stood 
 the Library of the Dominican order of monks called 
 Jacobins ; the Library was dedicated to the Dauphin, 
 on the day of his birth, 1638. That Dauphin, the son 
 of Louis XIII., born under the rule of Richelieu, was 
 Louis XIV. At the Revolution the Library was hired 
 by the political club called the " Friends of the Con- 
 stitution." But these constitutional friends ended in 
 friends of Robespierre and Marat ; and thus the 
 Library of the Dominican monks, dedicated in servile 
 terms to Louis XIV. under the auspices of Richelieu, has 
 given its name in all modern languages to sanguinary 
 revolution.' 
 
 And now let us make our way, still keeping behind 
 the screen of the new avenues, to the quaint old Place 
 des Victoires, where the gilt statue in the centre, once 
 dedicated viro immortali to the 'grand monarque' 
 has undergone in the last hundred years as many changes 
 as the successive governments of France, out of which 
 the 'great king' has at last returned to his original 
 place. And so we come to St. Eustache, that senigma 
 in the history of art, a Gothic Church built by Renas- 
 cence artists in a wonderful medley of two different 
 styles ; and we pass in to look at the grand tomb of 
 the great Colbert. 
 
 Thus we cross over to the vast Halles Centrales, and 
 
396 THE CITY IN HISTORY 
 
 thence to the delightful Marche aiix Innocents, with the 
 fountain of Pierre Lescot and Jean Goujon to my 
 mind, at least in its original form, the most perfect 
 work of the Renascence now it is much transformed, 
 but still in effect most lovely. For my part, I prefer 
 the second of the three shapes which the fountain 
 has received within the present century. In that old 
 March^ aux Innocents I loved on a bright summer day 
 to sit for hours, listening to the splash of the fountain 
 and the gay voices of the children at play. It used 
 to be a bit of old Paris : and worthy, with its colour, 
 warmth, and varied perspective, to rank with a market- 
 place in Verona or Genoa. Close by, in the small 
 street de la Ferronnerie, then much narrower, Henry IV. 
 was assassinated by Ravaillac ; and on the spot where 
 we stand was the grim burial-ground and charnel- 
 house of the Church of the Innocents. Quite close by, 
 across the new Rue de Rivoli, was the house of Coligny 
 where he was murdered in the St. Bartholomew. In 
 the Rue St. Denis is one of the houses in which Moliere 
 (Poquelin) was said to have been born. He certainly 
 died in No. 34 Rue de Richelieu, opposite the fountain 
 which bears his name. 
 
 Then we pass across to the old city, the original Lutetia, 
 the Paris of Julius Caesar, of Julian, of Clovis, and Hugh 
 Capet. There on the quay beside the apse of Notre 
 Dame we stop to mark the spot where stood the house 
 of Canon Fulbert where Abailard knew, taught, and 
 loved HeloTse, and then we wander on to what once 
 was Rue du Fouarre, now almost swamped in the new 
 Rue Monge, where stood the old school of Theology 
 and Arts. Dante calls the street vico degli strami ; and 
 he records Sigier, the famous doctor who taught there ; 
 and some have supposed that he actually lodged in this 
 
PARIS AS AN HISTORIC CITY 397 
 
 spot. Another suggestion (which has high authority) 
 is that from that spot he could watch the South Rose 
 Window in the transept of Notre Dame, which sug- 
 gested to him the idea of the Celestial Rose of Paradise. 
 Thus my old friend and I are wont to saunter on talk- 
 ing of the schools of Paris, which for several centuries 
 have played so vast a part in the history of France and 
 of Europe, and which during the twelfth and thirteenth 
 centuries were the main intellectual centre of the West. 
 And we look in at the Sorbonne to see the fine tomb 
 of Richelieu in his church, which has the earliest dome 
 ever built in Paris, or we stand for a moment before 
 the well-known house on the Quai Voltaire, where the 
 literary dictator of the eighteenth century died in the 
 plenitude of his fame. 
 
 Thus we stroll on to the Boulevard St. Germain, and 
 at the corner of the Rue Bonaparte we drop in at the 
 old church of St. Germain des Pres, to the historian one 
 of the most memorable in Europe, for its foundation 
 dates from thirteen centuries ago, and parts of what we 
 see are far older than any church in London. There, 
 with fragments of Merovingian building, we find the 
 tomb of the greatest of modern philosophers Rene 
 Descartes. And as we come into the quarter of the 
 Ecole de Medecine (a little below the square of the 
 Odeon, between it and the Boulevard St. Michel), 
 ' here,' says my friend, ' is the " terre sainte de la Re- 
 volution," and he takes off his hat as a mark of respect, 
 for he is a republican of the type of old Carnot, but 
 in no sense a Jacobin. Then we come to the Muse'e 
 Dupuytren, the surgical museum of Paris, formerly the 
 refectory of the convent of the Cordeliers friars, of the 
 Franciscan order, and in the revolution the Cordelier 
 club of Danton and Camille Desmoulins. Strange that 
 
398 THE CITY IN HISTORY 
 
 the garb designed in the thirteenth century by the 
 blessed St. Francis to express humility and love the 
 rough belt of cord should become in the eighteenth 
 century the synonym of passionate terrorism. A little 
 further off was the house where Danton lodged and 
 thus his statue is now placed beside it. My friend 
 knew the nephew of Danton, who remembered the great 
 tribune. And close by, I have had pointed out to me 
 the house where Charlotte Corday stabbed Marat in his 
 bath. ' There,' said my friend once, ' in the terrible 
 days of May, 1871, against that baker's shop, I saw as 
 he lay dead in his gore the body of poor Jules an 
 excellent soul but a flighty and for three days no one 
 dared to touch or remove it.' 
 
 Somewhat higher up the hill, just above the Sorbonne, 
 we came upon a dingy little inn in a back street. There 
 is a Hotel (then called St. Ouentin) where J. J. 
 Rousseau first stopped when he arrived in Paris, and 
 there he first saw his wife, Therese Levasseur, who was 
 a servant maid there ; the story is told well in the 
 Rousseau of Mr. John Morley. And we wander up 
 the hill to the old St. Etienne du Mont, that strange 
 potpourri of Renascence, Gothic, and classical bits ; and 
 there we search for the tombs of Racine and of Pascal, 
 the body and monument of Racine having been removed 
 from the old Port Royal, where he was originally laid, 
 to be placed here beside Pascal. 
 
 Pascal lived and died close by this St. Etienne du 
 Mont. I shall never forget the effect on my mind when 
 one day sauntering up the hill from the Luxembourg 
 garden to the observatory, I saw an old and dingy 
 building of the seventeenth century, now a women's 
 hospital. ' What is that ? ' I asked. ' That,' said my 
 friend,' ' is the Port Royal of Paris, a d6pendance of the 
 
PARIS AS AN HISTORIC CITY 399 
 
 central Port Royal des Champs, and it was spared when 
 the great seat of Jansenism was destroyed. What you 
 see is the house where Sceur Angelique and the Arnauds 
 removed for peace, which sheltered the Jansenists during 
 twenty-five years of their most brilliant time. There 
 Pascal met the Arnauds ; there often came also Racine 
 in his later years of theological mysticism.' It is the 
 only surviving monument of that wonderful movement 
 in France that we know as Jansenism. 
 
 That is the historic way of seeing Paris. But how 
 many thousands of our tourists believe they know 
 Paris as well as London, and have exhausted all its 
 sights, and hurry through Paris, and yet they could not 
 tell where the Convention had its hall, or how it came 
 there, or where the bones of king and queen and the 
 other victims of the guillotine were laid, and why they 
 were thrown in that spot, or where the guillotine stood : 
 nor have they seen the cells where Marie Antoinette and 
 Danton, Vergniaud and the Girondins passed their last 
 hours or could distinguish the parts of the Louvre, or 
 tell for whom the many L's and H's and M's are in- 
 scribed or where our Henry V. lived when he was 
 ruler of France after Azincourt, and where was the 
 Palace of St. Louis, or of Philip Augustus, or Clovis, 
 or the original Lutetia of the Parisii. 
 
 Let us try to group the record of Paris in historic 
 epochs and in their right chronological order. 
 
 It is easy to realise the Lutetia of the Romans, the 
 first Gaulish settlement. Loukhteith, its Celtic name, 
 is said to mean ' the stronghold in the morass,' not 
 ' mud-city,' as Carlyle calls it, nearly the same as 
 Llyn-dyn, or London, which means the Lake-town. 
 The island (or eyot as we say in the Thames), in the 
 Seine a little below the junction of the Marne, where 
 
400 THE CITY IN HISTORY 
 
 the Bievre flows into the Seine, formed an excellent 
 fastness. Caesar has given a vivid account of the siege 
 of Paris in 52 B.C., and from the top of the Pantlidon we 
 can stand and trace the campaign of Labienus, as told 
 by the mighty general of Rome. The historic record 
 of Paris thus begins 1946 years ago. It was a city of 
 some, but not of great importance in the Roman Empire, 
 its most famous incident being that it was the favourite 
 residence of the Emperor Julian in the middle of the 
 fourth century. In a well-known passage in his Miso- 
 pogon, he speaks of his dear Lutetia, of its soft and 
 delightful climate, and the richness of its vines. 
 
 There is something strangely suggestive in the 
 association of Paris with the brilliant, philosophical, 
 wrongheaded young Caesar, with his paradoxical ideals, 
 romantic adventures, and tragic end. 
 
 It is well known that the grand Roman remains 
 called Les Thermes, adjoining the Cluny Museum, 
 belonged to the palace of the Caesars ; the great hall 
 forming the frigidarium of the Baths, and the rest 
 of the foundations have been fairly made out. Other 
 Roman remains are the altar found under Notre Dame, 
 many altars and tombs, both Pagan and Christian, a 
 large collection of objects in the Carnavalet Museum, 
 some remains of city walls of the fourth century, the 
 famous inscription of the nautae or watermen's gild of 
 Paris, two aqueducts, that of Arcueil on the south near 
 Bicetre, and that of Chaillot near the Palais Royal, an 
 amphitheatre, east of the Pantheon near the R. Monge, 
 a second palace beneath the Conciergerie, several 
 cemeteries and tombs, in the R. Vivienne on the north, 
 and also in the south, a Roman camp, a factory of 
 pottery, a mass of antiquities at Monlmartre, the Mons 
 Martis, I think, not the Mons Martyrum. 
 
PARIS AS AN HISTORIC CITY 401 
 
 This forms a mass of Roman antiquities which 
 together raise Paris to the rank of importance amongst 
 the scanty remnants of ancient civilisation in Northern 
 Europe. In the Thermes we have the Roman Louvre, 
 in the altar of Jupiter the antitype of Notre Dame, in 
 the cemetery of the R. Vivienne the Roman Pere-la- 
 C/taise, in the foundations below the Palais de Justice, 
 the Roman Hotel de Ville, in the Parvis de Notre 
 Dame perhaps the Roman Forum, the predecessor of 
 the Place de Greve. 
 
 There is seldom to be met so striking a bit of city 
 topography as the long history of evolution in the Cite, 
 or island, of Paris. First, it was a group of palisaded 
 eyots in a broad river spreading out on both sides into 
 swamps the river stronghold of a tribe called by the 
 Romans Parisii, a word possibly connected with Bar 
 which is thought to signify a frontier (Bar-sur-Aube 
 etc.). Then this river stronghold is joined to the 
 mainland by two bridges not in a straight line but 
 at opposite ends of the island and both doubtless 
 defended ; it is next a Roman city, ultimately walled, 
 with its central temple, its municipality, its quays, and 
 some outlying buildings, the Imperial Palace, the 
 amphitheatre, cemeteries, camp, and the like, on the 
 mainland, both north and south : one bridge, now the 
 Pont au change, opening into the Place du Chdtelet ; the 
 smaller bridge, now Petit Pont, higher up the river 
 over the narrow arm, at the end of the R, St. Jacques. 
 
 This Roman city, mainly on the island, but with 
 annexes, north and south, on the mainland, according 
 to the legend of St. Genevieve, repels the assault of 
 Attila, is captured by Clovis at the end of the fifth 
 century, and is made his capital. During the early 
 monarchy, the island was the city, the home of the 
 
 2C 
 
402 THE CITY IN HISTORY 
 
 kings, the seat of the church, of government, and of 
 justice, crowded with narrow streets and churches, and 
 densely populated. Gradually as the walls of Paris 
 were extended in a series of circuits from the twelfth to 
 the eighteenth century, the island city was eased of its 
 close population, and at last in our own day was cleared 
 altogether by gigantic sweeps of destruction and recon- 
 struction. It once contained some 50,000 inhabitants, 
 at least fifty or sixty streets, and more than twenty 
 churches. To-day it has few private houses left, except 
 at each end. As we said, the Citt consists of Cathedral, 
 Palais de Justice, and Sainte Chapelle, Conciergerie and 
 Prisons, Prefecture of Police, Chamber of Commerce, a 
 huge hospital, a huge barrack, a flower market vast 
 ' places,' gardens, quays, and Morgue. This is almost all 
 that stands on the Paris of Julian, Clovis, and Hugh Capet. 
 It is a task full of historical teaching to trace the 
 successive circuits and the walls of the city as it 
 gradually grew. Each circuit represents an epoch in 
 the history of France. First comes the old Roman 
 and Gallo-Roman circuit the Citt or island with some 
 fortified post at the head of the North Bridge (PI. du 
 Chatelet) and at the South Bridge (R. St. Jacques) 
 extending on the South mainland as far as the TJtermes 
 with villas, theatres, cemeteries, and establishments out- 
 side the city circuit. The second circuit is that of Louis 
 the Stout, the great restorer of the monarchy ( 1 1 30), 
 who built the Grand CMtelet on the site of the Place du 
 Chdtelet, and the Petit ChAtelet on the Quai St. Michel 
 (left bank). The third circuit is that of the great king 
 Philip Augustus (1200), who built the Louvre, com- 
 pleted Notre Dame, and carried the walls North as far 
 as St. Eustache, South as far as the Pantheon, and 
 included the smaller island, so that the original Citt was 
 
PARIS AS AN HISTORIC CITY 403 
 
 now but a sixth of the city. Next comes the fourth 
 circuit, raised by Etienne Marcel in the middle of the 
 fourteenth century, just after Poitiers during the great 
 English War, who is duly commemorated by the fine 
 equestrian statue beside the Hotel du Ville. Marcel 
 laid the foundations of the Bastille, and repaired and 
 strengthened rather than extended the circuit of Philip 
 Augustus ; and then the whole work was completed by 
 Charles V. in the second half of the fourteenth century. 
 The fifth great circuit is that of Richelieu under Louis 
 XIII. who carried the city walls Northwards as far as 
 the existing inner Boulevards, and the R. Richelieu and 
 its quarter is one of its additions ; and Southwards it 
 inclosed the whole district of the Luxembourg and its 
 gardens to the Jardin des Plantes. The sixth great 
 change came in the reign of Louis XIV. who conceiving 
 himself invincible in France, if not in Europe, found 
 fortifications in Paris needless and barbarous. Accord- 
 ingly in his reign the old walls of Henry IV. and 
 Richelieu were razed, and the Boulevards that we know 
 were constructed as spacious avenues. On the site of the 
 ancient Tour de Nesle, the Institute and the College 
 Mazarin were built ; the Louvre was completed and 
 transformed into an Italian palace ; the Tuileries were 
 continued until they joined the Louvre ; the Invalides 
 and other great works were continued, and finally Paris 
 received its character of an open modern city of Palla- 
 dian architecture. The seventh great change was in 
 the reign of Louis XVI. just before the Revolution, when 
 for purely fiscal purposes the octroi barrier was carried 
 forward to inclose vast districts not before within the 
 walls. This was adopted by the Revolution and com- 
 .pleted by Napoleon. The eighth and final circuit was 
 that of L. Philippe in 1840, the fortifications which held 
 
404 THE CITY IN HISTORY 
 
 the German army at bay for four months which it is 
 now proposed to destroy for a military circuit even more 
 vast. The story of the successive circuits of Paris is the 
 history of France in its critical epochs. 
 
 After the political and military history of the city 
 comes the history of its religious foundations, the 
 Churches, Abbeys, and confraternities. No one can 
 suppose, till he has gone into it, the enormous number 
 of these, their strange antiquity, their rich and stirring 
 history. The fragments of these abbeys and churches 
 that we see to-day are the scanty remnants of vast 
 edifices and a dense population scattered and gone 
 just as a column or an arch at Rome survives to tell us 
 of the mighty city of the Caesars with its millions. The 
 Revolution, the Nineteenth Century, the Napoleons, 
 Haussmann, and the Municipal Council, have swept 
 away the old churches and convents of Paris by hun- 
 dreds and thousands. The immense clearances in the 
 Island Cite*, those between and around the Louvre and 
 the Tuileries, the new Boulevards and broad Avenues, 
 have destroyed scores and scores. The new Hotel Dieu 
 and the ' places ' in front of and round Notre Dame, the 
 Barrack of the Guard and the Tribunal de Commerce 
 and Prefecture of Police have between them demolished 
 more than twenty entire streets and at least twenty 
 churches, chapels, oratories, and religious edifices. The 
 names of churches and foundations destroyed survive in 
 the countless St Jacques and St. Pierres, the Capucins, 
 Jacobins, Mathurins, and so forth, that we find in the 
 streets and passages. All those who are seriously 
 interested in the ecclesiastical antiquities of old Paris 
 should study the very excellent guide just published 
 The CkurcJies of Paris, from Clovis to Charles X. y by S. 
 Sophia Beale, with illustrations by the author (London, 
 
PARIS AS AN HISTORIC CITY 405 
 
 1893). It collects, in a useful and interesting manner, 
 a mass of information as to the old churches of 
 Paris. 
 
 We forget, in their new casing, the antiquity of those 
 which remain. The Madeleine which we stare at as a 
 bran-new Greek Temple is as old as the thirteenth 
 century in foundation. It is contemporary with St. 
 Louis, and was in origin the chapel of the country 
 palace of the Archbishop of Paris exactly answering to 
 Lambeth Palace. So too the Pantheon which English- 
 men are too wont to look on as an imitation of St. Paul's, 
 and a mere piece of eighteenth century classicism is 
 one of the oldest and most interesting monuments in 
 Christendom. The church of Saint Genevieve, the 
 patron saint of Paris, who is said to have roused the 
 citizens to resist Attila the Hun, was founded to contain 
 her tomb in 508 by Clovis and Clotilda, the first Chris- 
 tian King and Queen of the Franks. Clovis and 
 Clotilda and many of their race were there buried, 
 beside the Jeanne d'Arc of the fifth century. A vast 
 abbey rose there ; its name was frequently changed. 
 The tombs and the relics were transferred at times to 
 St. Etienne du Mont, with which it is closely associated. 
 The name, the exact spot, the building, have been 
 constantly altered. The church that we see, which is 
 little more than a hundred years old, has been three 
 times a church, and three times converted into a secular 
 monument which it is to-day. It is the older Westminster 
 Abbey of Paris, for it goes back to times before Arthur, 
 and to a century before the coming of the monks 
 amongst the Saxons. The church which fourteen 
 centuries ago was dedicated to the first champions of 
 Northern Christianity, has been the burying-place of 
 Mirabeau, Voltaire, Rousseau, and Marat, and has now 
 
406 THE CITY IN HISTORY 
 
 again been made a secular monument in order to hold 
 the ashes of Victor Hugo. 
 
 ' St. Germain ' means to an English ear aristocratic, 
 magnificent, exclusive. But historically, St. Germain is 
 the abbey founded by Childebert, the son of Clovis in 
 542, half a century before Augustine came to Canter- 
 bury. Its church was the burying-place of many kings 
 of the first dynasty. The church that we see in the 
 Boulevard St. Germain is of the eleventh and twelfth 
 centuries ; but it is said to contain some fragments of 
 carving, capitals, and columns in the apse from the 
 church of Childebert. The ancient, but probably not 
 the original, tombs of the Merwings have been removed 
 to St. Denis and to the Museums. Hugh Capet, the 
 founder of the third dynasty, was Abbot of St. Germain. 
 It was one of the greatest foundations in Christendom. 
 We may read in the Histoire GMrale a full account of 
 it, with many illustrations at different times. It was one 
 of the greatest centres of Benedictine learning. Mabil- 
 lon, Monfaucon laboured there. They lie in the church 
 with Descartes and Boileau. 
 
 TheAbbaye, the prison of the Revolution, was part 
 of the monastery, and was only removed in the third 
 empire in my own memory. The famous Prt aux dercs, 
 renowned in romance and memoir, in the drama and in 
 art, where the gallants of the Renascence fought their 
 duels, was the riverside meadow of the learned monks. 
 What a world it is ! Here is a church, the Westminster 
 Abbey of the first Frank kings at a date when the 
 Britons were fighting the heathen Saxons inch by inch 
 the home for twelve centuries of a mighty order and 
 the central seat of their learning the abbey of the 
 mitred sovereign who gave his name to the dynasty of 
 France, the home of modern French learning, the 
 
PARIS AS AN HISTORIC CITY 407 
 
 scene of the duels of Henri II. and the massacres of 
 September now a poor maimed and restored fragment 
 of Romanesque architecture, drowned in the torrential 
 magnificence of a Napoleonic Boulevard, and giving 
 its ancient name to the luxurious retreat of impotent 
 bigotry. 
 
 St. Denis is the true Westminster Abbey of Paris, 
 the burying-place of so many kings since Dagobert. 
 It commemorates Dionysius, a Christian martyr of the 
 third century in the Decian persecution, called the first 
 bishop of Paris. Dagobert, in the seventh century, 
 built here a great basilica ; but in the twelfth century 
 Suger made it one of the great cradles of pointed archi- 
 tecture. If we could see St. Denis as it existed down 
 to the Revolution with all its tombs, its monuments, 
 and its treasures intact, our own Abbey could hardly 
 compare with it in historical interest. Accustomed to 
 the hallowed gloom of our own Abbey, we shudder at 
 the new, scraped, gilt revivalism of St. Denis to-day. 
 But though its treasures are scattered, and the bones 
 torn from its desecrated graves, and the old glass is 
 destroyed with the tombs, statues, carvings, and wood 
 work, though the Viollet-le-Ducs have had their will 
 upon the old church yet the historical mind must 
 recognise, when it has recovered its temper, that the 
 church of the great Abbot Suger still presents to us a 
 type with which few buildings of the Middle Ages can 
 vie in historical memories. 
 
 He who will follow up the histories of these Abbeys, 
 of Ste. Genevieve, of St. Germain, St. Dents, St. 
 Victor, the foundation of William of Champeaux, of 
 the other St. Germain, opposite the Louvre, and St. 
 Jacques de la Boucherie who will study the history of 
 the schools of Paris, so famous from the eleventh to the 
 
408 THE CITY IN HISTORY 
 
 fourteenth centuries and the growth of the University, 
 incorporated by St. Louis in the thirteenth century- 
 will come to see how completely, during the Middle 
 Ages, Paris was the intellectual centre of Catholicism, 
 if Rome was its centre of government. And he who 
 will watch all that goes on to-day in the quarter 
 between Notre Dame and the Invalides will understand 
 how deep are the roots of this organised Catholicism 
 still in spite of Voltaire, Rousseau, Revolution, and 
 Commune. 
 
 We may still see in Paris three typical masterpieces 
 of Gothic art, each one recording a great chief in a 
 central epoch. The first is the Abbey of St. Denis, 
 built in 1140 by Suger, the friend and fellow-worker 
 of St. Bernard, the great minister of Louis the Stout. 
 The next is the Cathedral of Notre Dame, practically 
 completed about sixty years later in the reign of Philip 
 Augustus. The third is the Sainte Chapelle, built in 
 1 245 by his grandson, Saint Louis. Within the space 
 of this one hundred years, from 1140 to 1245, the 
 pointed style in France arose, flourished, and reached 
 perfection. These three buildings are associated with 
 the three great kings of French Feudalism. St. Denis 
 is perhaps the earliest complete example of the pointed 
 style : it is earlier than our Salisbury by a hundred 
 years. As the Westminster Abbey of France, as the 
 type of the first pointed style in its central home, St. 
 Denis must be reckoned, at least by the historian, as 
 the cradle of pointed architecture, even more truly than 
 the dome of St. Peter's at Rome is the cradle of the 
 domed architecture of the Renascence. 
 
 Notre Dame, to the historian if not to the artist, is the 
 typical, central, Gothic Cathedral. It is almost, if not 
 absolutely, the earliest of the great pointed Cathedrals 
 
PARIS AS AN HISTORIC CITY 409 
 
 in their maturity. Its noble fagade is altogether the 
 grandest, most majestic, most permanently satisfying 
 of all the great creations of the pointed style at least 
 if, in the mind's eye, we conceive it with all its carving 
 and statues perfect in their original form, and perhaps 
 with its towers carried some hundred feet higher by 
 spires in some such way as Viollet-le-Duc conceived. 
 If there be pointed Cathedrals which surpass Notre 
 Dame in mass, richness, and beauty, and there can be 
 but three others, the historical importance of Notre 
 Dame stands pre-eminent, as the work of the French 
 monarchy at its highest point, as the cathedral of their 
 capital, the intellectual centre of Catholicism in the 
 thirteenth century the high water-mark of Western 
 Christendom. He who would understand the Middle 
 Ages should make a minute study of one of these 
 mighty works, with the admirable monographs of the 
 French archaeologists. Notre Dame, with its triple 
 portals, and the gallery of the kings, its carvings and 
 statues, the exquisite screen within round the choir, 
 its majestic facade and noble towers, had no superior 
 in Gothic Art, whilst it failed least in stability and 
 simplicity, the one side where Gothic art is usually 
 prone to err. It is a happiness to be able to remember 
 Notre Dame before the restoration began : when it was 
 surrounded by a labyrinth of picturesque streets and 
 buildings, and the grey facade rose up in proud pathos 
 from out the gables in crumbling and battered decay. 
 
 The Cathedral has never before been seen as we see 
 it to-day : for it now stands alone in vast open spaces, 
 detached from the houses, churches, chapels, and palaces 
 which were piled up round it. To-day it looks too 
 much like a huge model, or disinterred ruin, set in an 
 open-air museum. It is no longer the central cathedral 
 
410 THE CITY IN HISTORY 
 
 of Catholic France : it is a sight, a relic, a national 
 monument, an ecclesiastical Palais des Thermes : from 
 the restored fragments of which the city, and all that 
 can recall its builders has been unsparingly swept into 
 oblivion. 
 
 Thirdly, the Sainte Chapelle, the work of St. Louis, 
 in the middle of the thirteenth century, is accepted as 
 the type of pointed art in its zenith. It may be called 
 the only quite perfect work of Gothic art, mainly because 
 its small scale necessarily frees it from the besetting 
 weaknesses of Gothic art when it essays the grandest 
 problems of the builders' science. Nor need the his- 
 torian of art regret the restoration so fiercely as does 
 the artist. When Viollet-le-Duc took it in hand, it 
 was a mutilated ruin, out of which the ordinary visitor 
 could not reconstruct its original glow. The paint may 
 be overdone ; the colours are not always harmonious ; 
 the new glass is not equal to the old. But its restora- 
 tion by the most learned of modern antiquarians enables 
 the unlearned to judge the effect of Gothic architecture 
 in its glory, and to understand the pregnant remark of 
 Mr. Fergusson that Gothic architecture might well be 
 named the painted-glass style of building. To the 
 historian, this Chapel, the domestic oratory of St. Louis, 
 the purest hero of the Middle Ages, the church of the 
 palace of the French kings in their noblest era, the 
 entrancing masterpiece of pointed architecture, must 
 remain as one of the typical buildings in the world. 
 
 The mass of buildings, of which the Sainte Chapelle 
 is part, exactly answers to our palace of Westminster ; 
 and our palace alone can compare with it as a relic of 
 the Feudal monarchy. The Conciergerie prison, the 
 adjacent hall, and the towers which we see along the 
 Quai de PHorloge, correspond with the remains of the 
 
PARIS AS AN HISTORIC CITY 4! I 
 
 old palace of Westminster, which was finally destroyed 
 when the Houses of Parliament were built. The Sainte. 
 Chapelle answers to St. Stephen's, of which the ex- 
 quisite crypt alone survived the fire of 1834. West- 
 minster Hall answers to the Salle des Pas Perdus, 
 which took the place of the great Hall of St. Louis. 
 The Palais de Justice answers to the Law Courts of 
 Westminster which were in use till removed in 1882. 
 The Tour de VHorloge exactly repeats our Clock Tower. 
 Now the French palace is in foundation far more ancient 
 than the English ; more of its ancient parts remain ; 
 and its historical record is longer, and almost more 
 crowded with incident, than our own. The French 
 palace is the successor of the Municipal palace of 
 Roman Lutetia ; and traces of this building have been 
 preserved. It was certainly the Parisian palace of 
 Clovis and his dynasty, of Charlemagne and his dynasty, 
 and it was the capital seat of the Counts of Paris, when 
 they became kings of France. It only ceased to be a 
 royal residence in the age of Francis I. and Henri II. 
 It was thus for a thousand years the home of the 
 monarchs of the Seine valley. It is significant of 
 French history that, whereas in England Parliament 
 has finally ousted both Monarchy and Justice from the 
 Palace of Westminster and installed itself in the royal 
 abode and even taken its name, in Paris it is Justice 
 and Police which have appropriated the Palace in the 
 island Cite and have long ago ousted both Parliament 
 and Monarchy. 
 
 In England we have nothing of the old palace left 
 but the crypt of St. Stephen's, some cloisters, a few 
 chambers, and the great Hall. In France they have 
 rebuilt their old Hall ; but they have their Chapel almost 
 entire. And whereas in Westminster we have the old 
 
4T2 THE CITY IN HISTORY 
 
 palace now rebuilt, and absorbed in Barry's modern 
 perpendicular, in Paris they have still the shell of the 
 old towers and gateway, and some fine work of the age 
 of St. Louis within the Conciergerie building. There is 
 some noble masonry in what is called the Kitchen of 
 St. Louis, evidently the substructure of his palace, and 
 many other parts of his work within the precincts of the 
 prison. Few prisons have a record more stirring. Here, 
 during the Revolution, all the chief prisoners passed 
 their last hours. We may still see the cell where Marie 
 Antoinette uttered her last prayers, where Robespierre 
 lay in agony, and Danton and Vergniaud thundered out 
 their latest perorations, and they show you, too, the 
 traditional scene of the mythical last supper of the 
 Girondins, which figures so melodramatically in the 
 famous romance of Lamartine. 
 
 This Conciergerie, with the hall of the Cordelier Club, 
 the Musee Dupuytren, is the only extant building in 
 Paris, which is closely associated with great scenes of 
 the Revolution. The Bastille is gone, the Tuileries, the 
 Hotel de Ville, the Hall of the Convention in the R. de 
 Rivoli, the Jacobin Club, the prisons, the Temple, Abbaye, 
 La Force, Chatelet, and the rest. So, too, the tombs of 
 Mirabeau, Voltaire, Rousseau, Marat, Louis XVI., and 
 Marie Antoinette no longer hold their bones, and ceno- 
 taphs record the spot where they were laid. Etiain periere 
 sepulchra. New Haussmannic streets cover the soil, 
 wherein the ashes of Danton and Vergniaud, Charlotte 
 Corday and Madame Roland, moulder unknown. Of 
 the Revolution no buildings remain, but only sites ; and 
 the only edifices, which survive to speak to us of the 
 September massacres and the Terror are the dining- 
 hall of the followers of St. Francis and the palace of St. 
 Louis, the knight and crusader. 
 
PARIS AS AN HISTORIC CITY 413 
 
 In spite of destruction and reconstruction, the history 
 of the great edifices of old Paris is wonderfully instruc- 
 tive, even that of the buildings which have wholly 
 disappeared. But they must be studied in the learned 
 and elaborate works, such as those of Dulaure, Piganiol, 
 Viollet-le-Duc, Lacroix, Lenoir, Guilhermy, Fournier, 
 Hoffbauer, Fergusson, Hamerton, in the Histoire Gene- 
 rale, and in Paris a travers les Ages, in the splendid 
 series of etchings and engravings of old Paris, which may 
 be found in the library of the Carnavalet Museum, and 
 in our British Museum. Bastille, Louvre, Hotel de Ville, 
 Tuileries, Luxembourg, the Cite, St. Germain, Ste. Gene- 
 vieve, would each require an essay, or a volume with 
 maps and plans and restorations, to make them intelli- 
 gible. But those who seek to know what Paris has been 
 in the long succession of ages may still revive it in their 
 minds, with the aid of the mass of literature that is 
 open to them, and if they will study not only the extant 
 churches, but such works of domestic art as the Hotel 
 Cluny, and Hotel de Sens, Hotel la Valette, the house in 
 the Cours la Reine, and the Hotel Carnavalet. 
 
 A careful study of Silvestre, Ducerceau, and Meryon 
 will give some idea of old Paris, with its vast walls, 
 gates, towers, castles, its crowded churches, its immense 
 abbeys, its narrow winding streets, its fetid cemeteries, 
 gloomy courts and impasses, its filthy lanes, and its 
 bridges loaded with houses. We may linger about the 
 old remnants of churches, the flotsam and jetsam of 
 the Mediaeval Catholicism, such bits as the tower of St. 
 Jacques, and the portals of the two St. Germains, and 
 of St. Nicolas des Champs, the old churches of St. Julien 
 le Pauvre, and St. Martin des Champs, the church of 
 St. Severin, and the chapel of the Chateau de Vincennes. 
 Then let us study the tombs in St. Germain des Pres, of 
 
414 THE CITY IN HISTORY 
 
 St. Denis, and St. tienne du Mont : and then we may 
 go on to the tomb that all Englishmen visit the tomb 
 which I always feel to be the grandest of all sepulchral 
 conceptions (to be set beside the tomb of Theodoric at 
 Ravenna, and the tomb of Cecilia Metella on the Appian 
 way), almost the one work of modern art, which is at 
 once colossal, noble, and pathetic I mean the mighty 
 vault beneath the dome of the Invalides> where the 
 greatest soldier and the womt ruler of our age sleeps at 
 last in peace, guarded by the veterans of France. 
 
 We need not deny to modern Paris the gift of charm ; 
 we may admit that her museums and libraries, her col- 
 lections, and her treasures are inexhaustible to the fit 
 student ; but far more impressive is the history of this 
 memorable city, with its vast range of time, of variety, 
 of association with its record of the dawn of Western 
 civilisation, of Catholicism and Feudalism, of the Renas- 
 cence, and the modern world, of the Revolution of the 
 last century, and the Imperialism of this century with 
 its dust enriched with the bones of those who in things 
 of the soul and in things of war, in the love of beauty, 
 and .in the passion for new life, have dared and done 
 memorable deeds, from the days of Genevieve and 
 Clotilda, the Louis and the Henrys, down to the two 
 Napoleons, and the three Republics. 
 
CHAPTER XIV 
 
 THE TRANSFORMATION OF PARIS 1 
 
 No city of the Old World has undergone changes so 
 enormous within the last hundred years as the city of 
 Paris. To contrast its condition down to the year 1789 
 with its condition to-day is to measure the civilisation 
 of old Europe by the civilisation of the Europe we see. 
 Paris in 1789 was a perfect type of the feudal, monarchic, 
 obsolete system of privilege; the Paris of 1889 is the 
 most republican, the most modern, the most symmetrical 
 and complete of the cities of Europe. The hundred 
 years have witnessed there a reorganisation of social life 
 more rapid and profound than any other which Europe 
 has known. 
 
 If the millions who throng the boulevards, and the 
 Places, the Champ de Mars, and the Esplanade of the 
 Invalides could but roll back the veil of time, could 
 see that city as it stood in the closing years of the 
 eighteenth century, they would behold a city which in 
 all essential things was a fortress of the Middle Ages, 
 adorned with some vast palaces and churches of the 
 Grand Monarque a city, in the main, such as Rome 
 was until the Italian kingdom had entered and trans- 
 formed it. They would see the life of the seventeenth 
 century, in most material points, unaltered nay, traces 
 
 1 The North American Review, Sept. 1889, vol. cxlix. 
 
416 THE CITY IN HISTORY 
 
 of the life of the sixteenth, the fifteenth, and even of 
 the fourteenth century. 
 
 The vast, gloomy, and decayed remains of the old 
 city still cumbered the lines of so many gay and open 
 boulevards. Where there are now some twenty bridges 
 across the Seine, there were then but six or seven ; 
 and on some of these could still be seen the houses and 
 buildings which made the bridges of old Europe crowded 
 alleys. There were few open spaces at all except in 
 front of the Hotel de Ville and at the end of the garden 
 of the Tuileries. The old city of Richelieu and Mazarin 
 the city (to speak roughly) that lay between the 
 PantJieon and the gate of St. Denis, and between the 
 Tuileries and the Bastille existed still, and much in 
 the condition in which Richelieu and Mazarin had 
 known it, crowded with narrow, crooked, picturesque 
 streets, unpaved, uncleaned, ill-lighted, with Gothic 
 portals and towers here and there ; crowded round with 
 houses, halls, and mansions. The island, or old Cite, in 
 particular, was a dense tangle of streets, churches, and 
 religious edifices. From north to south there ran several 
 ancient and a few recent thoroughfares ; but from east 
 to west he who wished to pass from the Bastille to the 
 Louvre would make his way through a net-work of 
 tortuous lanes, where the direct route was continually 
 interrupted by huge palaces, mediaeval fortresses, or 
 conventual enclosures. 
 
 Four great castles of feudal times still frowned over 
 the city and bore the banner of the Old Monarchy the 
 Chdtelet, the Bastille, the Temple, and the Conciergerie. 
 Of these not a vestige remains except the restored 
 simulacrum of the last. In the midst of this jumble of 
 close and mediaeval streets there were scattered many 
 sumptuous Palladian palaces of royal, princely, or ducal 
 
THE TRANSFORMATION OF PARIS 417 
 
 founders, with fore-courts, colonnades, terraces, and 
 enclosed gardens, stretching over acres, and dominating 
 entire quarters in defiant, lavish, insolent pride. Here 
 and there still towered above the modern streets a huge 
 remnant of some castle of the fourteenth or fifteenth 
 century, such as we may see to this day in Florence, 
 Verona, or Rome. 
 
 And, besides these castles and palaces, the closely- 
 packed streets were even more thickly strewn with 
 churches, convents, and abbeys. Notre Dame, St. 
 Eustache, St. Germain I'Auxerrois, the Hotel de Ville, 
 the Louvre, the Palais Royal, and the Palais de Jiistice 
 were hemmed in with a labyrinth of old and entangled 
 streets. Buildings, alleys, and even churches separated 
 the Louvre from the Ttiileries, Notre Dame from the 
 Palais de Justice, cut off Notre Dame and the Hfael 
 de Ville from the river, stood between Palais Royal 
 and Louvre, and between the Pantheon and the garden 
 of the Luxembourg. Where the graceful fountain of 
 Victory now brightens one of the gayest spots in 
 Paris, the Place du Ckdtelet, bordered with two immense 
 theatres, colonnades, gardens, and trees, there were 
 then the decayed remnant of the great royal fortress 
 and a network of crooked and unsightly lanes. 
 
 Besides the churches, chapels, hospitals, palaces, and 
 castles, there also stood within the circuit of the city 
 more than two hundred religious houses for both sexes ; 
 abbeys, convents, nunneries, and fraternities ; peopled 
 with thousands of men and women, leading separate 
 lives, under different vows, owning obedience to far- 
 distant superiors, and possessing various immunities. 
 The vast areas occupied by the abbeys of St. Germain, 
 of St. Martin, of St. Victor, by the houses of the 
 Bernardins, and the Celestins, and the Quinze- Vingts, 
 
 2D 
 
41 8 THE CITY IN HISTORY 
 
 were a sensible portion of the whole area within the 
 walls. From the then new Place Louis XV. to the 
 Bastille, from the Luxembourg garden to the Porte St. 
 Denis, Paris was a great fortified city of the Middle 
 Ages, crammed with thousands of sacred buildings, 
 Catholic and feudal institutions, and thickly studded 
 with Italian palaces, colleges, hospitals, and offices in 
 the proud and lavish style of Louis XIV. Poverty, 
 squalor, uncleanness, and vice jostled the magnificence 
 of Princes and the mouldering creations of the ages of 
 Faith. 
 
 The difference between the Paris of 1789 and the 
 Paris of 1889 is enormous ; but it is very far from true 
 that the whole difference is gain. Much has been 
 gained in convenience, health, brilliance : much has 
 been lost in beauty, variety, and historical tradition. 
 To the uncultured votary of amusement the whole of 
 the change represents progress : to the artist, the 
 antiquarian, and the sentimentalist it represents havoc, 
 waste, and bad taste. It would be well if the tens of 
 thousands who delight in the boulevards, gardens, and 
 sunny bridges of to-day would now and then cast a 
 thought upon the priceless works of art, the historical 
 remains, and the picturesque charm which the new 
 Paris has swept away. Churches and towers, encrusted 
 sculptures of the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth 
 centuries, rare, inimitable, irrecoverable wonders of skill 
 and feeling, have been swallowed up wholesale in the 
 modern 'improvements.' Sixteen churches have dis- 
 appeared from the Citi alone : four of them and ten 
 streets have been carted away to make the site of a 
 single hospital. Where is the abbey of St. Victor, of 
 St. Germain, of Ste. Genevieve, and the Cour des Comptes, 
 and the churches of. St. Andre", St. Jacques de la 
 
THE TRANSFORMATION OF PARIS 419 
 
 Boucheric, Saints Innocents, St. Jean, and St. Fault 
 Where are the turrets of Saint Louis, and Etienne 
 Marcel, and Philip the Fair? Where are the quaint 
 passages and fantastic gables preserved for us only 
 by Silvestre, Perelle, Meryon, Gavarni, Martial, and 
 Gustave Dore ? 
 
 It would be idle to regret the inevitable more 
 especially when the inevitable means the rebuilding 
 and laying-out of the most brilliant, most spacious, 
 most symmetrical of modern cities. For us it is enough 
 that, down to the Revolution of 1789, Paris was an 
 intensely old-world city ; and that to-day it is the type 
 of the modern city. In the eighteenth century London 
 had lost every trace of the fortress, of the feudal city, 
 of subservience to king, aristocracy, or church. It had 
 neither ramparts, nor traces of rampart, nor convents, 
 nor proud palaces, nor royal castles in its midst. The 
 Reformation had swept away the monasteries, the 
 aristocracy were more than half bourgeois (at least 
 whilst they lived in London), and the King was a 
 popular country squire, who, in things essential, was 
 governed by a Liberal Parliament. The Tower was a 
 popular show ; the Mayor and Corporation were a 
 powerful, free, and public-spirited body ; the capital was 
 being extended and beautified in the interest of those 
 who lived in it ; and, in all its main lines, the city of 
 London was much what it is to-day. It was about one- 
 third more populous than Paris, better paved, better lit, 
 with a better supply of water and means of communi- 
 cation, and with a far superior system of administration. 
 It was practically a modern city, even then : it was the 
 current type of the modern city, and was regarded by 
 all as a far more agreeable, more civilised, more splendid 
 city than Paris. It was natural enough that, when the 
 
420 THE CITY IN HISTORY 
 
 liberal nobles and wits of France began to visit England 
 (as in the eighteenth century they universally did), an 
 Anglo-mania resulted which was one of the main 
 causes of the Revolution. 
 
 Some of the great ornaments of Paris existed com- 
 plete in 1789, but they were encumbered with narrow 
 streets and cut off from each other. The Louvre, the 
 Tuileries, the Palais Royal existed much as we have 
 seen them, but they were all divided from each other 
 by blocks of buildings and intricate lanes. The Palais 
 de Justice, the remains of the palace of St. Louis, and 
 Notre Dame were there, but were blocked up by modern 
 buildings. Portions of the Luxembourg and of the Hotel 
 de Ville were standing. The Invalides, the Ecole Mili- 
 taire, stood as we know them ; the Place de la Concorde 
 (then Place de Louis XV.) was already laid out, and 
 the two great offices flanking the Rue Royale were 
 already built. 
 
 On the other hand, the bridge now called de la Con- 
 corde was not open, nor did it abut on the Hall of the 
 Corps Ltgislatif ; there was no Arc de rEtoile, no 
 Madeleine, no Column of Vendome, no Place de V Optra, 
 du Chatelet, or de la Bastille. The Place du Carrousel 
 was blocked by buildings, and the Rue de Rivoli, the 
 the Rue de la Paix, did not exist. The Pantheon was 
 not quite finished ; the Louvre was not continued on 
 the northern side ; the site of the Halles was a net- 
 work of streets ; cemeteries and charnel-houses existed 
 within the city ; the quays were irregular and rude 
 structures ; the bridges were picturesque edifices of four 
 or five different centuries, and only one-third of their 
 present number ; there were no pavements for foot- 
 passengers, no cleansing of the streets, whilst open 
 sewers met one at every turn. Paris in 1789 was much 
 
THE TRANSFORMATION OF PARIS 421 
 
 what Rome was in 1860 a huge, ancient, fortified city, 
 filled with dense, squalid, populous districts, interspersed 
 with vast open tracts in the hands of powerful nobles or 
 great monasteries, and the whole perpetually dominated 
 by a bigoted, selfish, and indifferent absolutism. 
 
 The population of Paris in 1789, according to the 
 latest and best authorities, was about 640,000: in 1889 
 it is 2,240,000. It has thus increased exactly three and 
 one-half times. There is nothing abnormal in this. 
 London in the same time has grown quite fourfold, 
 and a similar rate of increase has been seen in Berlin, 
 Vienna, St. Petersburg, Lyons, Marseilles, and Rouen. 
 The increase of many English centres of industry, and 
 of nearly all the American, has been vastly greater 
 and more rapid. Still, the increase of Paris, within a 
 hundred years, of three or four times in population and 
 five or six times in area, is a sufficiently striking fact. 
 In 1789 there were about one thousand streets: there 
 are now about four thousand. There were fifteen boule- 
 vards : there are now more than one hundred. The 
 Involutes, the Ltixembourg, the Bastille, the line of the 
 inner boulevards, and the Place Vendome then marked 
 the utmost limits of regular habitations ; and thence 
 the open country began. There were within the barriers 
 immense spaces, gardens, and parks ; but they were 
 closed to the public. Paris which is now covered with 
 gardens, parks, plantations, and open spaces was in 
 1789 singularly bare of any. The Jardin des Plantes, 
 the Jardin des Ttiileries, were royal possessions ; the 
 Champs Elysees and the Palais Royal were favourite 
 walks. But these were almost the only accessible 
 promenades. Of some forty places of importance which 
 Paris now possesses, few existed in 1789, except the 
 Place de la Concorde, the Esplanade of the Invalides t 
 
422 THE CITY IN HISTORY 
 
 the Champ de Mars, the Place Vendome, and the Place 
 Royale (now des Vosges). Within the circuit of the 
 older city there was hardly a clear space, a plantation, 
 a parterre, or a free walk, except in the Parvis de Notre 
 Dame, the MarcJrf des Innocents, and the Place de la 
 Greve, From the Louvre to the Hotel de Ville there 
 lay a labyrinth of dark and tortuous lanes, such as we 
 may still see in the GJietto of Rome or round about the 
 Canongate at Edinburgh. 
 
 The change that has taken place is that of a dream, 
 or a transformation in a theatre. The Revolution came, 
 the Convention, the first Empire, the Orleans monarchy, 
 and the third Empire and all is new. Streets only too 
 symmetrical, straight, and long ; open spaces at the 
 junction of all the principal streets, boulevards, avenues, 
 gardens, fountains, have sprung by magic into the places 
 so lately covered with labyrinthine alleys. As we stand 
 to-day in the Place du Carrousel, in the Place de r Optra, 
 du Theatre Frangais, du ChAtelet, de la Bastille, des 
 Innocents, St. Michel, St. Germain, Notre Dame, or de 
 r Hotel de Ville, each radiant with imposing buildings, 
 stately avenues, monuments, fountains, columns, and 
 colonnades, with everything that modern architecture 
 can devise of spacious, airy, and gay, it is hard indeed to 
 understand how in so few years (and much of it within 
 the memory of men still living) all this has been created 
 over the ruins of the dense, dark, intricate streets of the 
 last century, where lanes still followed the ramparts of 
 Louis the Stout and Philip Augustus, where the rem- 
 nants existed of chAteaux built by mediaeval seigneurs, 
 or during the civil wars of the fifteenth and sixteenth 
 centuries. 
 
 The clearance has been most cruel of all in the old 
 Ctttf, the original Paris of the earliest ages. Down to 
 
THE TRANSFORMATION OF PARIS 423 
 
 the Revolution it had a population of about 20,000, 
 which has now almost wholly disappeared, along with 
 the sixteen churches, the oratories, and streets. The 
 ancient island Lutetia is now occupied almost solely 
 by six enormous public buildings ; and the spot, which 
 for eighteen centuries has been busy with the hum of 
 a city life of intense activity and movement, is now 
 covered only by a lonely but glorious cathedral, an 
 enormous hospital, a huge barrack, courts, offices, and 
 official buildings. The oldest bit of Paris, the oldest 
 bit of city in all Northern Europe, now looks for the 
 most part like a new quarter laid out on some vacant 
 space. Notre Dame, the Sainte Chapelle, the Concier- 
 gerie, have been restored and furbished up till they 
 almost might pass for modern buildings. The barrack, 
 the hospital, the geometric streets, the open square, 
 might do credit to Chicago. It is all very fine, impos- 
 ing, spacious, and new. But a groan may be forgiven 
 to those who can remember the mystic portals of Notre 
 Dame with the gallery of the kings, surrounded with 
 houses which seemed to lean upon the mother-church 
 for comfort and support, before the restorer had worked 
 his will upon the crumbling, dark, pathetic fragments 
 of carving, whilst the noblest fagade ever raised by 
 northern Gothic builders still looked like a great medi- 
 aeval church, and not like an objet d'art to be gazed at 
 in a museum. 
 
 This transformation, the most astounding that Europe 
 can show, fills us ever anew with a profound sense of the 
 power which for a century has animated the municipal 
 government of Paris ; of the energy, wealth, indus- 
 trial skill, artistic imagination, and scientific accom- 
 plishments which have gone to the making of it. To 
 plough miles and miles of broad new boulevards through 
 
424 THE CITY IN HISTORY 
 
 the most crowded lines of an ancient, populous, and 
 busy city ; to transform a net-work of Ghettos into a 
 splendid series of avenues, squares, and gardens ; to 
 eviscerate the heart of a great capital, and to create 
 symmetry, sunniness, convenience, gaiety, and variety 
 out of inveterate confusion, gloom, discomfort, and 
 squalor this impresses the mind with the visible signs 
 of imperial might in the ruler, and inexhaustible versa- 
 tility and adaptability in the governed. 
 
 It is a different thing when a Frederick plans a new 
 city in Berlin, or when a Republic creates itself a capital 
 in Washington. But in Paris the capital existed ; with 
 eighteen centuries of history, with monarchic, feudal, 
 ecclesiastical, municipal institutions by the thousand, 
 rooted for ages in the soil, and buttressed by long 
 epochs of prescription, privilege, law, and superstition. 
 Not for an hour has the capital ceased to be the living 
 heart of France ; not for a day has its own activity 
 been interrupted, or the lives of some million or so 
 of citizens been broken. Republic, Consulate, Empire, 
 Monarchy, have succeeded each other in turn. Revolu- 
 tions, sieges, massacres, anarchy, tyranny, parliaments, 
 dictators, and communes have in turn had their seat 
 in Paris, and have occupied her streets, buildings, and 
 monuments. But under all, the transformation of old 
 Paris into new Paris has gone on. Bastille, Chdtelet, 
 Temple, Tuileries, have been swept away : enormous 
 boulevards and avenues have torn their huge gaps like 
 cannon-shot through ancient quarters : abbeys, churches, 
 palaces, hospitals, convents, gardens, halls, and theatres 
 have disappeared like unsubstantial visions, and have 
 left not a rack behind. As the vacant spaces are 
 cleared, new streets, theatres, halls, and squares spring 
 Up. A thousand new fancies and hundreds of new 
 
THE TRANSFORMATION OF PARIS 425 
 
 monuments take their place with inexhaustible in- 
 vention. The city grows more populous, more rich, 
 more brilliant year by year. The busy life which is 
 silenced in the Cite, or by the new boulevards, avenues, 
 and places, bursts forth with a louder din elsewhere. 
 Every creation of artistic imagination, every invention 
 of science, is instantly brought into service and adapted 
 to modern life. And with all this whirl of change and 
 action, Paris remains in its essence an ancient, and not 
 a modern, city ; a very ancient city to him who knows 
 its history, and can recall the memorials of its past. To 
 this day, such an one can retrace her successive circuits, 
 her ramparts and barriers of successive dynasties ; he 
 can track out the spots made memorable by Julian, 
 by Clovis, by Philip Augustus, by Francis I. and 
 Henry IV., by Abailard, and Heloi'se, and Jeanne d'Arc, 
 by Dante, by Descartes, by Corneille. Some two 
 hundred streets still bear the names of saints, each 
 recalling some convent of the Merovingian, Carlo- 
 vingian, or Capetian dynasty, some one of the thou- 
 sands of churches, chapels, oratories, and religious 
 houses which once filled Paris. To the historical mind, 
 the St. Germains, the St. Thomases, the St. Andre's, the 
 St. Martins, the St. Victors, the St. Bernards, which we 
 read inscribed at the street corner, recall a series of 
 local memorials which reach back for a thousand years. 
 Here St. Louis stood and prayed ; here the Grand 
 Master of the Templars was burned ; here Jeanne d'Arc 
 fell desperately wounded ; here Moliere died ; here 
 Corneille lived ; here Coligny was murdered, here 
 Henry IV. was stabbed ; here Voltaire died, and here 
 Camille Desmoulins opened the Revolution. 
 
 Here, as everywhere in human life, we must take the 
 evil with the good. It is idle, peevish, retrograde, to 
 
426 THE CITY IN HISTORY 
 
 rail at the inevitable, or to cry out for the past. There 
 has been awful, wanton, brutal destruction ; there have 
 been corruption and plunder ; there has been vile art, 
 making itself the pandar to folly and lust ; there have 
 been cruel disregard of the poor and inhuman orgies of 
 wealth and power, in all this series of transformation 
 scenes which Paris has seen. No man can again recall 
 to us the exquisite fancies carved on stone and on 
 jewelled windows of the thirteenth and fourteenth cen- 
 turies. Perhaps it was better to cart them away than 
 to furbish them anew with gewgaw restorations, But 
 modern life in a vast city could not endure this plethora 
 of obsolete churches and useless convents in its midst, 
 and the friars, black, white, and grey, had to go with all 
 their belongings. Dark alleys are delicious in etchings ; 
 but they are the nests of disease, vice, and death. A 
 city of two millions cannot breathe within the winding 
 lanes which sufficed the burghers of the fourteenth 
 century within their gloomy ramparts. Haussmann 
 and his myrmidons may have amassed fortunes ; but 
 the world is still searching, lantern in hand like Diogenes, 
 for a wise, just, incorruptible municipal authority. The 
 art which has created modern Paris is not high art, is 
 not true art, is in many ways most meretricious art ; 
 and in its chef d'ceuvre, the new Opera, it has reached 
 the pinnacle of vulgar display. But, take it all and all, 
 Paris can show us the brightest, most inventive, and least 
 mesquin street architecture which the nineteenth century 
 can achieve, and certainly the most imperial civic 
 organisation which Europe can produce. 
 
 There is much to be said on all sides of this complex 
 problem ; the catholic, the legitimist, the republican, the 
 antiquarian, the artist, the poet, the socialist, the econo- 
 mist, even the tourist, may be listened to with sympathy 
 
THE TRANSFORMATION OF PARIS 427 
 
 in turn. Let us gnash our teeth at the tale told us by 
 the student of old art ; let us drop a tear over the wail 
 of the dispossessed orders ; let us linger over every frag- 
 ment of the past which the historian can point out as 
 spared in the havoc ; let us listen to the story of the 
 dispossessed workman ; let us study the statistics of the 
 old and the new city ; let us stroll with the flaneur on 
 the boulevards ; but let us not say that it is either alto- 
 gether evil or altogether good. Me Hern Paris is the 
 creation of the Revolution of 1789, and, like most of the 
 creations of that mighty and pregnant epoch, it has the 
 soul of good in things evil ; deplorable waste and error 
 in the midst of inevitable and indispensable reform. 
 
 A city is made to live in. Now, a serious defect in 
 old Paris was that it was a city in which men died. 
 Down to the Revolution of 1789, the annual deaths 
 exceeded the annual births. Since the Revolution the 
 births exceed the deaths. The birth-rate in Paris is low, 
 and the death-rate is high, as compared with that of 
 London and English towns to-day ; but the birth-rate 
 of Paris is now much in excess of the death-rate. 
 The total deaths in modern Paris are but double the 
 actual deaths in 1789, though the population is now 
 nearly four times as great. The death-rate of old 
 Paris was far higher than that of any actual city of 
 Western Europe, and for a parallel to it we must now go 
 to the cities of the East. The death-rate of Paris is 
 still high, for it is largely increased by the almost 
 deliberate destruction of infant life. But before the 
 Revolution, we must take it that some three or four 
 thousand lives were annually sacrificed to insanitary 
 conditions. The sanitary condition of Paris in the 
 middle of the last century was, indeed, that of Cairo or 
 Constantinople. Drinking-water taken direct from the 
 
428 THE CITY IN HISTORY 
 
 Seine, open sewers, cemeteries, and charnel-houses in the 
 heart of the city, infected and squalid lanes, dirt, decay, 
 and disorder made life precarious, and scattered disease 
 wholesale. The marvel is that pestilence was ever 
 absent. 
 
 This was no accident ; nor was it due to apathy or 
 ignorance in the people of Paris. It was a direct result 
 of the Old Regime the deliberate act of the Monarchy, 
 the Church, and the Nobility. Its causes were political. 
 Paris presented in herself an epitome of all the vices, 
 follies, inhumanities, and solecisms of the Old System. 
 Everything official was effete, barbarous, injurious to 
 modern civilisation ; all that prerogative, privilege, super- 
 stition, and caste could do to crush a great capital, was 
 done. No consideration of the health, comfort, or needs 
 of the great city affected Louis XIV. or Louis XV. They 
 and their courts lived at Versailles, given up to ambition, 
 display, or vice. Paris and the Parisians existed to 
 produce fine things, to give splendour to the monarch}-, 
 society to the nobility, fat benefices to the church. The 
 meanest fraternity of friars, the most scandalous abb, 
 the most rapacious courtier, was of more account than 
 the corporate officials of Paris. Vested interests, sacred 
 foundations, privileged rights, blocked every path to 
 reform and progress. The king's palaces, the king's 
 fortresses, the king's institutions were inviolable, sacred, 
 immutable. An obsolete foundation of bygone super- 
 stition was the cause of God. And the caprice of a 
 great noble was a high matter of state. 
 
 Old Paris consisted of dark and crooked lanes, because 
 in the Middle Ages cities were so built. To build new 
 streets, to plan fresh thoroughfares, would disturb some 
 church, destroy some oratory, inconvenience some 
 marquis, or displace some convent. To pave streets, to 
 
THE TRANSFORMATION OF PARIS 429 
 
 make sewers, to open spaces, to remove cemeteries, to 
 supply pure water, and to obtain fresh air would cost 
 money, would affect privileges, or invade some right. But 
 the money of Parisians was required to pay the king's 
 dues, not to improve Paris. All privileges were above the 
 law, and as sacred as the Ark of the Covenant. ' Rights,' 
 in the sense of privileges, came before law, before 
 necessity, before humanity, decency, or public duty. The 
 salus populi was the infima lex the lowest and last con- 
 sideration which authority recognised. Prescription and 
 the will of an absolute despot these were the sole 
 standards of public convenience. And the result was 
 that they made permanent and astounding accretions of 
 public inconvenience. Something was done by Louis XIV. 
 to add magnificence to the capital by some royal palaces, 
 churches, and boulevards ; and early in the reign of 
 Louis XV. the spirit of social improvement, which culmi- 
 nated in the States-General of 1789, began to make 
 itself felt. A few improvements were made, new streets 
 were built on the outskirts, the cemeteries were closed, 
 and the water-supply was reformed. From the middle 
 of the century a series of efforts were made, and not the 
 least by Turgot and by his father, the Provost. But 
 before privilege and prerogative the best efforts failed. 
 It needed a revolution to reform the city of Paris. And 
 the Revolution not only reformed, but transformed it 
 with a vengeance. 
 
 The physical disorder of old Paris was merely the 
 reflection indeed, but a pale reflection of the social, 
 political, moral disorder of the Old Regime. The organi- 
 sation of the city was a chaos of competing authorities, 
 a tangle of obsolete privileges, and a nest of scandalous 
 abuses. Anomalous courts jostled and scrambled for 
 jurisdiction ; ancient gilds and corporations blocked 
 
430 THE CITY IN HISTORY 
 
 every reform ; atrocious injustice and inveterate corrup- 
 tion reigned high-handed in the name of king, noble, or 
 church. A valuable work of great research appeared 
 (June 1889), under the direction of an important com- 
 mission of historians, which throws new light from public 
 documents on the condition of Paris under the old 
 system. 1 We may see in it an astounding picture of 
 misrule. The Parlement, the Hotel de Vil/e, the Chdtelet, 
 the Governor of Paris, the Governor of the Bastille, the 
 Minister of Paris, the University, the trade-gilds, the 
 church, the religious foundations, all claim privileges, 
 jurisdictions, rights, immunities, which cross and re- 
 cross each other in continual conflict. 
 
 There was no real municipality, no true elective 
 representation of the citizens. Certain officials, named 
 by the Crown, professed to speak and to act in the name 
 of the city. Civil and criminal justice was shared by 
 various bodies under quite indefinite authority. The 
 Chdtelet absorbed in the seventeenth century no less 
 than nineteen baronial jurisdictions ; but the Arch- 
 bishopric and several abbeys retained their own distinct 
 courts. The ChAtelet, the Hdtel de Vtlle, the church, 
 each divided Paris into distinct sets of local subdivisions. 
 Taxation, public works, justice, police, markets, public 
 health, even hospitals and charities, were under the 
 control of different authorities, with no defined limits. 
 Interminable disputes between the different authorities 
 ensued. Of the streets, one in ten was a cul-de-sac. 
 Although the area of Paris is now six or seven times 
 greater than it was before the Revolution, and though 
 the population is nearly four times as great, there are 
 little more than twice as many houses. There were 
 
 1 L'tat de Paris en 1789. Etudes et Documents stir 1'Ancien Regime 
 a Paris. H. Monin. Paris: Jouast, etc. etc. 1889. 
 
THE TRANSFORMATION OF PARIS 431 
 
 30,000 beggars in Paris. Down to 1779 the ancient 
 foundation of St. Louis, the Quinze- Vingts, held an 
 immense area between the Louvre and the Palais Royal, 
 blocking up both, as well as the Rue St. Honore and the 
 Rue Richelieu. This enclosure, which was a privileged 
 asylum, contained a population of from five to six 
 thousand, not only licensed to beg, but bound to live by 
 begging. It was not until 1786 that the cemetery and 
 charnel-house of the Saints Innocents was suppressed. 
 It is hardly credible that little more than a hundred 
 years have passed since, in the densest quarter of Paris, 
 long colonnades of grinning sculls and festering burying- 
 grounds were standing where now we have the lovely 
 fountain of Lescot and Goujon, transformed indeed, and 
 almost more lovely in its transformation, in the centre 
 of the bright and glowing square that recalls Verona or 
 Genoa. 
 
 The censorship of all writings ' contrary to law, to the 
 Catholic faith, to public morals, or judicial prerogative,' 
 opened a wide door for arbitrary power. In the years 
 immediately preceding the Revolution, the Parlement of 
 Paris suppressed sixty-five works. One of these is con- 
 demned as tending ' a soulever les esprits.' Another is 
 condemned as a libel on Cagliostro ! Sunday labour, 
 eating meat in Lent, neglecting to dress the house-front 
 on a religious procession, playing hazard, ' speaking so 
 as to alarm the public,' are some of the grounds of a 
 criminal sentence. The most revolting public execu- 
 tions were common in all parts of the city. As if to 
 accustom all to the sight of cruel punishments, some fifty 
 places are recorded as the scenes of these horrible public 
 exposures. The sentence sets out the details of these 
 executions in all their hideous particulars. Ledit so- 
 and-so shall be taken to Notre Dame, where his hand 
 
432 THE CITY IN HISTORY 
 
 shall be chopped off, then taken on a cart to another 
 place, where he shall be broken alive on a wheel, and so 
 left ' as long as it shall please God to prolong his life ' ; 
 then his body shall be burned and the ashes scattered 
 to the winds. A working-man, for stealing some linen, 
 is condemned to be hung on a gibbet and strangled by 
 the public executioner. It was not till 1780 that pre- 
 liminary torture of an accused person was abolished : 
 torture as part of the sentence was retained till the 
 Revolution. The personal punishments included the 
 pillory, branding, flogging, maiming, strangling, breaking 
 alive, and burning. This is how the ancient Monarchy 
 prepared the people for the guillotine. 
 
 The Revolution has swept away all this, and new 
 Paris has sprung to life out of the Revolution, like 
 Athene from the head of the thunderer. Out of 
 extreme confusion, symmetry ; out of ancient privilege, 
 absolute democracy ; out of paralysis of rival authori- 
 ties, intense concentration of authority ; out of squalor, 
 splendour ; out of barbarism, the latest devices of civilisa- 
 tion. Yet, for all these changes, Paris is not Chicago or 
 Washington ; it is no fine new city built on an open 
 plain. Her nineteen centuries of history are still there ; 
 the gay boulevards stand on the foundation-stones of a 
 thousand structures of the past ; the placards on each 
 omnibus recall the names of mighty centres of faith, 
 wisdom, devotion, purity, love. The religious passion, 
 the civic ardour, the republican zeal, the wit, the science, 
 the electric will, the social ideals, the devotion to ideas 
 are all there as of old. 
 
CHAPTER XV 
 
 THE TRANSFORMATION OF LONDON 
 I. London in 1887 
 
 A HUGE city like this of ours, with such boundless 
 possibilities before it for good or for ill, on the one hand 
 perpetually becoming more unmanageable and more 
 exhausting to life, on the other hand continually throw- 
 ing up unexpected signs of vitality and hope such a 
 city stands at the parting of the ways. It is already by 
 far the most inorganic mass of habitations that ever 
 cumbered the planet, and to the bulk of its population, 
 though not to the fortunate minority, it is not very 
 cheerful. And yet, even now it is the healthiest of all 
 capitals ; and in certain aspects of a city one of the best 
 ordered ; to a very few, one of the pleasantest. Which 
 is to prevail in the future the boundless evil or the 
 boundless good ? 
 
 Take the first, the darker side. Here is the hugest 
 assemblage of buildings ever piled by men on one spot 
 of earth. For three centuries one of the great fears of 
 thinking persons has been the enormous growth of 
 London ; and yet, till about a hundred years ago, 
 neither its population nor its area was what we should 
 now call abnormal. But since the last hundred years 
 it has advanced by leaps and bounds, increasing its 
 population fourfold within this century and its area at 
 
 2 E 
 
434 THE CITY IN HISTORY 
 
 least ten or fifteen fold. Even in our own lifetime the 
 area of London has increased at least fivefold, and its 
 population between two and threefold. So that now 
 we have a continuous population of some 4,000,000 
 packed in an area of more than one hundred square 
 miles, with nearly 2000 miles of streets, measuring 
 hardly anywhere less than ten or eleven miles in a 
 straight line. 
 
 Every year 70,000 souls, roughly speaking, are added 
 by immigration and births ; every year more square 
 miles are added to the area. Year by year some 20,000 
 immigrants press into this city : that is the population 
 of a fair county town ; so that every ten years there is 
 added to London by immigration alone a city as large 
 as Bristol or Lisbon ; and by the entire series of causes, 
 a new city as large as St. Petersburg or Vienna. And 
 thus already, in this corner of the Thames, there is 
 huddled together about one-sixth of the entire popula- 
 tion of England. ' Where is it to stop ? ' we ask, as 
 the tide of immigrants pours in, and great armies of 
 builders are perpetually laying fresh acres of meadow 
 under brick. 
 
 Size and numbers are not necessarily bad things per 
 se. But unhappily the size and numbers of London 
 have alarming consequences of their own. Great cities 
 have to grow organically, with some, kind of self- 
 adaptation to their development. But the increase of 
 London defies adaptation and adjustment. The 70,000 
 new souls a year arrive before London has time to con- 
 sider what she can do with them. The bricks pour 
 down in irregular heaps, almost as if, in some cataclysm 
 or tornado, it were raining bricks out of heaven on the 
 earth below. The huge pall of smoke gets denser and 
 more sulphurous, stretching out, they say, some thirty 
 
THE TRANSFORMATION OF LONDON 435 
 
 miles into the country, till Berkshire, Bucks, Herts, and 
 Kent are beginning to be polluted by its cloud. From 
 Charing Cross or the Royal Exchange a man has to walk 
 some five or six miles before he can see the blessed 
 meadows or breathe the country air. Few of us ever 
 saw more than half of the city we live in, and some of 
 us never saw nine-tenths of it. We all live more or less 
 in soot and fog, in smoky, dusty, contaminated air, in 
 which trees will no longer grow to full size, and the 
 sulphurous vapour of which eats away the surface of 
 stone. The beautiful river our once silver Thames 
 is a turbid, muddy receptacle of refuse ; at times in- 
 describably nasty and unwholesome. The water we 
 drink at times comes perilously near to be injurious to 
 health. Our burying-places, old and new, are a per- 
 petual anxiety and danger. Our sewers pour forth 
 5,500,000 tons of sewage per week, almost all of it 
 wastefully and dangerously discharged. An immense 
 proportion of our working population are insufficiently 
 housed, in cheerless, comfortless, and even unhealthy 
 lodgings. Not a few of these are miserable dens or 
 squalid cabins unfit for human dwelling-place. Every 
 few years some epidemic breaks out which carries off 
 its thousands. In some four- fifths of London the 
 conditions of life are sadly depressing and sordid, with 
 none of the advantages which city life affords. The 
 amusements, such as they are, are often unworthy of 
 us ; the resources of health and recreation are too few ; 
 whilst the dangers to life, to morality, to the intelligence, 
 are very real and ever present. 
 
 Is this monster city again to double and treble itself? 
 its water supply to get still more precarious and de- 
 fective, are its dead still more to endanger the living, 
 its dreariness to grow vaster, and its smoke even 
 
436 THE CITY IN HISTORY 
 
 thicker? It is a strange paradox that, whilst those 
 who have the means are always seeking to get away 
 from London, those who are destitute are perpetually 
 pouring into London ; whilst it is the ambition of every 
 well-to-do Londoner to retire to freedom in the country 
 or in the suburbs, it is the instinct of every countryman 
 in distress to find his way up to London. There are 
 tens of thousands who prefer to loaf or starve in the 
 streets rather than to work in comfort in the fields. 
 Nearly one-third of the annual increase of London is 
 due to immigration ; and the immigrants are in great 
 measure both destitute and incapable. Is it that our 
 agricultural system is sorely at fault ; that labour in the 
 country is become so flat, stale, and unprofitable, with 
 opportunities so wretched, hopes so few, and life so 
 weary and sordid, that the countryman at all risks will 
 crave the crowd, the glare, the excitement of the city, 
 even though it offers an almost certain wretchedness 
 and squalor? If this be so, if our civilisation has come 
 to this, that the labourer finds the country intolerable, a 
 complete resettlement of rural life is at hand. 
 
 But we cannot attribute too much to this ; for this 
 vast and rapid increase of great cities is a feature of 
 modern civilisation. It is equally marked under 
 despotic or democratic Governments, in monarchies 
 and republics, with a peasant proprietary or a system 
 of great domains, on both sides of the Atlantic, in every 
 race, in both hemispheres, in Asia, Africa, and America, 
 as well as in Europe. Paris, St. Petersburg, Berlin, 
 Vienna, Rome, Brussels, New York, Lyons, Marseilles, 
 Milan, Munich, Moscow, Turin, Bombay, and New 
 Orleans, have increased in fifty years more than London ; 
 and Glasgow, Hamburg, Philadelphia, and Chicago in- 
 crease at a far higher ratio. So the increase of London, 
 
THE TRANSFORMATION OF LONDON 437 
 
 tremendous as it is, has nothing exceptional about it 
 but its enormous positive volume. The increase itself, 
 and even the rate of increase, is at bottom the result of 
 modern industrial life and modern mechanical resources. 
 
 Of this vast problem, or wilderness of problems, it is 
 enough to touch on one or two ; and those rather of the 
 simpler and material sort. Take the single one of water 
 supply, a necessity of life, and the condition of health of 
 4,000,000 of Englishmen. It is inadequate in quantity, 
 inconvenient in supply, very various in quality, and 
 exposed to one or two immense risks of pollution. We 
 are at times drinking water that is minutely but sensibly 
 infected with deposit Though the recuperative energy 
 of moving water usually restores it to a fairly wholesome 
 condition, we all know that London is not quite safe 
 from a catastrophe. A single epidemic might any 
 summer make the water of London as deadly as the 
 climate of Vera Cruz. Now, the death-rate of Vera 
 Cruz in London would mean an extra mortality of 
 nearly 200,000. The morbid infection of the Lea and 
 the Upper Thames would in six months produce a 
 pestilence as appalling as any in History. And yet for 
 twenty years we have talked about a safe and adequate 
 water supply. The supply of London per head is 
 below that of most Continental cities, immensely below 
 that of most American towns, and about a quarter of 
 that of Rome. The house-cistern system is one of those 
 survivals of barbarism which shame modern mechanical 
 contrivance. Its dangers, inconveniences, and nastiness 
 are the text of every sanitary reformer. And still we 
 live on with the lead cistern and the ball-cock, whilst 
 our statesmen are debating about a railroad to Uganda 
 and the delimitation of Siam. 
 
 Turn from water to fire. Our means in London of 
 
43^ THE CITY IN HISTORY 
 
 dealing with fire are far below that of every wealthy city 
 in the world, varying from one-third to one-tenth of the 
 provision which the most advanced nations make. It is 
 true that London as yet has escaped, owing to its modes 
 of construction and of warming and its general habits. 
 But a great conflagration in London is not impossible, 
 and the means of dealing with it, if it ever came, 
 are ludicrously inadequate. London, with its boundless 
 wealth and its interminable area, has a fire brigade not 
 only relatively, but actually, less than those of Paris, 
 Berlin, New York, St. Petersburg, and Hamburg. 
 Either our friends on each side of the Atlantic are 
 foolishly timid, or we in this matter arc criminally 
 negligent. 
 
 London has swallowed up and holds festering in its 
 midst scores and scores of graveyards which still arc 
 and long will be a danger to the living. Year by year 
 the vast city expands, and is already reaching the more 
 modern cemeteries which it is about to engulf, adding 
 further dangers and fresh poison. The terrible mortality 
 in the larger town hospitals often double that of small 
 country infirmaries tells its significant and cruel tale. 
 The whole of our arrangements for mortuaries, inter- 
 ment, and the due check on contagion are utterly in 
 the rear of our resources and our science. What a 
 picture of a civilised community at the end of the 
 nineteenth century ! A noble river turned into a huge 
 open sewer, with its tide carrying millions of tons of 
 refuse up and down under our eyes. Contagion 
 scattered broadcast by carelessness, ignorance, greed. 
 Our sewers perpetually discharging deadly gases into 
 the rooms where our children and our young ones are 
 asleep ; the air choked with vapours injurious to animal 
 and even vegetable life ; hundreds of thousands of our 
 
THE TRANSFORMATION OF LONDON 439 
 
 workers housed in lodgings which are a standing source 
 of corruption, misery, and disease. 
 
 Let us turn now to the other side of the picture 
 
 what our great city might be, ought to be, will be if 
 
 we in this generation and the next can only be brought 
 
 in time to know our duty, our urgent necessities and 
 
 our imminent dangers. I am very far from thinking all 
 
 this can be remedied by Act of Parliament, and like the 
 
 carter in ^Esop's fable want to call upon the Hercules 
 
 of Westminster. We are all so much bewildered and 
 
 stunned by the whirl and scream of the parliamentary 
 
 machine that if a man only says that such and such an 
 
 improvement in our life ought to be accomplished, it is 
 
 thought that he is asking for an Act of Parliament to 
 
 carry out his end. It is a thing for society, for the rich, 
 
 for the poor, for the thoughtful, for the energetic, for the 
 
 clergy, for the municipalities, for the reformers, for the 
 
 working men and the working women, for the people 
 
 for us all to take up and to work on till we get it. And 
 
 it may be said : it is idle to appeal to the public about 
 
 the death-rate of cities, about sewers, and museums, 
 
 and cemeteries, and sanitary homes and parks for the 
 
 people, and play-grounds for the children, and baths and 
 
 wash-houses, and good schools. No ! it is everything to 
 
 have a true and sound notion of what we want or ought 
 
 to have ; to have a right ideal of a human, healthful, 
 
 and happy city. We can all do something, even the 
 
 humblest of us, to get a decent, habitable roof over our 
 
 heads ; to see that our children have water and milk to 
 
 drink that is not poisoning them ; we can all take 
 
 decent precautions not to spread disease by neglect, 
 
 folly, and ignorance. And we can all together make a 
 
 real impression on those who have the wealth and the 
 
 direction of society upon them, if we make them feel 
 
440 THE CITY IN HISTORY 
 
 that you are no longer satisfied with rotting old 
 tenements for homes, contaminated water to drink, and 
 dismal, joyless miles of streets to live in, where the pure 
 air of heaven is turned into a pall of smoke. We can 
 tell those who have the wealth and the power that the 
 lives, and the health, and the comfort of the great 
 masses are the very first of all their duties ; that the 
 contests of Radicals and Tories are of infinitely small 
 importance compared with the lives of the people. If 
 it be not true that Sanitas Sanitas, omnia Sanitas if 
 health and comfort be not the greatest of all things 
 they are the most urgent of all things, the foundation 
 of all things. 
 
 . It is quite true that the death-rate of London is 
 remarkably low, but it ought to be lower. The very 
 fact that London has so nobly distinguished itself 
 amongst all the capitals of Europe is proof that it can 
 do much to save life. It has a vast deal more to do. 
 One of our greatest authorities, Sir Spencer Wells, 
 speaking in the face of Europe as representing the 
 sanitary reformers of this country, gave it as his 
 deliberate judgment that the death-rate of our great 
 cities might be, and ought to be, reduced to at least 
 12 per thousand per annum that is, a reduction of 
 nearly 10 per thousand, not far off half the deaths. There 
 have been some weeks of recent years, when London 
 approached within measurable distance of this great 
 ideal. There are now some districts in the west 
 inhabited by the rich where the death-rate is at times 
 below even this limit. There is no sanitary authority 
 which denies the possibility of reaching a death-rate of 
 12 per thousand. It would mean some 30,000 lives 
 saved each year in London alone. 
 
 And at what price is the great result attainable ? 
 
THE TRANSFORMATION OF LONDON 441 
 
 The cost of an African war, perhaps, ten years of 
 engineering labour, absolutely wholesome water to 
 drink, and plenty of it to wash in and to wash with, a 
 rational and healthy drainage to carry off poison from 
 our homes sewer-gas and other abominations of 
 civilisation in the stage of blunder would become as 
 much things of the past as the leprosy. We should all 
 have pure milk, clean houses, air with no sulphur fumes 
 in it, open spaces, plenty of play-grounds, mortuaries on 
 right principles, cemeteries wholly away from the living, 
 and the bestowal of the dead no longer a danger to the 
 living, systematic precautions against contagion, hos- 
 pitals reconstructed on scientific methods. A little 
 common sanitary knowledge would be made a matter 
 of general education. There would be no exhausting 
 hours of work, no starvation wages, no overcrowded, 
 ill-ventilated, and dangerous factories, less drink, less 
 brutal treatment of women and children, more civilisa- 
 tion, more real charity, more true religion. This is the 
 price at which the death-rate may be reduced nearly 
 one-half, and upwards of 30,000 lives a year saved which 
 now perish by our folly, our neglect, and our crime. 
 
 London has already, as compared with the Continent, 
 an exceptionally low death-rate ; lower by 20, 30, even 
 50 per cent, than some other capitals, lower than almost 
 any large town in Europe, except a few of the ports in 
 the Baltic, and actually one-half of the death-rate of 
 some Russian and many Eastern cities. The death-rate 
 is a very complicated and treacherous field, and we 
 know that London is the centre which attracts hundreds 
 of thousands of youths and girls in the prime of life, 
 who come here and are employed in service and in 
 factories, unmarried and necessarily in average health. 
 That undoubtedly reduces the death-rate ; but the same 
 
442 THE CITY IN HISTORY 
 
 cause applies more or less in all great towns of Europe 
 or America, and (except that London absorbs a larger 
 number of domestic servants than either), it does not 
 affect London more than it affects Paris and New 
 York. 
 
 It is quite true that merely to keep sickly children 
 alive for a life of feebleness and disease is by no 
 means an unmixed boon ; but it will take a good deal to 
 convince us that a high death-rate is a sign of civilisa- 
 tion. We may take a low death-rate as the basis and 
 beginning of a thriving community. London has dis- 
 tinguished itself above all the great cities of Europe by 
 its low death-rate. The very increase of population, 
 which in some aspects is so alarming, is not due to any 
 exceptionally high birth-rate in London. Indeed, the 
 birth-rate is far below the standard of the eastern half 
 of Europe ; nay, it is below that of most cities in 
 Europe, except the French and Italian towns. The 
 increase is due to the immense interval between its 
 moderate birth-rate and its very low death-rate. Where- 
 as the deaths exceed the births in Naples and in St. 
 Petersburg, and the births are less than one in a thousand 
 in excess of the deaths at Madrid, Buda-Pesth, and 
 Rome, and the surplus of births in Paris and Lyons is 
 less than two in a thousand, in London, where the 
 birth-rate is below that of the majority of Continental 
 cities, the surplus of births over deaths is thirteen and a 
 half per thousand, or, say, about 50,000 souls a year. 
 As compared with Naples or St. Petersburg, therefore, 
 London saves some 50,000 human lives a year ; as 
 compared with Madrid, Pesth, and Rome, it saves, say, 
 45,000 lives ; as compared with Paris and Lyons, it 
 saves 40,000 lives. If it can do this, why cannot it do 
 more ? Our sanitary authorities tell us that it can do 
 
THE TRANSFORMATION OF LONDON 443 
 
 more : that 30,000 lives a year are still sacrificed to our 
 ignorance, our folly, and our crime. 
 
 We may take in turn a few of the ways in which the 
 lives of these 30,000 victims a year may be saved ; and, 
 with their lives, the infinite sorrow, suffering, and loss 
 which these 30,000 deaths involve. There is a book 
 with a most happy title, the instructive record of a most 
 useful life I mean The Health of Nations, by the well- 
 known reformer Sir B. W. Richardson. In that book 
 Dr. Richardson has collected the writings, described the 
 schemes, and explained the work of his friend, Edwin 
 Chadwick, the Nestor of sanitary reform, the Jeremy 
 Bentham of the Victorian epoch, the pioneer and 
 venerable chief of all health reformers. Edwin Chad- 
 wick, himself the philosophical executor and residuary 
 legatee of old Jeremy Bentham as a social and practical 
 reformer, in extreme, and hale old age, he was born in 
 the last century, in 1800 was still in 1887 hearty and 
 energetic in the cause to which he has devoted sixty 
 years of his life the great cause of the Health of 
 Nations. The Health of Nations is quite as important 
 as the Wealth of Nations. If the Health of Nations 
 does not need the philosophical genius of Adam Smith, 
 or the analytic genius of Jeremy Bentham, it needs a 
 spirit of social devotedness quite as serious, and a 
 practical energy in the apostle quite as great. As 
 Burke told us that John Howard had devoted himself 
 to a ' circumnavigation of charity,' so Edwin Chadwick 
 sixty years ago began a ' circumnavigation of sanitation,' 
 and after all his voyages he has at length finally put 
 into port. 
 
 Of all problems, the most important is water. We 
 are drinking water that at times is contaminated with 
 sewage, as well as with foul surface drainage, and that 
 
444 THE CITY IN HISTORY 
 
 to a degree which under possible conditions may be- 
 come deadly. I saw not long ago one of the large 
 affluents of the Upper Thames poisoned by mineral 
 refuse to a degree which suddenly killed the whole of 
 the fish. This garbage mineral poison, refuse, and 
 decaying fish we in London had to drink. It is true 
 that such are the forces of nature that even mineral 
 poison and stinking fish does not kill us always in 
 moderate doses. Were it not for the vis medicatrix 
 natura in the matter of water, air, and soil, we should 
 all be dead men some morning, the whole four millions 
 of us together. This want of abundant pure water is 
 one of the most crying wants of our age. There are 
 two or three modes in which London can be supplied 
 with wholesome water. Whether it is to come out of 
 the chalk, whether it is to be collected out of several of 
 the southern rivers at their head sources, whether it is 
 to come by a vast aqueduct from Bala Lake, the West 
 Midland hills, or from Ullswater, we need not discuss. 
 But it has to come pure, abundant, constant. Ulti- 
 mately, I believe, there will be a main aqueduct down 
 England from the lakes of Westmorland, sending off 
 branch mains to the greater Northern and Midland 
 towns, and pouring into London a river like the Eamont 
 at Penrith an inexhaustible source of pure water, just 
 as the Claudian or the Julian Aqueducts poured their 
 rivers into Rome Rome, the immortal type of all that 
 a great city ought to have in the way of water supply. 
 
 Let us away with all the nastiness and stupidities of 
 cisterns, with their dirt, poison, discomfort, and cost ; 
 away with the ball-cock, and the bursting pipes, and all 
 the abominations of bungling plumbers. A continuous 
 water supply is a necessity of civilisation. But free 
 water is as much a necessity of civilisation as pure 
 
THE TRANSFORMATION OF LONDON 445 
 
 water, or continuous water. Water, like the roadway, 
 is a public not a private concern. Neither water, air, 
 nor soil are manufactures like bread, clothes, and gas. 
 A man should be no more charged personally for water 
 by a commercial company than he should be charged 
 a toll for walking over London Bridge, or taking the 
 air in Hyde Park. It concerns the health of us all 
 that no family should be stinted in their water supply, 
 or even should stint themselves. Roadways, streets, 
 bridges, parks, embankments, the free use of air and 
 earth, ought to be secured us by public bodies, under 
 public control, making no private profit, and having no 
 private interest, and supported by common rates and 
 taxes, and so ought the free use of water to be. 
 
 Water we want unstinted and under absolute public 
 control for cooking, cleaning, and washing in our homes, 
 for cleansing the streets, for fire defence, for wash- 
 houses and public baths, for adornment and recreation. 
 And on every one of these grounds, for the same reason 
 that it would be criminal to make Hyde Park a private 
 company and let them charge a toll at the gates on 
 all these grounds we require Water to be a public and 
 not a private interest, a common advantage of a 
 civilised community, and not a commodity for share- 
 holders to speculate with and to sell to the needy. 
 
 Some day, I trust, we shall take in hand our rivers. 
 We have already done much. There is a vast deal 
 more to do. There is no positive reason why the 
 Thames as it flows by Westminster Palace should not 
 be as bright as when it reflects Hampton Court on 
 its surface. Factories, works, drainage, refuse, will no 
 longer, in secret and in defiance of Parliament, pollute 
 its stream ; the southern shores will be embanked like 
 the northern ; and the surface drainage of this metro- 
 
446 THE CITY IN HISTORY 
 
 politan area and its whole sewage will not be dis- 
 charged pell-mell into a tidal river. Some day, I 
 believe, our two or three millions of chimneys will no 
 longer pour out their endless pall of sulphur and soot. 
 No poisonous gas will ever enter a house ; for 
 mechanical contrivances will suck down the products 
 of refuse, instead of, as they now do, force them up 
 into our homes. 
 
 Nor need we doubt that we shall one day face the 
 great problem of health which death presents to us, in 
 the only way in which these vast modern cities can 
 face it by the system of cremation. All who have 
 studied the facts of cremation well know how idle are 
 the objections on the score of propriety, decency, 
 solemnity, or the concealment of crime. They know 
 that cremation alone affords the absolutely safe means 
 of bestowing the 80,000 corpses which each year casts 
 upon our sorrowing hands. The ordinary objections 
 which we hear are but melancholy remnants of childish 
 superstition. There are objections of weight which I 
 recognise to the full ; all that repugnance which springs 
 out of the hallowed memory of the buried remains, the 
 local sanctity of the grave, and all its religious and 
 beautiful associations. No one can respect these more 
 than I do ; no one can more heartily wish to preserve 
 them. But those who feel them have never made real 
 to their minds all the noble associations and resources 
 of urn burial one of the most ancient, beautiful, and 
 religious of all modes of disposing of the dead. Crema- 
 tion, in its present form, absolutely pure, effective, 
 simple, and dignified as it is, destroys the remotest 
 germs of deleterious power in the loved remains ; but 
 it does not annihilate the remains altogether. The 
 solid ashes remain far more pure and perfectly than in 
 
THE TRANSFORMATION OF LONDON 447 
 
 any ancient cremation the residuum of the body, 
 purified seven times in the fire. These ashes are 
 appropriately closed in an urn. They can be buried, if 
 it so be thought best, in the grave, and then the grave 
 will contain the body, not indeed putrescent in horrible 
 decay, but in a little harmless dust in a case. Crema- 
 tion need not at all affect the practice of interment. 
 The grave may remain undisturbed ; the sacred earth 
 may be there as now ; flowers, as now, will rise up and 
 bloom over the ashes. We the survivors may come 
 and stand beside the tombstone, and adorn it with a 
 wreath or a posy as now, and think over her and him 
 who rest below. But though they rest there as truly 
 as ever, it will not be in a long and lingering process 
 of abomination, ghastly and dangerous to the living 
 and dishonouring to the dead. The great and holy 
 work of Nature, purifying the poor insensible remains 
 which she had taken into her own bosom, will be done, 
 not in a lingering and loathsome fashion, but with a 
 swift and beautiful blaze of a modern scientific gas 
 furnace which in a few hours will consume the limbs 
 that have rested for ever, and will transmute them into 
 a permanent and innocent dust. 
 
 But it is in the name not only of the health of the 
 living that we need cremation in great cities, but as 
 the sole means left to us of preserving the sanctity of 
 the tomb, the religio loci of the dead. Although in- 
 terment may long hold its ground in open country, and 
 even partially combined with cremation in cities, as in 
 early Christian ages interment and cremation existed 
 together, urn burial of the ashes left by cremation 
 affords us surpassing facilities for art, poetry, sentiment, 
 and devotion in our ultimate disposal of the dead. 
 The sacred dust in its urn can be fitly placed in all 
 
448 THE CITY IN HISTORY 
 
 sorts of places ; for it is absolutely innocuous, very 
 moderate in bulk, and easily adapted to all kinds of 
 uses. It may be placed in a covering tomb, or as the 
 centre of a monumental construction. It may be 
 placed in a church, in a cloister, in a cemetery, in a 
 private chapel, even in a private room. Hence the 
 receptacles of sacred ashes need not be as now they 
 must be or ought to be at a wearisome distance from 
 the vast city and the home of the survivors. We can 
 again have our dead beside us, as they did in Roman 
 times and in mediaeval times ; but now without risk or 
 inconvenience. The ashes of the greater dead might 
 rest even in small consecrated chapels in the very 
 heart of the city, in our public places, or even in our 
 parks and churches. But for the general dead there is 
 that beautiful institution the cloister, or Campo Santo. 
 Those who know the lovely Campo Santo at Pisa, or 
 at Bologna, or at Genoa, even under a strict system of 
 interment, and will imagine what such a Campo Santo 
 or cloister could be made when combined with the 
 Roman system of the Columbaria, or cells for the 
 funeral urns, can see what a vast range is opened to the 
 preservation of the remains in ways full of beauty, 
 piety, and solemnity. The cloisters where our dead 
 lie need not be at any distance from our midst they 
 will be most glorious additions to our city monuments. 
 The old, clammy, ghastly, unsightly, useless city 
 churchyard will regain its uses and its beauty and lose 
 all its dangers. The new, noisy, untidy, and far-away 
 cemeteries will also be at an end. Beautiful cloisters 
 round the old graveyards of our parish churches will be 
 filled with chapels, oratories, monuments, Columbaria, 
 and devices of every kind where the pure ashes of our 
 dead will rest each in its own urn, and with its own 
 
THE TRANSFORMATION OF LONDON 449 
 
 record, to which \ve can come when we please to gaze, 
 and to recall in memory with resignation, love, and 
 outpouring of heart. Such seems to be for great cities 
 the burial of the future. 
 
 Nor can we doubt that our whole system of city 
 dwelling must be reformed. Our method in England 
 of separate houses for each family has great and precious 
 advantages ; and those who know its blessings will be 
 sore put to sacrifice it. But sacrifice it we must at last 
 in our great cities. As it is, it is in London for the 
 most part the privilege of the rich and the comfortable. 
 The enormous mass of our London workers live, as they 
 are forced to live, in lodgings or tenements. The whole 
 of the old, poisonous, crumbling houses of older London 
 are doomed. And we must boldly face the necessity of 
 rebuilding London some day for the masses in blocks. 
 It is the plan universal on the Continent. The enormous 
 waste of space, the indefinite increase of toil, involved 
 in our present London system, is alone conclusive as 
 to our practice. If London were constructed on the 
 tenement plan of Paris or New York, London would 
 save a third or a half of its unwieldy area. Again, it is 
 impossible to secure adequate air, sanitary construc- 
 tion, sanitary appliances, cleanliness, convenience, and 
 freedom, unless the homes of the workers be ultimately 
 constructed on the collective system. Water, lighting, 
 washing, drains, cleansing, provision for sickness, acci- 
 dent, death, and the like, and, above all, really scientific 
 construction can only be obtained, at low rents, on the 
 collective or tenement system. We need not reduce 
 them to the cheerless, huge, monotonous barracks which 
 are now too often called ' model dwellings.' But we 
 can conceive in the future the working homes of our 
 great cities consisting of detached blocks of not less 
 
 2 F 
 
450 THE CITY IN HISTORY 
 
 than five or six stories, each housing not less than 
 twenty or thirty families, with common appliances for 
 cooking, washing, bathing, exercising, playing, and 
 reading, which would supplement, not supersede, the 
 appliances of each apartment. And each such block 
 should contain in itself some sort of receptacle, some 
 kind of sick-house or infirmary, some spare rooms for 
 the treatment of malignant diseases, and for the due 
 disposal of the dead. 
 
 We need not here discuss the government of London 
 or the municipality for London. That is a political 
 and parliamentary question, and we all must desire 
 a central, real government for London, on the sole 
 condition that it be a good government. But for the 
 material resources of London we need local dispersion, 
 decentralisation, and local organisation. We can have 
 a government a long way off from us ; but we cannot 
 have museums, libraries, baths, parks, play-grounds, 
 schools, hospitals, and cemeteries a long way off from us 
 and our homes. Or if we do, they are of little use to 
 us. Materially though not governmentally London 
 needs to be treated departmentally, locally, and 
 separately. We may see the signs of that movement 
 on every side. There are the People's Palace, and the 
 new libraries, the new town halls, the new schools, the 
 parks, museums, the Toynbee Halls, which are springing 
 up everywhere. The great parliamentary reform of 
 1885 which grouped London into sixty divisions is a 
 step of immense importance. The parliamentary 
 borough is about large enough for local purposes. 
 Every parliamentary borough wants its own organisa- 
 tion for its museums, libraries, baths, parks, and play- 
 grounds, and all the rest. The children's school must 
 be within an easy walk. So must the men's reading- 
 
THE TRANSFORMATION OF LONDON 451 
 
 room, or lecture-hall, or library. The women must be 
 able to find a good wash-house at the end of the street ; 
 a man after his Sunday dinner must be able to take his 
 family to get fresh air and rational recreation without 
 walking more than a mile for it. The children and 
 young people must be able to get to their playgrounds, 
 or their gymnasia, or their concert, or dance, walk or 
 talk, without being tired by the walk before they get 
 there. For there is one thing certain, which is that all 
 the telegraphs, and railways, and all the inventions of 
 modern science have not made human legs and feet 
 able to go quicker or go farther than they used ; that 
 even tramcars and underground railways are only a 
 very partial substitute for legs ; and that until science 
 invents seven-leagued boots, perfectly available for 
 every man, woman, and child, and provided gratis at 
 every house door, the appliances of civilised life must 
 be within an easy walk of people's homes. 
 
 To some such city, then, we may look in the future. 
 A city where our noble river will flow so bright and 
 clear that our young people can swim in it with pleasure 
 as they do at Paris. A city where we shall again see 
 the blessed sun in a clear blue sky, and watch the 
 steeples and the towers as they do at Paris shining 
 aloft in the bright air. A city which at night will be 
 radiant with the electric light, in the midst of which 
 fountains, as at Rome, will pour forth fresh rivers from 
 the hills a river in our case of perennial water that has 
 fallen from Snowdon or Helvellyn. A city where all 
 noxious refuse is absolutely unknown, where no deadly 
 exhalations are pumped into our homes, where a child 
 can drink a glass of water from the tap or the street 
 fountain and sleep in its garret at home with entire 
 impunity, a city where typhus and typhoid, smallpox, 
 
452 THE CITY IN HISTORY 
 
 zymotic disease, shall be as rare as the plague, and as 
 much a matter of history as the leprosy. A city where 
 the dead shall no longer be a terror to the living, no 
 longer despatched unremembered to some distant burial- 
 place, but kept in our midst at once a source of 
 reverent memory and of beautiful adornment. A city 
 where preventable disease is a crime to be charged 
 against some one, and an opprobrium to the district in 
 which it breaks out, like a murder or a burglary. A 
 city where no child shall go untaught because it has no 
 suitable school at hand. A city where no man should 
 go without books, pictures, music, society, art, exercise, 
 or religion, because there were no free libraries at hand, 
 or no museums open when he was at leisure after work, 
 no galleries to look at on a Sunday, no concerts, no 
 parks, no playgrounds within reach, no free seats in a 
 church which he cared to enter. 
 
 II. London in 1894 
 
 The Local Government Act of 1888 has undoubtedly 
 added a new impulse to that transformation of London, 
 which historic causes of European range had made 
 necessary for more than a generation, and which had 
 been stimulated anew by the Parliamentary Redistribu- 
 tion Act of 1885. With the political aspect of these 
 Acts, and with the policy of the London County Council, 
 we have no occasion to concern ourselves in these pages. 
 But the effect of this great municipal reform on the 
 evolution of London as a historic city is too momentous 
 to be passed in silence. 
 
 In the first place, London, which a generation ago 
 was an inorganic mass of Parishes variously controlled 
 by obscure Vestries, has been showing in the last decade 
 
THE TRANSFORMATION OF LONDON 453 
 
 unexpected tendencies towards organic unity and to 
 evolve an internal organisation. The organic unity has 
 been adjourned, in spite of heroic efforts on many sides, 
 by the natural rivalries between the new Council and 
 the historic Corporation, by differences between the two 
 Houses of Parliament, and by the protracted crisis in 
 the political world. Of all these causes (temporary as 
 true patriots hope) nothing will be said here. In the 
 meantime the spontaneous organisation of London into 
 an aggregate of cities has been one of the most striking 
 of modern movements. It has been greatly stimulated 
 by the two political reforms which created 650,000 voters 
 for London, and divided it into numerous boroughs. 
 These have become real civic organisms of a manage- 
 able size ; and they have naturally developed a kind of 
 local patriotism, such as was hardly possible to grow up 
 in the vague welter of an unknown and unknowable 
 ' Metropolis.' 
 
 The ultimate destiny of this huge agglomeration of 
 houses is now vested in the hands of the vast masses of 
 the working population. They have far more keen 
 interests in the city than their wealthier neighbours, who 
 look on London as a centre of labour, amusement, or 
 struggle for a season or a period, whilst they often ' get 
 away ' from it, and hope at last to retire to a calmer 
 place. In the meantime the richer classes seldom know 
 London as a whole, or care for it as their home, or 
 regard it as having any claim on them as their city. 
 Far different is this to the working men : to whom 
 London is their home, their ' county,' their permanent 
 abode. It is a city which they quit only for a few 
 hours or days, which many of them are forced to 
 traverse from end to end under the exigencies of their 
 trade, where they expect to pass their old age and to 
 
454 THE CITY IN HISTORY 
 
 lay their bones. The healthiness, convenience, pleasant- 
 ness of London, are all in all to them and to their 
 household. Mismanagement is to them, and to those 
 dear to them, disease, discomfort, death. There is 
 every reason to look forward to the complete trans- 
 formation of London into an organic city, with a people 
 proud of its grandeur and beauty, so soon as the new 
 institutions have been fully matured. We have seen 
 a local municipal patriotism break forth with extraor- 
 dinary rapidity and energy in several of the new 
 boroughs, such as Battersea, Chelsea, and St George's- 
 in-the-East. And this interest in city life will grow 
 and deepen, as it has done in Midland and Northern 
 towns, until ultimately we may look to see London as 
 a whole develop the spirit of pride and attachment 
 which the great cities of the Middle Ages bred in their 
 citizens of old. 
 
 The big collective problems which deal with Water, 
 with Fire, with the Sick, with the Dead, with central 
 Communications, and with the Housing of the poor 
 population can only be undertaken by a supreme 
 central municipality, but not by vestries, or boroughs. 
 And unhappily in London no supreme municipality has 
 as yet a free hand, or can count on the aid of the 
 Legislature. But in spite of division of authority and 
 legislative obstacles, not a little has been done and 
 much more has been attempted and prepared in every 
 one of these departments. It is fair to say that both 
 the ancient Corporation and the County Council have 
 striven to attain these ends ; and in not a few cases 
 with combined energies and resources. And although 
 in the case of the Water Supply no final solution has 
 been reached, an immense amount of scientific study 
 has been directed to the problem ; and a great improve- 
 
THE TRANSFORMATION OF LONDON 455 
 
 ment both in quantity and quality has been obtained. 
 At the same time determined efforts and a large ex- 
 penditure have visibly improved the condition of our 
 great river ; and fill us with hope that living men may 
 yet come to see a pure and healthy Thames. 
 
 The great problem of how to bring London up to 
 the level of its position in the world and to make it a 
 really noble and commodious city has been continually 
 attacked : as yet with incomplete results and a better 
 understanding of the difficulties which beset it. It is 
 mainly a financial and political question. The great- 
 est and richest city in the world is also the city which 
 now seems to practise the most rigid economy in its 
 own improvement. With the greatest river of any 
 capital in Europe, with boundless energy, wealth, and 
 opportunities, London is put to shame by Paris, Berlin, 
 Vienna, Rome, and New York. London, it is true, has 
 no mind to follow the monstrous extravagance which 
 has imposed crushing burdens on so many Italian cities. 
 But it will not even follow the honourable example 
 of Manchester, Liverpool, Glasgow, Birmingham, and 
 Nottingham. The London Council is housed in hired 
 makeshifts, and London communications are indefinitely 
 adjourned. This, however, is entirely a financial and 
 political question. With the existing system of finance 
 and in the equilibrium of political parties, it has been 
 the fixed resolve of the Council to throw no fresh 
 burdens on the occupying ratepayer. 
 
 Yet in spite of legislative obstacles, within five 
 years the number of the public Parks, Open Spaces, 
 and Playgrounds, has been more than doubled, and 
 their public usefulness immeasurably increased. The 
 material, the stations, and the staff devoted to ex- 
 tinguish fires have been very largely augmented ; and 
 
456 THE CITY IN HISTORY 
 
 further increase is contemplated ; so that the army 
 required for fighting urban conflagrations may ere long 
 be brought up to the level of modern civilisation. 
 Great efforts are also being made to arrest infectious 
 disease, to suppress nuisances, to prevent contamination 
 of food, to condemn insanitary dwellings, to secure just 
 weights and measures, and to rehouse the people in com- 
 fortable and healthy homes. When we consider how 
 much has been done within the last few years to 
 increase the healthiness, the convenience, the pleasant- 
 ness of London for the masses who inhabit it in per- 
 manence, there is ground to trust that the reorganisation 
 of the great city has begun. Even in the costly and 
 difficult problem of trans-fluvial communications the 
 work has been taken in hand. London presents in this 
 matter more arduous problems than any European 
 capital. But the Tower Bridge, the Blackwall Tunnel, 
 the steam-ferry, and the rebuilding of old bridges that is 
 projected, will do something to meet this urgent want 
 
 The side wherein London still most visibly halts 
 is in the street improvements and new communications 
 so loudly demanded for years. This, however, is an 
 operation enormously costly and beset with complex 
 parliamentary difficulties. Until these are solved, and 
 the conflict on the form and incidence of municipal 
 taxation is decided, we cannot expect much to be done. 
 But the question has already been stirred in all its 
 forms ; and many schemes have been put before the 
 public and parliament. London has many noble 
 features, in its great river, its fine parks, its position 
 astride of the Thames, and its northern heights gradu- 
 ally sloping down to the embankment. But it has vast 
 arrears of work to make up before it can be counted a 
 commodious or splendid city. There are large parts 
 
THE TRANSFORMATION OF LONDON 457 
 
 of London where crooked lanes and decayed houses 
 remain almost as they were built after the fire of 1666. 
 The urgent problem now is to secure better thorough- 
 fares from north to south. Below Vauxhall Bridge 
 not a single carriage bridge has been added for two 
 generations, whilst the population has increased three- 
 fold. The trans-fluvial communication, including the 
 enlargement and rebuilding of existing bridges, and 
 the approaches to these both north and south, needs at 
 this hour to be at least doubled in number and carrying 
 power. 
 
 Amongst the larger problems still awaiting solution 
 for the material improvement of London are : 
 
 1. The completion of the embankment of the river 
 
 on both sides between Battersea and Blackfriars, 
 with due provision for continual easy access to 
 the Embankment, and with docks at suitable 
 stations within it. 
 
 2. Improved access to the existing bridges, north 
 
 and south. 
 
 3. New carriage bridges, at least at Lambeth and at 
 
 Charing Cross. 
 
 4. A direct avenue connecting the three great 
 
 northern railway termini with the Waterloo 
 terminus and with Charing Cross. 
 
 5. Connections of Holborn with the Strand, the 
 
 British Museum with Somerset House, Victoria 
 Terminus with South Kensington and Lambeth, 
 Ludgate Hill with Cheapside. 
 
 6. The reconstruction of Covent Garden and its 
 
 approaches and connection of it with the Courts 
 of Justice and with the north. 
 
 7. The reconstruction of the Main Drainage system, 
 
 including the discharge of sewage to the sea. 
 
458 THE CITY IN HISTORY 
 
 8. The re-housing of the people displaced from de- 
 cayed insanitary areas. 
 
 The minor improvements in every outlying parish 
 and suburb are far too many and complex to be treated 
 here. 
 
 These undertakings, together with a suitable building 
 for the government of London to work in, may occupy 
 the energy and resources of a whole generation. It is 
 impossible to calculate the enormous loss in money, in 
 comfort, in health, in labour, wasted by millions of 
 people struggling to reach each other through crowded, 
 narrow, and circuitous streets. Nor can we easily 
 estimate the evils of pinching the government of a 
 great capital by niggardly supply of the material ap- 
 pliances of its task. 
 
 The first thing is to make our city a healthful home 
 for the people. The next is to furnish it abundantly 
 with all the resources of civic life one of the primary 
 of which is adequate means of transit. The third is to 
 invest it with dignity, impressiveness, and beauty. The 
 people who now have the destinies of their own city 
 in their own hands will not long remain satisfied with 
 squalor, ugliness, and discomfort. The civic patriotism 
 of London has lain dormant for centuries, but in our 
 generation it is reviving. And we may hope that ere 
 the twentieth century is far advanced, it may create a 
 new London worthy of its past history and its vast 
 opportunities. 
 
CHAPTER XVI 
 
 THE SACREDNESS OF ANCIENT BUILDINGS 1 
 
 A TORSO from the hand of Pheidias, a portrait by Titian, 
 a Mass by Palestrina or Bach, a lyrical poem of Milton, 
 an abbey church of the thirteenth century are all works 
 of art ; matchless, priceless, sacred : such as man on this 
 earth will never replace, nor ever again see. They are, 
 each and all, that which are a great life, or a memorable 
 deed : once spent, they can never be repeated in the same 
 way again, and yet, once lived, or once achieved, they 
 make the world to be for ever after a better place. And 
 these inimitable works are not only amongst the heir- 
 looms of mankind ; but they are records of the life of 
 our fathers, which concentrate in a single page, canvas, 
 block of stone, hymn, or it may be, portal, as much 
 history as would fill a library of dull written annals. 
 From the point of view of beauty, of knowledge, of 
 reverence, these works of art are, as the historian of 
 Athens said, ' an everlasting possession.' 
 
 Yet how strangely different is the care with which we 
 treat the statue, the picture, the music, the poem, from 
 the treatment we give the church the church, one 
 would think the most sacred of all. It is not so with 
 us. We preserve the torso, or the portrait we restore 
 the church. We give it a new inside and a fresh out- 
 
 1 An address given at the Annual Meeting of the Society for the Preser- 
 vation of Ancient Buildings, 1887. Contemporary Review, vol. lii. 
 
460 THE CITY IN HISTORY 
 
 side. We deck it out in a brand-new suit to cover its 
 nakedness. A committee of subscribers choose the 
 style, the century, into which it shall be transposed ; 
 they wrangle in meetings, in rasping letters, and 
 corrosive pamphlets, as to carrying on an early-pointed 
 arcade in the lady-chapel, or as to introducing a gridiron 
 mass of perpendicular tracery in the west window. The 
 chapter, the subscribers, the amateur archaeologists, each 
 have their pet style, sub-style, and epoch, their fancy 
 architect, or infallible authority in stone, antiquities, and 
 taste. Between them the church is gutted, scraped, re- 
 faced, translated into one of those brand-new, intensely 
 mediaeval, machine-made, and engine -turned fabrics, 
 which the pupils of the great man of the day turn out 
 by the score. This is how we treat the church. 
 
 Imagine the tenth part of this outrage applied to 
 statue, picture, hymn, or poem. Suppose the Trustees 
 of the British Museum were to call in Mr. Gilbert and 
 commission him to restore the Parthenon torsos, to 
 bring the fragments from the Mausoleum up to the 
 style of the Periclean era. Suppose the Ministry of 
 Fine Arts in France restored the arms of the Melian 
 Aphrodite in the Louvre, or the Pope restored the legs, 
 arms, and head to the torso beloved by Buonarroti. 
 Europe, in either case, would ring with indignation and 
 horror. Time was, no doubt, when these things were 
 done, and done by clever sculptors in better ages of art 
 than ours. But we may be fairly sure that it will never 
 be done again. 
 
 Pictures, we know, have been restored ; and, perhaps, 
 on the sly are restored still. Years ago I saw a 
 miscreant painting over the ' Peter Martyr ' of Titian 
 in the Church of SS. Giovanni e Paolo ; and it would 
 have been a condign punishment if the fire which con- 
 
THE SACREDNESS OF ANCIENT BUILDINGS 461 
 
 sumed it had caught him red-handed in the act. They 
 have daubed Leonardo's ' Cenacolo ' till there is nothing 
 but a shadow left. But though a sacrilegious brush 
 may now and then be raised against an ancient Master 
 (just as murder, rape, and arson are not yet absolutely 
 put down), even our great-great-grandfathers, who made 
 the grand tour and ' collected ' in the days of Horace 
 Walpole, never added powder and a full wig to one of 
 Titian's Doges, or asked Zoffany to finish a chalk study 
 by Michael Angelo. 
 
 I do not know that there ever was a time when people 
 restored a poem or a piece of music. Certainly Colley 
 Gibber restored some of Shakespeare's plays, introducing 
 bon ton into ' Hamlet ' and ' Richard III.' And Michael 
 Costa would interpolate brass into Handel's ' Messiah.' 
 But in any world that claims a title to art, taste or 
 culture, to falsify a note or a word, either in music or in 
 poem, is rank forgery and profanity felony without 
 benefit of clergy. Manuscripts are searched with 
 microscopes and collated by photographs to secure 
 the ipsissima verba of the author. And the editor who 
 ' improved ' a single line of ' Lycidas ' would be 
 drummed out of literature to the ' Rogue's March.' 
 
 In our day, happily, poem, music, picture, and statue 
 are preserved with a loving and religious care. Picture 
 and statue are cased in glass and air-tight chambers ; 
 for we would not beteem the winds of heaven visit their 
 face too roughly. The rude public are kept at arms' - 
 length ; and in some countries are not suffered so much 
 as to look at the books, engravings, and paintings for 
 which they have paid. Worship of an old poet is 
 carried to the point of printing his compositions in the 
 authentic but unintelligible cacography he used. And 
 as to old music, reverence is carried so far that too 
 
462 THE CITY IN HISTORY 
 
 often we do not perform it at all, I suppose for fear 
 that a passage here and there may not be interpreted 
 aright. 
 
 Go to Sir Charles Newton or Mr. Murray, and tell 
 him that the 'Theseus' and 'Ilissus' in the Elgin 
 Room (I use the old conventional names) are sadly 
 dilapidated on their surface, and that you could restore 
 their skins to the original polish ; or propose to repaint 
 the Panathenaic frieze in the undoubted colours used 
 by Pheidias. Tell Sir Frederick Burton or Mr. Poynter 
 that the lights in the ' Lazarus ' and the ' Bacchus and 
 Ariadne ' have plainly gone down ; and that you will 
 carry out the ideas of Sebastian and Titian by heighten- 
 ing them a little. Tell him that 'Alexander and the 
 Family of Darius ' is full of anachronisms, and that you 
 will re-robe the figures with strict attention to chronology 
 and archaeology. I should like to see the looks of these 
 public servants when you proposed it, as I should like 
 to have seen Michael Angelo watching the ' Breeches- 
 maker' who clothed the naked saints in his Sistine 
 ' Last Judgment.' 
 
 Statue, picture, book, music, are preserved intact with 
 reverential awe. Not but what some of them have 
 suffered too by time, get utterly dilapidated, are in risk 
 of perishing, have become mere fragments, or offer 
 tempting ground for ambitious genius. The 'Aphrodite' 
 of Melos is still a riddle : the torso of the Vatican is a 
 very sphinx in stone, a mass of marble ever propound- 
 ing enigmas, ever rejecting solutions. It is a block as 
 it stands : head, arms, legs, and action would make it a 
 statue. The ' Cenacolo' of Milan has long been a mere 
 ghost of a fresco, faint as the last gleam of a rainbow. 
 There are still whole choruses of yEschylus to restore ; 
 and Shakespeare is certainly not responsible for every 
 
THE SACREDNESS OF ANCIENT BUILDINGS 463 
 
 scene in his so-called works. Literature and Art are 
 full of works, either injured by time, or left incomplete 
 by their authors, or such as modern research could 
 easily purge of their anachronisms, inconsistencies, and 
 general defects. 
 
 It is in one art only that modern research dares this 
 outrage. Great works of architecture are not exactly 
 on the same footing with great works of sculpture, of 
 painting, of music, of poetry. They differ from all ; and 
 I will presently consider these differences. But great 
 works of architecture are, like all great works of art, 
 matchless, priceless, and sacred. They are absolutely 
 beyond renewal. It is easier to copy Titian's ' Entomb- 
 ment ' than the portal of Chartres or Notre Dame as 
 they once stood, and stand no more. Each great work 
 of architecture is also unique : completely distinct from 
 every work that ever was or ever will be. Giotto's 
 Campanile, the Duke's Palace at Venice, stand alone 
 must we say stood alone? like Hamlet or Lear, 
 ' remote, sublime, and inaccessible.' A man who 
 wanted to 'continue' Giotto's Campanile, or add a 
 new story, and enlarge the Palace at Venice, is the 
 kind of man who would ' continue ' the Iliad or 
 dramatise the Divine Comedy for the Lyceum stage. 
 
 In all ways the great building is worthy of a deeper 
 reverence, is consecrated with a profounder halo of 
 social and historical mystery than any picture or any 
 statue can be. Of the five great arts, that of building is 
 the only one which adds to its charm of beauty the 
 solemnity of the genius loci. It is the one art which is 
 immovably fixed to place ; the rest are migratory or 
 independent of space. Poetry and music, not being 
 arts of form, are not confined to any spot. Statues and 
 paintings, though they can only be seen in some spot, 
 
464 THE CITY IN HISTORY 
 
 may be carried round the world and set up in museums 
 and galleries. But the building belongs for ever to the 
 place where it is set up. It is incorporated with the 
 surroundings, the climate, the people, the site, where it 
 first rose. No museum can ever hold it ; it is not to be 
 catalogued, mounted, framed, or classed like a coin or a 
 mummy in a glass case. It stands for ever facing the 
 same eternal hills, the same ever-flowing river, rising 
 into the same azure or lowering sky into which it rose 
 at first in joy or pride. It may be as old as the Pyramids, 
 or as recent as Queen Anne. But in any case it has 
 watched generation after generation come and go ; for 
 thousands of years men have passed under that portal ; 
 for centuries the bell has tolled from that tower. The 
 steps of this colonnade have been worn by the feet of 
 Pericles, Sophocles, Plato, and Socrates ; under this arch 
 passed the Antonines, Trajan, and Charlemagne ; Saint 
 Louis used to pray standing on this very floor, six 
 centuries and a half ago ; this chapter-house was for 
 two centuries the cradle of the Mother of Parliaments 
 throughout the world. 
 
 No other art whatever, with the partial exception of 
 large frescoes, 1 neither music nor poetry, has this religio 
 loci, this consecration of some spot by hallowed associa- 
 tion, which is bound up with the very life of every great 
 building. In the whole range of art there is nothing so 
 human, so social, so intense, as this spirit which has 
 made the practice of pilgrimage an eternal instinct of 
 humanity. To pass from the roar of Paris or London 
 to sit beside the Venus or the Theseus is delight. We 
 all feel rest and awe before a Madonna of Raphael, a 
 
 1 Such frescoes as those of the Arena Chapel at Padua, or the Sistine 
 Chapel at Rome, belong to architecture as much as to painting, almost as 
 much as the frieze of the Parthenon is a part of the building. 
 
THE SACREDNESS OF ANCIENT BUILDINGS 465 
 
 portrait of Titian, or listening to Mozart's ' Requiem,' or 
 to ' Paradise Lost.' But to me, a son of earth, no art 
 comes home, seeming at once so intense and so infinite, 
 as when I wander round the old piazzas at Florence and 
 Venice, or pace about the Forum or the Abbey. There 
 art, memory, veneration, patriotism, the pathos, the 
 endurance, the majesty of humanity, seem to me to 
 blend in one overpowering sensation. Who can say 
 where Art ends and Veneration begins ? 
 
 Thus every ancient building, whether it be a successful 
 work of art or not, is sacred by its associations, and is a 
 standing record in itself. But an ancient building is a 
 far more definite product of the society out of which it 
 grew and the civilisation which created it, than any 
 statue or any painting, almost more than any music, or 
 any poem. It is usually a far less personal and in- 
 dividual act of imagination than statue, painting, poem, 
 or music. It is a collective and developing work, the 
 creation of a series of minds, the inspiration of a given 
 epoch, and of a particular people. No great statue, or 
 painting, or piece of music, or poem, was ever produced 
 by a group of artists. Most great buildings were. The 
 Parthenon is in what is called the Doric not the Ionic 
 style ; and we think of Pheidias, the sculptor, rather 
 than Ictinus, the architect, as the genius who created it. 
 Hardly a single great church, till the age of Wren, can 
 be positively assigned to one sole author, as we assign 
 the ' Agamemnon ' positively to yEschylus, or the 
 Sistine Madonna to the stessa mano of Raphael. A 
 few, a very few, buildings bear the stamp of one unique 
 genius, such as the Campanile at Florence, the Sainte 
 Chapelle, and our St. Paul's. Statues, paintings, poems, 
 and music, are each the complete conception of one 
 mind, the execution of one hand. As a rule, buildings 
 
 2 G 
 
466 THE CITY IN HISTORY 
 
 are the accumulating conception of several minds, the 
 execution of successive generations. 
 
 It is no doubt this character in buildings which has 
 made us slow to treat them with the reverence and love 
 that we show so readily to works in the other arts. 
 Other works are the creations of some master whose 
 name, story, and individuality we know. A Madonna 
 is by Raphael or Bellini ; a poem is by Dante or 
 Milton ; a Mass is by Bach or Mozart ; a statue is by 
 Pheidias or Michael Angelo. And we cannot conceive 
 any other hand or brain so much as touching the work. 
 But the Church of the Holy Wisdom at Constantinople 
 is the work of the Byzantine School ; the Cathedral of 
 Chartres is the work of builders in the Middle Ages ; 
 the Abbey, the Tower of London, the Louvre, the 
 Duomo and the Palazzo Vecchio at Florence, repre- 
 sent whole centuries of successive evolution in art and 
 manners. Statues and paintings are the creations of 
 single Masters. Buildings are the collective growth of 
 Ages. 
 
 But for this very reason, what buildings lose in 
 personal interest they gain in human interest, in social 
 significance, in historical value. The multiplicity of 
 parts in a great edifice, the vast range of its power over 
 an infinite series of human souls, the sacrifices, the 
 endurance, the concentration of efforts by which it was 
 built up, and the countless generations of men who 
 have contributed to its beauty or have been touched by 
 its majesty, give it a collective human glory, which no 
 statue or picture ever had a glory which is exceeded 
 only by the great poems of the world. A Madonna 
 was struck off in a few months, and since it was put on 
 canvas has been seen by some tens of thousands, of 
 whom some thousand came from it better men. A 
 
THE SACREDNESS OF ANCIENT BUILDINGS 467 
 
 statue, a song, a lyric, appeals to a definite number in a 
 definite way, but hardly to a whole people on every 
 side of their souls. But take a great building a great 
 group of buildings at its highest point say the 
 Acropolis at Athens, the Forum at old Rome, the Papal 
 edifices at modern Rome, the Piazzas at Florence, 
 Venice, and Verona, Notre Dame as it stood unrestored, 
 our own great group at Westminster in vast range of 
 impression and invention they are certainly surpassed 
 by the Bible, the Iliad, the Divine Comedy, or the 
 works of Shakespeare, but by no other creative work 
 of man ever produced. The civilisation of whole 
 races is petrified into them. For centuries, tens of 
 thousands of men have toiled, thought, imagined, and 
 poured their souls into the work. It would be an 
 education in art to have known by heart that glorious 
 facade of Notre Dame, as it once was, when every leaf 
 in its foliage, every fold in the drapery, every smile in 
 every saint's face was an individual conception of some 
 graceful spirit and some deft hand to have known 
 every legend which blazed in ruby, azure, and emerald 
 in the countless lights of nave, choir, aisle, and transept, 
 the thousands of statues which peopled it within and 
 without, the carved stalls and screens, the iron, brass, 
 and silver and gold work, the pictures, the frescoes, the 
 tombs, the altars, the marbles, the bronzes, the em- 
 broideries, the ivories, the mosaics. A great national 
 building is the product of a nation, and is the school of 
 a nation. And for this reason it should stand in our 
 reverence and love next to the great poems of a 
 nation. Next to the Iliad and the Trilogy crimes the 
 Parthenon. Next to the Divine Comedy the Duomo of 
 Florence and its adjuncts. Next to Shakespeare and 
 Milton the Abbey. 
 
468 THE CITY IN HISTORY 
 
 There is thus a peculiar quality in the great historic 
 building which marks it off from all other works of art. 
 It is in a special sense a living work. It is not so much 
 a work as a being. It has an organic life, organic 
 growth ; it has a history, an evolution of its own. The 
 Pantheon at Rome has gone on living and growing for 
 nearly nineteen centuries, the Castle of St. Angelo for 
 nearly seventeen, the Church of the Holy Wisdom for 
 thirteen, and our own Tower for eight centuries ; and 
 all of them are still living buildings, and not at all 
 ruins or 'monuments.' A building may undergo amazing 
 permutations, like Hadrian's Mausoleum, the baths of 
 Diocletian, or the Church of Justinian, and yet retain 
 its identity and its vital energy. A building is indeed 
 rather an institution than a work ; and, like all in- 
 stitutions, it has its own evolution, corresponding with 
 the social evolution on which it depends, and of which 
 it is the symbol. Our Tower, Abbey, Palace of West- 
 minster, and Windsor Castle are much more like our 
 Monarchy, Parliament, and Judicial system than they 
 are like a Madonna by Raphael, or a statue by Pheidias, 
 They are not objects to be looked at in museums. 
 They are organic lives, social institutions, historic forces. 
 
 Now I hold that all national, historic, monumental 
 buildings whatever, however small or humble, partake 
 of this character, and ought to have the same veneration 
 and sacredness bestowed on them. Every building that 
 has a definite public history, and has been dedicated to 
 public use, be it church, tower, bridge, gateway, hall, is 
 a national institution, is a public possession, and has 
 become "sacrosanct, as the Romans said. In the law of 
 Rome, the ground in which one who had the right 
 buried a dead body became, ipso facto, religious ; it 
 ceased to be private property, it could not be bought or 
 
THE SACREDNESS OF ANCIENT BUILDINGS 469 
 
 sold, transferred or used. It was for ever dedicated to 
 the dead, and reserved from all current usage. So a 
 building, which our dead forefathers have dedicated to 
 the service of generations, should be sacrosanct to the 
 memory of the Past. 
 
 Its size, its beauty, its antiquity, its celebrity, are 
 matters of degree not of principle. Essentially it is a 
 national possession, an irreparable monument, a sacred 
 record, as the great Charter and ' Domesday ' are. 
 These records have become so pitiably few, their 
 possible value is so incalculably great, their unique, 
 inimitable, priceless nature as relics is so obvious, that 
 wantonly to destroy one of them ought to be treated 
 as a public crime, like smashing the Portland Vase, 
 or defacing the Charter and ' Domesday.' It is pre- 
 posterous that an incumbent and his churchwardens, a 
 dean and chapter, a mayor and aldermen, a warden and 
 benchers, a highway board, or a borough corporation, 
 should be free to deface a national relic, and falsify a 
 national record. At the very least, a parish church 
 should be as well protected by law as a parish register 
 is against wanton defacement and falsification of its 
 contents. In principle the idea is admitted by the 
 need for a ' faculty.' But a ' faculty ' is become a 
 melancholy form ; and no ' faculty ' is needed by the 
 trustees who sell an ancient edifice to a builder's 
 speculation, by the highway board which carts away a 
 tower or a gate, or ' restores ' and ' improves ' a bridge. 
 
 Our glorious Milton said, in a passage as immortal 
 as his poems, ' as good almost kill a Man as kill a good 
 Book.' We may add : ' As good almost kill a good 
 Book as kill an ancient Building.' The one is as ir- 
 recoverable as the other ; it may teach us as much ; it 
 should affect us even more. See how the words of that 
 
470 THE CITY IN HISTORY 
 
 most Biblical of passages, which Isaiah himself might 
 have uttered, apply to the building as much as to the 
 book. Is not a great historic abbey ' an immortality 
 rather than a life ' ? Is not the cathedral, too, ' the 
 precious life-blood of a master-spirit, embalmed and 
 treasured up on purpose to a life beyond life"? Are 
 not these 'restorers' and 'improvers' of our public 
 monuments the men who ' spill that seasoned life of 
 man preserved and stored up in ' the buildings which 
 our forefathers raised, in which their lives were recorded, 
 and their best work was bestowed ? 
 
 Every work of art has in it ' the precious life-blood 
 of a master-spirit ' ; but a work of great architecture 
 and historic importance has in it the precious life-blood 
 of many a master-spirit. And the humblest ancient 
 monument, though it be a petty parish church or a 
 market cross, has this ' seasoned life of man preserved 
 in it.' Like the picture, the statue, the poem, in every 
 work of art, the precious life-blood of the master-spirit 
 which informs it should make it sacred from sacrilegious 
 hands. But the building has also that which picture, 
 statue, and poem, have not the religio loci. ' The 
 place whereon thou standest is holy ground,' may be 
 said of every historic monument. Nay more. The 
 ancient building is marked by a filiation of master- 
 spirits. Like the Saxon ' Chronicle,' or the ' Annals of 
 Waverley,' it is not a fixed but a current record. It is 
 a continuous and moving monument at once contem- 
 porary like annals, and yet organic like a history. The 
 great Charter, ' Domesday,' the Bayeux tapestry, are 
 records of given moments in the national life. But in 
 the Abbey and its precincts may be seen the works 
 of English hands, continuously for a thousand years, 
 generation after generation, typical contemporary work. 
 
THE SACREDNESS OF ANCIENT BUILDINGS 471 
 
 Now, the humblest old parish church partakes of this 
 quality of continuous typical work for centuries. 
 
 It is monstrous that any man, any body of men, even 
 any single generation, should claim the right in the 
 name of property, or their office, or their present con- 
 venience, to destroy in a moment the continuous work 
 of centuries, to desecrate the best work of their fore- 
 fathers, and to rob their own descendants of their 
 common birthright. Who gave this rare and inimitable 
 value to the ancient building? Not they, nor even 
 the first founders of it. Generation after generation 
 stamped their mark on it, recorded their thoughts in 
 it, poured into it their precious life-blood. It is an 
 aggregate product of their race, a social possession of 
 all. Whence came the religio loci which casts a halo 
 over it ? From no single author, from no set of builders: 
 from a long succession of ancestral generations to whom 
 it has grown a sacred and national symbol. That 
 precious value which time, society, the nation, have 
 given it, is now at the mercy of any man, or any board. 
 
 There was a noble doctrine in the old Roman Law, 
 which may be stated in the words of Gaius : Sanctae 
 quoque res, velut muri et portae, quodammodo divini 
 iuris sunt. Quod autem divini iuris est, id nullius in 
 bonis est. ' Things like city walls, city gates, are sacro- 
 sanct ; and, in a sense, under divine sanction. But 
 whatever is under the divine sanction cannot be the 
 subject of property.' That is to say, historic buildings 
 which form part of the national records are consecrated 
 by the past and dedicated to the future, and are taken 
 out of the arbitrary disposal of the present. This 
 principle goes deeper than the making them public 
 property. They are not property at all not to be 
 used, consumed, and adapted at the passing will of the 
 
472 THE CITY IN HISTORY 
 
 day. They are not the chattels of the public. They 
 are not public property ; they are consecrated to the 
 nation. Each generation is too apt to ask, like a 
 famous peer, ' May I not do what I please with mine, 
 own ? ' No ! national possessions are much more than 
 public property. They are not ' the own ' of a passing 
 body. They are the inheritance which the past is 
 bequeathing to the future, and of which we are but 
 trustees. We have no absolute rights over them at all ; 
 we have only the duty to preserve them. 
 
 So great is the difference between our treatment of old 
 pictures, statues, poems, and songs, and our treatment 
 of old buildings, that there must be some ground for 
 our practice. Certainly there is. Architecture is an 
 art essentially different from other arts ; and buildings 
 are not simple works of art. A building intended to 
 shelter and contain men, is, like clothing, food, and 
 firing, a necessity of man's material existence, and not, 
 as picture, statue, poem, and song are, means of giving 
 grace and joy to man's life. Hence every building is 
 first and principally a necessity and a material utility, 
 and a work of beauty afterwards (if it ever become so 
 at all). The most restless generation does not ' restore ' 
 and ' convert ' either picture, statue, poem, or song, as 
 if it were an old gown or a piece of carpet, simply 
 because they are not conveniences but enjoyments. A 
 generation which finds an old building inconvenient, is 
 cruelly tempted to ' convert,' ' adapt,' extend, or alter it. 
 Again, the building not only occupies a surface of 
 ground enormously greater than picture, statue, or book, 
 but it occupies immovably for ever one definite spot 
 on the planet ; and in the perpetual changes of social 
 life that may easily become an intolerable burden on the 
 living. As the building occupies unalterably a given spot 
 
THE SACREDNESS OF ANCIENT BUILDINGS 473 
 
 which is sometimes a primary necessity for active life, 
 the alternative not seldom presents itself of adaptation 
 or destruction. Thirdly : whilst picture, statue, or book 
 can be preserved almost indefinitely by moderate care, 
 the building requires incessant work, sometimes partial 
 renewal of its substance, at times elaborate constructive 
 repair to prevent it from actually tumbling down. 
 
 There are thus a set of grounds, some on one side 
 some on the other, which mark off the building from 
 all other works of art. There are three main grounds, 
 which tempt the living compel the living to deal 
 with it from time to time. 
 
 First, it is primarily a material utility, and only 
 secondarily a work of art. 
 
 Next, it occupies a very large and unalterable spot. 
 
 Lastly, it requires constant labour to uphold it 
 
 On the other hand, there are three main grounds 
 which make the ancient building more sacred than any 
 other work of man's art. 
 
 First, it alone has the true religio loci. 
 
 Secondly, it is a national creation, a social work of 
 art, in the supreme sense. 
 
 Thirdly, it is a national record, in a way that no other 
 work of art is, because it is almost always both a 
 collective and a continuous record. 
 
 Now the action and reaction of these two competing 
 sets of impulses undoubtedly makes the protection of 
 our ancient buildings a very complex and very difficult 
 problem. Both sets are very powerful, both act in 
 varying degrees, and the final compromise between the 
 rival sets of claims is necessarily the work of much 
 anxious discrimination. I venture to maintain that the 
 complication and antagonism is such that no hard-and- 
 fast doctrine can be laid down. Each case must stand 
 
474 THE CITY IN HISTORY 
 
 on its merits. Each decision must be the laborious 
 reconcilement of conflicting interests. Our cause has 
 suffered from over-arbitrary dogmas and some affecta- 
 tion of contempt for the plain necessities of material 
 existence. Every one outside the Tuileries laughed at 
 Edmond About, when he told the Romans of to-day 
 that the only thing left for them was ' to contemplate 
 their ruins.' I wish myself that they had contemplated 
 their ruins a little longer, or had allowed us to contem- 
 plate them, instead of seeking to turn Rome into a 
 third-rate Paris. But we shall be laughed at if we ever 
 venture to tell the nineteenth century that it must con- 
 template its ruins. 
 
 The trust imposed on the century is not to con- 
 template its ruins, but to protect its ancient buildings. 
 Now that will be done if the century can learn to feel 
 the true sacredness of ancient buildings, if it will admit 
 that the building stands on the same footing with picture, 
 statue, and poem, that it is unique, inimitable, irreplace- 
 able ; and, above all, has its own consecration of place, 
 continuity, and record. Admit this first, and then we 
 will consider the claims of the present, their convenience, 
 and their means. But the burden of proof ought always 
 to be pressed imperiously against those whose claim is 
 to destroy, to convert, or to extend. When every other 
 means fail, when irresistible necessity is proved, it may 
 be a sad duty to remove an ancient building, to add to 
 it, or to incorporate it. But this can never justify what 
 we now call ' restoring,' a process which makes it as 
 much like the original as Madame Tussaud's figures are 
 like the statesman or general they represent. It can 
 never justify re-decoration cutting out ancient art- 
 work and replacing it by new work or machine work. It 
 can never justify archaeological exercises I mean the 
 
THE SACREDNESS OF ANCIENT BUILDINGS 475 
 
 patching on to old buildings new pieces of our own 
 invention, which we deliberately present as fabrications 
 of the antique. These things are mere Wardour Street 
 spurious bric-a-brac, no more like ancient buildings than 
 a schoolboy's iambics are like ^Eschylus. How often do 
 committees, dean and chapter, public offices, and even 
 Parliament itself, treat our great national possessions as 
 if they were mere copy books, on the face of which our 
 modern architects were free to practise the art of com- 
 posing imitations of the ancients. Such buildings 
 become much like a Palimpsest manuscript ; whereon, 
 over a lost tragedy of Sophocles, some wretched monk 
 has scribbled his barbarous prose. How often is the 
 priceless original for ever lost beneath the later stuff! 
 
 In these remarks I have strictly confined myself to 
 general principles : first, because I do not pretend to 
 any special or technical knowledge which would entitle 
 me to criticise particular works, but mainly because I 
 believe our true part to be the maintenance of general 
 principles. If we fall into discussions of detail we may 
 lose hold of our main strength. We have to raise the 
 discussion into a higher atmosphere than that of archi- 
 tectural anachronism. We cannot pitch our tone too 
 high. It is not architectural anachronism which we have 
 *to check : it is the safety of our national records, our 
 national self-respect, the spirit of religious reverence 
 that we have to uphold. We have to do battle against 
 forgery, irreverence, and desecration. Let us raise a 
 voice against the idea that any work of art can ever, 
 under any circumstances, be really ' restored ' ; against 
 the idea that any ancient art work can usefully be 
 ' imitated/ against the idea that ancient monuments are 
 a corpus vile whereon to practise antiquarian exercises ; 
 against the habit of forging spurious monuments, as the 
 
476 THE CITY IN HISTORY 
 
 monks in the Middle Ages forged spurious charters ; 
 finally, against the idea that the convenience of to-day is 
 always to outweigh the sacredness of the past. 
 
 Strangely enough, the foes of ancient buildings are too 
 often those of their own household. Amongst the worst 
 sinners of all are the public departments, corporations, 
 and the clergy. The forgers, the destroyers, the muti- 
 lators, are too often the official guardians of our old 
 monuments. One can see why. They are the people 
 who use them, to whom they are a necessity and a con- 
 venience. Naturally they are constantly tempted to 
 give them greater practical usefulness, to convert them 
 to modern requirements, and, above all, to make them 
 look smart. We, of the public, gaze at an old monu- 
 ment, and then we go home. We laymen enjoy an old 
 thirteenth -century church just as it is ; but to the 
 official, to the priest, the old hall or the old church is 
 the place where his official work is done. And a dread- 
 ful temptation besets them both to make the seat of 
 official work adequate for its office, and appear to be up 
 to the level of our time. A natural sentiment ; but one 
 false and dangerous. Let us resist it in the name of 
 the nation, of the past and of the future. These things 
 are sacred by what they have seen and known, by what 
 they teach, by what they record. The true solution is 
 this. If the present age needs new public offices, bigger 
 churches, new halls, bridges, gates, let it build new 
 ones. If it needs to exercise itself in architectural 
 Latin verses, let it do it with new bricks, new stones, 
 and on a site of its own choosing. 
 
 I am very far from thinking that this needs Acts of 
 Parliament ; but the sacredness of ancient buildings can 
 be guaranteed by law. Pictures, statues, poems, are now 
 safe from modern Vandals by the force of public opinion 
 
THE SACREDNESS OF ANCIENT BUILDINGS 477 
 
 and true feeling for art and antiquity. The owner of a 
 Raphael or a Titian, of a Greek statue, does not need 
 to be restrained by an Act of Parliament or an injunc- 
 tion in Equity against the temptation to paint over his 
 picture, or to add new limbs to his marble. We never 
 hear the owner of some princely gallery say to his 
 friends : ' You remember what a dingy thing my 
 Veronese used to be, how poor in colour my Madonna 
 was, and what a stick the Venus looked, with one arm 
 and no nose. Well ! I had Rubemup, R.A., down from 
 the Academy, and you see the Veronese is as bright as 
 an Etty ; my Raphael might go into a new altar at the 
 Oratory, and the Venus is fit for the Exhibition ! ' We 
 never hear this ; but we do hear a dean or a rector take 
 a party over the ' restored ' cathedral and church, and 
 point out how the whole of the stone-work has been 
 refaced, how new tracery has been added ' from Scott's 
 designs,' and how the Jacobean wood-carving has been 
 carted away to Wardour Street. And now the old 
 church looks like a new chapel-of-ease at a fashionable 
 seaside place. And the Bishop comes down in lawn and 
 blesses the restored and re-consecrated building, and the 
 rector gives a garden party, and the county paper brags 
 about the liberal subscription lists. What we have to 
 do, is to make them all understand that the whole busi- 
 ness is profanation, ignorance, and vulgarity. 
 
 Ancient buildings certainly cannot be treated as 
 'exhibits,' to be cased in glass, and displayed in a 
 museum. All their powers, their vitality and solemnity 
 would disappear. They have in most cases to be kept 
 fit for use ; and in some rare cases they may have to be 
 completed, where the kind of work they need is within 
 our modern resources. As to Palladian work that may 
 possibly be attempted ; but as to true mediaeval work of 
 
478 THE CITY IN HISTORY 
 
 the best periods, it is absolutely impossible. No fine 
 carving of this age can be remotely reproduced or imi- 
 tated by us now in feeling and manner. The current of 
 gradual growth for the best mediaeval work has been 
 broken for centuries. And we cannot now recover the 
 tradition. The archaic naive grace of a thirteenth- 
 century relief, the delicate spring of foliage round capital 
 or spandrel, are utterly irrecoverable. There does not 
 exist the hand or the eye which can do it. To cut out 
 old art-work wholesale, and insert new machine carving, 
 is exactly like cutting out a Madonna in an altar-piece, 
 or inserting a new head on to a Greek torso. What we 
 have to do is to uphold the fabric as best we may, and 
 preserve the decoration as long as we can. 
 
 There is need to educate the public, especially the 
 official public, and above all the clergy, to understand 
 all thatjs meant by the sacredness of ancient buildings. 
 The business is not so much to discuss solecisms in 
 style and blunders in chronology, as to make men feel 
 that our national monuments are dedicated by the past 
 to the nation for ever, and that each generation but 
 holds them as a sacred trust for the future. 
 
CHAPTER XVII 
 
 PAL^OGRAPHIC PURISM 1 
 
 IN this age of historical research and archaic realism, 
 there is growing up a custom which, trivial and plausible 
 in its beginnings, may become a nuisance and a scandal 
 to literature. It is the custom of re-writing our old 
 familiar proper names ; of re-naming places and persons 
 which are household words : heirlooms in the English 
 language. 
 
 At first sight there seems something to be said for the 
 fashion of writing historical names as they were written 
 or spoken by contemporary men. To the thoughtless 
 it suggests an air of scholarship and superior knowledge, 
 gathered at first hand from original sources. Regarded 
 as the coat-armour of some giant of historical research, 
 there is something piquant in the unfamiliar writing of 
 familiar names ; and it is even pleasant to hear a great 
 scholar talk of the mighty heroes as if he remembered 
 them when a boy, and had often seen their handwriting 
 himself. When Mr. Grote chose to write about Kekrops, 
 Terete, l&leopatra, and Perikles, we were gratified by the 
 peculiarity ; and we only wondered why he retained 
 Cyrus, Centaur, Cyprus and Thucydides. And when 
 Professor Freeman taught us to speak of 'Charles the 
 Great,' and the Battle of Senlac, we all felt that to talk 
 of Hastings would be behind the age. 
 
 1 Nineteenth Century, Jan. 1886, vol. xix. No 107. 
 
480 THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 But, in these days, the historical schools are growing 
 in numbers and range. There are no longer merely 
 Attic enthusiasts, and Somersaetan champions, but 
 other ages aud races have thrown up their own 
 historiographers and bards. There are ' Middle- 
 English ' as well as ' Old -English ' votaries, and 
 Eliza-ists, and Jacob-ists, and Ann-ists. Then there 
 are the French, the German, the Italian, the Norse 
 schools, to say nothing of ^Egyptologists, Hebraists, 
 Sanscritists, Accadians, Hittites, Moabites, and 
 Cuneiform-ists. It becomes a very serious question, 
 what will be the end of the English language if all 
 of these are to have their way, and are to re-baptize 
 the most familiar heroes of our youth and to re-spell 
 the world-famous names. 
 
 Each specialist is full of his own era and subject, and 
 is quite willing to leave the rest of the historical field 
 to the popular style. But there is a higher tribunal 
 beyond ; and those who care for history as a whole, 
 and for English literature in the sum, wonder how far 
 this revival in orthography is to be carried. Let us 
 remember that, both in space and in time, there is a 
 vast body of opinion of which account must be taken. 
 There is the long succession of ages, there is the 
 cultivated world of Europe and America, in both of 
 which certain names have become traditional and 
 customary. And if every knot of students is to re-name 
 at will familiar persons and historic places, historical 
 tradition and the custom of the civilised world are 
 wantonly confused. This true filiation in literary 
 history is of far more importance than any alphabetic 
 precision. 
 
 About forty years ago, Mr. Grote began the practice 
 of re-setting the old Greek names ; but his spelling has 
 
PAL^EOGRAPHIC PURISM 481 
 
 not commended itself to the world. There seems much 
 to be said for Themistokles and Kleon ; but when we 
 were asked to write Korkyra and Krete, we felt that 
 the filiation of Corcyra and Crete with Latin and the 
 modern tongues was needlessly disturbed. Kirke, 
 Kilikia, Perdikkas, Katana, seemed rather harsh and 
 too subversive. And if Sophokles and Sokrates are 
 right, why sEschylus and ALneas, in lieu of Aischulos 
 and Aineias! Besides, on what ground stop short 
 at a k, leaving the vowels to a Latin corruption ? The 
 modern Greeks call the author of the Iliad Omeros ; 
 and the victor of Marathon MeelteeaAthes ; and it is 
 highly probable that this is far nearer the true 
 pronunciation than are our Homer and Miltiades. 
 To be consistent, we shall have to talk of Aias, 
 Odusseus, Purrhos, Lukourgos, Thoukudides, Oidipous, 
 Aischulos, and Kirke, wantonly interrupting the whole 
 Greco-Roman filiation. And, whilst we plunge ortho- 
 graphy into a hopeless welter, we shall stray even 
 farther from the true ancient pronunciation. In the 
 result, English literature has rejected the change with 
 an instinctive sense that it would involve us in quick- 
 sands ; and would to no sufficient purpose break the 
 long tradition which bound Greece with Rome, and 
 both with European literary customs. 
 
 Mr. Carlyle would have all true men speak of 
 Friedrich and Otto ; of the Kurfiirst of Kb'ln ; of Trier, 
 Prag, Regensburg, and Schlesien. But then he is quite 
 willing to speak like any common person about 
 MaJwmet and the Koran, of Clovis and Lothar, of a 
 Duke of Brunswick, and of Charles Atnadeus of Savoy ; 
 he anglicises Marseille, Preussen, Oesterreich, and 
 Sachsen ; nay, he actually talks about ' Charlemagne ' 
 at ' Aix-la-Chapelle.' Tradition and English literature 
 
 2 H 
 
482 THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 are in fact too strong for him, except where he wishes 
 to be particularly affectionate or unusually impressive. 
 I venture to think that Frederick and Cologne are 
 names so deeply embedded in our English speech that 
 there is nothing affectionate or impressive in the effort 
 to uproot them by foreign words which the mass of 
 Englishmen cannot pronounce. It is ridiculous to write, 
 ' The Kurfiirst of Kb'ln! It should be, ' Der Kurfiirst 
 von Koln.' But, then, we had better write in German 
 at once. 
 
 Of all the historical schools, that of the Old English 
 has been the most revolutionary in its methods, and 
 the most exacting in its demands. It began by con- 
 demning ' Charlemagne ' and the ' Anglo-Saxons ' ; and 
 now to use either of these familiar old names is to be 
 guilty of something which is almost a vulgarism, if not an 
 impertinence. We have all learned to speak of Karl 
 and the Old English. One by one, the familiar names 
 of English history, the names that recur in every 
 family, were recast into something grotesque in look 
 and often very hard indeed tp pronounce. Ecgberht, 
 Cnut, or Knud, the Hwiccas, ALlfthryth, Hrofesceaster, 
 and Cantwara-byryg had rather a queer look. Chlota- 
 char, Chlodowig, Hrotland, were not pleasing. But 
 when we are asked to give up Alfred, Edward, and 
 Edgar, and to speak of sElfred, Eadweard, and Eadgar, 
 we began to reflect and to hark back. 
 
 Alfred, Edward, and Edgar are names which for a 
 thousand years have filled English homes, and English 
 poetry and prose. To rewrite those names is to break 
 the tradition of history and literature at once. It is no 
 doubt true that the contemporaries of these kings 
 before the conquest did, when writing in the vernacular, 
 spell their names with the double vowels we are now 
 
PAL/EOGRAPHIC PURISM 483 
 
 invited to restore. But is that a sufficient reason ? We 
 are not talking their dialect, nor do we use their spell- 
 ing. We write in modern English, not in old English ; 
 the places they knew, the titles they held, the words 
 they used, have to be modernised, if we wish to be 
 understood ourselves. We cannot preserve exactly 
 either the sounds they uttered, or the phrases they 
 spoke, or the names of places and offices familiar to 
 them. Why then need we be curious to spell their 
 names as their contemporaries did, when we have 
 altered all else pronunciation, orthography, titles, and 
 indeed the entire outer form of the language? The 
 precision for which we vainly strive in the spelling 
 of names is after all a makeshift, very imperfectly 
 observed by any one, and entirely neglected by 
 others. And it has the defect of ignoring a long 
 and suggestive unity in history, language, and common 
 civilisation. 
 
 It may be true that the contemporaries of ' Edward 
 the Elder,' 'Edward the Martyr,' and 'Edward the 
 Confessor' spelt the name Eadward, or Eadweard, 
 if they wrote in English ; though they did not 
 uniformly do so when they wrote it in Latin. But 
 did the ' Edwards ' of Plantagenet so spell their name ; 
 or ' Edward ' Tudor ; and will ' Edward the Seventh ' 
 so spell his name? And is Alfred, a name to conjure 
 with wherever the English speech is heard, to be 
 severed from the great king ? ' Alfred ' is a familiar 
 name just as ' king ' is a familiar title ; and it is as 
 pedantic to insist on archaic forms of the name as it 
 would be to insist on the Saxon form of the office. 
 Since Edward was not called by his contemporaries 
 either ' King ' or ' The Elder,' what do we gain by such 
 a hybrid phrase as ' King Eadweard the Elder ' ? 
 
484 THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 It is only a half-hearted realism which writes 
 ' Eadweard was now King of all England.' It should 
 run: ' Eadweard was now Cyning of all Engla-land. 
 It is quite correct to write in modern English : ' King 
 Edward marched from London to York.' Here, the 
 proper names are all alike adapted to our vernacular. 
 It is an anachronism, or an anarchaism, to write ' King 
 Eadweard marched from London to York.' It ought 
 to run, if we are bent on writing pure old English, 
 ' Eadweard Cyning marched from Lundenbyryg to 
 Eoforwlc! That is the real couleur locale ; but the 
 general reader could hardly stand many pages of this. 
 It is not true in fact that ' AZtJielberht lived at Canter- 
 bury.' He lived at ' Cant-wara-byryg! Ethelbert, 
 however, may properly be said to have lived at 
 Canterbury. For thirteen centuries Canterbury and 
 York have been famous centres of our English life. 
 Except in a parenthesis, or in a monograph, it would 
 be a nuisance to mention them under the cumbrous 
 disguises of ' Eoforwlc ' and ' Cant-wara-byryg* ; and 
 for precisely the same reason it is a nuisance to read, 
 Alfred, Ecgberht, and Eadweard. 
 
 Where is it going to stop ? Ours is an age of 
 archaeology, revival, and research ; and in no field is 
 research more active than in Biblical and other Oriental 
 history. The grand familiar names, which have had a 
 charm for us from childhood, which have kindled the 
 veneration of a long roll of centuries, are all being 
 ' restored ' to satisfy an antiquarian purism. We shall 
 soon be invited to call Moses, Mosheh, as his con- 
 temporaries did. Judah should be written Yehuda ; 
 Jacob will be Ya'aqdb. Our old friend Job will appear, 
 clothed and in his right mind, as lyob. The prophet 
 Elijah is Eliyahu ; and the prophet Isaiah is now 
 
PAL/EOGRAPHIC PURISM 485 
 
 metamorphosed into Yeshayahu. Imagine how our 
 descendants will have to rewrite the lines : 
 
 'O thou my voice inspire, 
 Who touch'd Yeshayahu? s hallow'd lips with fire. ' 
 
 And the teacher will have to explain to our grand- 
 children that 'Isaiah' is an old vulgarism for Yeshayahu. 
 ' Jerusalem the Golden ' will appear in the children's 
 hymns as Yerfishalaim ; and when we speak of the 
 walls of JericJw we must sneeze, and say J'recho. We 
 must say the Proverbs of Shelomoh, But this is not 
 the end of it The very names in men's prayers and 
 devotions must be reformed. Catholics must learn to 
 say their Aves to ' Maridm ' ; and the Protestant must 
 meditate on the 'Blood of Jehoshua.' 
 
 The historical mind will so have it. It has laid down 
 a rigid canon that proper names should be spelt in the 
 form in which their contemporaries wrote them. And 
 if Alfred, a name which for so many centuries has been 
 a watchword to the English race, is to be 'restored' 
 into ^Elfred, because he and his so spoke it and wrote 
 it ; by the same rule must we speak and write of 
 Jehoshna of Nazareth, using the same letters in which 
 the Scribes and Pharisees of his day recorded the name 
 in official Hebrew. The historical mind has said it ; 
 and English literature, custom, the vernacular speech, 
 poetry, patriotism, and devotion, must all give way. 
 
 The historical mind has an almost unlimited field ; 
 and all the names it records will have to be ' restored ' 
 in turn. When Mosheh led forth the people of YehAda 
 to the promised Yertlshalatm, he really led them out of 
 Chemi or Kebt-hor, not out of ' Egypt,' which is a Greek 
 corruption. And Pi-Re and all his host were drowned 
 in the Yam-Siiph ; for of course Red Sea is a mere 
 
486 THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 translation of a late Hellenic term. About the central 
 Asian monarchies we fortunately have an imperishable 
 and infallible record ; for the great king himself inscribed 
 on the eternal rock the names of his ancestors and his 
 contemporaries. It is therefore inexcusable in us if \vc 
 continue to write the names of Oriental sovereigns in 
 the clumsy corruptions of ignorant Greeks. 
 
 All history contains no record more authentic than 
 the sculptured rock of Behistun, whereon the names of 
 the great kings stand graven in characters as unalterable 
 as the laws of the Medes and the Persians. ' Darius,' 
 we used to write in our ignorant way, ' became King of 
 Persia, Susiana, Babylonia, Assyria, Arabia, and Egypt.' 
 Not so was it said by them of old time ; not Darius, 
 but Ddrayavnsh ; not king, but Khshdyathiya. So, 
 then, the geography lessons of our grandsons will run : 
 ' Ddrayavush was the Khshdyathiya of Pdrsa, of 
 ' Uvaja, of Bdbirush, of Athurd, of Arabdya, of Mndrdya? 
 The entire orthography of the Median and Persian 
 Dynasties is now complete and exact. It was not 
 ' Cyrus ' who founded the Persian Empire, as we used 
 to be told : it was Kuraush. The famous king who 
 perished in the desert was Kdbuj'iya, the son of Kuraush. 
 And both, beside their own ancestral dominion of 
 Pdrsa, ruled over the mighty world-famous city of 
 Bdbirum, and the country which lay between the rivers 
 Tigrdm and Ufrdtauvd. Oriental history is at last as 
 simple as an infant's ABC. 
 
 And we are now able to record the immortal tale of 
 the war between Hellas and Pdrsa with some regard 
 for orthographic accuracy. It was Khshaydrshd who 
 mustered the millions of Asia in the great struggle 
 which ended in the glorious battles of the Hot Gates 
 and of Psyttale ia. His great generals, Ariyabhaja and 
 
PAL^iOGRAPHIC PURISM 487 
 
 Munduniya, met the Hellenic hoplites only to court 
 defeat ; and Khshaydrshd, the son of Ddryavush, at 
 length withdrew from a land which seemed fatal to 
 the entire race of Hakkdmanish, and sought rest in his 
 luxurious palace of 'Uvaja. So will run the Hellenic 
 histories of the future, in an orthography not quite so 
 cacophonous and hieroglyphic as many a page in the 
 Making of England. 
 
 Oriental literature is making vast strides, and the 
 authentic books of the East are daily brought closer 
 and clearer to our firesides. And under the influence 
 of this learning our very children are coming to be 
 familiar with the new dress of the old names. We have 
 grown out of ' Mahomet,' ' Moslem,' ' Koran,' and 
 ' Hegira,' and we are careful to write Muhammad, 
 Muslim, Qur'dn, and Hejra. For our old friend 
 Mahomet and his Koran various professors contend. 
 Mohammed, Muhammad, Mahmoud, and Mehemet have 
 had their day ; and now they are contending whether 
 Qur'an or Qordn best represents the exact cacophony 
 of the native Arabic. And so on through the whole 
 series of famous Oriental names : the Zend-Avesta, or 
 Avesta, the Upanishads, K'ung Foo-tsze, Tsze-Kung, 
 and Tsze-Sze. Scholars, of course, have to tell us all 
 about the Sukhdvati- Vyuha and the Pra<gnd-Pdramitd- 
 Hridaya-Sutra ; but the question is, if the rising 
 generation will ever be familiarised with these elaborate 
 names. 
 
 It may be doubted if, after all, the exact equivalent 
 of these foreign sounds can ever be presented to the 
 English reader by any system of phonetic spelling ; all 
 the more when this spelling has to call to its aid an 
 elaborate system of circumflex, diphthong, comma, 
 italic, breathing Sh'va and Daghesh, most alien to the 
 
488 THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 genius of our language. Can a man, unlearned in the 
 respective tongues, pronounce K'ung-Foo-tsze, Kur- 
 fiirst of Koln, Qurdn, with any real correctness? And, 
 if he cannot, is it worth while to upset the practice of 
 Europe for centuries, and so vast a concurrence of 
 literature, for the sake of a phonetic orthography which 
 is almost picture-writing in its lavish use of symbols : 
 and all in pursuit of an accuracy which can never be 
 consistently adopted ? It may look very learned, but is 
 it common sense ? 
 
 It so happens that almost all of the Founders of 
 Religions in the East are known to us by certain 
 familiar names, which are obviously not the actual 
 names they bore in their lifetime ; but which for 
 centuries have passed current in the literary speech 
 of Europe. Confucius, Mencius, Buddha, Zoroaster, 
 Mahomet, Moses, and Jesus are popular adaptations 
 of names which the European languages could not 
 easily assimilate. As such those names are embedded 
 in a thousand works of poetry, history, and criticism, 
 and have gathered round them an imposing mass of 
 interest and tradition. Is it not almost an outrage to 
 discard these old associations and to re-baptize these 
 hoary elders with the newfangled literalism of phonetic 
 pedantry? Kung-Foo-tsze, Mang-tsze, SAkyamouni, or 
 SiddhArlha, Zarathustra or Zerdusht, Muhammad, 
 Mdsheh, and Jehoshua, may be attempts to imitate the 
 sounds emitted by their contemporaries in Asia, but 
 they are an offence in Europe in the nineteenth century, 
 which has long known these mighty teachers under names 
 that association has hallowed to our ears. If scholarship 
 requires us to sacrifice these old familiar names, the 
 necessity applies to all alike. If we are henceforth to 
 talk of the Qur'an of Muhammad, we had better give 
 
PAL.^EOGRAPHIC PURISM 489 
 
 out the first lesson in church from the Torath of the 
 law-giver Mosheh. 
 
 And, of course, our Roman history will have to be 
 ' restored.' ' Romans] ' Etruscans,' ' Tarquinj ' Appius 
 Claudius} and the rest are now the Ramnes, the Ras- 
 enna, Tarchnaf, and Attus Clauzus. What is to be the 
 final issue of that bottomless pit of Roman embryology, 
 Dr. Mommsen only knows. All that we now behold is 
 a weltering gulf of Ramnes, Tities, Sabelli, Ras, Curites, 
 where archaic and ethnologic fumes roll upwards in- 
 cessantly, as from an unfathomable crater. Some day 
 we shall know what was the true, unpronounced, and 
 undivulged name of Rome ; and what is the true 
 phonetic equivalen' t of Romulus ' and ' Numa,' of ' Tar- 
 quin ' and ' Brutus' We are even now in a position to 
 speak with accuracy of the later history. When they 
 come to the Punic wars, our boys and girls in the 
 Board-schools of the twentieth century will learn to 
 say : ' The great contest now begins between the 
 Ramnes and the Chna-ites of the mighty city of Kereth- 
 Hadeshoth ; ' A n-nee-baal,' the son of ' A m-Melech- 
 yYr/rt//V proved himself the greatest general of antiquity ; 
 but, when he was overwhelmed in the final defeat of 
 Naraggara, the city of Queen Jedidiah fell before the 
 irresistible valour of the worshippers of Diovispater! 
 And when the young scholars get down to the Kym-ry 
 and the Galtachd, the Vergo-breiths, Ver-kenn-kedo-righ, 
 Or-kedo-righ, Cara-dawg, and Heer-fiirst, may mercy 
 keep their poor little souls ! There are Gdltachd-ic, and 
 Kym-ric, and Duitisch enthusiasts, as well as those of 
 Wessex and Gwent. I understand there are people even 
 now who want us to call Paris Loukh-teith. 
 
 A very large proportion of famous men have been 
 known in history and commemorated in literature 
 
490 THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 under names other than those given to them by their 
 godfathers and their -godmothers in their baptism, or 
 those that were entered in the parish register. Under 
 those names we love them, think of them, and feel akin 
 to them. Their names are household words : a part of 
 European literature, and fill us with kindly and filial 
 feelings. These good old names are being steadily 
 supplanted by the alphabetic martinets who recall us to 
 the register with all the formalism of a parish clerk or 
 a Herald from the College. Not Moliere, but Poqucliti ; 
 not Voltaire, but Arouet', not George Sand, but the 
 Baroness Dudevant ; not Madame de Se'vigne', but Marie 
 de Rabutin-Chantal. It will soon be a sign of ignor- 
 ance to speak of Tom Jones and Becky Sharp. It will 
 be Thomas Summer, Esq., Junior, J.P., and Mrs. Joseph 
 Sedley. We shall soon have the Essays of Viscount St. 
 Albans, and the Letters of the Earl of Orford. 
 
 Every reader is familiar with the consummate perfec- 
 tion of the Library of the British Museum, the glory of 
 British, the envy of foreign scholars. And it gives one 
 an awful sense of the growth of this form of purism 
 to watch it invading our noble library. Go to the 
 Catalogue and turn to Voltaire, and you will read 
 ' Voltaire, see Arouet;' and you will have to trudge to 
 the other end of the enormous alphabet. Why Arouetl 
 What has his legal name to do with a writer who put 
 his name, Voltaire, on the title-page of thousands of 
 editions, and never on one, Arouetl And Molierel is 
 not Moliere, as a name, a part of modern literature? 
 Mr. Andrew Lang tells a most delightful story of a 
 printer, who found in his ' copy ' some reference to ' the 
 Scapin of Poquelin! This hopelessly puzzled him, till 
 a bright idea struck his inventive mind, and he printed 
 it ' the Scapin of M. Coqueltn.' 
 
PAL^OGRAPHIC PURISM 491 
 
 Turn, in the Reference Catalogue of the Museum, 
 to Madame de Sevigne, and we read : ' Sevigne, Marie 
 de Rabutin-Chantal, Marchioness de: see Rabutin- 
 Chantal! Why should we 'see' Rabutin-Chantan 
 That was her maiden-name ; and since she married at 
 eighteen, and her works are letters to her daughter, it 
 seems a little odd to dub an elderly mamma of rank by 
 her maiden-name. And what in the name of precision 
 is ' Marchioness de' ? It is like saying ' Mister Von Goethe' 
 Once attempt a minute heraldic accuracy, and endless 
 confusion results. Why need ' Mrs. Nicholls ' appear in 
 the catalogue of the works of Currer Bein And why 
 need George Eliot be entered as Marian Evans a 
 name which the great novelist did not bear either in 
 literature or in private life ? 
 
 If we apply the baptismal-certificate theory strictly 
 to history, universal confusion will result. Law students 
 will have to study the Digest of Uprauda. His great 
 general will be Beli-Tzar. And by the same rule, the 
 heroic Saladin becomes Salah-ed-deen, or rather, Malek- 
 Nasser-Yousouf; Dante becomes Durante Alighieri; 
 Copernicus is Kopernik ; and Columbus becomes Cris- 
 tobal Colon. If baptismal registers are decisive, we 
 must turn ' Erasmus ' into Gerhardt Praet ; ' Melancthon ' 
 into Schwarzerd; and ' Scaliger ' into Bordoni. There 
 is no more reason to change Alfred into dELlfred and 
 Frederick into Friedrich than there would be to trans- 
 form the great sailor into Crist6bal Colon, and to talk 
 about the Code of Uprauda. 
 
 And the dear old painters, almost every one of whom 
 has a familiar cognomen which has made the tour of 
 the civilised world. What a nuisance it is to read in 
 galleries and catalogues, Vecellio, Vannucci, and Cagliari, 
 in lieu of our old friends Titian, Perugino, and Veronese ! 
 
492 THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 Raphael and Michael Angela, Masaccio and Tintoretto 
 are no more: 'restorers' in oil are renewing for us tin- 
 original brilliancy of their hues ; whilst ' restorers ' in 
 ink are erasing the friendly old nick-names with vcrn 
 copias of the baptismal certificates in their hands. Every 
 chit of an testhete will talk to you about the Cenacolo, 
 or the Sposalizio, of Sanzio ; and the Paradiso in the 
 Palazzo Ducale ; though these words are nearly the 
 limit of his entire Italian vocabulary. This new poly- 
 glot language of historians and artists is becoming, 
 in fact, the speech which is known to the curious as 
 macaronic. It recalls the famous lines of our youth : 
 Trumpeter unus erat, coatum qui scarlet habebat. 
 
 There are two fatal impediments to this attempt at 
 reproducing archaic sounds. It is at best but a clumsy 
 symbolism of unpronounceable vocables, and it never is, 
 and never can be, consistently applied. ALthelthryth, 
 Hrofesceaster, and Gruffydd are grotesque agglomera- 
 tions of letters to represent sounds which are not 
 familiar to English ears or utterable by English lips. 
 The ' Old English ' school pur sang do not hesitate to 
 fill whole sentences of what is meant to be modern and 
 popular English with these choking words. Professor 
 Freeman used obsolete letters in an English sentence. 
 Now, I venture to say that English literature requires 
 a work which is intended to take a place in it, to be 
 written in the English language. In mere glossaries, 
 commentaries, and philological treatises, the obsolete 
 letters and obsolete spelling have their place. But in 
 literature, the <5 and > are as completely dead as a 
 Greek Digamma. 
 
 The most glaring defect of this ' Neo-Saxonism ' is 
 its inconsistency. Human nature would revolt if all 
 the schools were to adopt the same rule ; but each 
 
PAL/EOGRAPHIC PURISM 493 
 
 separate school contradicts itself in the same page. It 
 is curious that the ' Old-English ' school wantonly 
 modernise the spelling of names which happen not to 
 be ' Old-English.' They first mangle the traditions of 
 English literature by twisting household words into an 
 archaic form ; and then, in the case of names of the 
 Latin race, they mangle the traditions of English and 
 of foreign literature at once, by twisting other house- 
 hold words into a modern Anglicised form. Mr. Free- 
 man writes in his great history : ' Alfred compared 
 with Lewis IX.' Now, here is a double violation of the 
 traditions of English literature ; not on the same, but 
 on two contradictory principles. ' Saint Louis ' is as 
 familiar to us as ' Alfred.' In French and in English, 
 the name has long been written, Louis, which is certainly 
 the actual French form. But, as Saint Louis was only 
 a Frenchman, and not a West-Saxon, his true name is 
 Anglicised into what (in spite of Macaulay) is an 
 obsolete form. And Alfred, who is West-Saxon pur 
 sang, is promoted or ' translated ' into Alfred. If Lewis 
 can be shown to be literary English (and there was 
 something to be said for that suggestion in Swift's time) 
 one would not object. But by that rule, Alfred must 
 stand ; for assuredly that is literary English. One 
 cannot have it both ways, except on the assumption 
 that you intend to spell none but your favourite race 
 with archaic precision. 
 
 William the Conqueror, the great subject of Mr. 
 Freeman's great book, was king of England for some 
 twenty-one years and one of the mightiest kings who 
 ever ruled here. In Latin, his contemporaries called 
 him Willelmus, Wilielmus, or Wilgelmus ; in French, 
 Guillaume, or Willame; in English, Wtllelm. We 
 have his charter in English to this day ; which runs 
 
494 Tin-: MEANING OF IIISTOKV 
 
 ' Willelm Kyng gret Will elm BisceopJ Now, if we a re- 
 obliged to write Alfred, and Eadward, why not write 
 the Conqueror in one of the forms that his contempo- 
 raries used ? But no ; the great founder of the new 
 English monarchy never got over the original sin of 
 being a Frenchman ; and so he is modernised like any 
 mere ' Lewis,' or ' Henry I or ' Philip' 
 
 In the case of English kings, their wives and relations 
 of non-English blood, this school can leave them to 
 the vulgar tongue. It is William, Henry, Margaret, 
 Matilda, Mary, Stephen, and so on. No doubt it would 
 look very odd in an English history to read about our 
 sovereigns ' Stephen (or Estienne) fighting with the 
 Kaiserinn Mathildis' But then, what is the good of 
 all this precision if it is so grossly inconsistent ? They 
 who insist on talking of Elsass and Lothringen write, 
 like the rest of us, Venice and Florence. And Mr. Free- 
 man, who is quite content with William and Stephen, 
 mere modern Anglicisms, is very particular how he 
 writes Sdkrates. He happens to be fond of West-Saxon 
 annals and Greek philosophers. And so, both are 
 recorded in the aboriginal cacophony. 
 
 But there is a far more serious change of, name that 
 the ' Old-English ' school have introduced ; which, if it 
 were indefinitely extended, would wantonly confuse 
 historical literature. I mean the attempt to alter names 
 which are the accepted landmarks of history. It is now 
 thought scholarly to write of the 'Battle of Senlac,' 
 instead of the ' Battle of Hastings' As every one 
 knows, the fight took place on the site of Battle Abbey, 
 seven miles from Hastings ; as so many great battles, 
 those of Tours, Blenheim, Canna, Chdions, and the like, 
 have been named from places not the actual spot of the 
 combat. But since, for eight hundred years, the historians 
 
PAL^EOGRAPHIC PURISM 495 
 
 of Europe have spoken of the ' Battle of Hastings,' it does 
 seem a little pedantic to re-name it. ' Hastings ' is the 
 only name given to the battle in Wiilelm's Domesday 
 Survey ; it is the only name given by the Bayeux 
 Tapestry. ' Exierunt de Hestenga et venerunt ad 
 prelium' is there written not a word about Senlac. 
 The nameless author of the Continuation of Wace's 
 Brut says : 
 
 A Hastinges, sunt encontre 
 Li rois e li dux par grant fierte. 
 
 And Guy, Bishop of Amiens from 1058-1076 A.D., wrote 
 a poem, ' De Hastings prczlio' One would think all 
 this was sufficient authority for us to continue a name 
 recorded in history for eight centuries. So far as I 
 know, there is no positive evidence that Senlac was a 
 place at all ; the sole authority for ' Battle of Senlac ' is 
 Orderic, an English monk who left England at the age 
 of nine and lived and wrote in Normandy in the next 
 century. Yet, on the strength of this authority, the 
 ' Old English ' school would erase from English litera- 
 ture one of our most familiar names. 
 
 Battles are seldom named with geographical precision, 
 The victors hastily give the first name ; and so it passes 
 into current speech. To be accurate, the Battle of 
 Salamis should be the Battle of Psyttaleia ; the Battle 
 of Canna should be named from the Aufidus; and the 
 ' Battle of Zania ' was really fought at Naraggara. 
 Imagine a historian of the future choosing to re-name 
 the Battle of Waterloo from Hougoumont ; because, in 
 the twentieth century, some French writer should so 
 describe it. The Battle of Trafalgar would have to be 
 described as the sea-fight of ' Longitude 6 f 5" West, 
 and Latitude 36 10' 15" North.' In old days we used 
 to say that 'Charles Martel defeated the Saracens in 
 
496 THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 the battle of Tours.' So wrote Gibbon, Hallam, 
 Milman. Now, we shall have to write ' Karl tJic 
 Hammer defeated the Ya'arabs of Yemen on the 
 plateau of Sancta Maura' Surely all this is the 
 mint and anise of the annals, neglecting the weightier 
 matters of the law. 
 
 Has not the ' Old-English ' school made rather too 
 much that Karl the Great was not a Gaul ; and that 
 'the Anglo-Saxons' was not the ordinary name of 
 any English tribe? No one is ever likely to make 
 these blunders again ; but to taboo these convenient 
 old names from English literature is surely a needless 
 purism. ' Charlemagne ' has been spoken of in England 
 ever since, as Wace tell us, Taillefer at Hastings died 
 singing ' De Karlemaine e de Rollant ; ' and in an 
 enormous body of literature for a thousand years 
 Charles has been so named. The reason is obvious 
 enough ; the great Emperor has become known to us 
 mainly through Latin, French, and Old-French sources, 
 Chansons de Gestes, and metrical tales in a Romance 
 dialect. That in itself is an interesting and important 
 fact in literary history. The pure Frank sources, in a 
 Teutonic dialect, are very much fewer and less known. 
 The name ' Charlemagne ' is as much a part of the 
 English language as is the title, ' Emperor', and it is as 
 little likely to be displaced by any contemporary 
 phonogram as the names of Moses and Jesus. Let 
 Germans talk about Kaiser Karl : Englishmen of sense 
 will continue to talk of the ' Emperor Charlemagne : ' 
 a name which is used by Gibbon and Milman, by 
 Hallam and Sir Henry Maine. 
 
 And so, ' Anglo-Saxon ' is a very convenient term to 
 describe the vernacular speech used in England before 
 its settlement by the Normans. ' Old English ' is a 
 
PAL/EOGRAPHIC PURISM 497 
 
 vague and elastic term. In one sense, the orthography 
 of Dryden or of Milton is Old-English ; so is Spenser's, 
 or Chaucer's, or the Ancren Riwle. We want a con- 
 venient term for the speech of Englishmen, before it 
 was affected by the Conquest. Edward the Elder, the 
 first true King of all England, chose to call himself 
 ' Rex Angul-Saxonuui ' ; and an immense succession 
 of historians and scholars have used the term Anglo- 
 Saxon. Is not that enough? The most learned 
 authorities for this period have used it : men like 
 Kemble, Bosworth, Thorpe, and Skeat. So too, 
 Bishop Stubbs, in his magnificent work, systematically 
 employs a term which is part of the English language, 
 quite apart from its being current amongst this or that 
 tribe of Engles or West Saxons. Perhaps, then, we need 
 not be in such a hurry to outlaw a term that was for- 
 mally adopted for our nation by the first King of all 
 England, and has since been in use in the language. 
 
 There is something alien to the true historic spirit 
 in any race jealousy and ethnological partisanship. 
 History is the unbroken evolution of human civilisa- 
 tion ; and the true historians are they who can show 
 us the unity and the sequence of the vast and complex 
 drama. Theories of race are of all speculations the 
 most cloudy and the most misleading. And to few 
 nations are they less applicable than to England. Our 
 ethnology, our language, our history are as mixed and 
 complex as any of which records exist. Our nationality 
 is as vigorous and as definite as any in the world ; but 
 it is a geographical and a political nationality ; and not 
 a tribal or linguistic nationality. To unwind again the 
 intricate strands which have been wrought into our 
 English unity, and to range them in classes is a futile 
 task. If we exaggerate the power of one particular 
 
 2 I 
 
498 THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 element of the English race, one source of the English 
 people, one side of English institutions, one contributory 
 to the English language, we shall find it a poor equip- 
 ment for historical judgment. 
 
 Race prejudices are at all times anti - historic. 
 Professor Clifford used to talk about morality as an 
 evolution of the ' tribal ' conscience. Assuredly con- 
 fusion is the only possible evolution for a ' tribal ' 
 history. The Carlylese school, and the Orientalists, 
 and the Deutsch and Jutish enthusiasts, bid fair to 
 turn our language and its literature into an ungainly 
 polyglott. Their pages bristle with Bretwaldas and 
 Heretogas, Burks and Munds, Folk-friths and Tun- 
 gerefas ; or with Reichs, Kurfiirsts, Pfalzes, and 
 Kaisers. All this is very well in glossaries, but not 
 in literature. How absurd it is to write ' The 
 Kurfiirst of Kdln} or ' The Ealdorman of the Hwiccas ' ! 
 It is as if one wrote 'The Due of Broglie was once 
 Ministre of the Affaires Etrangeres ' ; or that ' Welling- 
 ton defeated the Empereur Napotion and all his 
 Martchaux ' : just as they do in a lady's-maid's high- 
 polite novel. Why are Deutsch and Jutish titles to be 
 introduced any more than French or Spanish? In 
 glossaries they are useful ; but histories of England 
 should be written in English. And it is pleasant to 
 turn to a great book of history, like that of Bishop 
 Stubbs ; where, in spite of the temptations and often 
 of the necessities of a specialist dealing with a technical 
 subject, the text is not needlessly deformed with 
 obsolete, grotesque, and foreign words. 
 
 A wide range of ethnology and philology shows us 
 that these origins and primitive tongues were themselves 
 the issue of others before them, and are only a phase 
 in the long evolution of history and language. These 
 
PAL^iOGRAPHIC PURISM 499 
 
 Engles, and Saxons, and Jutes, these Norse and Welsh, 
 had far distant seats, and far earlier modes of speech. 
 They were no more ' Autochthones ' in the forests of 
 Upper Germany than they were in Wessex and Caint. 
 Their speech has been traced back to Aryan roots 
 current in Asia. And there, by the latest glimmerings 
 of ethnographic science, we lose all these Cymric, and 
 British, and Teutonic tribes in some (not definable) 
 affinity, in some (not ascertainable) district of Central 
 Asia, with some (not recoverable) common tongue of 
 their own. So that these war cries about the White 
 Horse, and Engles, and Jutes, turn out to mean simply 
 that a very industrious school of historians choose to 
 direct their attention to one particular phase of a 
 movement which is in perpetual flux ; and which, in 
 time, in place, and in speech, can be traced back to very 
 distant embryos in the infinite night of conjecture. 
 
 It is treason to our country and to scientific history 
 to write, as Mr. Green ventured to do in his fine and 
 eloquent histories of England, that 'with the landing 
 of Hengest English history begins.' The history of 
 England is something more than the tribal records of 
 the Engles. The history of England began with the 
 first authentic story of organised communities of men 
 living in this island : and that most certainly existed 
 since Caesar narrated his own campaigns in Britain. 
 The history of England, or the history of France, is the 
 consecutive record of the political communities of men 
 dwelling in the lands now called England and France. 
 The really great problem for history is the assimilation 
 of race and the co-operation of alien forces. And so, 
 too, the note of true literature lies in a loyal submission 
 to the traditions of our composite tongue, and respect 
 for an instrument which is hallowed by the custom of 
 
500 THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 so many masterpieces. Loyal respect for that glorious 
 speech would teach us to be slow how we desecrate 
 its familiar names with brand-new archaisms ; how we 
 ruffle its easy flow with alien cacophonies and solecisms, 
 and deform its familiar typography with hieroglyphic 
 phonograms. 
 
 In passing from the literary iconoclasm of the ' Old- 
 English ' school I would venture to add that no man is 
 a more humble admirer than I am of the vast learning 
 and the marvellous powers of research belonging to the 
 author of the Norman Conquest. Nor can any man 
 more deeply deplore another disaster which our literature 
 has sustained in the premature loss of the author of A 
 Short History of England: one who in his brief time 
 has shown such historical imagination and such literary 
 power, that it is impossible to mention him without 
 a pang of regret. Si, qua fata aspera rumpas, Tu 
 Marcellus eris. 
 
 We may add a few words about various names which 
 under the influence of a most mistaken literalism are 
 being wantonly transformed. Persons who are anxious 
 to appear well informed seem almost ashamed to spell 
 familiar names as their grandfathers did. What is the 
 meaning of ' Vergil '? As every one knows, the best 
 MSS. in the last lines of the fourth Georgic spell Vergil- 
 ium ; and accordingly some scholars think fit so to alter 
 the poet's name. Be it so. But ' Vergil' is not Latin, 
 any more than ' Homer ' is Greek. Virgil is a familiar 
 word, rooted deep in English literature and thought. 
 To uproot it, and the like of it, would be to turn the 
 English language into a quagmire. We shall be asked 
 next to write ' OmerJ If all our familiar names are to be 
 recast, as new manuscripts or autographs turn up, none 
 of these venerable names will remain to us. We shall 
 
PAL/EOGRAPHIC PURISM 5<DI 
 
 have to talk of the epic poets, Omeros and Durante. 
 Again, if autographs are conclusive, we shall have to 
 write of Marie, Quean of Scots, and Lady Jane Duddley ; 
 of the statesmen, Cecyll and Walsyngham ; of ' Lord 
 Nelson and Bronte', of the great Maryborough, of the 
 poet Noel- Byron, of Sir Kenelme Digby, Sir Philip 
 Sidnei, and A rbella Seyniaure ; of Bloody ' Marye,' and 
 Robert Duddley, Earl of Leycester. All of these queer 
 forms are the actual names signed by these personages 
 in extant autographs. The next step will be to write 
 about these personages in the contemporary style ; and 
 archaic orthography will pass from proper names to the 
 entire text. 
 
 The objection to insisting on strict contemporary 
 orthography is this : the spelling of the family name was 
 continually changing, and to write it in a dozen ways is 
 to break the tradition of the family. If we call Burleigh 
 ' Cecyll,' as he wrote it himself, we lose the tradition of 
 the family of the late Prime Minister. If we call the 
 author of the Arcadia Sidnei, as he wrote it himself, we 
 detach him from the Sidneys. The Percys, Howards, 
 Harcourts, Douglas, Wyatts, Lindsays, and Mont- 
 gomerys of our feudal history will appear as the Perses, 
 Hawards, Harecourts, Dowglas, Wiats, Lyndesays, and 
 Monggomberrys. If we read Chevy Chase in the pure 
 palaeography, we shall find how the ' Doughete dogglas ' 
 spoke to the ' lord perse ' ; and how there died in the fray, 
 Wetharryngton , ser hewe the monggomberry, ser dauy 
 Iwdale, and ser charls a murre. 
 
 And then how the purists do drag us up and down 
 with their orthographic edicts ! Just as the Old-English 
 school is restoring the diphthong on every side, the 
 classical reformers are purging it out like an unclean 
 thing. We need not care much whether we write of 
 
 212 
 
502 THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 Caesar or ' Caesar.' But just as we have learned to write 
 Caesar and Vergil's Aeneid, in place of our old friends, 
 we are taught to write Bceda and ^Elfred, for ' Bede' and 
 ' Alfred.' The 'Old-English' school revel in diphthongs, 
 even in the Latin names ; your classical purist would 
 expire if he were called upon to write ' Caesar ' or 
 4 Pompey.' Farewell to the delightful gossipy style of 
 the last century about ' Tully,' and 'Maro,' and ' Livy ' ! 
 They knew quite as much about them at heart as we do 
 to-day with all our Medicean manuscripts and our 'sic. 
 Cod. Vat: 
 
 The way in which it all works into ordinary books is 
 this. The compilers of dictionaries, catalogues, com- 
 pendiums, vade-mecums, and the like, the writers of 
 newspaper paragraphs and literary announcements, are 
 not only a most industrious, but a most accurate and 
 most alert, race of men. They are ever on the watch for 
 the latest discovery, and the last special work on every 
 conceivable topic. It is not to be expected that they 
 can go very deeply into each matter themselves ; but 
 the latest spelling, the last new commentary, or the 
 newest literary ' find,' is eminently the field of their 
 peculiar work. To them, the man who has abolished 
 the * Battle of Hastings ' as a popular error must know 
 more about history than any man living ; and so, the 
 man who writes Shakspere has apparently the latest 
 lights on the Elizabethan drama. Thus it comes that 
 our ordinary style is rapidly infiltrated with Karls and 
 Alfreds, and Senlacs, Qur'dns, and Shaksperes ; till it 
 becomes at last almost a kind of pedantry to object. 
 
 How foolish is the attempt to re-name Shakespeare 
 himself by the aid of manuscripts ! As every one 
 knows, the name of Shakespeare may be found in con- 
 temporary documents in almost every possible form of 
 
PAL^OGRAPHIC PURISM 503 
 
 the letters. Some of these are Shakespeare, Schakespere, 
 Schakespeire, Shakespeyre, Chacsper, Shakspere, Shake- 
 spere, Shakespeere, Shackspear, Shakeseper, Shackespeare, 
 Saxspere, Shackspeere, Shaxeper, Shaxpere, Shaxper, 
 Shaxpeer, Shaxspere, Shakspeare, Shakuspeare, Shakesper, 
 SJiaksper, Shackspere, Shakspyr, Shakspear, Shakspeyr, 
 Shackspeare, Shaxkspere, Shackspeyr, Shaxpeare, Shake- 
 sphere, Sackesper, Shackspare, Shakspeere, Shakxsper, 
 Shaxpere, Shakspeyr, Shagspur, and Shaxberd. Here 
 are thirty-nine of the contemporary modes of spelling 
 his name. Now are the facsimilists prepared to call 
 the great poet of the world by whichever of these, 
 as in a parish election, commands the majority of the 
 written documents ? So that, if we have at last to call 
 our immortal bard, Chacsper, or Shaxper, or Shagspur, 
 we must accept it ; and in the meantime leave his name 
 as variable as ever his contemporaries did ? 
 
 Shakespeare no doubt, like most persons in that age, 
 wrote his name in various ways. The extant autographs 
 differ ; and the signature which is thought to be Shak- 
 spere, has been simply misread, and plainly shows 
 another letter. The vast preponderance of evidence 
 establishes that in the printed literature of his time his 
 name was written Shakespeare. In his first poems, 
 Lucrece and Venus and Adonis, he placed Shakespeare 
 on the title-page. So it stands on the folios of 1623 
 and 1632. So also it was spelled by his friends in their 
 published works ; by Ben Jonson, by Bancroft, Barne- 
 field, Willobie, Freeman, Davies, Meres, and Weever. 
 It is certain that his name was pronounced Shake-spear 
 (i.e., as ' Shake ' and ' Spear ' were then pronounced) by 
 his literary friends in London. This is shown by the 
 punning lines of Ben Jonson, by those of Bancroft and 
 others ; by Greene's allusion to him as the only Shake- 
 
504 THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 scene ; and, lastly, by the canting heraldry of the arms 
 granted to his father in 1599 : ' In a field of gould upon 
 a bend sables a speare of the first : with crest a ffalcon 
 supporting a speare' 
 
 It is very probable that this grant of arms, about 
 which Dethick, the Garter-King, was blamed and had to 
 defend himself, practically settled the pronunciation as 
 well as the spelling. It is probable that hitherto the 
 family name had not been so spelt or so pronounced in 
 Warwickshire. It is possible that Shake-speare was 
 almost a nick-name, or a familiar stage-name ; but, like 
 Erasmus, Melancthon, or Voltaire, he who bore it carried 
 it so into literature. For some centuries downwards, the 
 immense concurrence of writers, English and foreign, 
 has so accepted the name. A great majority of the 
 commentators have adopted the same form : Dyce, 
 Collier, Halliwell-Phillipps, Staunton, W. G. Clark. No 
 one of the principal editors of the poet writes his name 
 ' Shakspere' But so Mr. Furnivall decrees it shall be. 
 
 One would have thought so great a preponderance of 
 literary practice need not be disturbed by one or two 
 signatures in manuscript, even if they were perfectly 
 distinct and quite uniform. Yet, such is the march of 
 palaeographic purism, that our great poet is in imminent 
 danger of being translated into Shakspere, and ultimately 
 Shaxper. The Museum Catalogue devotes six volumes 
 to the poet and his editors. All these thousands of 
 works are entered under ' Shakspere ' ; though in about 
 95 per cent, of them the name is not so written. The 
 editions of Dyce, Collier, Staunton, Halliwell-Phillipps, 
 and Clark, which have Shakespeare on their title-pages, 
 are lettered in the binding Shakspere. Nay, the facsimile 
 of the folio of 1623, where we not only read Shakespeare 
 on the title-page, but laudatory verses addressed to 
 
PAL/EOGRAPHIC PURISM 505 
 
 ' Shake-speare ' (sic\ is actually lettered in the binding 
 (facsimile as it purports to be), Shakspere. We shall 
 certainly end with ' Shaxper! 
 
 The claim of the palaeographists to re-name great 
 men rests on a confusion of ideas. ' Shakespeare ' is a 
 word in the English language, just as 'Tragedy' is ; and 
 it is in vain to ask us, in the name of etymography^ to 
 turn that name into Shakspere, as it would be to ask us, 
 in the name of etymology \ to turn ' Tragedy ' into Goat- 
 song. The point is not, how did the poet spell his name 
 that is an antiquarian, not a literary matter, any more 
 than how Homer or Moses spelled their names. Homer 
 and Moses, as we know, could not possibly spell their 
 names : since alphabets were not invented. And, as in 
 a thousand cases, the exact orthography is not possible : 
 the matter which concerns the public is the form of a 
 name which has obtained currency in literature. When 
 once any name has obtained that currency in a fixed 
 and settled literature, it is more than pedantry to dis- 
 turb it : it is an outrage on our language. And it is a 
 serious hindrance to popular education to be ever un- 
 settling familiar names. 
 
 If we are to re- edit Shakespeare's name by strict 
 revival of contemporary forms, we ought to alter the 
 names of his plays as well. There is reason to think 
 that Macbeth was Mcelbcethe. The twentieth century 
 will go to see Shaxper's Malbcethe performed on the 
 stage. And so they will have to go through the cycle 
 of the immortal plays. Hamlet was variously written 
 Hamblet) Amleth, Hamnet, Hamle, and Hamlett ; and 
 every ' revival ' of Hamlet will be given in a new name. 
 Leir's daughters were properly Gonorill, Ragan, and 
 Cordila. If ' Shakspere's ' own orthography is decisive, 
 we must talk about the Midsummer Nights Dreame, 
 
506 THE MEANING OF HISTORY 
 
 and Twelffe-Night, Henry Fift, and Cleopater, for so he 
 wrote the titles himself. Under the exasperating re- 
 vivalism of the palaeographic school all things are 
 possible ; and, in the next century, it will be the fashion 
 to say that 'the master-creations of Shaxper are un- 
 doubtedly Cordila, Hamblet, and Madbaethe.' Goats and 
 monkeys ! can we bear this ? 
 
 All this revivalism rests upon the delusion, that bits of 
 ancient things can be crammed into the living organism 
 of modern civilisation. Any rational historical culture 
 must be subordinate to organic evolution ; lumps of the 
 past are not to be inserted into our ribs, or thrust down 
 our throats like a horse drench. A brick or two from 
 our fathers' houses will not really testify how they built 
 their homes ; and exhuming the skeletons of their buried 
 words may prove but a source of offence to the living. 
 An actor who had undertaken the character of Othello 
 once blacked himself all over the body, in order to enter 
 more fully into the spirit of the part ; but it is not 
 recorded that he surpassed either Edmund Kean or 
 Salvini. So we are told that there exists a company of 
 enthusiastic Ann-ists, who meet in the dress of Addison 
 and Pope, in boudoirs which Stella and Vanessa would 
 recognise, and read copies of the old Spectator, reprinted 
 in contemporary type. 
 
 In days when we are warned that the true feeling for 
 high art is only to be acquired by the wearing of ruffles 
 and velvet breeches, we shall soon be expected, when we 
 go to a lecture on the early Britons, to stain our bodies 
 all over with woad, in order to realise the sensations of 
 our ancient ' forbears ' ; and no one will pass in English 
 history till he can sputter out all the guttural names in 
 the Saxon Chronicle. Palaeography should keep to its 
 place, in commentaries, glossaries, monographs, and the 
 
PAL^OGRAPHIC PURISM 507 
 
 like. In English literature, the literary name of the 
 greatest ruler of the West is Charlemagne ; the literary 
 name of the most perfect of kings is Alfred; and the 
 literary name of the greatest of poets is Shakespeare. 
 The entire world, and not England alone, has settled all 
 this for centuries. 
 
 THE END 
 
 Printed by T. and A. CONSTABLE, Printers to Her Majesty 
 at the Edinburgh University Press 
 
FS? FREDERIC HARRISON. 
 
 Oliver Cromwell. By FBEDEBIC HABBISON. Crown 8vo. 2s. 6d. 
 
 [In " Twelve English Statesmen."] 
 
 TIMES. " He gives a wonderfully vivid picture of events t nor does he shrink from 
 speculating on the incidents which history has left most obscure. As for the grand subject 
 of his monograph, he paints him as Cromwell desired to be painted."' 
 
 ACADEMY (Signed S. R. Gardiner). " What he brings to his study of facts already 
 ascertained is a fresh and vigorous mind, illuminated by a wide knowledge of political and 
 social life. He neither falls into the mistake of judging Cromwell by the test of any special 
 religious creed, nor does he imagine, as so many have imagined, that the existing British 
 constitution has attained to absolute perfection ... It is not likely that any investigation 
 will do much to change the general lines which he has firmly and skilfully drawn." 
 
 ATHENAEUM. "The picture of what Oliver did for England how the Protectorate 
 paved the way for the orderly freedom that followed is one of the most excellent pieces of 
 political disquisition we ever read." 
 
 WEEK (Toronto). "Mr. Harrison, in brief space, gives all the essential facts in the life 
 of the Protector, both as a soldier and an administrator, and outlines a striking picture of 
 the man and t his time, Which many more ambitious works fail to supply. Nor is Mr. 
 Harrison lacking in sympathy with the religious characteristics of Cromwell and his fellow 
 Puritans, but on the contrary does ample justice to the temper of the times and to the 
 type of manhood which the times produced. The chapter on the domestic life of Cromwell, 
 in this respect, is a most valuable one, and it should be read by every one who wants to 
 understand and to do justice to Puritanism." 
 
 SPECTATOR. "Well and truly has Mr. Frederic Harrison told the story of Oliver 
 
 Cromwell's life and work This supreme quality of success in Cromwell, which came 
 
 far less from mere luck than from steadiness of purpose, high resolve, and singleness of 
 aim Cromwell was never one of those men who have traitors in their own breasts and are 
 always secretly longing that things may both be and not be at the same time is well 
 brought out in Mr. Harrison's narrative. Cromwell's latest biographer shews also in clear 
 relief the tenderness and amiability of Cromwell's private character." 
 
 SATURDAY REVIEW." It generally has distinction and literary quality. ... The 
 merit of the book lies in the fulness, fluency, and (on the whole) fairness of its narrative of 
 facts." 
 
 WORLD." It was Mr. Harrison's fortune to start with these advantages ; to use them 
 as he has is all to his own credit. He is a bit of an advocate, no doubt, yet on the whole 
 not unreasonably so, though one might perhaps demur to such a phrase as the ' noble 
 fanatic Harrison,' and a few others like it, as a little extreme ; but after all is over we do 
 not think even the most sentimental Royalist will find much to seriously dispute in his 
 estimate of Oliver's character or work. Mr. Harrison's chief praise, however, is the skill 
 with which he has always kept Cromwell in the foreground, never suffering him to become 
 merged in the course of events, merely one of many great actors on a busy scene. . . . Mr. 
 Harrison has done an extremely good piece of work." 
 
 ST. JAMES'S GAZETTE." Mr. Harrison has proved once more that style, taken in its 
 broadest sense of lucidity of arrangement, unity of conception, and just proportion of 
 treatment, is an essential quality of a good history. It is a truth which men of letters 
 cannot do better than to impress upon the historians. . . . But the main cause of Mr. 
 Harrison's success is the fact that he takes a genuine interest in his subject. He has a 
 hearty admiration for Cromwell, and does not lind himself under the constant necessity of 
 apologising for him with a half-hearted kind of impartiality." 
 
 LITERARY WORLD." There are few greater themes, and there is, in most respects, no 
 living writer more fitted by sympathy, and certainly none more fitted by ability, to handle 
 this one." 
 
 JOURNAL OF EDUCATION. "The result is an admirable portrait of Cromwell as a 
 man, a soldier, and a statesman, which must take a high, if not the highest, place in what 
 promises to be the best of the many series of this kind which have been published within 
 the last few years." 
 
 MACMILLAN & CO., LONDON. 
 
BY FREDERIC HARRISON. 
 
 Annals of an Old Manor House, Button Place, Guildford. By 
 FREDERIC HARRISON. Illustrated from the original Drawings by WM. 
 LUKER, Jun., W. NIVEN, and C. FORSTER HAYWARD. Printed on hand- 
 made paper, and illustrated with numerous plates after original 
 drawings, facsimiles, head and tail-pieces, etc. Medium 4to. 42*. net. 
 
 TIMES. " Constitutes a monograph of quite exceptional interest ami beauty, almost an 
 attractive to those who have never seen the house as to those, like Mr. Harrison, who have 
 lived in It and learned to love it. ... He has invested an old house with the undying 
 Interest of our national life and history, and no professed historian or antiquary can do 
 more, while few can do it better." 
 
 STANDARD. "The book is written with scholarly care, as well as with imaginative 
 insight, and everywhere there is a sense of space about the narrative, for Mr. Harrison 
 never allows us to forget the changing social and political characteristics of each succeed- 
 ing reign." 
 
 DAILY CHRONICLE. " Externally, one of the handsomest books we have seen for a 
 long time, and in contents a very charming labour of love." 
 
 WESTMINSTER GAZETTE. " All through Mr. Harrison's pages one can see how the 
 'genius of the place has inspired him. . . . The volume is magnificently illustrated by 
 photographs, etchings, and drawings, many of which show up with beautiful clearness 
 charming 'bits' of the building, and give an excellent idea of the delicate decoration 
 which is so marked a feature of it. The numerous head and tail-pieces are all taken from tin- 
 ornamental terra-cotta work, and are, in their way, gems." 
 
 SATURDAY REVIEW. "Mr. Harrison would, no doubt, write well upon any house 
 which had a history worth the tracing out. But his work upon this particular manor- 
 house has all the additional charm of a labour of love." 
 
 SPECTATOR." Mr. Harrison has managed to combine just the right amount of imagina- 
 tion and learning, and to give their proper places and proportions to the history, the art, the 
 architecture, the heraldry, the genealogy, and that special lore connected with old things, 
 i.M places, and old families, that want a specific name. Above all, we feel with Mr. 
 Harrison that he has not merely got up these subjects for the purpose of the book." 
 
 TABLET. "A. more beautiful gift-book than this, or one more welcome in the homes of 
 Catholic England, would be difficult to desire." 
 
 The Choice of Books ; and other Literary Pieces. By FREDERIC 
 HARRISON. Second Edition. Globe 8vo. 5*. [Kversley Series. 
 
 OXFORD REVIEW." It is long since any book of this kind has appeared, so notable for 
 keen insight, breadth of view, and clear, definite, expressive method. It is a volume which 
 may be taken up at any moment, and will nut readily be laid down ; which may be opem <1 
 anywhere, and will at once enchain attention." 
 
 The New Calendar of Great Men. Biographies of the 558 Worthies 
 of all Ages and Countries in the Positivist Calendar of Auguste Comte. 
 Edited by FREDERIC HARRISON. Crown 8vo. 7. 6d. net. 
 
 MR. JOHN MOBLEY in the NINETESNTH CENTURY." It is not too much to say no 
 far as one like myself can judge that a high level of general competency has been attained , 
 though, of course, in a survey of this encyclopedic magnitude, there are a thousand points 
 for remark, deduction, and objection. In one respect everybody will concur K\ en those 
 who are most ready to find Positivism, as a creed, hard, frigid, repulsive, and untrue, will 
 till recognise and admire the genuine and devout enthusiasm for purity, nobility and 
 beauty, In art, literature, character, life, and service, which has inspired the present 
 enterprise and marks every page of it." 
 
 ATHBN&UM. " Well written and accurate sketches, and form much more Interesting 
 reading than notices generally so brief could be expected to be. ... The notices as a rule 
 display great knowledge and sympathy." 
 
 MACMILLAN & CO., LONDON. 
 
 79 
 
DATE DUE 
 
 JUL 5 
 
 JUN 1 7 966 5 
 
 GAYLORD