THE LIBRARY

THE UNIVERSITY

OF CALIFORNIA

RIVERSIDE

Ex Libris
ISAAC FOOT

THE MEANING OF HISTORY

OTHER HISTORICAL PIECES

THE

MEANING OF HISTORY

AND OTHER HISTORICAL PIECES

FREDERIC HARRISON

LONDON

MACMILLAN AND CO.
AND NEW YORK

1894

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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,

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

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.

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

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.'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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,

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.

DATE DUE

JUL 5

JUN 1 7 966 5

GAYLORD