Bel bowed down, and Nebo stooped;
Their idols were upon the cattle,
A burden to the weary beast.
They stoop, they bow down together;
They could not deliver their own charge;
Themselves are gone into captivity.
And what, to return, what was the end of the great Cyrus and of his
empire?
Alas, alas! as with all human glory, the end was not as the beginning.
We are scarce bound to believe positively the story how Cyrus made one
war too many, and was cut off in the Scythian deserts, falling before the
arrows of mere savages; and how their queen, Tomyris, poured blood down
the throat of the dead corpse, with the words, 'Glut thyself with the
gore for which thou hast thirsted.' But it may be true--for Xenophon
states it expressly, and with detail--that Cyrus, from the very time of
his triumph, became an Eastern despot, a sultan or a shah, living apart
from his people in mysterious splendour, in the vast fortified palace
which he built for himself; and imitating and causing his nobles and
satraps to imitate, in all but vice and effeminacy, the very Medes whom
he had conquered. And of this there is no doubt--that his sons and their
empire ran rapidly through that same vicious circle of corruption to
which all despotisms are doomed, and became within 250 years, even as the
Medes, the Chaldeans, the Lydians, whom they had conquered, children no
longer of Ahura Mazda, but of Ahriman, of darkness and not of light, to
be conquered by Alexander and his Greeks even more rapidly and more
shamefully than they had conquered the East.
This is the short epic of the Persian Empire, ending alas! as all human
epics are wont to end, sadly, if not shamefully.
But let me ask you, Did I say too much, when I said, that to these
Persians we owe that we are here to-night?
I do not say that without them we should not have been here. God, I
presume, when He is minded to do anything has more than one way of doing
it.
But that we are to-night the last link in a chain of causes and effects
which reaches as far back as the emigration of the Persians southward
from the plateau of Pamir, we cannot doubt.
For see. By the fall of Babylon and its empire the Jews were freed from
their captivity--large numbers of them at least--and sent home to their
own Jerusalem. What motives prompted Cyrus, and Darius after him, to do
that deed?
Those who like to impute the lowest motives may say if they will, that
Daniel and the later Isaiah found it politic to worship the rising sun,
and flatter the Persian conquerors: and that Cyrus and Darius in turn
were glad to see Jerusalem rebuilt, as an impregnable frontier fortress
between them and Egypt. Be it so; I, who wish to talk of things noble,
pure, lovely and of good report, would rather point you once more to the
magnificent poetry of the later Isaiah which commences at the 40th
chapter of the Book of Isaiah, and say--There, upon the very face of the
document, stands written the fact that the sympathy between the faithful
Persian and the faithful Jew--the two Puritans of the Old World, the two
haters of lies, idolatries, superstitions--was actually as intense as it
ought to have been, as it must have been.
Be that as it may, the return of the Jews to Jerusalem preserved for us
the Old Testament, while it restored to them a national centre, a sacred
city, like that of Delphi to the Greeks, Rome to the Romans, Mecca to the
Muslim, loyalty to which prevented their being utterly absorbed by the
more civilised Eastern races among whom they had been scattered abroad as
colonies of captives.
Then another, and a seemingly needful link of cause and effect ensued:
Alexander of Macedon destroyed the Persian Empire, and the East became
Greek, and Alexandria, rather than Jerusalem, became the head-quarters of
Jewish learning. But for that very cause, the Scriptures were not left
inaccessible to the mass of mankind, like the old Pehlevi liturgies of
the Zend-avesta, or the old Sanscrit Vedas, in an obsolete and hieratic
tongue, but were translated into, and continued in, the then all but
world-wide Hellenic speech, which was to the ancient world what French is
to the modern.
Then the East became Roman, without losing its Greek speech. And under
the wide domination of that later Roman Empire--which had subdued and
organised the whole known world, save the Parthian descendants of those
old Persians, and our old Teutonic forefathers, in their German forests
and on their Scandinavian shores--that Divine book was carried far and
wide, East and West, and South, from the heart of Abyssinia to the
mountains of Armenia, and to the isles of the ocean, beyond Britain
itself to Ireland and to the Hebrides.
And that book--so strangely coinciding with the old creed of the earlier
Persians--that book, long misunderstood, long overlain by the dust, and
overgrown by the parasitic fungi of centuries, that book it was which
sent to these trans-Atlantic shores the founders of your great nation.
That book gave them their instinct of freedom, tempered by reverence for
Law. That book gave them their hatred of idolatry; and made them not
only say but act upon their own words, with these old Persians and with
the Jewish prophets alike, Sacrifice and burnt-offering thou wouldst not;
then said we, Lo, we come. In the volume of the book it is written of
us, that we come to do thy will, O God. Yes, long and fantastic is the
chain of causes and effects, which links you here to the old heroes who
came down from Central Asia, because the land had grown so wondrous cold,
that there were ten months of winter to two of summer; and when simply
after warmth and life, and food for them and for their flocks, they
wandered forth to found and help to found a spiritual kingdom.
And even in their migration, far back in these dim and mystic ages, have
we found the earliest link of the long chain? Not so. What if the
legend of the change of climate be the dim recollection of an enormous
physical fact? What if it, and the gradual depopulation of the whole
north of Asia be owing, as geologists now suspect, to the slow and
age-long uprise of the whole of Siberia, thrusting the warm Arctic sea
further and further to the northward, and placing between it and the
Highlands of Thibet an ever-increasing breadth of icy land, destroying
animals, and driving whole races southward, in search of the summer and
the sun?
What if the first link in the chain, as yet conceivable by man, should be
the cosmic changes in the distribution of land and water, which filled
the mouths of the Siberian rivers with frozen carcases of woolly mammoth
and rhinoceros; and those again, doubt it not, of other revolutions,
reaching back and back, and on and on, into the infinite unknown. Why
not? For so are all human destinies
Bound with gold chains unto the throne of God.
LECTURE V.
ANCIENT CIVILISATION.
There is a theory abroad in the world just now about the origin of the
human race, which has so many patent and powerful physiological facts to
support it that we must not lightly say that it is absurd or impossible;
and that is, that man's mortal body and brain were derived from some
animal and ape-like creature. Of that I am not going to speak now. My
subject is--How this creature called man, from whatever source derived,
became civilised, rational, and moral. And I am sorry to say there is
tacked on by many to the first theory, another which does not follow from
it, and which has really nothing to do with it, and it is this--that man,
with all his wonderful and mysterious aspirations, always unfulfilled yet
always precious, at once his torment and his joy, his very hope of
everlasting life--that man, I say, developed himself, unassisted, out of
a state of primaeval brutishness, simply by calculations of pleasure and
pain, by observing what actions would pay in the long run and what would
not; and so learnt to conquer his selfishness by a more refined and
extended selfishness, and exchanged his brutality for worldliness, and
then, in a few instances, his worldliness for next-worldliness. I hope I
need not say that I do not believe this theory. If I did, I could not be
a Christian, I think, nor a philosopher either. At least, if I thought
that human civilisation had sprung from such a dunghill as that, I
should, in honour to my race, say nothing about it, here or elsewhere.
Why talk of the shame of our ancestors? I want to talk of their honour
and glory. I want to talk, if I talk at all, about great times, about
noble epochs, noble movements, noble deeds, and noble folk; about times
in which the human race--it may be through many mistakes, alas! and sin,
and sorrow and bloodshed--struggled up one step higher on those great
stairs which, as we hope, lead upward towards the far-off city of God;
the perfect polity, the perfect civilisation, the perfect religion, which
is eternal in the heavens.
Of great men, then, and noble deeds I want to speak. I am bound to do so
first, in courtesy to my hearers. For in choosing such a subject I took
for granted a nobleness and greatness of mind in them which can
appreciate and enjoy the contemplation of that which is lofty and heroic,
and that which is useful indeed, though not to the purses merely or the
mouths of men, but to their intellects and spirits; that highest
philosophy which, though she can (as has been sneeringly said of her)
bake no bread, can at least do this--and she alone--make men worthy to
eat the bread which God has given them.
I am bound to speak on such subjects, because I have never yet met, or
read of, the human company who did not require, now and then at least,
being reminded of such times and such personages--of whatsoever things
are just, pure, true, lovely, and of good report, if there be any manhood
and any praise to think, as St. Paul bids us all, of such things, that we
may keep up in our minds as much as possible a lofty standard, a pure
ideal, instead of sinking to the mere selfish standard which judges all
things, even those of the world to come, by profit and by loss, and into
that sordid frame of mind in which a man grows to believe that the world
is constructed of bricks and timber, and kept going by the price of
stocks.
We are all tempted, and the easier and more prosperous we are, the more
we are tempted, to fall into that sordid and shallow frame of mind.
Sordid even when its projects are most daring, its outward luxuries most
refined; and shallow, even when most acute, when priding itself most on
its knowledge of human nature, and of the secret springs which, so it
dreams, move the actions and make the history of nations and of men. All
are tempted that way, even the noblest-hearted. _Adhaesit pavimento
venter_, says the old psalmist. I am growing like the snake, crawling in
the dust, and eating the dust in which I crawl. I try to lift up my eyes
to the heavens, to the true, the beautiful, the good, the eternal
nobleness which was before all time, and shall be still when time has
past away. But to lift up myself is what I cannot do. Who will help me?
Who will quicken me? as our old English tongue has it. Who will give me
life? The true, pure, lofty human life which I did _not_ inherit from
the primaeval ape, which the ape-nature in me is for ever trying to
stifle, and make me that which I know too well I could so easily
become--a cunninger and more dainty-featured brute? Death itself, which
seems at times so fair, is fair because even it may raise me up and
deliver me from the burden of this animal and mortal body--
'Tis life, not death, for which I pant;
'Tis life, whereof my nerves are scant;
More life, and fuller, that I want.
Man? I am a man not by reason of my bones and muscles, nerves and brain,
which I have in common with apes and dogs and horses. I am a man--thou
art a man or woman--not because we have a flesh--God forbid! but because
there is a spirit in us, a divine spark and ray, which nature did not
give, and which nature cannot take away. And therefore, while I live on
earth, I will live to the spirit, not to the flesh, that I may be,
indeed, a _man_; and this same gross flesh, this animal ape-nature in me,
shall be the very element in me which I will renounce, defy, despise; at
least, if I am minded to be, not a merely higher savage, but a truly
higher civilised man. Civilisation with me shall mean, not more wealth,
more finery, more self-indulgence--even more aesthetic and artistic
luxury; but more virtue, more knowledge, more self-control, even though I
earn scanty bread by heavy toil; and when I compare the Caesar of Rome or
the great king, whether of Egypt, Babylon, or Persia, with the hermit of
the _Thebaid_, starving in his frock of camel's hair, with his soul fixed
on the ineffable glories of the unseen, and striving, however wildly and
fantastically, to become an angel and not an ape, I will say the hermit,
and not the Caesar, is the civilised man.
There are plenty of histories of civilisation and theories of
civilisation abroad in the world just now, and which profess to show you
how the primaeval savage has, or at least may have, become the civilised
man. For my part, with all due and careful consideration, I confess I
attach very little value to any of them: and for this simple reason that
we have no facts. The facts are lost.
Of course, if you assume a proposition as certainly true, it is easy
enough to prove that proposition to be true, at least to your own
satisfaction. If you assert with the old proverb, that you may make a
silk purse out of a sow's ear, you will be stupider than I dare suppose
anyone here to be, if you cannot invent for yourselves all the
intermediate stages of the transformation, however startling. And,
indeed, if modern philosophers had stuck more closely to this old
proverb, and its defining verb 'make,' and tried to show how some person
or persons--let them be who they may--men, angels, or gods--made the
sow's ear into the silk purse, and the savage into the sage--they might
have pleaded that they were still trying to keep their feet upon the firm
ground of actual experience. But while their theory is, that the sow's
ear grew into a silk purse of itself, and yet unconsciously and without
any intention of so bettering itself in life; why, I think that those who
have studied the history which lies behind them, and the poor human
nature which is struggling, and sinning, and sorrowing and failing around
them, and which seems on the greater part of this planet going downwards
and not upwards, and by no means bettering itself, save in the increase
of opera-houses, liquor-bars, and gambling-tables, and that which
pertaineth thereto; then we, I think, may be excused if we say with the
old Stoics--[Greek text]--I withhold my judgment. I know nothing about
the matter yet; and you, O my imaginative, though learned friends, know I
suspect very little either.
Eldest of things, Divine Equality:
so sang poor Shelley, and with a certain truth. For, if, as I believe,
the human race sprang from a single pair, there must have been among
their individual descendants an equality far greater than any which has
been known on earth during historic times. But that equality was at
best, the infantile innocence of the primary race, which faded away in
the race as quickly, alas! as it does in the individual child.
Divine--therefore it was one of the first blessings which man lost; one
of the last, I fear, to which he will return; that to which civilisation,
even at its best yet known, has not yet attained, save here and there for
short periods; but towards which it is striving as an ideal goal, and, as
I trust, not in vain.
The eldest of things which we see actually as history, is not equality,
but an already developed hideous inequality, trying to perpetuate itself,
and yet by a most divine and gracious law, destroying itself by the very
means which it uses to keep itself alive.
'There were giants in the earth in those days, And Nimrod began to be a
mighty one in the earth'--
A mighty hunter; and his game was man.
No; it is not equality which we see through the dim mists of bygone ages.
What we do see, is--I know not whether you will think me superstitious or
old-fashioned, but so I hold--very much what the earlier books of the
Bible show us under symbolic laws. Greek histories, Roman histories,
Egyptian histories, Eastern histories, inscriptions, national epics,
legends, fragments of legends--in the New World as in the Old--all tell
the same story. Not the story without an end, but the story without a
beginning. As in the Hindoo cosmogony, the world stands on an elephant,
and the elephant on a tortoise, and the tortoise on--what? No man knows.
I do not know. I only assert deliberately; waiting, as Napoleon says,
till the world come round to me, that the tortoise does not stand--as is
held by certain anthropologists, some honoured by me, some personally
dear to me--upon the savages who chipped flints and fed on mammoth and
reindeer in North-western Europe, shortly after the age of ice, a few
hundred thousand years ago. These sturdy little fellows--the kinsmen
probably of the Esquimaux and Lapps--could have been but the
avant-couriers, or more probably the fugitives from the true mass of
mankind--spreading northward from the Tropics, into climes becoming,
after the long catastrophe of the age of ice, once more genial enough to
support men who knew what decent comfort was, and were strong enough to
get the same, by all means fair or foul. No. The tortoise of the human
race does not stand on a savage. The savage may stand on an ape-like
creature. I do not say that he does not. I do not say that he does. I
do not know; and no man knows. But at least I say that the civilised man
and his world stand not upon creatures like to any savage now known upon
the earth. For first, it seems to be most unlikely; and next, and more
important to an inductive philosopher, there is no proof of it. I see no
savages becoming really civilised men--that is--not merely men who will
ape the outside of our so-called civilisation, even absorb a few of our
ideas; not merely that; but truly civilised men who will think for
themselves, invent for themselves, act for themselves; and when the
sacred lamp of light and truth has been passed into their hands, carry it
on unextinguished, and transmit it to their successors without running
back every moment to get it relighted by those from whom they received
it: and who are bound--remember that--patiently and lovingly to relight
it for them; to give freely to all their fellow-men of that which God has
given to them and to their ancestors; and let God, not man, be judge of
how much the Red Indian or the Polynesian, the Caffre or the Chinese, is
capable of receiving and of using.
Moreover, in history there is no record, absolutely no record, as far as
I am aware, of any savage tribe civilising itself. It is a bold saying.
I stand by my assertion: most happy to find myself confuted, even in a
single instance; for my being wrong would give me, what I can have no
objection to possess, a higher opinion than I have now, of the unassisted
capabilities of my fellow-men.
But civilisation must have begun somewhen, somewhere, with some person,
or some family, or some nation; and how did it begin?
I have said already that I do not know. But I have had my dream--like
the philosopher--and as I have not been ashamed to tell it elsewhere, I
shall not be ashamed to tell it here. And it is this:--
What if the beginnings of true civilisation in this unique, abnormal,
diseased, unsatisfied, incomprehensible, and truly miraculous and
supernatural race we call man, had been literally, and in actual fact,
miraculous and supernatural likewise? What if that be the true key to
the mystery of humanity and its origin? What if the few first chapters
of the most ancient and most sacred book should point, under whatever
symbols, to the actual and the only possible origin of civilisation, the
education of a man, or a family by beings of some higher race than man?
What if the old Puritan doctrine of Election should be even of a deeper
and wider application than divines have been wont to think? What if
individuals, if peoples, have been chosen out from time to time for a
special illumination, that they might be the lights of the earth, and the
salt of the world? What if they have, each in their turn, abused that
divine teaching to make themselves the tyrants, instead of the ministers,
of the less enlightened? To increase the inequalities of nature by their
own selfishness, instead of decreasing them, into the equality of grace,
by their own self-sacrifice? What if the Bible after all was right, and
even more right than we were taught to think?
So runs my dream. If, after I have confessed to it, you think me still
worth listening to, in this enlightened 19th century, I will go on.
At all events, what we see at the beginning of all known and half-known
history, is not savagery, but high civilisation, at least of an outward
and material kind. Do you demur? Then recollect, I pray you, that the
three oldest peoples known to history on this planet are Egypt, China,
Hindostan. The first glimpses of the world are always like those which
the book of Genesis gives us; like those which your own continent gives
us. As it was 400 years ago in America, so it was in North Africa and in
Asia 4,000 years ago, or 40,000 for aught I know. Nay, if anyone should
ask--And why not 400,000 years ago, on Miocene continents long sunk
beneath the Tropic sea? I for one have no rejoinder save--We have no
proofs as yet.
There loom up, out of the darkness of legend, into the as yet dim dawn of
history, what the old Arabs call Races of pre-Adamite Sultans--colossal
monarchies, with fixed and often elaborate laws, customs, creeds; with
aristocracies, priesthoods--seemingly always of a superior and conquering
race; with a mass of common folk, whether free or half-free, composed of
older conquered races; of imported slaves, too, and their descendants.
But whence comes the royal race, the aristocracy, the priesthood? You
enquire, and you find that they usually know not themselves. They are
usually--I had almost dared to say, always--foreigners. They have
crossed the neighbouring mountains. They have come by sea, like Dido to
Carthage, like Manco Cassae and Mama Bello to America, and they have
sometimes forgotten when. At least they are wiser, stronger, fairer,
than the aborigines. They are to them--as Jacques Cartier was to the
Indians of Canada--as gods. They are not sure that they are not
descended from gods. They are the Children of the Sun, or what not. The
children of light, who ray out such light as they have, upon the darkness
of their subjects. They are at first, probably, civilisers, not
conquerors. For, if tradition is worth anything--and we have nothing
else to go upon--they are at first few in number. They come as settlers,
or even as single sages. It is, in all tradition, not the many who
influence the few, but the few who influence the many.
So aristocracies, in the true sense, are formed. But the higher calling
is soon forgotten. The purer light is soon darkened in pride and
selfishness, luxury and lust; as in Genesis, the sons of God see the
daughters of men, that they are fair; and they take them wives of all
that they choose. And so a mixed race springs up and increases, without
detriment at first to the commonwealth. For, by a well-known law of
heredity, the cross between two races, probably far apart, produces at
first a progeny possessing the forces, and, alas! probably the vices of
both. And when the sons of God go in to the daughters of men, there are
giants in the earth in those days, men of renown. The Roman empire,
remember, was never stronger than when the old Patrician blood had
mingled itself with that of every nation round the Mediterranean.
But it does not last. Selfishness, luxury, ferocity, spread from above,
as well as from below. The just aristocracy of virtue and wisdom becomes
an unjust one of mere power and privilege; that again, one of mere
wealth, corrupting and corrupt; and is destroyed, not by the people from
below, but by the monarch from above. The hereditary bondsmen may know
Who would be free,
Himself must strike the blow.
But they dare not, know not how. The king must do it for them. He must
become the State. 'Better one tyrant,' as Voltaire said, 'than many.'
Better stand in fear of one lion far away, than of many wolves, each in
the nearest wood. And so arise those truly monstrous Eastern despotisms,
of which modern Persia is, thank God, the only remaining specimen; for
Turkey and Egypt are too amenable of late years to the influence of the
free nations to be counted as despotisms pure and simple--despotisms in
which men, instead of worshipping a God-man, worship the hideous
counterfeit, a _Man-god_--a poor human being endowed by public opinion
with the powers of deity, while he is the slave of all the weaknesses of
humanity. But such, as an historic fact, has been the last stage of
every civilisation--even that of Rome, which ripened itself upon this
earth the last in ancient times, and, I had almost said, until this very
day, except among the men who speak Teutonic tongues, and who have
preserved through all temptations, and reasserted through all dangers,
the free ideas which have been our sacred heritage ever since Tacitus
beheld us, with respect and awe, among our German forests, and saw in us
the future masters of the Roman Empire.
Yes, it is very sad, the past history of mankind. But shall we despise
those who went before us, and on whose accumulated labours we now stand?
Shall we not reverence our spiritual ancestors? Shall we not show our
reverence by copying them, at least whenever, as in those old Persians,
we see in them manliness and truthfulness, hatred of idolatries, and
devotion to the God of light and life and good? And shall we not feel
pity, instead of contempt, for their ruder forms of government, their
ignorances, excesses, failures--so excusable in men who, with little or
no previous teaching, were trying to solve for themselves for the first
time the deepest social and political problems of humanity.
Yes, those old despotisms, we trust, are dead and never to revive. But
their corpses are the corpses, not of our enemies, but of our friends and
predecessors, slain in the world-old fight of Ormuzd against
Ahriman--light against darkness, order against disorder. Confusedly they
fought, and sometimes ill: but their corpses piled the breach and filled
the trench for us, and over their corpses we step on to what should be to
us an easy victory--what may be to us, yet, a shameful ruin.
For if we be, as we are wont to boast, the salt of the earth and the
light of the world, what if the salt should lose its savour? What if the
light which is in us should become darkness? For myself, when I look
upon the responsibilities of the free nations of modern times, so far
from boasting of that liberty in which I delight--and to keep which I
freely, too, could die--I rather say, in fear and trembling, God help us
on whom He has laid so heavy a burden as to make us free; responsible,
each individual of us, not only to ourselves, but to Him and all mankind.
For if we fall we shall fall I know not whither, and I dare not think.
How those old despotisms, the mighty empires of old time, fell, we know,
and we can easily explain. Corrupt, luxurious, effeminate, eaten out by
universal selfishness and mutual fear, they had at last no organic
coherence. The moral anarchy within showed through, at last burst
through, the painted skin of prescriptive order which held them together.
Some braver and abler, and usually more virtuous people, often some
little, hardy, homely mountain tribe, saw that the fruit was ripe for
gathering; and, caring nought for superior numbers--and saying with
German Alaric when the Romans boasted of their numbers, 'The thicker the
hay the easier it is mowed--struck one brave blow at the huge inflated
wind-bag--as Cyrus and his handful of Persians struck at the Medes; as
Alexander and his handful of Greeks struck afterwards at the
Persians--and behold, it collapsed upon the spot. And then the victors
took the place of the conquered; and became in their turn an aristocracy,
and then a despotism; and in their turn rotted down and perished. And so
the vicious circle repeated itself, age after age, from Egypt and Assyria
to Mexico and Peru.
And therefore, we, free peoples as we are, have need to watch, and
sternly watch, ourselves. Equality of some kind or other is, as I said,
our natural and seemingly inevitable goal. But which equality? For
there are two--a true one and a false; a noble and a base; a healthful
and a ruinous. There is the truly divine equality, and there is the
brute equality of sheep and oxen, and of flies and worms. There is the
equality which is founded on mutual envy. The equality which respects
others, and the equality which asserts itself. The equality which longs
to raise all alike, and the equality which desires to pull down all
alike. The equality which says--Thou art as good as I, and it may be
better too, in the sight of God. And the equality which says--I am as
good as thou, and will therefore see if I cannot master thee.
Side by side, in the heart of every free man, and every free people, are
the two instincts struggling for the mastery, called by the same name,
but bearing the same relation to each other as Marsyas to Apollo, the
Satyr to the God. Marsyas and Apollo, the base and the noble, are, as in
the old Greek legend, contending for the prize. And the prize is no less
an one than all free people of this planet.
In proportion as that nobler idea conquers, and men unite in the equality
of mutual respect and mutual service, they move one step further towards
realising on earth that Kingdom of God of which it is written--'The
despots of the nations exercise dominion over them, and they that
exercise authority over them are called benefactors. But he that will be
great among you let him be the servant of all.'
And in proportion as that base idea conquers, and selfishness, not
self-sacrifice, is the ruling spirit of a State, men move on, one step
forward towards realising that kingdom of the devil upon earth, 'Every
man for himself and the devil take the hindmost.' Only, alas! in that
evil equality of envy and hate, there is no hindmost, and the devil takes
them all alike.
And so is a period of discontent, revolution, internecine anarchy,
followed by a tyranny endured, as in old Rome, by men once free, because
tyranny will at least do for them, what they were too lazy and greedy and
envious to do for themselves.
And all because they have forgot
What 'tis to be a man--to curb and spurn
The tyrant in us: the ignobler self
Which boasts, not loathes, its likeness to the brute;
And owns no good save ease, no ill save pain,
No purpose, save its share in that wild war
In which, through countless ages, living things
Compete in internecine greed. Ah, loving God,
Are we as creeping things, which have no lord?
That we are brutes, great God, we know too well;
Apes daintier-featured; silly birds, who flaunt
Their plumes, unheeding of the fowler's step;
Spiders, who catch with paper, not with webs;
Tigers, who slay with cannon and sharp steel,
Instead of teeth and claws:--all these we are.
Are we no more than these, save in degree?
Mere fools of nature, puppets of strong lusts,
Taking the sword, to perish by the sword
Upon the universal battle-field,
Even as the things upon the moor outside?
The heath eats up green grass and delicate herbs;
The pines eat up the heath; the grub the pine;
The finch the grub; the hawk the silly finch;
And man, the mightiest of all beasts of prey,
Eats what he lists. The strong eat up the weak;
The many eat the few; great nations, small;
And he who cometh in the name of all
Shall, greediest, triumph by the greed of all,
And, armed by his own victims, eat up all.
While ever out of the eternal heavens
Looks patient down the great magnanimous God,
Who, Master of all worlds, did sacrifice
All to Himself? Nay: but Himself to all;
Who taught mankind, on that first Christmas Day,
What 'tis to be a man--to give, not take;
To serve, not rule; to nourish, not devour;
To lift, not crush; if need, to die, not live.
'He that cometh in the name of all'--the popular military despot--the
'saviour of his country'--he is our internecine enemy on both sides of
the Atlantic, whenever he arises--the inaugurator of that Imperialism,
that Caesarism into which Rome sank, when not her liberties merely, but
her virtues, were decaying out of her--the sink into which all wicked
States, whether republics or monarchies, are sure to fall, simply because
men must eat and drink for to-morrow they die. The Military and
Bureaucratic Despotism which keeps the many quiet, as in old Rome, by
_panem et Circenses_--bread and games--or if need be, Pilgrimages; that
the few may make money, eat, drink, and be merry, as long as it can last.
That, let it ape as it may--as did the Caesars of old Rome at first--as
another Emperor did even in our own days--the forms of dead freedom,
really upholds an artificial luxury by brute force; and consecrates the
basest of all aristocracies, the aristocracy of the money bag, by the
divine sanction of the bayonet.
That at all risks, even at the price of precious blood, the free peoples
of the earth must ward off from them; for, makeshift and stop-gap as it
is, it does not even succeed in what it tries to do. It does not last.
Have we not seen that it does not, cannot last? How can it last. This
falsehood, like all falsehoods, must collapse at one touch of Ithuriel's
spear of truth and fact. And--
'Then saw I the end of these men. Namely, how Thou dost set them in
slippery places, and casteth them down.
'Suddenly do they perish, and come to a fearful end. Yea, like as a
dream when one awaketh, so shalt Thou make their image to vanish out of
the city.'
Have we not seen that too, though, thank God, neither in England nor in
the United States?
And then? What then? None knows, and none can know.
The future of France and Spain, the future of the Tropical Republics of
Spanish America, is utterly blank and dark; not to be prophesied, I hold,
by mortal man, simply because we have no like cases in the history of the
past whereby to judge the tendencies of the present. Will they revive?
Under the genial influences of free institutions will the good seed which
is in them take root downwards, and bear fruit upwards? and make them all
what that fair France has been, in spite of all her faults, so often in
past years--a joy and an inspiration to all the nations round? Shall it
be thus? God grant it may; but He, and He alone, can tell. We only
stand by, watching, if we be wise, with pity and with fear, the working
out of a tremendous new social problem, which must affect the future of
the whole civilised world.
For if the agonising old nations fail to regenerate themselves, what can
befall? What, when even Imperialism has been tried and failed, as fail
it must? What but that lower depth within the lowest deep?
That last dread mood
Of sated lust, and dull decrepitude.
No law, no art, no faith, no hope, no God.
When round the freezing founts of life in peevish ring,
Crouched on the bare-worn sod,
Babbling about the unreturning spring,
And whining for dead creeds, which cannot save,
The toothless nations shiver to their grave.
And we, who think we stand, let us take heed lest we fall. Let us
accept, in modesty and in awe, the responsibility of our freedom, and
remember that that freedom can be preserved only in one old-fashioned
way. Let us remember that the one condition of a true democracy is the
same as the one condition of a true aristocracy, namely, virtue. Let us
teach our children, as grand old Lilly taught our forefathers 300 years
ago--'It is virtue, gentlemen, yea, virtue that maketh gentlemen; that
maketh the poor rich, the subject a king, the lowborn noble, the deformed
beautiful. These things neither the whirling wheel of fortune can
overturn, nor the deceitful cavillings of worldlings separate, neither
sickness abate, nor age abolish.'
Yes. Let us teach our children thus on both sides of the Atlantic. For
if they--which God forbid--should grow corrupt and weak by their own
sins, there is no hardier race now left on earth to conquer our
descendants and bring them back to reason, as those old Jews were
brought, by bitter shame and woe. And all that is before them and the
whole civilised world, would be long centuries of anarchy such as the
world has not seen for ages--a true Ragnarok, a twilight of the very
gods, an age such as the wise woman foretold in the old Voluspa.
When brethren shall be
Each other's bane,
And sisters' sons rend
The ties of kin.
Hard will be that age,
An age of bad women,
An axe-age, a sword-age,
Shields oft cleft in twain,
A storm-age, a wolf-age,
Ere earth meet its doom.
So sang, 2,000 years ago, perhaps, the great unnamed prophetess of our
own race, of what might be, if we should fail mankind and our own calling
and election.
God grant that day may never come. But God grant, also, that if that day
does come, then may come true also what that wise Vala sang, of the day
when gods, and men, and earth should be burnt up with fire.
When slaked Surtur's flame is,
Still the man and the maiden,
Hight Valour and Life,
Shall keep themselves hid
In the wood of remembrance.
The dew of the dawning
For food it shall serve them;
From them spring new peoples.
New peoples. For after all is said, the ideal form of human society is
democracy.
A nation--and, were it even possible, a whole world--of free men, lifting
free foreheads to God and Nature; calling no man master--for one is their
master, even God; knowing and obeying their duties towards the Maker of
the Universe, and therefore to each other, and that not from fear, nor
calculation of profit or loss, but because they loved and liked it, and
had seen the beauty of righteousness and trust and peace; because the law
of God was in their hearts, and needing at last, it may be, neither king
nor priest, for each man and each woman, in their place, were kings and
priests to God. Such a nation--such a society. What nobler conception
of mortal existence can we form? Would not that be, indeed, the kingdom
of God come on earth?
And tell me not that that is impossible--too fair a dream to be ever
realised. All that makes it impossible is the selfishness, passions,
weaknesses, of those who would be blest were they masters of themselves,
and therefore of circumstances; who are miserable because, not being
masters of themselves, they try to master circumstance, to pull down iron
walls with weak and clumsy hands, and forget that he who would be free
from tyrants must first be free from his worst tyrant, self.
But tell me not that the dream is impossible. It is so beautiful that it
must be true. If not now, nor centuries hence, yet still hereafter. God
would never, as I hold, have inspired man with that rich imagination had
he not meant to translate, some day, that imagination into fact.
The very greatness of the idea, beyond what a single mind or generation
can grasp, will ensure failure on failure,--follies, fanaticisms,
disappointments, even crimes, bloodshed, hasty furies, as of children
baulked of their holiday.
But it will be at last fulfilled, filled full, and perfected; not perhaps
here, or among our peoples, or any people which now exist on earth: but
in some future civilisation--it may be in far lands beyond the sea--when
all that you and we have made and done shall be as the forest-grown
mounds of the old nameless civilisers of the Mississippi valley.
* * * * *
LONDON: PRINTED BY
SPOTTISWOODE AND CO., NEW-STREET SQUARE
AND PARLIAMENT STREET
Footnotes:
{71} Black, translator of Mallett's _Northern Antiquities_,
Supplementary Chapter I., and Rafn's _Antiquitates Americanae_.
{91} On the Fiftieth Birthday of Agassiz.