Vinogradoff, _Roman Law in Mediaeval Europe_. Harper's Library of Living

Thought.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 22: Sophocles, _Antigone_, 449-57 (Jebb's translation).]

[Footnote 23: Herodotus, iii. 38.]

VI

THE COMMON ELEMENTS IN EUROPEAN LITERATURE AND ART

For some hundred years past it has been common to lay great stress upon

the importance of national characteristics in art. This has been very

natural, for they represent one main aspect and justification of the

revolt against the conception of the one permanent and immutable

standard of perfection of the Neo-classicists of the Renaissance.

Lessing and Herder, who were the critical protagonists of the new world,

had indeed a knowledge and admiration of ancient art which was probably

superior to that of the classicists, but they refused to admit that art

was bound to follow the forms of antiquity, and maintained rather that

its forms would necessarily change with the changing conditions of the

world, and with the varying characteristics of different nationalities

or races.

From their time down to our own, then, this conception of art, as being

coloured or affected strongly and continually by nationality, has become

almost a commonplace of criticism, and it will not be denied that there

is real importance in the conception. For though nothing is really art

which is not distinctive and personal and unique, yet just so far as the

personality of the artist is conditioned by his nationality, so far also

will his artistic work reflect the characteristics of his nation or

country. And yet, while this is true, it really needs very little

consideration to see that when we consider a great work of art, we are

very little concerned with the question of the nationality of the

artist, but with something which is deeper and larger than his

nationality. The great artist no doubt represents life under the forms

or terms of his concrete experience, but it is life and the world itself

which he represents. He is not greatly concerned with the merely

superficial or passing aspects of human nature and the world, but with

that which is essential and continuing under these terms.

It may indeed be urged that there is some real and fundamental

difference between the art of the East and that of the West, but as we

have come to know eastern art better, we have become more doubtful even

of this, and are rather impressed with the unity of the artistic

expression even of East and West. I am far from wishing to say that

nationality or race has no significance in art, but I think that we have

been in danger of greatly exaggerating its importance. I am at least

certain that we have very constantly made too much of the supposed

differences in the literature and art of the different European

countries, and that we must make clear to ourselves that European art

and literature are really one.

It is not unimportant to observe this at the present time, to consider

whether literature and art are dividing or uniting forces. As far as we

can understand, what indeed seems a little unintelligible, the Germans

desire to impress upon Europe their culture or civilization, an attempt

as absurd as it would be impossible, for German culture is, after all,

only a part of the great European civilization, and the part cannot take

the place of the whole. But on the other hand it is not less important

for us to understand that what we desire to do is not to destroy those

elements which Germany contributes to European civilization, but only

that they should take their natural and appropriate place in that

greater unity which is enriched and enlarged by the contribution of

every separate national society. European art is one; that is, the

common characteristics are far more important than the national

differences. And further, we often take to be national, characteristics

which happen to show themselves at one time in one place, while they may

have existed at another time in another place. The history of European

art is in a great measure the history of successive influences or

movements which were for the most part common to all Europe, but which

did not always exactly synchronize in the different European countries.

* * * * *

So far as there is such a thing as nationalism in literature it is

wholly modern, while in mediaeval literature and art there is hardly

anything of it. This may seem strange to those who imagine that it is

only the railway and the steamship which have brought the world

together, but the truth is that the movement of ideas and fashions was

probably at least as rapid in the Middle Ages as it is to-day. However

this may be, the fact is, I think, clear, that when we come to examine

mediaeval literature we find that it is practically homogeneous, that

whether we look at it in England or France, in Germany or in

Scandinavia, it has practically the same qualities. I do not speak of

Italy yet, for Italian literature is the latest-born of the great

European literatures, it has not at least come down to us in any forms

earlier than those of the thirteenth century.

Mediaeval literature is known to us primarily under two forms, the

heroic epic and the romance, and it is to these that we must first turn

our attention. We know the heroic epic in different languages throughout

a period which extends roughly from the eighth to the twelfth centuries.

The earliest example is the English Beowulf; among the latest are the

German Nibelungenlied and some of the French Chansons de Geste, which

belong to the end of the twelfth century. This epic literature is not

least interesting to us because it has, as far as we can judge, no

trace of that great classical influence of which you have already heard,

and which plays so great a part in the later developments of European

literature. Now what is the epic? Its materials are the stories of

northern mythology, the traditions of the great migrations which

overthrew the Roman empire in the west, and the legends which grew up

round the name of Charles the Great. They are stories of the gods and

demigods, of the Burgundian and the Hun, of the English people possibly

while still settled on the Baltic coasts, of the conflicts of the Frank

and the Saracen, of the earliest settlers in Iceland; and they vary in

their temper and their tone.

But they all represent the sense of the glory and splendour of the great

fighting man, of the stout heart, which rises with rising danger and is

never so great or so splendid as when it faces overwhelming odds and

defies the inexorable fates. The epic poet is so possessed by this sense

of the greatness of human nature that it does not matter much even

whether the man is wrong or perverse: he loves the obstinacy of Roland,

who will not, till too late, sound his horn to call Charlemagne and his

armies, but prefers to face the enemy, and if need be to die, by

himself, rather than to ask for help; he is filled with the sense of the

magnificence of the stark figure of Hagen, who had indeed treacherously

murdered the great Siegfried, but whose heart is so high and his hand so

heavy, that when he is overpowered, and Chriemhilda at last avenges upon

him the murder of her husband, the old knight standing by kills

Chriemhilda herself--it was not meet that so great a fighter should be

slain by a woman. These are the men of the epics.

And beside them stand the figures of women great and gracious, women for

whose love men die and perish, but who themselves also can hate and

love passionately and fiercely. It has sometimes been said by those who

only know the epics in one or other of the various languages, that women

and the love of women have no place in the epic, but belong to the

romance, but this is a mistake. In the mediaeval epic there is little

talk about emotion, but in the Nibelungenlied and in some of the

Icelandic sagas the woman is, like Helen in the Homeric epic, the motive

and source of all the action.

The epic is the story of great and heroic figures, abstracted in that

sense from the common or ordinary circumstances of life, but the

background of the action is always realistic and even detailed in its

realism, so that, just as again in the Homeric poems, we can frequently

reconstruct the life and manners of the time to which the poems belong

from that which they tell us. And it is impossible to say that there is

any really national difference between the epics as we find them in

different languages; they are indeed the expression of the temperament

and personality of the great artists who produced them, and they are

each unique and individual in proportion to the greatness of their

authors, but in their general characteristics they are the same.

There are few changes in the history of literature more remarkable than

that which came over European art in the later years of the eleventh

century and the beginning of the twelfth. The epic is concerned with the

world of action, the romance is occupied almost exclusively with the

world of feeling and emotion. For this is the real character of the

romance. It has sometimes been said that the essence of the romance lies

in the strange and mysterious circumstances of the world, in stories of

mystery and wonder, of fairyland and magic. And it is quite true that it

often uses these forms of human experience. But this is not its real

quality. From the story of Tristan and the 'lais' of Mary of France,

down to the _Vita Nuova_ of Dante, that with which it is occupied is the

human heart, its hopes and fears, its joys and sorrows, its exultation

and despair. We have only to read the earliest and greatest forms in

which the story of Tristan and Iseult have come down to us to see this

for ourselves. It is indeed true that we can see or that we can

conjecture that behind the present romance there may have lain an epic

story of the hero's actions, but what we see now is nothing but the

story of the 'infinite passion', the 'infinite pain' of the human heart.

It is the story of their fatal love, of the passion which drives them

out of the homes of men into the wilderness, the fatal passion which

separation only makes deeper, which nothing can change, nothing can end,

the story of a man and woman to whom the world is well lost for love.

And if you wish to see the whole meaning of life as the romance actually

understood it, you have but to turn again to that 'lai' of Mary of

France, which tells us in a few lines how Tristan and Iseult, long

parted, succeed in meeting in the forest for a few moments--meet and

then part--and over it all there is nothing but a certain exquisite

sentiment of love and pain, of love and tears.

This romance poetry is indeed strange, so strange that no one has yet

succeeded in finding or explaining its real origin. Only the day before,

the great artists were singing the gallant deeds of men, but now they

can see nothing, think of nothing but the human heart. And what is

perhaps strangest of all, this great reality of feeling, of passion, is

presented under the form of a world almost wholly unreal and

conventional. The men and women of the epic were great heroic figures,

of larger stature, of greater passions than the common run, but they

were quite real people, moving and acting in the real world. The figures

of romance are for the most part, but for the intense reality of their

love, the unreal, conventional figures of a world of knights and ladies,

of unreal and conventional actions. We understand the epic world, we see

and recognize their people, their dwellings, their ways of acting and

thinking, but the romantic knights and ladies are mere conventions.

The truth is that the chivalrous or romantic world is unreal, partly

perhaps because the artists are occupied with nothing but the emotions,

and profound though these are, it is perhaps because of their

abstraction that the romance ended in the strange allegorical movement

of the thirteenth century. In the hands of the later and lesser poets,

the romantic method finally loses almost all sense of personality, and

becomes a picture and analysis of abstract emotion. It is to these

abstractions that Guillaume de Lorris gave a new life and a singular

grace in the personifications of the _Romance of the Rose_, and the

charm and grace of his art carried Europe off its feet, so that for

nearly three hundred years it tended to dominate European poetry. Even

the greatest artists of these centuries, Dante and Chaucer, at least

started with this method, and at the very end of the fifteenth century

William Dunbar in Scotland still used it with grace and vivacity.

But I have lingered too long in the Middle Ages. I have done so because,

if we could only make more clear to ourselves the homogeneity of the

Europe out of which we all came, it would, I think, greatly help to

clear up the superstitious exaggeration of the conception of nationality

in art. There is not time to deal with it, or we might stay to observe

that the characteristic of mediaeval literature is that of all mediaeval

art and life. To myself, indeed, it is clear that the notion that the

people of the Middle Ages desired or worked for a unified political

organization is indeed a great mistake. But, on the other hand, it is

equally certain that in general civilization, as in religion, there was

a real unity, and that it was only very slowly indeed that the

self-conscious nationalities of the modern world were formed out of the

welter of the confused races and tribes of Europe: indeed, in some parts

of Europe this development was not reached till the nineteenth century

and in south-eastern Europe it is only coming to-day.

* * * * *

European art still transcends nationality; in its essence it is

differentiated by the personality of the artist, not by the distinction

of nationality. This may seem at first sight a paradox, for you may be

inclined to say that surely the modern national literatures are in many

ways different, you will say that there is surely some great difference

between Dutch and Italian painting, some great contrast between English

and French poetry. Many people used to speak, perhaps some do still, of

the warm and passionate and romantic south, and of the cold and

ungracious and passionless north. But this is merely a delusion. Dante

is not more imaginative or passionate than Shakespeare.

What is it then which has produced this impression? The answer to the

question and the best evidence of the unity of European art will perhaps

be found in examining some of the great movements in its history, since

the time when the civilization of the Middle Ages reached its highest

point in the thirteenth century.

With the fourteenth century we come to the beginning of a movement which

culminated in the greatest literature of the modern world, in the drama

of England and Spain. But its beginnings are at first sight strangely

different from its fulfilment, and it is almost impossible therefore to

find any phrase or term under which we can justly represent it. The

first great master of the new world was Dante, but not the Dante of the

exquisite sentiment but artificial form of the _Vita Nuova_, but the

great imaginative realist of the _Divine Comedy_, the artist who could

portray the passion and pain of Francesca and her lover, and with equal

power the masterful figure of Farinata, whose dauntless soul not hell

itself could quell; who could pass from the vivid drama of the fierce

contemporary life of Italy to the infinite peace of those to whom 'la

sua voluntade è nostra pace'. For indeed it is this which places Dante

among the supreme poets of the world, that there is no aspect of the

reality of human life and experience which is strange to him, and which

the greatness of his imagination cannot make living to us. It has often

been said that Dante is the greatest and most representative artist of

the Middle Ages, but so far as this is true, and it is only partially

true, it may make plain to us that there are no boundaries of time in

art any more than of race or country. Dante is the first great artist of

a new world, but it was not till three centuries had passed, it was not

until Shakespeare, that the whole meaning of the new literature was made

clear. The new literature has been thought to begin with two great

artists, an Italian and an Englishman: with Boccaccio in the south and

Chaucer in the north.

What is, then, the characteristic quality or note of the _Decameron_ and

the _Canterbury Tales_? It is not, as some absurd persons think, to be

discovered in the licentiousness or grossness of some of these tales,

this only represents one aspect of their realism, and indeed in this

they do little more than continue the characteristics of what we know as

the 'Fabliaux' of the Middle Ages. The quality of the new art lies just

in this, that there is nothing in human life which is uninteresting or

insignificant to these great artists, that they are bound by no

traditions, hampered by no conventions. They had begun as artists of

romance, and the romantic sentiment of life never ceased to interest

and move them, but they had learned to go beyond the romantic

conventions, and to find the material of their art in everything which

was part of the reality of life. To them, as to the other tale-writers

of these centuries, it was quite immaterial whether they were retelling

a story which had come down from immemorial antiquity, or relating

something which had happened but yesterday in their own town or village,

and they knew nothing of distinctions of class or rank or circumstance;

it is the universal human interest which arrests them. The example which

we shall find most representative is that which is to us English people

the most familiar, that is the 'Prologue' to the _Canterbury Tales_. Was

there ever anything greater of its kind than this? Who can ever forget

these figures: the Knight, the Franklyn, the Prioress, the Wife of Bath?

As we read there passes before us all the company of human life, wise

and foolish, grave and gay, good and bad. Chaucer and Boccaccio are the

greatest artists of what has often been called the 'realistic' type,

they are at least very easy to distinguish from the epic and romantic

artists.

They are great artists, but it is also clear enough that their powers

and their insight into human life were limited. What they began was

carried out to its fulfilment by the great dramatists of the sixteenth

and seventeenth centuries. For this is indeed the relation of the

tale-writers to the dramatists, that they furnish the materials upon

which the dramatists built up their presentation of human life, or

rather, the elements which are transformed by the imagination of the

great dramatists from bare 'realism' into the highest expression of

reality. No doubt the dramatists take into their work other materials

and influences, but the substantial quality whether of the tragedy or

the comedy is intimately related to that of the tales. How often were

the great dramas built up on materials which they drew from Bandello or

the other Italians who continued the tradition of Boccaccio, or from

similar northern sources. But the great dramatists gave their stories a

life, a passion, a breadth and fullness which is far removed from that

of their sources. In their hands, or rather in their creative

imagination, we see not merely the external circumstance, the bare fact,

but we see all the fullness and completeness, all the exquisite grace

and beauty, all the passion and terror of human experience. We may call

Boccaccio and Chaucer 'realists', but it is only in Marlowe and Webster,

and above all in Shakespeare, that we reach reality itself.

We all know the world of Shakespeare, how he ranges from Falstaff to

Hamlet, from Bottom to Lear, from Mrs. Quickly and Doll Tearsheet to

Rosalind and Imogen and Cordelia; we know how to Shakespeare, and in a

lesser degree to some of the other great Elizabethans like Marlowe and

Webster, there is nothing common and insignificant in life, nothing

which the creative imagination of the artist cannot transform,

transmute, from mere dross into pure gold. We say, and we say rightly,

that here is the greatest thing that England has brought forth, and we

think of it as representing the splendid youth and the first maturity of

a great nation.

But now, do we remember and understand that alongside of the English

drama there is another drama, not indeed so great as that of

Shakespeare, but greater, I think, than that of any other Elizabethan,

the drama of Spain, of Lope de Vega and Calderon, a drama of the same

character, inspired by the same spirit, living under the power of the

same creative imagination, a drama in which the same vivid reality is

informed by the same breath of magical romance. In the tragedy of Lope

de Vega, in the comedies of Calderon, with all the distinctive

individuality of the great artists, and of each great work of art, we

have a poetic drama which is in its essential characteristics the same

as that of England.

And yet how different were the circumstances of the two nations, Spain

was decadent, bankrupt, defeated; England was rising to the supreme

heights of its greatness under Elizabeth and Cromwell. At the end of the

sixteenth century, Spain had passed its splendid meridian and was

falling into the grey obscurity of a clouded evening. It had quickly

lost the great place which for a few years it had held in the world,

every day brought a new failure, every year a new disaster; the great

Armada had perished miserably on the dunes of Flanders and Holland, on

the cliffs of Scotland and Ireland; a handful of valiant Dutchmen had

defied its power and broken its wealth; the real enemy of Spain, that is

France, had gathered itself together after forty years of ruin and

misery, and had driven out the Spanish power. Indeed, so great, so

overwhelming, was--as we can now see it--the ruin, that Philip II, who

to the English imagination has stood for the embodiment of cruel and

masterful malignity, has become to the historical student one of the

tragic figures in history, a sincere, stupid, bigoted man, vainly

striving to hold together the great empire which had been created by

Ferdinand and Isabella, by Cortez and Pizarro and Charles V.

England, on the other hand, was rising from obscurity to its place as

the mistress of the seas; Englishmen were raiding and plundering the New

World, which Spain and Portugal had looked on as their own; England was

sending out its sailors and merchants to all the seas, and to all lands,

from the frozen north to the Indies.

And again, Spain was possessed by a fierce and passionate love for the

old religious order, it was the one country in which devotion to the

forms and conceptions of mediaeval religion had proved unshakeable,

while England was the representative power of the new religious temper,

and was soon to hold almost the foremost place in the new intellectual

life of Europe.

And yet the drama of Spain is in all its most essential and intimate

characteristics the same as that of England; represents on the one side

the same overwhelming sense of the tragic conflicts of life, the same

sense of the greatness, the splendour of human nature, which is most

triumphant when most it seems to fail; and on the other side at least

something of that exquisite, that almost unimaginable grace of the

romantic comedy, of the world of Portia and Viola and Beatrice and

Miranda. I do not think that the unity of the great art of Europe, the

comparative insignificance of merely national characteristics and

historical circumstances can find a more convincing illustration.

* * * * *

I could wish that I were able to deal adequately with the parallel

movements of painting and sculpture during these centuries, but I have

neither the capacity nor is there now the time to deal with them. This

much only may be said, that the movement of these arts is very closely

parallel during these centuries, from the fourteenth to the seventeenth,

to that of literature. I cannot discuss the characteristics of mediaeval

sculpture and painting, but I would remind you that the notion that

these were merely conventional and abstract is just as mistaken as the

notion that mediaeval literature deals only with conventions or

allegories. It is of course obviously true that the ecclesiastical or

religious purpose served by the greater part of the decorative art of

the Middle Ages which has survived to us, limits and restrains its

subjects and its forms. But no one who is at any pains to consider

mediaeval sculpture and mosaic painting can fail to see that alongside

of much which became conventional, and was fixed in what has been

called the 'Byzantine' style, there is an immense amount of work both in

sculpture and in mosaic which expresses the determination of the

mediaeval artist to represent the world as he experienced and saw it,

and that the main obstacle to the free expression of this spirit was not

the acquiescence or satisfaction of the mediaeval artist in conventional

forms, but the lack of technical dexterity. This will become evident to

any one who will turn his attention, in studying the mosaics, from what

are no doubt the somewhat conventional and hieratic figures of saints

and angels to the realistic attempts to portray the stories of the

Bible. And it will be clear to any one who will study, for instance, the

sculpture of Wells or Amiens or Chartres that by the thirteenth century

the artists were rapidly learning how to represent the world as they

knew it, and something of its grace and beauty. If we say that the

history of the plastic arts in Europe from the fourteenth to the

seventeenth centuries is the history of the discovery and presentation

first of reality, and then of reality as transformed by the highest

imaginative conception of beauty, this must not be understood to mean

that reality and beauty had been absent from those arts in the Middle

Ages.

If then we trace the development of Italian art, we shall first observe

in such work as that of Masaccio in the Brancacci chapel at Florence

just the same characteristic interest in the appearance and the

varieties of human life as we find in the work of Boccaccio and Chaucer,

and in the succession of the great Tuscan and Umbrian and Venetian

painters and sculptors the same transformation of the bare reality of

life by the magic of the imaginative sense of beauty and of passion as

in the great drama. It is not, I think, merely fanciful to say that the

real counterpart of the English and Spanish drama is to be found in the

Italian painters and sculptors of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries

and in the Flemish artists of the early seventeenth. It is certainly

true that each of these great artists had his own individual and

distinctive genius, but the exquisite grace and beauty of the Umbrians

and Tuscans have never been matched save in the romantic comedy of

Shakespeare, and the presentation of the tragic passion of the human

soul in _King Lear_ has only once been equalled, and that is in the

dreadful beauty and horror of the Night and Day, the Evening and the

Morning of Michelangelo.

* * * * *

I do not think I need say much about the classical movement in art and

literature, for we all know that it was international. It was begun by

Petrarch, not indeed the Petrarch of the sonnets, for these are only a

later form of the Troubadour lyric, and do not show any special trace of

the classical influence, but the Petrarch whose letters were the first

summons of Europe to a new and indefatigable work of the rediscovery of

the ancient world. It was an Italian with whom the classical movement

began, but it was only in the hands of two northern artists that it

achieved a satisfying development in literature: the one a Frenchman,

Racine, the other an Englishman, Milton. Neither are, I imagine, really

classical at all, but of the two, Milton, as he was by far the more

learned in ancient art, was also probably nearer to the ancient world

both in form and in spirit.

Nor need I say anything about the deplorable ravages of the movement of

good taste and common sense, which produced Boileau and, in some

measure, Pope. It did some good, but far more evil, but happily it is

long past and dead and done with, and we can afford to remember the

little good and to forget the evil. Good or evil, it was at least very

clearly a European and not a national movement.

I must ask you now to consider the extraordinary changes which passed

over Europe in the eighteenth century, to trace the beginnings of that

change which culminated in what we generally call the Romantic movement.

We all know, though not as well as we should, the work of Defoe, and

beside Defoe there stands a painter whom also we all know, the great

Hogarth. We all at least have read _Robinson Crusoe_, and we have

probably all seen Hogarth's engravings of the good and bad apprentices,

and the series of paintings in the National Gallery known as the

'Marriage à la mode'.

What is it now that we find in Defoe and Hogarth? An infinite multitude

of detail--we all remember the 'three Dutch cheeses' and the

'fowling-pieces' which Robinson carefully ferried on his raft from the

wreck to the island--an unsparing presentation of all the ugly and

sordid realities of life; you might almost say, by preference the ugly

realities, the squalid vices, the stupid and brutal ferocity of human

nature. It is not a pretty or a pleasing world which we see in Hogarth

or in Defoe's _Colonel Jack_. But they are great artists. If you see

human nature often on its most repulsive side, in its harshest and most

repellent form, at least you see in their novels or pictures, the world

as they saw it in the streets and taverns, in the police courts and

prisons of their day, as for that matter you can still see it everywhere

in town or country. The world which they see may often, perhaps usually,

be ugly, but at least there is no conventional prettiness, there is no

smug veneer of an artificial good taste which refuses to call a spade a

spade, and which deliberately turns away from those things in life which

are irritating to its sense of decorum and propriety.

Here there is something new, and we can imagine a defender of the

nationalist conception of art saying that here at last we have an

obvious example of the revolt of northern realism against the southern

or classical grace. But there could not be a greater delusion. For

though it is true that the new realism was not fully developed all over

Europe until the eighteenth century, it had its beginnings in the

sixteenth century, and not in the 'cold' north, but in the 'romantic'

south. The first signs of the new movement are to be found not in

England or in Flanders, but in Spain in the sixteenth century. It was

the _Lazarillo de Tormes_, the first of the Picaresque novels which

struck the new note, which turned from the fantastic and conventional

world of the romances in which Don Quixote had nourished his soul, and

from the heroic world of beauty and grace of the dramatists, to the bare

and hard reality of the life of the beggar and the vagabond. Not even

Defoe himself ever surpassed the clearness and precision of the

_Lazarillo_, and it was the first work of a type, whose slow development

can be traced in almost every country in Europe: in England, in the

realistic attempts of Greene and Nash and Deloney, in Germany in

_Simplicissimus_, in France in the _Roman comique_ of Scarron and in the

_Gil Blas_ of Le Sage, who was an almost exact contemporary of Defoe.

And all this can be traced just as clearly in the history of painting.

The great Italian painting had ended with the gorgeous magnificence of

the Venetian school, with Giorgione and Titian and Tintoretto, and its

mastery passed for a few years to Flanders, to Rubens and Vandyck; but

in the painting of Spain and of the Low Countries in the later

seventeenth century we find ourselves in another world. The little

beggar boys of Murillo may perhaps show a somewhat mannered realism, but

the Spanish painting, as a whole, while it would be absurd to try to

describe it under any one phrase, shows very clearly the determination

to present the reality of the world under terms which are very

different from those of the great Italians of the fifteenth and

sixteenth centuries. And when we turn to the art of the Low Countries in

the latter part of the seventeenth and in the eighteenth centuries,

leaving for the moment out of account the new art of landscape painting,

we find ourselves in the same world as that of Defoe and Hogarth.

What was this, then, that had come to European art and literature?

Clearly what we see is the transition from the heroic world of the

tragedy, from the splendid beauty and force of the Italian painters,

from the infinite grace of the romantic comedy, to some other artistic

apprehension of the world. The movement was not indeed wholly dependent

upon a reaction, but in its development it corresponds with the reaction

against the continuance of a great tradition which had become merely a

convention, when it had lost its vitality and sincerity. The best

examples of this may perhaps be found in Dryden's attempt to carry on

the heroic tradition in English tragedy, and in Voltaire's strenuous and

meritorious efforts to continue the work of Racine and Corneille. They

meant well, and their tragic dramas are not without merit, but it is

clear enough that they could not bend the bow of Ulysses. They were

great artists, as we can see clearly enough in _Absalom and Ahitophel_,

or in _Candide_, but their genius lay in other directions. 'Il faut

cultiver notre jardin' is a great judgement of life, one very wholesome

and necessary for all time, but it was not the mood of Othello or of

Hamlet.

European art had to come down from the empyrean, and though the descent

was great, yet it gained new life by once again touching mother earth.

No doubt, however, the harsh reality of Hogarth and Defoe was not the

whole of life, and, by a strange transition, before the middle of the

eighteenth century we find the novelists and, though they are less

important, the dramatists, turning from the faithful and minute study of

the outward appearance and form of things to the study of sensibility

and emotion, and the world, which had seemed so hard and unmoved, was

dissolved in tears.

We find this a strange and even a ridiculous spectacle, the men who had

prided themselves on their common sense and reasonableness, whose

literature had sparkled with wit and epigram, blubbering and crying like

great children; but whatever we think of it, that is what happened. The

first artist of the new type was a Frenchman, Marivaux, and his _Vie de

Marianne_ is a study of a young woman who is the embodiment of

sensibility and self-consciousness, an amiable and virtuous girl, who is

hardly able to enjoy the good that life brings her, for fear lest she

should miss the opportunity of renunciation. The first great novel of

sentiment is also French, the Abbé Prévost's _Manon Lescaut_, and here

indeed we are in the deep waters of affliction; there are but few

moments between the beginning and the end of his sad story when the hero

is not in tears. And yet it is a great novel, for there are few studies

of human nature, as absorbed and almost lost in emotion, which are more

moving.

These novels, however, which appeared between 1730 and 1740, are

overshadowed by the works of the great Englishmen, by Richardson and

Sterne and Goldsmith, for these are not artists of England alone, but of

all Europe, known and loved and imitated in every country in Europe. The

sorrows of _Clarissa_, the pathetic or maudlin humour of Sterne, the

idyllic grace and gentle laughter of Goldsmith, these, as they moved

every heart, influenced even the greatest of European artists. The

influence of _Clarissa_ on Rousseau, of Goldsmith on Goethe and Jean

Paul Richter need no exposition.

The sentimental movement reached almost its highest level in the great

and morbid genius of Rousseau, who was himself the living embodiment of

the movement. Far more than even his creations, more than Julie or

Saint-Preux, was he himself possessed by an emotionalism which finally

became a disease. But, strangely enough, it was the Olympic genius of

Goethe which gave its supreme form to the treatment of life under the

terms of feeling. In _Werther_ this whole phase of art passed beyond

itself into the tragedy of the vain and hopeless efforts of an honest

but over-sensitive nature to control his emotion and to master his life.

Not indeed that it was with _Werther_ the movement ended: it was

continued in Byron: it was perhaps the most important element in what

the Germans call specifically their _Romantische Schule_, and in the

work of the French Romantic artists from Chateaubriand to Alfred de

Musset. If you wish to see it in painting you have only to look at the

work of Greuze, and at the engravings in our grandmothers'

'Forget-me-nots'. In spite of all its absurdities this sentimental

movement played a great part in preparing men for the great revolution

itself, for it opened men's hearts, it set free their emotions; if the

realism of Defoe and Hogarth had enabled men to escape from convention

and the mannerisms of good taste into a world of reality, the emotional

movement gave this reality fullness and content, represented a larger

and more intimate apprehension of life.

This brings us to another aspect of the art of the seventeenth and

eighteenth centuries, to the poetry and painting of 'nature', to the

beginnings of that great artistic movement which culminates in

Wordsworth and Turner, and whose influence dominated all Europe in the

eighteenth century and continues to do so in our own time. It seems a

strange thing, but it is true, that it was not till the seventeenth and

eighteenth centuries that there appeared a school of painting which took

landscape, and a poetry which took 'nature' specifically for its

subject. There is indeed frequent reference to 'nature' in the poetry of

the Middle Ages and of the sixteenth century, and this is often

significant in the early English poetry and charming in the romances and

in Petrarch and Chaucer, while in Dante and the Elizabethans, and

especially in Shakespeare, it reaches an almost incomparable beauty; yet

in all these it is, as in the backgrounds of the great Tuscan and

Umbrian painters, exquisite and significant and true, but not the prime

subject which engages their attention.

There are indeed two great poets in whom we begin to feel that the

background begins to be almost as important as the figures of the

foreground; Spenser is genuinely interested in his stories of chivalry

and honour, and in his moral allegory, but we sometimes wonder whether

the most important thing in his poetry is not the chequered light and

shade of his forests, the picturesque splendour of his castles, and the

gloom of his caverns and dungeons. Spenser's poetry is like a tapestry

on which indeed some story of human life is presented, but which is in

the end a great work of decorative art, to which the immediate subject

contributes form and pattern and colour, but in which it is in a measure

lost.

In Milton the matter is different: no one can doubt that he is a great

artist of human life and fate; even if _Paradise Lost_ were to leave us

in some uncertainty, the _Samson_ would convince us all. But, while I

think this is true, it is also clear that not only in the grace of his

earlier poetry, but in the maturity of his genius, in the _Lycidas_ and

even in the _Paradise_, Milton is at least as great an artist of nature

and its beauty as he is of life. And near Milton there stands a poet,

lesser indeed, but individual and unique, that is Henry Vaughan, who had

unhappily strayed into the 'metaphysical' maze, and who helplessly

enough tries to endue himself with the giant armour of Donne, but who,

when he is himself, is one of the most exquisite and gracious poets of

nature.

We may perhaps, without being fanciful, find a parallel to these poets

in the great Venetian painters of the sixteenth century, in whose work

we see the landscape of Venetia and the Cadore compelling more and more

our attention, as not a mere background, but as an integral part of the

picture; but it was not till the seventeenth century and the Flemish and

Dutch painters that we see the transition complete, and the artist sets

before us not some scene in human life, but simply the beauty and

splendour of 'nature' herself.

It was not till Thomson began to publish _The Seasons_ in 1726 that the

development was complete in poetry. Thomson is a difficult poet to

appreciate rightly, for though his subject was 'nature' his method was

often as conventional and artificial as that of any Augustan; but he was

a lover of the fields and woods, and his imagination, if it is not very

powerful, is often very sincere. What was begun by Thomson was carried

on with greater sincerity and reality by Cowper, and was transformed by

the imagination of Gray and Collins. We sometimes think of this

development as specifically English, and it is true that in Wordsworth

and Shelley the poetry of nature grew into something which is unique and

unmatched, but we must not think of the poetry of Wordsworth as though

it were the only form under which nature can be presented. That would be

to ignore the qualities, in England of Keats and Tennyson, and in Europe

of great artists in whom the treatment of nature assumed other forms.

The great poetry of nature began in England, but it was carried on in

all the European countries, and for more than a century it was dominated

mainly by the genius of Rousseau in France and of Goethe in Germany. I

cannot here pretend to deal with the treatment of nature in Rousseau,

or with the outcome of his influence first in Bernardin de Saint-Pierre

and Chateaubriand, and then in the elegiac beauty of Lamartine and de

Musset's _Nuits_; nor can I deal with the poetry of nature in Goethe,

and its lesser but often beautiful expression in the German

'Romanticists', and in Heine. It is only possible here to remind

ourselves that neither the poetry nor the painting of nature belongs to

any one country, but is an intimate part of all modern art.

* * * * *

And thus at last we come to the great revolution itself, that great

revolution in art and thought and life, of which the political and

social revolution is one form, and of which we are all the children. In

this, all the elements of which we have been thinking are gathered up

and come to perfection; reality, sentiment, nature. And this was of no

one country or nationality. The first and also the greatest artist of

the revolution is Goethe himself, for it all culminates and reaches its

highest expression in _Faust_. The passion for freedom, for the complete

experience of life, for life itself, and not mere knowledge or mere

words--this is the motive which drives Faust till he is willing to make

his bargain with any power which will give him this. The infinite, the

insatiable desire of the human soul, which can never be wholly

satisfied, which can never reach its term, this is the passion which

possesses Faust, this is the rock upon which the hopes of the poor devil

are shipwrecked, the poor devil who in the limitation of the merely

critical and negative temper cannot understand that Faust can never be

satisfied, will never say to the moment, 'Verweile doch, du bist zu

schön.' For the drama of _Faust_ is not a drama of damnation, but of

redemption, and though the breadth and scope of the whole conception

pass beyond all presentation in complete and rounded form, the great

tragedy of Gretchen takes us from the splendid but abstract world of

ideas into the simplest experience of human life, where Faust becomes

human through love itself, but too slowly, too late to avert the

tragedy.

If Goethe represents the great humane conceptions of the revolution most

profoundly, Wordsworth comes very near him in the depth of his knowledge

of humanity, and in his supreme sense of the unity of all life and

nature with the living spirit who is in all things; and the great

romantic artists of France are governed by the same sense of nature and

love and the spiritual, and in Victor Hugo this reaches a level only

just below that of Goethe himself.

* * * * *

You must not misunderstand me, nationality has real meaning, it has

something akin, but distantly, to personality; but in the main it

affects the more superficial aspects of art. In painting and sculpture

the European artists use a language which we can all understand, imagine

life and nature under terms which we all feel and know to be true. And,

though in literature the language creates a real difference, and causes

a difficulty in recognizing the unity which lies behind the difference,

yet the moment we begin to overcome that difficulty we find ourselves in

a world intelligible, familiar, moving to us all; and intelligible just

in proportion to the greatness of the artist.

It is idle for us to dispute about the relative greatness of our

national arts, for their greatness lies not in national idiosyncrasies,

but in the personality of the artist, and in the single, the unique

quality of the particular works of art, and these belong not to this

country or nation or to that, but to us all. It is not to Frenchmen only

that the intellectual passion of Pascal, or the hatred of shams and the

love of the honest man of Molière or of Voltaire, appeal, but to us all.

It is not only Germans who understand the splendour of human

experience, and the infinite pathos of the mistakes of the human heart,

but we all. And the spectacle of the tempest in the heart of Lear, that

tempest of the soul, of which the storms of nature are but a faint

reflection, or the exquisite serenity and humanity of the recognition of

Cordelia, these are not the prerogative possessions of England, but they

speak to the heart and soul of the whole world.

We may be divided from each other by many things, material or political,

but in the supreme art and poetry we rise above all these distinctions

and are only men and women, with the earth under our feet and the

heavens above us.

* * * * *

BOOKS FOR REFERENCE

The subject treated in the essay may be considered in relation to the

following works:

_Beowulf_; _The Song of Roland_; _The Nibelungenlied_.

_Tristan and Iseult_ (Thomas, or Béroul); Mary of France, _Lais_.

Dante, _Divina Commedia_.

Boccaccio, _Decameron_; Chaucer, _Canterbury Tales_.

Shakespeare; Lope de Vega; Calderon.

Defoe, _Robinson Crusoe_; Le Sage, _Gil Blas_.

Marivaux, _Marianne_; Prévost, _Manon Lescaut_.

Richardson, _Clarissa_; Goethe, _Werther_.

Goethe, _Faust_; Wordsworth, _Michael_, &c..

Victor Hugo, _Légende des Siècles_.

There are English translations of the greater number of these.

VII

SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY AS UNIFYING FORCES

Some political thinkers have taken the State for the highest form of

human association. Humanity is for them a mere abstract idea. It is no

organized whole; owns, they think, no common allegiance, pursues no

common aim. To find such an organized whole, such an allegiance, such an

aim, we must look to the State and to nothing beyond it. We find such a

whole in Germany, in France, in England, but not in anything common to

the three and to other States as well. This opinion, due in its modern

shape to Hegel and his followers, is false to history, false in

political theory, and mischievous in ethics, but it is nowhere more

false than in relation to the world of thought. The essential unity of

Western civilization as an intellectual, moral, and spiritual

commonwealth is indeed illustrated--unfortunately illustrated as it

happens--by this very theory of the State which denies it. For the

theory is of German make. It arose out of the historical conditions of

Prussia in the early years of the nineteenth century, was fostered in

Germany by the peculiar method by which the unity of the nation was

effected, and, setting out from its home, has permeated much of the

thought of the West, effectively combating the Liberal humanitarianism

which was the especial contribution of England to the movement of the

nineteenth century. The reaction of the German idea of the State on the

English conception of liberty is the dominating influence of the last

forty years in English political thought and progress. There can hardly

be a more striking testimony to the reality of that unity which the

theorists who embody it seek to depreciate or deny.

When we speak of unity in this connexion we may mean one of three

things. There is a unity of character or type. There is the unity

involved in continuous unbroken descent from a common origin, and there

is unity of effective interconnexion and mutual dependence. These senses

of the term unity are confused by some writers, but must clearly be

distinguished before any useful inquiry can be made. Unity of character,

for example, is a different thing from continuity of historical

development, for a civilization might radically change its character in

the course of generations. It might lose all the specific features of

its own family and come into closer resemblance with others of quite

distinct parentage. Again unity of character is not the same thing as

the effective interconnexion and co-operation of different centres. On

the contrary, such co-operation is of most value where there is marked

difference of character, where, for instance, a lack of a quality in one

nation is counteracted by a surplus in another. Thus these three forms

of unity are distinct, but if distinct they are not unrelated.

Naturally, where there is a common origin, many traits of the primitive

unity of character are likely to persist, and where there is effective

intercommunication, many differences may be rubbed off. So, where we

start with unity of origin, we are likely to find some measure of unity

in other respects, and this is what we do find, in fact, in the case of

Western civilization. It does possess a certain unity of character, and

this is largely due to unity of origin, and is maintained in spite of

marked divergences, which have not impeded an effective

intercommunication but have tended rather to add interest and value to

the results which that intercommunication has produced.

SECTION I.--UNITY OF CHARACTER

There is a certain unity of character running through all civilization,

and indeed through all humanity. Certain fundamental institutions and

principles of organization are common to East and West, to the ancient

and modern world, to civilization and savagery, and there is not the

least evidence that the similarities are the result of historic

connexion. On the contrary, they arise from a human nature which is

fundamentally the same, adjusting itself to conditions of life which are

fundamentally the same. But of course it is only the broadest and most

general characters that are thus common to all the world. Within them

there is every sort and degree of specific difference. There are types

within types, worlds within worlds, and what we call Western

civilization is one of these. That is to say, it is at the present day a

family or group of nations sharing in common certain things which

distinguish it from the rest of the world, such things, for instance, as

a certain degree of social order, a certain outlook upon life, certain

fundamentals of religion and ethics, and an industrial organization

based on applied science. Now to mention any of these points is at once

to provoke a criticism. In each respect, it will be said, the nations of

Western Europe and the lands that have been colonized from them differ

vastly among themselves. The social order of Germany is by no means that

of England. The industrial development of southern Italy is very

different from that of Belgium. The Prussian outlook upon life--this in

particular will be emphasized just now--is quite another thing from the

French. This is true enough, but once again it means only that there are

further specific differences within the genus. We could pursue the

differences as far down as we like. For the United Kingdom, say, is by

no means one homogeneous whole. Even within England alone deep

contrasts reveal themselves between the agricultural South and the

industrial North. Yet we do not hesitate to think of the English

character, English institutions, the English type as distinct from the

rest of the world, and we are right in so doing because there is a real

unity pervading all the differences. Just in the same way at a higher

remove there is a certain unity of character pervading the deeper and

wider differences that appear in the various centres of Western

civilization.

* * * * *

SECTION II.--UNITY OF ORIGIN

This unity of character is very largely due to continuous descent from a

common cultural ancestor. The civilization of the West is fundamentally

one not because the peoples of the West are one racially. They are not

so. They comprise every branch of the Aryan family and a considerable

admixture of quite other stocks. Their civilization owes its common

characteristics mainly to a common origin and continued interaction.

That is why it is in the mass a community of ideas, for ideas pass from

man to man and from nation to nation more readily than institutions,

more readily far than character, more readily perhaps than anything

except material goods. In the realm of ideas Western civilization forms

a single commonwealth of informal but of exceeding democratic

constitution. This freedom, indeed, it owes in large measure to its

international character, for there are constantly arising local and

temporary dictators, arbiters of fashion in the ideas of politics,

philosophy, and even of science. Within a narrow circle such a dictator

often has it all his own way, but it is seldom that he can maintain a

prolonged ascendancy throughout the international commonwealth unless

there is some pretty solid foundation for his doctrine.

This commonwealth has its foundations in the past. It derives in the

first instance from the unity of mediaeval Christendom, where it enjoyed

the advantage of a common language of learning, the gradual loss of

which is imperfectly compensated by the possession of two or three

modern languages alone by the educated man of the present day. Through

mediaeval Christendom and through the Arabic schools, which can hardly

be regarded as a part of Western civilization but in the Middle Ages

were rather its teachers, it derives from the Greco-Roman world, and

through the Greco-Roman world from the Greeks themselves. The Greeks in

their turn were aware that they owed the rudiments of their science to

the ancient civilizations of the Nile and the Euphrates. Thus in the

intellectual world there is a continuity stretching back six thousand

years or more to the beginnings of recorded civilization. More than once

the continuity is nearly broken, but some strand is always preserved,

and it is in this continuity in the world of ideas that we get the main

evidence of such progress as human history reveals.

The foundations of material civilization were laid in Egypt and in

Babylonia, where the progress made in agriculture and the industrial

arts implies a considerable body of empirical knowledge of physics and

chemistry at an early date. We have Egyptian textbooks of arithmetic

dating from the eighteenth and perhaps from the twelfth dynasty. We have

texts dealing with the rudiments of geometry. Empirical chemistry

appears to be of Egyptian origin, the word itself is referred to the

Egyptian term for black earth--and to have passed to the Arabs, who made

it into a quantitative science, without greatly interesting the

scientific mind of Greece. Careful astronomical records extending over

thousands of years were kept both in Egypt and Babylonia, and upon them

a considerable body of astronomical knowledge was built up. But there

is no evidence of a scientific interest detached at once from theology

and industry. In theology itself Egyptian learning early became

dissatisfied with the popular deities, and sought for a unity of the

godhead either in some one supreme deity such as the sun or, more often,

in a mystical identification of all the gods as so many incarnations or

impersonations of a single principle. But though these and kindred

speculations were not without influence on Greek thought, the entire

achievement of Egypt in this direction, so far as known to us, was of

little importance as compared with that of other oriental civilizations.

Thus without underestimating a debt which the Greeks themselves

acknowledged, it remains true to regard science and philosophy alike as

in essence an original creation of the Greek genius. What grew up in

Greece during the sixth and fifth centuries B.C. was the spirit of

disinterested inquiry proceeding on rational methods. By the term

disinterested I mean detached from ulterior objects. Geometry for the

Greek was something more than the art of land measurement, astronomy

something more than a means of regulating the calendar or foretelling an

eclipse. It was a study of the nature of the heavens, an attempt to

penetrate the construction of the material universe. So with geometry.

It might begin as an investigation of the relations of particular

triangles, squares, and oblongs, but it developed into an attempt to

grasp the nature of space relations and to understand them as depending

on simple common principles. This is to say that in the hands of the

Greeks these subjects first became sciences. But a still greater subject

also became in their hands matter for disinterested rational inquiry.

They developed what Aristotle called the science of Reality, or, as we

call it, Philosophy--the attempt to approach by the rational criticism

of experience the problem of the nature and origin of the universe and

of man's place therein. They propounded the fundamental questions which

still occupy the highest intellects of mankind. They laid the

foundations of method and bequeathed to Europe the terminology which all

exact thinking requires. Even when we speak of method we are using an

Aristotelian term, and when we distinguish one subject from another we

are employing the Latin translation of the word which Aristotle

introduced. In a word, modern thought, scientific and philosophic alike,

has a unitary origin. It is derived from the Greek.

The mode of this derivation is not simple, and would require

considerable space to examine in detail. In outline it must suffice to

say that the Greek culture was spread over the Eastern Mediterranean

through the conquests of Alexander, and that as its capital Alexandria

gradually replaced Athens. It flowed westward with the Roman conquests,

when, as the Roman poet said, captured Greece took captive her barbarous

conqueror and introduced the arts into rustic Latium. It shared in the

general decline which accompanied the rebarbarization and final collapse

of the Roman Empire. But now occurred a division in the stream of

historic tendency. The fortunes of East and West were separated. The

Western Empire was overrun by Germanic tribes, and after the sixth

century the tradition of the old culture was maintained for the most

part in the monasteries. Greek was forgotten in the West. Greek authors

were known only in Latin translations, and science and philosophy came

to a standstill. In the East the Mohammedan conquests brought the Arabs

into touch with Greek learning. They preserved the tradition and

extended the work, and it was the contact with Arabic culture through

the crusades which initiated the first renaissance in the West in the

twelfth century. There followed the epoch of the great mediaeval

systems, the rediscovery of Aristotle and the attempt to fuse the

Christian faith with the Aristotelian system. The later Middle Age was

the period at which Western civilization was most distinctly a cultural

unit, the scene of a great attempt to unify all the aspects of life, the

religious, the philosophic, the political, on the basis of a religious

faith made articulate and systematic with the aid of Greek philosophy,

speaking the Latin tongue as the common possession of all educated men.

The paradox of thought is that while unity is its ideal, freedom is its

necessary condition, and endless divergence the inevitable consequence.

There could not be much thinking about matters of faith without heresy,

nor about matters of politics without disaffection, rebellions and new

political grouping. Heresy and schism broke up the mediaeval unity and

reinforced the political tendencies making towards the modern state

system. The rise of modern literature displaced the classics from their

unique position as literary models. After the seventeenth century the

habit of writing in the vernacular tended more and more to oust

Latinity, and culture in each country began to assume more of a

distinctively national character. Specific national characteristics

began to appear in science and philosophy as well as in literature and

education, and a large part of the history of modern thought depends on

the partial independence on the one hand and the frequent interactions

on the other of these centres.

* * * * *

SECTION III.--UNITY OF INTERCONNEXION

This brings us to the third sense in which unity can be predicated of a

cultural group. The unity that depends on the interconnexion of distinct

parts implies some differences of character. Western civilization has

lost something of the unity of character which it owed to its common

origin, though it still retains enough of it to figure as a single

whole in contrast to the rest of the world. We may be sure that the

differences between German, French, and English seem much less marked to

the intelligent Chinese than they are to Germans, Frenchmen, and English

themselves. We ourselves habitually think of China and Japan together as

denizens of the Far East, and it is only personal acquaintance which

makes us begin to mark the differences between them. Few Europeans, I

imagine, get as far in their discrimination as to appreciate the

distinctions between the Northern and Southern Chinese, which are as

clear to the Chinese themselves as the difference between English and

Scottish is to us. Western civilization does retain a generic unity of

character, though national differences have had an increasing influence

in the sphere of thought. Meanwhile the unity of interconnexion has on

the whole grown closer with the spread of education, the multiplication

of learned magazines and the facilities of travel. One of the most

interesting chapters in the development of modern thought can be

written, as Dr. Merz has shown by example as well as by precept, on the

theme of the mutual influence of the great national centres of thought,

and in particular of France, England, and Germany. These nations might

seem as though designed, whether by nature or by the unconscious hand of

political history, to be half-willing, half-reluctant complements to

each other. English common sense, French lucidity, German idealism;

English liberty, French equality, German organization; English breadth,

French exactitude, German detail,--how much poorer the world would be if

any one of these had been allowed to develop on its own lines without

the criticism of the other two. What a special providence gave the

easy-going Englishman a northern neighbour to lecture him on German

metaphysics in his own tongue and compel him to the definiteness which

he instinctively detests. Without Scotland as a link, the connexion

between English and German thought would hardly have been effective and

continuous, and it was a Scotsman who aroused the greatest of German

metaphysicians--himself of Scottish descent--from his dogmatic slumbers.

This international division of labour is more significant in the regions

of metaphysics and political thought than of physical science. To

science, every modern nation has contributed both great names and useful

journeyman work. Through the medium of the learned reviews and of

periodical congresses science has become more and more international. It

is still possible now and again for a great discovery like that of

Mendel or an important hypothesis like that of the kinetic theory of

gases to be ignored for a whole generation. But this does not seem to

depend especially on difficulties of language or of international

communication. There is a queer element of arbitrary fashion in the

scientific world which every now and then decrees that certain people

shall be ignored, no matter how sound their work, or that certain

hypotheses shall be treated as matters of faith, no matter how flimsy

their structure. Man does not all at once become a creature of pure

reasoning by assuming the robe of science and entering the laboratory.

But national prejudices are not pre-eminent among the forces which

dictate these fashions. Indeed in the English intellectual world there

operates, if anything, a certain anti-national prejudice. It has

sometimes been easier for an Englishman to get a hearing in Germany than

in England, and it is certain that in many subjects a respect is paid to

German writers which they would not have been able to win if they had

written either in French or in English. This is due to a certain

encyclopaedic minuteness which is the peculiar property of German

industry. If you want an exhaustive negative, I remember an

archaeologist saying once, you must go to the Germans. That is to say,

on almost any subject you will find some German, and a German only, who

has taken the trouble to go through the whole matter from beginning to

end, not attending merely to what is interesting or important, but

writing down _all_ that is to be found out in all the authorities

bearing on that subject. And this work will be insufferably tedious and,

taken by itself, may be very unilluminating. But it is much less tedious

for the reader than it was for the writer, and, if suitably indexed,

such a work will in permanence serve as a guide-book to those who are

going to exercise real thought and insight upon that subject. It is the

element of disinterested drudgery which the Germans have contributed to

science. Not that they have lacked men of genius, but that they have

added to genius that which, Carlyle notwithstanding, it so often

lacks--the infinite capacity for taking pains. Take up any scientific

treatise in any language and on almost any subject, cast your eye down

the references to authorities in the footnotes on a few pages at random,

and you will find probably three out of four of those cited bearing

German names. They will outbalance English, American, French, Dutch, and

Italian added together. If you pass from quantity to quality, if you

take the leading ideas contributed to the subject, you will find the

balance redressed. Here French and English and others hold their own,

and perhaps a little more than their own. But in bulk of work, and

especially in the faithful, unrepaying service of the hard dry fact, the

Germans have set a standard to the world. It may be that their very

merit is due in part to a lack of certain qualities as well as to a

superabundance of others. There is a want of proportion in some of these

vast Teutonic treatises that takes the heart out of the English student.

Some witty person has said that German science consists in demonstrating

over again with enormously elaborate apparatus what an Englishman has

already made plain enough to any sensible person with the aid of a

gingerbeer bottle and an old sardine tin. But I suspect there is another

side to the question. The German has probably worked out his figures to

the twentieth decimal where the Englishman was content with the second,

and it may always turn out that the twentieth decimal has its value. Be

that as it may, the co-operation of both types of mind is necessary, and

patient endeavour in the elaboration of detail is the peculiar function

which the German academic tradition has developed in the service of the

general cause of the advancement of learning.

In more speculative thought the equipoise of international co-operation

reveals itself in the changes which national thought has undergone under

foreign influence. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries

English and Scottish metaphysics developed in the main on lines of their

own. It was the heyday of the so-called English school of experience.

This school was influential in France, and in Germany acted as the

ferment which dissolved the older academic tradition and stimulated the

growth of the new idealism. German idealism first became an influence in

England through the medium of Coleridge and later of Carlyle. But it had

little effect on the national philosophy except in shaking the younger

Mill out of the narrow rut in which he had been educated and

contributing to his thought that stream of influence which throughout

life he tried in vain to merge harmoniously with the paternal teaching.

But in the last third of the nineteenth century new channels of

influence were opened. The authority of Green at Oxford and of Caird in

the Scottish universities brought the tide of Hegelian influence, on the

ebb in Germany, in full flood over the intellectual world of Great

Britain and America. English empiricism was rapidly swept out of

existence. Mill and Spencer, the dominating figures of the sixties and

seventies were reduced to the position of dummies used for target

practice by beginners. Being intelligible they could be read by the

first-year student, and the exposition of their fallacies provided an

easy task for the lecturer's wit. There was none so poor to do them

reverence, or if any did he was relegated to a fourth class in the Final

Schools. It would be a very interesting study in our object to analyse

the Anglo-Scottish idealism in close relation to the German original,

and measure the changes which a philosophy undergoes in the process of

assimilation by a people of very different intellectual tradition. Lack

of sympathy with German and particularly with Hegelian idealism

disqualifies me from the task, but this much in spite of this lack I can

see. The German philosophers had a hold on those large and general ideas

which the English mind seems instinctively to distrust, and which

English philosophy had sought to resolve away into component parts. The

Englishman as a philosopher is by nature very much like the Englishman

as a mechanic or as a business man. He wants to touch and see, to test

and handle, before he is convinced of reality. 'I desire that it be

produced' is the frequent remark of Hume--Scotsman in some respects, but

very English in this--whenever he is dealing with some conception not

readily verifiable in experience. English philosophy left to itself was

not inclined to do justice to the subtler, more evasive notions that are

not readily defined. It did not allow enough for what we may call the

imponderable elements. German idealism has had just the opposite fault.

It has been too ready to take its thoughts for realities, too prone to

use large and perhaps vague conceptions as if they were solid coin and

not tokens that needed a good deal of scrutiny to determine their value.

We may see an example in a branch of political thought which has been a

good deal under discussion of late. To some German thinkers the

conception of the State presents itself in a manner which by no means

comes natural to the Englishman. To the German the State is an entity as

obvious, real, and apparent as the individual citizen. It is not just

the head of Germany, or the sixty-five millions of Germans, or the

Kaiser, or the army, or the Government. It is just itself, the State,

and it has attributes and powers, is the object of duties and possessor

of rights just like any Hamburg merchant or Prussian Junker. To the

natural Englishman all this seems half mystical, half superficial. Talk

to him of the State and if he is to grasp the conception at all he must

get it into terms of persons or things. He pictures it perhaps as the

Government, perhaps simply as the income-tax collector, perhaps as the

miscellaneous millions living in the United Kingdom. If he discusses its

well-being, its success or its failure, he does so under the reserve

that all this is a shorthand for the well-being of great numbers of men

and women. If its honour and good faith are in question what he will ask

is whether Sir E. Grey fulfilled a definite pledge at a given moment

after the manner of an English gentleman. Now for my own part, whether

through national prejudice or not, I believe this habit of checking and

resolving large conceptions to be the safest and most scientific way of

dealing with them. Yet I can also see that it may lead to a good deal of

crudity and may lead men to ignore important elements for which they

cannot readily find some concrete expression. In this very matter of the

State, for example, we are dealing with an organization of individuals,

and if our way of talking about it makes us overlook the flesh and blood

of which it is composed, the other way may obscure in our minds the

vital differences introduced by the very fact of organization. The

Germans have often seen the wood more clearly when the Englishman was

more careful to distinguish and name the trees. So I cannot doubt that

it will prove in the end to have been good for us to have been compelled

by a few leading thinkers to go to school with the Germans for a couple

of generations, even at the cost of the temporary depreciation of much

that was most vital in our own social philosophy. Perhaps the best thing

that can be wished for Germany, and through her for Europe, in the next

generation, is that she should learn as much from our tradition as we

have learned from her.

The whole history of political thought in the last two centuries is a

study of complex interactions between processes going forward in each of

the leading nations. The liberalism of Locke and the principles of the

Whig revolution profoundly influenced France, and the very fact that

distance lent them enchantment and allowed them to be idealized gave

them a value as a stimulus to the French critic of absolute government

which they could hardly exercise at home, where their real limitations

were better known. The French revolution bore on the entire thought of

Europe, alike by sympathy and antipathy, producing the reactionary

philosophies of Burke in England and of Hegel in Germany, and the

endeavour to formulate a new and safer line of Radicalism by Bentham.

Philosophical Radicalism expressed in the main by the distinct but

related Manchester school had two generations of development in England,

and was felt as a real influence abroad during the period of comparative

peace that followed Waterloo and that raised men's hopes of an era that

should put wars aside and devote itself to the essential progress of

mankind. French influences again, particularly that of Comte acting

through J.S. Mill, brought new life into this school as the first flush

of its youth was fading. Finally, as we have seen, German influences

overwhelmed it, and England, fascinated as much by the prestige of

Germany as by her thought, gravitated more and more to the doctrine of

the self-contained, military, Protectionist, all-powerful State. In this

story of political thought events have been no less potent than

arguments. The failure and success of institutions, the victories and

defeats of countries identified with certain principles have repeatedly

brought new strength and resolution to the adherents or opponents of

those principles as the case might be in all lands. The successive steps

by which Italy secured unity and freedom were a perpetual encouragement

to believers in national right and liberal government throughout the

middle of the century. The triumph of Germany in 1870 was a victory for

autocratic power, for discipline, for unscrupulous statesmanship, for

blood and iron, which effected a conversion, only half conscious and

very slow in producing its result, but all the more complete for that

reason, in the attitude of men to fundamental questions of social

ethics. Looking back on the hundred years that separate the two European

cataclysms, the historian will discover a rise of liberal and

humanitarian opinions to ascendancy in the earlier period and a reaction

against them towards the close. The causes of such a change are

multifarious and tangled, but he will, I believe, recognize the year

1870 and the victory of Bismarck as the dividing line. May it be so that

he will find in the present war another turning-point from which a new

movement is to begin.

Be this as it may, we may rest assured that the political thought of

Europe, like its philosophy and its science, will go forward or backward

as a unity. It may move by peaceful and friendly co-operation or by the

stimulus of embittered rivalry. But its many centres are related by so

many strands of connexion that the movement in any one of these is

reflected in the rest. The liberties of England are fostered by the

emancipation of the Alsatian, the Slovak, or the Pole. They are

enfeebled by the victories of political autocracy or the military

machine. Thinkers, it may be said, ought to be above these mundane

influences. Philosophy should deal with what is in itself and eternally

rational and just and wise. But philosophy as it exists on earth is the

work of philosophers, who, authority tells us, suffer as much from

toothache as other mortals, and are, like others, open to the

impressions of near and striking events and to the seductions of

intellectual fashion. Yet, if the larger thought is worth anything, it

should enable those who follow it to look a little further beyond the

present and a little deeper below the surface differences that distract

the kindred peoples. If the thinkers are true to their thought it may be

that from them will come the beginnings of the healing process which

Europe will need. Much is being and will be said of the political

reconstruction which is needed to restore and secure the civilized

order. But the commonwealth of thought will revive of itself from the

day when peace is concluded. German physiology will not be less learned,

German scientists will not be less expert, German chemists will not be

less pre-eminent because their military lords have plunged Europe into a

disastrous war. We shall need their services, shall watch their

experiments, read their records, and utilize their brains as before.

Perhaps it may be some years before the international congresses can be

resumed, but the internationalism of learning will revive of itself,

against our wills if not by and with our wills, and in the world of

science, and in this world alone, the event of war will make no

difference. Conqueror and conquered will work at the same task and meet

as equals. The scientific demonstration knows no more of the nationality

of its originator than of his caste or colour, age or sex. In this one

real democracy the idea, the hypothesis, the proof, whatever it may be,

stands or falls on its own merits with no questions asked as to its

ancestors or country of origin. In the growth of this commonwealth war

is but a momentary check. Its destiny is to become wider in extent,

closer in its interconnexions, and not less rich in the diversities of

its national centres. Whether it is also destined to grow into a

political unity the future must decide. At least we can say that for any

such unity it provides the only sure and solid foundation.

BOOKS FOR REFERENCE

Merz, _History of European Thought in the 19th Century_. W. Blackwood.

Marvin, _The Living Past_. Clarendon Press.

VIII

THE UNITY OF WESTERN EDUCATION

I have been asked to address you on the Unity of Education in Western

Europe. The task is not an easy one, for what do we mean by unity? It

would be easy for me to spend my time in talking on the technical aspect

of the subject; I could deal with curriculum and organization, with

school buildings and class-rooms, black-boards, and all the material of

schoolmastering, and could show you how great is the similarity in these

matters in all civilized countries. I doubt, however, whether this would

interest you; I doubt whether this is the unity of which you are in

search. You would tell me that you asked for unity and I had given you

uniformity. Uniformity you can have anywhere; in modern life all is

standardized and stereotyped; you have it in the great hotel and the

Atlantic liner--there you have men of all nations, they do the same

thing at the same time, they eat the same food and wear the same

clothes; you find it in the factory and on the battle-field. Go to a

textile factory, whether in Oldham or in Chemnitz, or in Bombay, the

processes are the same and the product is the same, except as there may

be more or less adulteration.

And so in education, if you care to do so, you can find the mechanical

uniformity of modern civilization. A new form of school-desk makes the

round of the world as quickly as a new chemical process or a new

battleship. The pictures on the walls of the rooms may be the

reproduction of some modern German work, and the atlases you use may be

second-rate copies of the products of Gotha or Leipzig; you can have,

too, uniformity in time-table and curriculum; but, after all, this

uniformity may be merely superficial. Go along the streets of an old

town and you may see the regular façade of a modern street, but behind

this you will find all the variety of the mediaeval buildings which it

encloses--the façade is mere paint and stucco.

Uniformity is not necessarily unity, and unity is not inconsistent with

variety. That which I presume we are searching for is a more

fundamental, spiritual, and intellectual unity--internal not external;

not a painted and stucco resemblance, but a unity of origin and of life.

Let us see what we can learn from history.

The history of European education is centred round two institutions, the

School and the University. Both have their origin in the remote past,

and both have maintained themselves with singular fidelity to their

original type.

The School goes back to the very origin of our civilization; if we are

to understand its nature, we must transfer ourselves in thought to those

early days when the first missionaries planted in the Somerset valleys

and on the stern Northumberland coast the Cross of Christ. They came to

a people still on the verge of barbarism, with a language still unformed

by literature, with a religion that gave no clue to the mysteries of

life by which they were oppressed. They came to these men full of the

enthusiasm of the Gospel--coming not only as teachers of religion, but

as the apostles of a higher civilization, for they had behind them the

awful name of Rome.

Wherever they came, among their first duties was to found schools in

which to train men who would succeed them; we must always remember that

the education which they gave had one supreme object--it was to bring up

the boys of the rude and barbarous communities in which they found

themselves, to become teachers and servants of the Church. The substance

of the teaching was always the same, whether in Spain, in Gaul, in

Ireland or in Britain; it was the Bible, the services of the Church, and

the writings of the Fathers. It was by the school that the boys were

initiated into the common system of Western Christendom, and were made

citizens of the greater world the centre of which was in Rome.

But if the substance and the object was identical throughout Europe, so

always was the form in which the teaching was given; at a time when all

learning and all religion came from Rome, the foundation of knowledge

was the Latin tongue. In these early days was established the tradition

that still subsists; the gateway to learning and to culture lay by the

narrow road of the Latin grammar. The schoolboy who still tells out his

longs and shorts can compare them with the ruder efforts of his Saxon

forefathers thirteen centuries ago. Never have authors attained a fame

and a circulation equal to that of the great grammarians who, during the

decline of the Empire, codified the rules of Latin speech; generation

after generation passed, and down almost to our own days every schoolboy

began his career on the lines laid down in the works of Donatus and

Priscian.

We must, however, guard ourselves against a mistake into which it would

be easy to fall. It is true that in the early mediaeval days education

was based on the study of the Latin language; and it was only through

literature that the language could be learnt. The study of classical

literature as we understand it was, however, far removed from the ideals

of this time. The most authoritative teachers never neglected to warn

their pupils against the moral dangers which arose from the study of

heathen writers; Ovid and Cicero were only admitted under protest, and

they were merely the stepping-stone to the study of Augustine and

Prudentius.

On this common basis--the Bible, the Church, and the Latin

language--was then established the education of Western Europe, and the

form it then assumed it retained for over a thousand years, almost

without change. By this a common cast was given to the intellect, and

the nations were disciplined by common spiritual teaching. It was

extraordinarily effective. It kept down, and in many countries almost

destroyed, the vigorous and aspiring local and national life which, in

every country, was striving after self-expression. In our own country

this effect was most conspicuous. The English, illiterate though they

might be, were not without the promise of a great future. In the remains

of the Saxon poems we can see the beginnings of what under happier

circumstances might have grown into a great national literature. Its

origins were deep seated in the life of the people. It proved itself

quickly able to absorb the new teaching of the Gospel, and, as the

Christian Epics show, here was the basis on which might have been built

a national interpretation of Christianity. All that was required was the

adoption of English as the language of the Church and the School. The

beginning was made when Alfred, during the few years which he secured

from the Danish inroads, began his great work of founding an English

literature in which the teaching of the Church and the works of

antiquity were included. The attempt was ruined for the time by the

renewal of the Danish inroads, permanently by the Norman Conquest. For

William brought with him not only his French knights, but also Italian

priests. Once more, under the influence of Lanfranc and his successors,

the Church and the School were brought under the full control of the

revived power of Rome, and all prospect of a spontaneous and indigenous

national intellectual life was destroyed. Unity was re-established, and

the School was the instrument by which England was fully incorporated in

the culture and religion of the Western Church.

As it was with the School so also with the university. The second, as

the first, was the creation of the Church, and even more conspicuously

it was the vehicle for fostering and maintaining the control of common

institutions and a common learning, and thereby of crushing out the rich

variety of local life which everywhere was springing up. In its very

constitution the University of Paris, the mother and model of all later

universities (at least in northern Europe), showed its international

character; the students who flocked to it from all countries were

organized in 'nations' a system which, at least in name, still remains

in many of the universities to this day; the whole instruction was and

remained in Latin, and the whole course of instruction was a long

apprenticeship to the study of theology. It was from the universities

that emanated the great system of philosophy in which a Frenchman as

Abelard, an Italian as Thomas of Aquinas, an Englishman as William of

Ockham each took his part.

We may regard with admiration the great intellectual achievements of the

Scholastic philosophy which, for over two centuries, dominated the

official education, but we must not forget that its ascendancy implied

the exclusion from all public recognition of the local and national

thought and literature which now, as before, was struggling into life.

The Troubadours and the Minnesänger, the Chanson de Roland and the

Nibelungenlied, the Chronicles of Froissard, Chaucer, and Piers Plowman,

each of them so full of fresh vigorous local life, were not only outside

the official system of education, but in their essence opposed to it.

This was clearly seen as soon as the free and uncontrolled mind was

directed to the highest subjects of thought. National idiosyncrasies, as

they found expression in the domain of philosophy and theology, produced

results different from the established teaching of the school. To the

Church truth was always one and the same. Truth was one, error was

manifold; in unity was salvation, and divergence was heresy. And so

every attempt at national and local thought was not only suppressed in

education, but fell under the ban of discipline. In Languedoc the

Albigenses ventured the assertion of their independence; Huss in

Bohemia, in England Wyclif. What happened? The Albigenses were

massacred, Huss was burnt, Wyclif was condemned, and his followers

suffered under the new law of heresy.

This system, which had originated as a part of a great spiritual

movement, long outlived its usefulness. It became an intolerable

tyranny. Its effects were to be seen in the teaching of the humblest

grammar school, and every boy who began the study of the Latin grammar

was being initiated into the abstractions or the Scholastic logic. It

became a dead and iron crust by which the mind of man was confined, and

it was the school and the university which were the peculiar

institutions by which this system was maintained. Unity of education

there was, but at what a price had it been won.

One thing had, however, been secured: the common Christian basis of our

modern civilization had been stamped upon the peoples; so long as Europe

remains Europe this cannot be forgotten or obliterated. No nation can

repudiate its own past, and, whether they will or no, all Western

nations are irrevocably bound together by the ties of the home in which

their childhood and youth was passed.

At last the change came: it came in that double revolution which we call

the Renaissance and the Reformation. In considering them we must confine

ourselves as closely as we can to their effect on education.

The revival of learning was essentially an educational movement, it had

from the beginning to do primarily with the school. It had as its object

a complete change both in the subject-matter and in the spirit of

education. Always it drew its inspiration from the literature of Greece,

and this meant the fullest freedom of the human intellect, freedom of

speculation, freedom of inquiry on the conditions of human life, and in

particular it was a revolt from the ascetic ideas of the mediaeval

Church; it was the assertion of the dignity of the body and mind of man.

Now whereas in Italy, its original home, this took a warp definitely

antagonistic to Christian faith and Christian ethics, in Northern Europe

the new classical learning was harmonized with Christianity, and

classical learning was applied to the interpretation of the Bible. It

was the synthesis of what mediaeval Europe had regarded as

irreconcilable opponents. That was the inspiration of the school reform,

and this is the guiding principle of all higher education for the next

three centuries. It was a movement that originally was not local or

national but European, and in its first form was not in opposition to

the maintenance of the ecclesiastical unity of Western Europe. The

figure in whom it reaches its clearest expression is that of Erasmus.

Standing at the transition between two epochs, he was the last of the

great European scholars, and belongs to the undivided Catholic Church as

much as did Abelard or Anselm. The wandering scholar of the Renaissance,

without father, without mother, completely freed from ties of family or

country, at home equally in Deventer or Cambridge, in Basel or in Paris

or in Rome, without even a native language, for to him Latin was the

only vernacular (he has, I believe, left no word written in any other

language), he saw the vision of a Europe still united in obedience to

the one Church, but a Europe in which the culture of the humanist would

go side by side with the common faith inherited from early days.

The hopes of Erasmus were not to be fulfilled. It is indeed true that he

laid the foundation on which the recognized and official scheme of

education has continued almost to our own day; the Latin schools of

Germany and the Grammar Schools of England were each alike conducted on

the basis of the Church and the classics, but even before the

foundations had been completed the real unity was gone. The Renaissance

was met by two forces, each stronger than itself, and the common stream

was broken into a number of smaller currents. These have since increased

in strength till the sense of the common origin has almost disappeared.

The common mediaeval system (and in this the spirit of the Renaissance

was still mediaeval) depended on the common Church, and especially in

education, in the use of Latin as the universal language of learning.

During the sixteenth century both were overthrown. Luther was stronger

than Erasmus, and the new languages, Italian, French, Spanish, English,

quickly began to encroach on the claims of Latin to be the one language

of the school.

The religious revolution need not detain us. It is sufficient to recall

that in many parts of Europe the divergence of creed tended to become if

not identical with, at least closely to follow the boundaries of states

and nations. In every land the school was still strictly under the

control of the Church, acting now as the delegate of the temporal ruler,

and in each country a whole body of teaching and discipline was evolved,

the result of which was a fundamental difference in the attitude of

mind. The English bishops, the German consistories, the Scotch

presbytery, set their seal on the schools, as much as did the Jesuits

and Port Royal in France. The Shorter Catechism, the English Prayer

Book, the German hymns, each gave a distinct character to the religions

of the country, and this character was the basis of the teaching in the

schools.

Religion, which had been the great unifier, became the chief engine of

separation.

Equally important was the growth of national literature. This indeed

goes back far beyond the sixteenth century, but none the less it is from

this time that the writers not only of imagination, but also of

learning, began to express themselves each in his own vernacular. Sir

Thomas More, it is true, wrote his _Utopia_ in Latin, but it was in

English that it had its great circulation. Bacon used both languages,

but it is on English editions of his works that his fame chiefly rests.

In particular we find that works on religion and theology are now

produced not only in Latin, but one hundred years before Hooker would

have discoursed on 'ecclesiastical polity' in the learned language, and

Pascal would never have thought of using French for discussing the

philosophy of the Jesuits.

The influence of these changes upon the school is remarkable. Strictly

speaking, for many generations they seemed to have little immediate

effect upon it. In every country in Europe Latin remained both the

subject and the vehicle of higher education, but it is just for this

reason that we find that, during the seventeenth century and the greater

part of the eighteenth, the schools are more and more falling out of

touch with the intellectual life of the times. They continued in the old

way; for them Shakespeare and Milton, Montaigne and Molière, Cervantes

and Tasso, seemed to have written in vain. They maintained the form of

an older period, but they had lost the spirit by which it had been

inspired. Their learning remained purely classical; but even though the

new national literature was long in winning for itself a definite place

in the recognized school system, the growth of this literature and the

evolution of national consciousness of which it was a part could not in

fact take place without altering the whole spirit of the teaching. If we

are to understand how this was we must keep in mind one of the chief

characteristics of what is called a classical education.

The study of the classics means the study of the whole life of the two

great nations of antiquity as preserved in the extant literature. Now

this does not contain a definite and formulated doctrine, it does not

even, as might be said of the Middle Ages, mean one attitude towards the

world; it opens to the student a field of extraordinary wealth and

variety, and from this each will take that which he is able to

appropriate. To one it may be the mysticism of the Cambridge Platonists,

to another the frank and pagan joy in life of Anacreon and Horace.

Rousseau and Grote will each in his own way appropriate the lesson of

Liberty, while others will turn to the story of the militant and

dominant aristocracy of Rome. Goethe and Keats, Milton and Gibbon,

Berkeley and Schopenhauer, will each draw their inspiration from the

classics, but the result will not be to make them resemble one another,

it will be to give vigour, decision, form, resolution, and dignity to

the qualities of each.

And as it is with individuals, so it is with nations. The schools of all

nations maintained their classical curriculum; boys still began, and

often ended, their schooling with the Latin grammar, but this did not

mean, as it had meant in the earlier days, that the influence was the

same. There was indeed little in common between what we may venture to

call the pedantry of Germany and the superficial elegancy of the Jesuit

schools. And so the classical basis did not prevent the school assuming

a national complexion. Let me give one illustration of the manner in

which the classical teaching could take a markedly national spirit.

Perhaps the most effective classical teaching that we find in the

eighteenth century is that at Eton, and it was on it that was founded

the great school of oratory and statesmanship. It was on Cicero and

Homer and Demosthenes that Pitt and Fox and Canning and Gladstone (for

the tradition continued to his day) formed their minds and their style,

but they emerged from their training above all Englishmen, but

Englishmen who had learnt how to give to their own national feelings a

dignity of expression and nobility of form equal to that of the

exemplars whom they had studied.

Now just as the finest expression of the English national spirit is

found in those whose school training had been based on the classics,

just as the Girondists based their revolutionary doctrines on Hellenic

models, so almost at the same time the great political awakening of

Germany and Prussia was inspired by what has been called the second

Renaissance; and yet how profound is the divergence between Wellesley

and Pitt, Humboldt and Stein, St. Just, Demousin, and Vergniaud; all

were children of the common classical tradition, but how different is

the use to which they put it. During the centuries that passed between

the Renaissance and the Revolution, the education of the different

countries had then in fact been drifting far apart. What has been done

during the nineteenth century has been openly to carry into effect

changes which had long been overdue and were already to a large extent

operative.

It was inevitable that the new literature and thought would eventually

find its way into the schools and universities. Before this change had

been accomplished, a fresh and even stronger influence asserted itself.

Democracy had come, and a democracy which based the state on the

principle of nationality. It seized on the school as the means to hold

the minds of men in fief, just as had the mediaeval Church, and in doing

so enforced and perpetuated the national differences.

In the eighteenth century rulers troubled themselves little about

matters apparently of such minor importance as the languages in which

their subjects conversed and read. Even the French did not try to touch

the German-speaking inhabitants of Alsace, and Copenhagen could become

a centre of German letters, while French maintained itself at the Court

of Berlin. All this was changed by the Revolution, and Napoleon was the

first deliberately to convert the whole fabric of French schools and the

university into an instrument for the organized propaganda of the cult

of the Empire. Since then there is scarcely a government (always except

that of England, which alone has been strong enough to rest on the

native and undisciplined political sense of the people) which has not

followed in his path. In particular when the state is founded on the

nation the school is used to develop in the children the full

consciousness of nationality. That institution that was for so long the

home of European unity has become the most useful agent for the

perpetuation and exaggeration of national differences. It is in the

school that the immigrant to the United States is taught to reverence

the institutions of his new fatherland, and from generation to

generation the school labours to keep alive the memory of the

half-forgotten struggle of the new republic and the British monarchy. In

France each successive government has used the school to force on the

nation its interpretation of the national history and ideals. And the

victories of Prussian armies were cemented and confirmed by the official

exposition of the Prussian state and the cult of the Hohenzollern. To

the school is transferred the conflict between the doctrines of

authority and the revolution, of the secular state and of the Kingdom by

the Grace of God. Every nation rightly struggling to be free has seen in

the school the instrument for securing the allegiance of the young, and

the school has become the centre of political struggle. In Trieste and

in Poland, in Alsace and in Macedonia, we find kings and politicians

contending for the minds and souls of children, and it is in the school,

the college, and the university that has been prepared the conflict that

is now devastating Europe.

What has been done in the nineteenth century has really been only to

carry into effect the change which was long overdue and was implicit in

earlier years. The national culture and national authors have at length

forced their way into the schools, and the result has been that

institutions which originally in reality, and for so long in appearance,

were the vehicles for the expression of the common European

civilization, have been almost entirely won over to the cause of the

national expression.

This is indeed inevitable. Education, as we have seen, can only be

effective when it is the vehicle for strong beliefs, and is informed by

the conscious expression of an attitude towards the world. Now, in

modern days, the consciousness of a common European spirit has, in fact,

almost disappeared. In its place we find the intense consciousness of

the nation. Even religion has become national, and God has once again

become a tribal deity. The new consciousness of the common interests of

what is called Labour have no recognition in the approved teaching. If

the work of the school was not to be merely the dead instruction in

useless knowledge, if the work was to be directed towards informing the

minds of the pupils with ideals and beliefs, it was only in the

idealization of the national thought that this could be attained.

Is the older union of thought to be permanently lost? If not, you must

find it again in some higher synthesis. There are many who would do so

in the pursuit of mathematics and the natural sciences; in them, at

least, no divisions of country can be found. The student in his chemical

laboratory, the doctor in his hospital, the mathematician in his study,

finds his colleagues in every country in the civilized world, and it

matters not to him whether the next step in penetrating the secrets of

nature have been made in Vienna, or in Paris, or Amsterdam, or Bologna.

There are many who believe that on this basis will be established the

Union of Civilization. If we look, however, more critically, we may find

reason to doubt whether this optimistic view is justified. I do not

share this hope and this belief, I do not look forward to a spiritual

and intellectual unity of the nations established on the basis of

scientific education. It is, indeed, impossible to over-estimate not

only the practical but also the intellectual influence of what we may

call the scientific spirit. It is indeed true that those who are

accustomed to the careful and systematic investigation of causes, who

have been trained from their earliest years to recognize in the pomp and

pageantry of the external world--and even to some extent in the working

of the human mind and the structure of human society--the orderly

sequence of natural law, will have a type and character of mind

essentially different from those who have not passed through this

discipline. The civilization (I scarcely dare to use the word culture)

of those nations who have this in common will have a unity of their own,

and will differ fundamentally from their own past and from that of other

races.

On the other hand there are two considerations that I should like to put

before you, as leading to a less important position, the one arising

from the practical nature of science, the other connected with its

essential intellectual origin.

It is a characteristic of all work in physical science that however it

may originate in the pure desire for truth, it is very quickly available

for practical use, personal comfort, the acquisition of wealth, and

national efficiency. The physicist who calculates the stresses and

strains of an aeroplane finds that in teaching man how to control nature

he is also providing the means for his struggle, whether in peace or

war, in commerce or on the battle-field. We soon find that the progress

of technical skill is curiously inoperative in its effect on human

thought and feeling. Men remain the same whether they ride in a coach,

or a train, or a motor-car; it matters little whether they use bows and

arrows, or rifles, or hand-grenades, or liquid fire.

Now in education it is the technical side of scientific progress which

almost inevitably becomes most prominent, and the greater the advance in

knowledge the more will this be true. The wider the domain of knowledge

the greater is the number of those who will be chiefly occupied with the

use of the processes and materials that have been discovered and the

smaller is the proportion of those who will have reached the border of

the known, and will begin the work of exploration into the unknown. That

is, the greater will be the number of those who are the servants and not

the masters of science. A unity of a certain kind we shall have, the

unity of those who have learned to pilot an aeroplane, to apply X-rays,

to extract the phosphate from iron, or to test cattle for tubercle. All

this may produce a uniformity in the machinery of life, it passes by

untouched the motives of action, the beliefs, affections, and interests.

How many illustrations of this do we see around us! What more glorious

illustration of the power of the human intellect can be found than the

later developments of electricity, but scarcely had the discoveries been

made when we find them seized upon by the man of affairs, and wireless

telegraphy becomes the subject of speculation on the Stock Exchange, and

a chief instrument of war. That which the chemist finds in his

laboratory is, within a few years, sometimes even a few months, found

again in the factory, and perhaps on the field of battle.

Do not let it be supposed that I would underrate the possibility of a

deeper unity, but if we would find it we must carry our analysis further

back. The progress of science is in truth not a cause but a result, not

an ultimate fact but the symptom of a state of mind. It springs from

that which was brought into Europe consciously at the Renaissance and

which we may call the spirit of Greece. It is that to which we owe not

only the investigation and subjection of nature, but equally with it all

progress in every department of thought, the analysis of society,

whether political or economic, the investigations of the working of

human reason, the probing of human passions, and their record in art and

literature.

What is this spirit? Is it not the confidence in the spirit of man, the

spirit which in intellectual matters bends to no authority, and

recognizes no limit to its enterprise, which probes all things, tests

all things, and follows fearlessly where the argument leads it? This is

what I mean by the spirit of Greece, it is that which Sophocles has

immortalized. Of all this, what we call science is but a part, perhaps

at present the most striking and important part, but still a part only;

to look to it as the key of our civilization and the sole basis of our

education would be to set up a partial and, therefore, a false ideal. An

ideal, moreover, which, if pursued to its logical conclusion, would

become the basis for the most appalling tyranny, by which the free

spirit of investigation, to which we owe all our scientific progress,

would be buried in the structure that itself had reared. For what is the

end to which it must lead? Is it not a society which is held together by

technical skill, a society of organized efficiency, where each

individual holds his place, not as a living spirit, but as a slave of

the great machine, tied throughout his life to the perfect performance

of his limited and specialized task? I can imagine such a society; it is

the ideal which some modern German writers have definitely put before

us. It may be that this will be the Europe of the future, a Europe with

a common government and a universal system of education by which each

child will be trained to take his allotted part in an organized slavery.

I hope I shall not live to see it.

None the less, a unity there is, but it is a deeper unity than this. It

is the unity inherited from the past. Here we may find, not indeed a

superficial uniformity, but a real unity of life and spirit. No

civilization can repudiate its own origin, and whatever the future may

have in store the childhood of Europe was nourished on the Bible and

Christianity, and in the more mature years there was added the impulse

to the boldest use of the human intellect that came from Greece. These

two elements give us that which is the peculiar characteristic of

Western Europe, and as we are told that the growth of each individual

repeats the evolution of the race, so the education of each individual

repeats in childhood and boyhood the education of the nation. It is from

these two elements that the whole of modern culture springs, and it is

from them that again and again they regain their strength.