and such a district in the course of a year. The contempt for human
dignity which is characteristic of modern injustice permits these
poor devils to be treated like so many animals, to be thrashed,
tortured, caged, and stripped: measured, recorded, dealt with as
vile bodies for experiment. Lombroso (or for that matter any one
possessed of a glimmering of human reason) can see that of these two
hundred unfortunate wretches, a larger proportion will be diseased or
malformed, than would be the case among two hundred taken at random
among the better fed or better housed and more carefully nurtured
citizens. The Charlatan is in clover! He gathers his statistics:
twenty-three per cent. squint, eighteen per cent. have lice--what is
really _conclusive_ no less than ninety-three per cent. suffer from
metagrobolisation of the hyperdromedaries, which is scientist Greek for
the consequences of not having enough to eat. It does not take much
knowledge of men and things to see what the Charlatan can make of such
statistics. Lombroso pumps the method dry and then produces a theory
uncommonly comfortable to the well-to-do--that their fellow-men if
unfortunate can be treated as irresponsible chattels.
There is the beginning and end of the whole humbug.
With the characteristic lack of reason which is at once the weakness
and the strength of this vicious clap-trap, a totally disconnected--and
equally obvious--series of facts is dragged in. If men drink too much,
or if they have inherited insanity, or are in any other way afflicted,
by their own fault or that of others, in the action of the will, they
will be prone to irresponsibilities and to follies; and where such
irresponsibilities and follies endanger the comfort of the well-to-do,
the forces of modern society will be used to restrain them. Their
acts of violence or of unrestrained cupidity being unaccompanied by
calculation will lead to the lock-up. And so you have another stream of
statistics showing that "alcoholism" (which is Scientist for drinking
too much) and epilepsy and lunacy do not make for material success.
On these two disparate legs poses the rickety structure which has
probably already done its worst in European jurisprudence and against
which the common sense of society is already reacting.
Fortunately for men Charlatanry of that calibre has no very permanent
effect. It is too silly and too easily found out. If Lombroso had for
one moment intended a complete theory of Materialist morals or had for
one moment believed in the stuff which he used for self-advertisement,
he would have told us how physically to distinguish the cosmopolitan
and treasonable financier, the fraudulent company-worker, the traitor,
the tyrant, the pornographer, and the coward. These in high places are
the curse of modern Europe--not the most wretched of the very poor. Of
course Lombroso could tell us nothing of the sort; for there is nothing
to tell.
Incidentally it is worthy of remark that this man was one of those
charlatans who are found out in time. Common sense revolted and in
revolting managed to expose its enemy very effectively while that enemy
was still alive. A hundred tricks were played upon the fellow: it is
sufficient to quote two.
After a peculiarly repulsive trial for murder in Paris, a wag sent
the photograph of two hands, a right hand and a left hand, to the
great criminologist, telling him they were those of the murderer, and
asking for his opinion. He replied in a document crammed with the
pompous terms of the scientific cheap-jack, hybrid Greek and Latin, and
barbarous in the extreme. He discovered malformations in the fingers
and twenty other mysteries of his craft, which exactly proved why these
hands were necessarily and by the predestination of blind Nature the
hands of a murderer. Then it was that the wag published his letter and
the reply with the grave annotation that the left hand was his own (he
was a man of letters) and the right hand that of an honest fellow who
washed down his carriage.
The other anecdote is as follows: Lombroso produced a piece of fatuous
nonsense about the Political Criminal Woman. He based it upon "the
skull of Charlotte Corday"--which skull he duly analysed, measured, and
labelled with the usual regiment of long and incomprehensible words.
Upon the first examination of the evidence it turned out that the skull
was no more Charlotte Corday's than Queen Anne's--a medical student had
sold it to a humble Curiosity Shop, and the dealer, who seems to have
had some intellectual affinity with the Lombroso tribe, had labelled
it for purposes of sale, "The Skull of Charlotte Corday." Lombroso
swallowed it.
The Ass!
XXXII
THE BARBARIANS
The use of analogy, which is so wise and necessary a thing in
historical judgment, has a knack of slipping into the falsest forms.
When ancient civilisation broke down its breakdown was accompanied by
the infiltration of barbaric auxiliaries into the Roman armies, by the
settlement of Barbarians (probably in small numbers), upon Roman land,
and, in some provinces, by devastating, though not usually permanent,
irruptions of barbaric hordes.
The presence of these foreign elements, coupled with the gradual loss
of so many arts, led men to speak of "the Barbarian invasions" as
though these were a principal cause of what was in reality no more than
the old age and fatigue of an antique society.
Upon the model of this conception men, watching the dissolution of
our own civilisation to-day, or at least its corruption, have asked
themselves whence those Barbarians would come that should complete its
final ruin. The first, the least scholarly and the most obvious idea
was that of the swamping of Europe by the East. It was a conception
which required no learning, nor even any humour. It was widely
adopted and it was ridiculous. Others, with somewhat more grasp of
reality, coined the phrase "that the barbarians which should destroy
the civilisation of Europe were already breeding under the terrible
conditions of our great cities." This guess contained, indeed, a
half-truth, for though the degradation of human life in the great
industrial cities of England and the United States was not a cause of
our decline it was very certainly a symptom of it. Moreover, industrial
society, notably in this country and in Germany, while increasing
rapidly in numbers, is breeding steadily from the worst and most
degraded types.
But the truth is that no such mechanical explanation will suffice to
set forth the causes of a civilisation's decay. Before the barbarian
in any form can appear in it, it must already have weakened. If it
cannot absorb or reject an alien element it is because its organism has
grown enfeebled, and its powers of digestion and excretion are lost
or deteriorated; and whoever would restore any society which menaces
to fall, must busy himself about the inward nature of that society
much more than about its external dangers or the merely mechanical and
numerical factors of peril to be discovered within it.
Whenever we look for "the barbarian," whether in the decline of our
own society or that of some past one whose historical fate we may be
studying, we are looking rather for a visible effect of disease than
for its source.
None the less to mark those visible effects is instructive, and
without some conspectus of them it will be impossible to diagnose the
disease. A modern man may, therefore, well ask where the barbarians
are that shall enter into our inheritance, or whose triumphs shall, if
it be permitted, at least accompany, even if they cannot effect, the
destruction of Christendom.
With that word "Christendom" a chief part of the curious speculation
is at once suggested. Whether the scholar hates or loves, rejects
or adopts, ridicules or admires, the religious creed of Europe, he
must, in any case, recognise two prime historical truths. The first
is that that creed which we call the Christian religion was the
soul and meaning of European civilisation during the period of its
active and united existence. The second is that wherever the religion
characteristic of a people has failed to react against its own decay
and has in some last catastrophe perished, then that people has lost
soon after its corporate existence.
So much has passion taken the place of reason in matters of scholarship
that plain truths of this kind, to which all history bears witness,
are accepted or rejected rather by the appetite of the reader than by
his rational recognition of them, or his rational disagreement. If
we will forget for a moment what we may _desire_ in the matter and
merely consider what we _know_, we shall without hesitation admit both
the propositions I have laid down. Christendom was Christian, not by
accident or superficially, but in a formative connection, just as an
Englishman is English or as a poem is informed by a definite scheme
of rhythm. It is equally true that a sign and probably a cause of a
society's end is the dissolution of that causative moral thing, its
philosophy or creed.
Now here we discover the first mark of the Barbarian.
Note that in the peril of English society to-day there is no positive
alternative to the ancient philosophic tradition of Christian Europe.
It has to meet nothing more substantive than a series of negations,
often contradictory, but all allied in their repugnance to a fixed
certitude in morals.
So far has this process gone that to be writing as I am here in public,
not even defending the creed of Christendom, but postulating its
historic place, and pointing out that the considerable attack now
carried on against it is symptomatic of the dissolution of our society,
has about it something temerarious and odd.
Next look at secondary effects and consider how certain root
institutions native to the long development of Europe and to her
individuality are the subject of attack and note the nature of the
attack.
A fool will maintain that change, which is the law of life, can
be presented merely as a matter of degree, and that, because our
institutions have always been subject to change, therefore their very
disappearance can proceed without the loss of all that has in the past
been ourselves.
But an argument of this sort has no weight with the serious observer.
It is certain that if the fundamental institutions of a polity are no
longer regarded as fundamental by its citizens, that polity is about to
pass through the total change which in a living organism we call death.
Now the modern attack upon property and upon marriage (to take but two
fundamental institutions of the European) is precisely of this nature.
Our peril is not that certain men attack the one or the other and deny
their moral right to exist. Our peril rather is that, quite as much
as those who attack, those who defend seem to take for granted the
relativeness, the artificiality, the non-fundamental character of the
institution which they are apparently concerned to support.
See how marriage is defended. To those who would destroy it under the
plea of its inconveniences and tragedies, the answer is no longer made
that, good or ill, it is an absolute and is intangible. The answer
made is that it is convenient, or useful, or necessary, or merely
traditional.
Most significant of all, the terminology of the attack is on the lips
of the defence, but the contrary is never the case. Those opponents
of marriage who abound in modern England will never use the term "a
sacrament," yet how many for whom marriage is still a sacrament will
forego the pseudo-scientific jargon of their opponents?
The threat against property is upon the same lines. That property
should be restored that most citizens should enjoy it, that it is
normal to the European family in its healthy state--all this we hear
less and less. More and more do we hear it defended, however morbid in
form or unjust in use, as a necessity, a trick which secures a greater
stability for the State or a mere power which threatens and will break
its opponents tyrannously.
The spirit is abroad in many another minor matter. In its most
grotesque form it challenges the accuracy of mathematics: in its most
vicious, the clear processes of the human reason. The Barbarian is
as proud as a savage in a top hat when he talks of the elliptical
or the hyperbolic universe and tries to picture parallel straight
lines converging or diverging--but never doing anything so vulgarly
old-fashioned as to remain parallel.
The Barbarian when he has graduated to be a "pragmatist," struts like
a nigger in evening clothes, and believes himself superior to the gift
of reason, or free to maintain that definition, limit, quantity and
contradiction are little childish things which he has outgrown.
The Barbarian is very certain that the exact reproduction in line or
colour of a thing seen is beneath him, and that a drunken blur for
line, a green sky, a red tree and a purple cow for colour, are the mark
of great painting.
The Barbarian hopes--and that is the very mark of him--that he can have
his cake and eat it too. He will consume what civilisation has slowly
produced after generations of selection and effort but he will not be
at the pains to replace such goods nor indeed has he a comprehension
of the virtue that has brought them into being. Discipline seems
to him irrational, on which account he is for ever marvelling that
civilisation should have offended him with priests and soldiers.
The Barbarian wonders what strange meaning may lurk in that ancient
and solemn truth, "_Sine Auctoritate nulla vita_."
In a word, the Barbarian is discoverable everywhere in this that
he cannot _make_; that he can befog or destroy, but that he cannot
sustain; and of every Barbarian in the decline or peril of every
civilisation exactly that has been true.
We sit by and watch the Barbarian, we tolerate him; in the long
stretches of peace we are not afraid.
We are tickled by his irreverence, his comic inversion of our old
certitudes and our fixed creeds refreshes us: we laugh. But as we laugh
we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond: and on these faces
there is no smile.
We permit our jaded intellects to play with drugs of novelty for the
fresh sensation they arouse, though we know well there is no good in
them, but only wasting at the last.
Yet there is one real interest in watching the Barbarian and one that
is profitable.
The real interest of watching the Barbarian is not the amusement
derivable from his antics, but the prime doubt whether he will succeed
or no, whether he will flourish. He is, I repeat, not an agent, but
merely a symptom, yet he should be watched as a symptom. It is not he
in his impotence that can discover the power to disintegrate the great
and ancient body of Christendom, but if we come to see him triumphant
we may be certain that that body, from causes much vaster than such as
he could control, is furnishing him with sustenance and forming for him
a congenial soil--and that is as much as to say that we are dying.
XXXIII
ON KNOWING THE PAST
An apprehension of the past demands two kinds of information.
First, the mind must grasp the nature of historic change and must
be made acquainted with the conditions of human thought in each
successive period, as also with the general aspect of its revolution
and progression.
Secondly, the actions of men, the times, that is the dates and hours of
such actions, must be strictly and accurately acquired.
Neither of these two foundations upon which repose both the teaching
and the learning of history is more important than the other. Each
is essential. But a neglect of the due emphasis which one or the
other demands, though both be present, warps the judgment of the
scholar and forbids him to apply this science to its end, which is the
establishment of truth.
History may be called the test of true philosophy, or it may be called
in a very modern and not very dignified metaphor, the object lesson of
political science; or it may be called the great story whose interest
is upon another plane from all other stories because its irony, its
tragedy and its moral are real, were acted by real men, and were the
manifestation of God.
But whatever brief and epigrammatic summary we make to explain the
value of history to men, that formula still remains an imperative
formula for them all, and I repeat it: the end of history is the
establishment of truth.
A man may be ever so accurately informed as to the dates, the hours,
the weather, the gestures, the type of speech, the very words, the
soil, the colour, that between them all would seem to build up a
particular event. But if he is not seized of the mind which lay behind
all that was human in the business, then no synthesis of his detailed
knowledge is possible. He cannot give to the various actions which he
knows their due sequence and proportion; he knows not what to omit,
nor what to enlarge upon, among so many, or rather a potentially
infinite number of facts, and his picture will not be (as some would
put it) distorted: it will be false. He will not be able to use
history for its end, which is the establishment of truth. All that he
establishes by his action, all that he confirms and makes stronger,
is untruth. And so far as truth is concerned, it would be far better
that a man should be possessed of no history than that he should be
possessed of history ill-stated as to the factor of human motive.
A living man has to aid his judgment and to guide him in the
establishment of truth, contemporary experience. Other men are his
daily companions. The consequence and the living principles of their
acts and of his own are fully within his grasp.
If a man is rightly informed of all the past motive and determining
mind from which the present has sprung, his information will illumine
and expand and confirm his use of that present experience. If he know
nothing of the past his personal observation and the testimony of his
own senses are, so far as they go, an unshakable foundation. But if
he brings in aid of contemporary experience an appreciation of the
past which is false because it gives to the past a mind which was not
its own, then he will not only be wrong upon that past, but he will
tend to be wrong also in his conclusions upon the present. He will for
ever read into the plain facts before him origins and predetermining
forces which do not explain them and which are not connected with them
in the way he imagines. And he will easily come to regard his own
society, which as a wholly uninstructed man he might fairly though
insufficiently have grasped, through a veil of illusion and of false
philosophy, until at last he cannot even see the things before his
eyes. In a word, it is better to have no history at all than to have
history which misconceives the general direction and the large lines of
thought in the immediate and the remote past.
This being evidently the case one is tempted to say that a just
estimate of the revolution and the progression of human motive in the
past is everything to history, and that an accurate scholarship in the
details of the chronicle, in dates especially, is of wholly inferior
importance. Such a statement would be quite false. Scholarship in
history, that is an acquaintance with the largest possible number of
facts, and an accurate retention of them in the memory, is as essential
to this study as of that other background of motive which has just been
examined.
The thing is self-evident if we put an extreme case. For if a man were
wholly ignorant of the facts of history and of their sequence, he could
not possibly know what might lie behind the actions of the past, for
we only obtain communion with that which is within and that which is
foundational in human action by an observation of its external effect.
A man's history, for instance, is sound and on the right lines if he
have but a vague and general sentiment of the old Pagan civilisation
of the Mediterranean so long as that sentiment corresponds to the very
large outline and is in sympathy with the main spirit of the affair.
But he cannot possess so much as an impression of the truth if he has
not heard the names of certain of the great actors, if he is wholly
unacquainted with the conception of a City State, and if the names of
Rome, of Athens, of Antioch, of Alexandria, and of Jerusalem have never
been mentioned to him.
Nor will a knowledge of facts, however slight, be valuable;
contrariwise it will be detrimental and of negative value to his
judgment if accuracy in his knowledge be lacking. If he were invariably
inaccurate, thinking that red which was blue, inverting the order of
any two events and putting without fail in the summer what happened in
winter, or in the Germanies what took place in Gaul, his facts would
never correspond with the human motive of them, and his errors upon
externals would at once close his avenues of access towards internal
motive and suggest other and non-existent motive in its place.
It is, of course, a childish error to imagine that the knowledge of
a time grows out of a mere accumulation of observation. External
things do not produce ideas, they only reveal them. And to imagine
that mere scholarship is sufficient to history is to put one's self
on a level with those who, in the sphere of politics, for instance,
ignore the necessity of political theory and talk muddily of the
"working" of institutions--as though it were possible to judge whether
an institution were working ill or not when one had no ideal that
institutions might be designed to attain. But though scholarship is
not the source of judgment in history, it is the invariable and the
necessary accompaniment of it. Facts, which (to repeat) do not produce
ideas but only reveal or suggest them, do none the less reveal and
suggest them, and form the only instrument of such suggestion and
revelation.
Scholarship, accurate and widespread, has this further function: that
it lends stuff to general apprehension of the past, which, however
just, is the firmer, the larger and the more intense as the range
of knowledge and its fixity increase. And scholarship has one more
function, which is that it connects, and it connects with more and more
precision in proportion as it is more and more detailed, the tendency
of the mind to develop a general and perhaps justly apprehended idea
into imaginary regions: for the mind is creative; it will still make
and spin, and if you do not feed it with material it will spin dreams
out of emptiness.
Thus a man will have a just appreciation of the thirteenth century in
England; he will perhaps admire or will perhaps be repelled by its
whole spirit according to his temperament or his acquired philosophy;
but in either case, though his general impression was just, he will
tend to add to it excrescences of judgment which, as the process
continued, would at last destroy the true image were not scholarship
there to come in perpetually and check him in his conclusions. He
admires it, he will tend to make it more national than it was, to
forget its cruelties because what is good in our own age is not
accompanied by cruelty. He will tend to lend it a science it did not
possess because physical science is in our own time an accompaniment of
greatness. But if he reads and reads continually, these vagaries will
not oppress or warp his vision. More and more body will be added to
that spirit, which he does justly but only vaguely know. And he will
at last have with the English thirteenth century something of that
acquaintance which one has with a human face and voice: these also are
external things, and these also are the product of a soul.
Indeed--though metaphors are dangerous in such a matter--a metaphor
may with reservation be used to describe the effect of the chronicle,
of research and of accurate scholarship in the science of history.
A man ill provided with such material is like one who sees a friend
at a distance; a man well provided with it is like a man who sees a
friend close at hand. Both are certain of the identity of the person
seen, both are well founded in that certitude; but there are errors
possible to the first which are not possible to the second, and close
and intimate acquaintance lends to every part of judgment a surety
which distant and general acquaintance wholly lacks. The one can
say something true and say it briefly: there is no more to say. The
other can fill in and fill in the picture, until though perhaps never
complete, it is asymptotic to completion.