War thus greatened in character by its ideal, the phrase of the Greek

orator, let me repeat, is no longer an empty sound, but vibrates with

its original life--"How fortunate the dead who have fallen in battle!

And how fortunate are you to whom sorrow comes in so glorious a shape!"

An added solemnity invests the resolutions of senates, and the prayer

on the battlefield, "Through death to life," acquires a sincerity more

moving and a simplicity more heroic. And these, I imagine, will be the

results of Imperialism and of this deepening consciousness of its

destiny in Imperial Britain, whether in war which is the act of the

State as a whole, or in the career of the soldier which receives its

consummation there in the death on the battlefield.

[1] The sea and the invincible might of Athens on the waves formed the

connecting ideas of the three dramas, _Phineus, Persae, Glaucus_. The

trilogy was produced in 473 or 472 B.C., whilst the memory of Salamis

was still fresh in every heart. The Phoenissae, the "Women of Sidon,"

a tragedy on the same theme by Phrynichus, had been acted five years

earlier. The distinction of these works lay in the presentation to the

conquering State of a great victory as a tragedy in the life of the

vanquished. The cry in the _Persae_, "+opaides hellenoite+", still

echoes with singular fidelity across 3,000 years in the war-song of

_modern_ Greece: "+deute paides ton hellenon+."

[2] Thus in speaking of the ancient life of the Teutonic peoples: "Doch

alles das (Neigung zum Kampf mit den Nachbarn und zu kriegerischen

Zuegen in die Ferne) hat nicht gehindert, dass, wo die Deutschen sich

niederliessen, alsbald bestimmte Ordnungen des oeffentlichen und

rechtlichen Lebens begruendet wurden."--_Verfassungsgeschichte_, 3rd

ed., i, p. 19; _cf._ also i, pp. 416-17: "Es hat nicht eigene

Kriegsvoelker gegeben, gebildet durch und fuer den Krieg, nicht

Kriegsstaaten in solchem Sinn, dass alles ganz und allein fuer den Krieg

berechnet gewesen waere, nicht einmal auf die Dauer Kriegsfuersten, deren

Herrschaft nur in Kriegfuehrung und Heeresmacht ihren Grund gehabt."

[3] The lapse of ages, enthusiasm, or carelessness, tribal jealousies

or the accidental predilections of an individual poet or historian,

combine to render the early history of the Arabs, so far as precision

in dates, the definite order and mutual relations of events,

characters, and localities are concerned, perplexing and insecure, or

tantalizing by the wealth of detail, impressive indeed, but eluding the

test of historical criticism. Their tactics and the composition of

their armies make the precise share of this or that general in

determining the result of a battle or a campaign difficult to estimate.

Yet by (he concord of authorities the glory of the overthrow of the

Empire of the Sassanides seems to be the portion, first of Mothanna,

who sustained the fortunes of Islam at a most critical hour, A.H.

13-14, and by his victory at Boawib just warded off a great disaster;

and secondly of Saad, the victor of Kadesia, A.H. 15, A.D. 636-7, the

conqueror and first administrator of Irak. The claims of Amr, or

Amrou, to the conquest of Egypt, Pelusium, Memphis, Alexandria, A.D.

638, admit of hardly a doubt; whilst the distinction of Khalid, "the

Sword of God," in the Syrian War at the storming of Damascus and in the

crushing defeat of Heraclius at the Yermuk, August, A.D. 634, may

justly entitle him to the designation--if that description can be

applied to any one of the devoted band--of "Conqueror of Syria."

[4] "The twelve years of their military command (_i.e._, of Nicephorus

and Zimisces) form the most splendid period of the Byzantine annals.

The sieges of Mopsuestia and Tarsus in Silicia first exercised the

skill and perseverance of their troops, on whom at this moment I shall

not hesitate to bestow the name of Romans."--Gibbon, chap. lii. The

reign of Zimisces, A.D. 969-76, forms the subject of the opening

chapters, pp. 1-326, of Schlumberger's massive work, _L'epopee

Byzantine a la fin du dixieme siecle_, Paris, 1896, which exhausts

every resource of modern research into this period. Zimisces' rise to

power, and the career of the other heroic figure of the tenth century

in Byzantine history are dealt with not less exhaustively in

Schlumberger's earlier volume, _Un Empereur byzantin_, Paris, 1890.

[5] Carlyle was in his seventy-seventh year when he completed the

_Early Kings of Norway_. "Finished yesterday that long rigmarole upon

the Norse kings" is the comment in his Journal under date February

15th, 1872.--Froude, _Carlyle's Life in London_, vol. ii, p. 411.

[6] Mr. Herbert Spencer's characterization of Carlyle as a

devil-worshipper (_Data of Ethics_, Sec. 14) must be regarded less as an

effort in serious criticism than as the retort, perhaps the just

retort, of the injured evolutionist and utilitarian to the Pig

Philosophy of the eighth of the _Latter-Day Pamphlets_.

[7] The Revolution of 1848 made the appearance of Palacky's work in the

native language of Bohemia possible. Two volumes had already been

issued in German. If ever the work of a scholar and an historian had

the effect of a national song, this virtue may be ascribed to the Czech

version of Palacky's _Geschichte Boehmens_. After two centuries of

subjection to the Hapsburgs and apparent oblivion of her past, Bohemia

awoke and discovered that she had a history. Of the seven volumes of

the German edition, the period dominated by the personality of George

of Podiebrad forms the subject of the fourth (Prague, 1857-60).

[8] France has given the world the Revolution; Germany, the

Reformation; Italy, modern Art; but Russia? "We," Tourgenieff once

said, "we have given the samovar." But that poet's own works, the

symphonies of Tschaikowsky, the one novel of Dostoievsky, have changed

all this.

[9] Nevertheless the Truce of God is one of the noblest efforts of

mediaeval Europe. It drew its origins from southern France, arising

partly from the misery of the people oppressed by the constant and

bloody strife of feudal princes and barons, heightened at that time by

the fury of a pestilence, partly also from a widespread and often fixed

and controlling persuasion that with the close of the century the

thousand years of the Apocalypse would be fulfilled, and that with the

year A.D. 1000 the Day of Judgment would dawn. Ducange has collected

the evidence bearing on the use of the Latin term, and Semichon's

admirable work, _La Paix et la Treve de Dieu, premiere edition_, 1857,

_deuxieme edition revue et augmentee_, 1869, sketches the growth of the

movement. With the eleventh century, though the social misery is

unaltered, the force of the mystic impulse is lost; at the synod of

Tuluges in 1027 the days of the week on which the Truce must be

observed are limited to two. But towards the close of the century the

rising power of Hildebrand and the crusading enthusiasm gave the

movement new life, and the days during which all war was forbidden were

extended to four of the seven days of the week, those sacred to the

Last Supper, Death, Sepulture, and Resurrection. With the decline of

the crusading spirit and the rise of monarchical principles the

influence and use of the Treuga waned. The verses of the troubadour,

Bertrand le Born, are celebrated--"Peace is not for me, but war, war

alone! What to me are Mondays and Tuesdays? And the weeks, months,

and years, all are alike to me." The stanza fitly expresses the way in

which the Truce had come to be regarded by feudal society towards the

close of the twelfth century.

[10] St.-Pierre's work appeared in 1712, three years after Malplaquet,

the most sanguinary struggle of the Marlborough wars. It is thus

synchronous with the last gloomy years of Louis XIV, when France, and

her king also, seemed sinking into the mortal lethargy of Jesuitism.

St.-Simon in his early volumes has written the history of these years.

Voltaire accuses St.-Pierre of originating or encouraging the false

impression that he had derived his theory from the Dauphin, the pupil

of Fenelon and the Marcellus of the French Monarchy. An English

translation of St.-Pierre's treatise was published in 1714 with the

following characteristic title-page: "A Project for settling an

Everlasting Peace in Europe, first proposed by Henry IV of France, and

approved of by Queen Elizabeth and most of the Princes of Europe, and

now discussed at large and made practicable by the Abbot St. Pierre of

the French Academy."

[11] As late as 1791 we find Priestley looking to the French Revolution

as the precursor of the era of Universal Peace. In a discourse

delivered at "the Meeting House in the Old-Jewry, 27th April, 1791," he

describes the "glorious enthusiasm which has for its objects the

flourishing of science and the extinction of wars." France, he

declares, "has ensured peace to itself and to other nations at the same

time, cutting off almost every possible cause of war," and enables us

"to prognosticate the approach of the happy times in which the sure

prophecies of Scripture inform us that wars shall cease and universal

peace and harmony take place."

LECTURE VI

THE VICISSITUDES OF STATES AND EMPIRES

[_Tuesday, July_ 3_rd_, 1900]

Having considered in the first lecture a definition of Imperialism, and

traced in the second and third the development in religion and in

politics of the ideal of Imperial Britain, and having afterwards

examined the relations of this ideal to the supreme questions of War

and Peace, an inquiry not less momentous, but from its intangible and

even mystic character less capable of definite resolution, now demands

attention. How is this ideal of the Imperialistic State related to

that from which all States originally derive? How is it related to the

Divine? From the consideration of this problem two others arise, that

of the vicissitudes of States and Empires, and that of the destiny of

this Empire of Imperial Britain.

From the analogy of the Past is it possible to apprehend even dimly the

curve which this Empire, moved by a new ideal, and impelled by the

deepening consciousness of its destiny, will describe amongst the

nations and the peoples of the earth?

Empire, we have seen, is the highest expression of the soul of the

State; it is the complete, the final consummation of the life of the

State. But the State, the soul of the State, is in itself but a unity

that is created from the units, the individuals which compose it.

Nevertheless the unity of the State which results from those units is

not the same unity, nor is it subject to, or governed by, the same laws

as regulate the life of the individual. Not only the arraignment of

the maxims of statesmen as immoral, but the theories, fantastic or

profound, of the rise and fall of States, are marred or rendered idle

utterly by the initial confusion of the organic unity of the State with

the unity of the individual. But though no composite unity is governed

by the same laws as govern its constituent atoms, nevertheless that

unity must partake of the nature of its constituent atoms, change as

they change, mutually transforming and transformed. So is this unity

of the State influenced by the units which compose it, which are the

souls of men.

Sec. I. THE METAPHYSICAL ORIGIN OF THE STATE

Consider then, first of all, in relation to the consciousness which is

the attribute of the life of the State, the consciousness which is the

soul of man. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, as we have seen,

the saintly ideal which had hitherto controlled man's life dies to the

higher thought of Europe. The saint gives place to the crusader and

scholastic, and the imagination of the time acknowledges the spell of

oriental paganism and oriental culture.

Certain of the most remarkable minds of that epoch, men like

Berengarius of Tours, for instance, or St. Victor, and Amalrich, are

profoundly troubled by a problem of the following nature. How shall

the justice of God be reconciled with the destiny He assigns to the

souls of men? They are sent forth from their rest in the Divine to

dwell in habitations of mortal flesh, incurring reprobation and exile

everlasting, or after a season returning, according as they are

appointed to a life dark to the sacrifice on Calvary, or to a life by

that Blood redeemed. By what law or criterion of right does God send

forth those souls, emanations of His divinity, to a doom of misery or

bliss, according as they are attached to a body north of the

Mediterranean, or southward of that sea, within the sway of the falsest

of false prophets, Mohammed? This trouble in the heart of the eleventh

century arose from the insight which compassion gives; the European

imagination, at rest with regard to its own safety, is for the first

time perplexed by the fate of men of an alien race and faith, whose

heroism it has nevertheless learnt to revere, as in after-times it was

perplexed in pondering the fate of Greece and Rome, whose art and

thought it vainly strove to imitate. Underlying this trouble in their

hearts is the assumption to which Plato and certain of his sect have

leanings, that within the Divine there is as it were a treasury of

souls from which individual essences are sped hither, to dwell within

each mortal body immediately on its birth.

Now in an earlier age than the age of Berengarius and St. Victor, there

arose within Alexandria one whose thought in its range, in the sweep of

its orbit, was perhaps the widest and most distant amongst the children

of men. In the most remarkable and sublime of his six _Enneads_,

another theory upon the same subject occurs.[1] The fate of the soul

in passing from its home with the Everlasting is like the fate of a

child which in infancy has been removed from its parents and reared in

a foreign land. The child forgets its country and its kindred as the

soul forgets in the joy of its freedom the felicity it knew when one

with the Divine. But after the lapse of years if the child return

amongst its kindred, at first indeed it shall not know them, but now a

word, now a gesture, or again a trick of the hand, a cadence of the

voice, will come to it like the murmur of forgotten seas by whose

shores it once had dwelt, awaking within it strange memories, and

gradually by the accumulation of these the truth will at last flash in

upon the child--"Behold my father and my brethren!" So the soul of

man, though knowing not whence it came, is by the teachings of Divine

wisdom, and by inspired thinkers, quickened to a remembrance of its

heavenly origin, and its life henceforth becomes an ever-increasing,

ever more vivid memory of the tranced peace, the bliss that it knew

there within the Everlasting.

Let me attempt to apply this thought of the Egyptian mystic to the

problem before us. Disregarding the theory of an infinite series of

successive incarnations from the inexhaustible treasury of the Divine,

permit me to recall the observations made in an earlier lecture on the

contrast between the limited range of man's consciousness, and the

measureless past stretching behind him, the infinite spaces around him.

Judged by the perfect ideal of knowledge, the universe is necessary to

the understanding of a flower, and the dateless past to the

intelligence of the history of a day. But as the beam of light never

severs itself from its fountain, as the faintest ray that falls within

the caverns of the sea remains united with the orb whence it sprang, so

the soul of man has grown old along with nature, and acquainted from

its foundations with the fabric of the universe.

Therefore when it confronts some simple object of sense or emotion, or

the more intricate movements and events of history, or the rushing

storm of the present, the soul has about it strange intimacies, it has

within it preparations drawn from that fellowship with nature

throughout the aeons, the abysses of Eternity. And as the aeons

advance, the soul grows ever more conscious of the end of all its

striving, and its serenity deepens as the certainty of the ultimate

attainment of that end increases.

Baulked of its knowledge of an hour by its ignorance of Eternity, it

attains its rest in the Infinite, which seeking it shall find, piercing

through every moment of the transient to the Eternal. What are the

spaces and the labyrinthian dance of the worlds to the soul which is

ever more profoundly absorbed, remembering, knowing, or in vision made

prescient of its identity with the soul of the universe? And as the

ages recede, the immanence of the Divine becomes more consciously, more

pervadingly present. Earth deepens in mystery; premonitions of its

destiny visit the soul, falling manifold as the shadows of twilight, or

in mysterious tones far-borne and deep as the chords struck by the

sweeping orbs in space.

The soul thus neglects the finite save as an avenue to the infinite,

and holds knowledge in light esteem unless as a path to the wonder, the

ecstasy, and the wisdom which are beyond knowledge. The past is dead,

the present is a dream, the future is not yet, but in the Eternal NOW

the soul is one with that Reality of which the remotest pasts, the

farthest presents, the most distant futures, are but changing phases.

If then we regard the soul, its origin and its destiny, in this manner,

what a wonder of light invests its history within Time! Banished from

its primal abode beyond the crystal walls of space, with what

achievements has not the exile graced the earth, its habitation!

Wondrous indeed is man's course across the earth, and with what shall

the works of his soul be compared? From those first uncertainties,

those faltering elations, the Vision, dimly discerned as yet, lures him

with tremulous ecstasies to eternise the fleeting, and in columned

enclosure and fretted canopy to uprear an image which he can control of

the arch of heaven and the unsustained architecture of the stars.

These out-reach his mortal grasp, outwearying his scrutiny, blinding

his intelligence; but, master of the image, his soul knows again by

reflection the felicity which it knew when one with the Shaper of the

worlds.

And thus the soul mounts, steep above steep, from the rudely hewn

granite to the breathing marbles of the Parthenon, to the hues of

Titian, to the forests in stone, the domes and minarets, and the gemmed

splendour of later races, to the drifted snows of the Taj-Mahal,

iridescent with diamond and pearl.

Yea, from those first imaginings, caught from the brooding rocks, and

moulded in the substance of the rocks, still it climbs, instructed by

the winds, the ocean's tidal rhythm, and the tumultuous transports of

the human voice, its raptures, sorrows, or despairs, to the newer

wonder, the numbered cadences of poetry, the verse of Homer, Sophocles,

and Shakespeare.

And at the last, lessoned by those ancient instructors, winds and

tides, and the ever-moving spheres of heaven, how does the soul attain

its glory, and in Music, the art of arts, the form of forms, poise on

the starry battlements of God's dread sanctuary, tranced in prayer, in

wonder ineffable, at the long pilgrimage accomplished at last--in the

_adagio_ of the great Concerto, in the _Requiem_, or those later

strains of transhuman sadness and serenity trans-human, in which the

soul hears again the song sung by the first star that ever left the

shaping hands of God and took its way alone through the lonely spaces,

pursuing an untried path across the dark, the silent abysses--how dark,

how silent!--a moving harmony, foreboding even then in its first

separate delight and sorrow of estrangement all the anguish and all the

ecstasy that the unborn universes of which it is the herald and

precursor yet shall know!

Aristotle indeed affirms that in the universe there are many things

more excellent than man, the planets, for instance. He is thinking of

the mighty yet perfect curve which they describe, though with all the

keenness of his analytic perception, he is in this judgment not

unaffected by the fancy, current in his time, that those planets are

living things each with its attendant soul, which shapes its orbit and

that fixed path athwart the night. How much higher a will that

steadfast motion argues than the wavering purposes, the unstable

desires of human life. But we know that the planet with all its mighty

curve is but as the stage to the piece enacted thereon; it is the

moving theatre on which the drama of life, from its first dark

unconscious motions to the freest energy of the soul in its airy

imaginings, is accomplished. And the thought of Pascal which might be

a rejoinder to this of Aristotle is well known, that though the

universe rise up against man to destroy him, yet man is greater than

the universe, because he knows that he dies, but of its power to

destroy the universe knows nothing.

If this then be the origin of the individual soul, and if its recorded

and unrecorded history and action in the universe be of this height, it

is not astonishing that the laws and operations of the soul of the

State, which is of an order yet more complex and mysterious, should

baffle investigation, and foil the most assiduous efforts to reduce

them to a system, and compel speculation to have recourse to such false

analogies and misleading resemblances as those to which reference has

in these lectures more than once been made.

Sec. 2. THE STATE, EMPIRES, AND ART

Thus we trace the unity of the State to the unity of the individual

soul, and thence to the Divine unity. The soul of the State is the

higher, the more complex unity, and it is not merely in the actions of

the individual in relation to or as an organic part of the State that

we must seek for the entire influence of the State upon individual

life, or for the perfect expression of the abstract energy of the State

in itself and by itself. Man in such relations does often merit the

reprobation of Rousseau, and his theory of the deteriorating effects of

a complex unity upon the single unity of the individual soul seems

often to find justification. Similarly, the exclusive admiration of

many unwitting disciples of Rousseau for the deeds of the individual as

opposed to the deeds of the State, for art as opposed to politics,

discovers in a first study of these relations strong support. But the

artist is not isolated and self-dependent. If the supreme act of a

race is war, if its supreme thought is its religion, and its supreme

poems, its language--deeds, thoughts, and poems to which the whole race

has contributed--so in manifold, potent, if unperceived ways the State

affects those energizings in art and thought which seem most

independent of the State. The sentence of Aristotle is familiar, "The

solitary man is either a brute or a god," but the solitariness whether

of the Thebaid or of Fonte Avellano, of Romualdo, Damiani, or of that

Yogi, who, to exhibit his hate and scorn of life, flung himself into

the flames in the presence of Alexander, is yet indebted and bound by

ties invisible, mystic, innumerable, to the State, to the race, for the

structural design of the soul itself, for that very pride, that

isolating power which seems most to sever it from the State.[2] And

who shall determine the limits of the unconscious life which in that

lonely contemplation or that lonelier scorn, the soul receives from the

State? For from the same source the component and the composite, the

constituent and the constituted unity alike arise, and the Immanence

that is in each is One. "Whither shall I go from Thy spirit? or

whither shall I flee from Thy presence? If I ascend up into heaven,

Thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, Thou art there. If I

take the wings of the morning, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the

sea; even there shall Thy hand lead me, and Thy right hand shall hold

me. If I say, Surely the darkness shall cover me; even the night shall

be light about me. Yea, the darkness hideth not from Thee; but the

night shineth as the day; the darkness and the light are both alike to

Thee."

The everyday topic which makes man "the creature of his time" derives

whatever truth it possesses from this unity, but Sophocles did not

write the _Ajax_ because Miltiades fought at Marathon, nor Tirso, _El

Condennado_ because Cortez defeated Montezuma. Whatever law connect

greatness in art and greatness in action, it is not the law of cause

and effect, of necessary succession in time. They are the mutually

dependent manifestations of the same immortal energy which uplifts the

whole State, whose motions arise from beyond Time, the roots of whose

being are beyond the region of cause and effect.

Consider now as an illustration of the interdependence of the soul of

the individual and of the State, and of the immanence in each of the

Divine, the relation which world-history reveals as existing between

the higher manifestations of the life of the individual and of the

State. The greatest achievements of individual men, whether in action,

or in art, or in thought, are, it will generally be found, coincident

with, and synchronous with, the highest form which in its development

the State assumes, that is, with some form or mode of empire. For it

is not merely the art of Phidias, of Sophocles, that springs from the

energy aroused by the Persian invasions; the energy which finds

expression in the Empire of Athens is to be traced thither, empire and

art arising from the same exaltation of the State and of the

individual. But they are not related as cause and effect, nor is the

art of Sophocles _caused_ by Marathon; but the _Agamemnon_ and Salamis,

the Parthenon and the _Ajax_, are incarnations in words, in deeds, or

in marble of the divine Idea immanent in the whole race of the

Hellenes. A race capable of empire, the civic form of imperialism,

thus arises simultaneously with its greatest achievements in art.

Similarly in the civic State of mediaeval Florence, the age of Leonardo

and of Savonarola is also the age of Lorenzo, when in politics Florence

competes with Venice and the Borgias for the hegemony of Italy, and the

actual bounds of her civic empire are at their widest. So in Venetian

history empire and art reach their height together, and the age which

succeeds that of Giorgione and of Titian is an end not only to the

painting but to the political greatness of Venice.

As in civic so in national empires. In Spain, Charles V and the

Philips are the tyrants of the greatest single military power and of

the first nation of the earth, and have as their subjects Rojas and

Tirso, Lope and Cervantes, Calderon and Velasquez. Racine and Moliere

serve _le grand Monarque_, as Apelles served Alexander. The mariners

who sketched the bounds of this empire, which is at last attaining to

the full consciousness of its mighty destinies, were the contemporaries

of Marlowe and Webster, of Beaumont and Ford.

Napoleon's fretful impatience that its victories should have as their

literary accompaniments only the wan tragedies of Joseph Chenier and

the unleavened odes of Millevoye was just. An empire so glorious, if

based on the people's will, should not have found in the genius of the

age its sworn antagonist. This stamped his empire as spurious.

But these simultaneous phenomena, these supreme attainments at once in

action and in art, are not connected as cause and effect. For the

roots of their identity we must search deeper. The transcendent deed

and the work of art alike have their origin in the _elan_ of the soul,

the diviner vision or the diviner desire. The will which becomes the

deed, the vision which becomes the poem or the picture, are here as yet

one; and this _elan_, this energy of the soul, what is it but the

energy of the infinite within the finite, of the eternal within time?

Art in whatever perfection it attains is but an illustration,

imperfect, of the spirit of man. The greatest books that ever were

written, the most exquisite sculptures that ever were carved, the most

delicate temples that ever were reared, the richest paintings that ever

came from Titian are all in themselves ultimately but the dust of the

soul of him who composes them, builds them, carves them. The

unrevealed and the unrevealable is the soul itself that in such works

is dimly adumbrated. The most perfect statue is but an imperfect

semblance of the beauty which the sculptor beheld, though intensifying

and reacting upon, and even in a sense consummating, that inward

vision; and the sublimest energy of imperial Rome derives its tragic

height from the degree to which it realizes the energy of the race.

In the Islam of Omar this law displays itself supremely, and with a

flame-like vividness. There the divine origin of the State which in

the Athens of Pericles is hidden or revealed in the myriad forms of

art, plastic or poetic, in the Rome of Sulla or Caesar in tragic

action, displays itself in naked purity and in majesty unadorned. If

artistic loveliness marks the age of Sophocles, tragic grandeur the

Rome of Augustus, mystic sublimity is the feature of the Islam of Omar.

The thought and the deed, +logos kai poiesis+, here are one.

Sec. 3. THE FALL OF EMPIRES: THE THEORY OF RETRIBUTION

We have now reached the final stage of our inquiry. Is there any law

by which the vicissitudes of the States, whose origin has been traced

through the individual to a remoter and more awful source, are fixed

and directed? And can the decay of empires, those supreme forms in the

development of States, be resolved into its determining causes, or do

we here confront a movement which is beyond the sphere ruled by cause

and effect?

In Western Europe a broken arch and some fragments of stone are often

all that mark the place where stood some perfect achievement of

mediaeval architecture, a feudal stronghold or an abbey. But on the

lower plains of the Euphrates and Tigris, a ruin hardly more

conspicuous may denote the seat of an empire. Such a region, fronting

the desert, formed a fit theatre for man's first speculations upon his

own destiny and that of the nations. Those two inquiries have

proceeded together. His vision of the universe, original or accepted,

inevitably shapes and transforms the poet's, the prophet's, or the

historian's vision of any portion of that universe, however limited in

time and space.

Hebrew literature, affected by the revolutions of Assyria, Chaldaea,

Media, and Egypt, already discloses two theories which, modified or

applied, mould man's thought when bent to this problem down to the

present hour. Round one or other of these conceptions the speculations

of over two thousand years naturally group themselves.

The first of these theories, which may be styled the Theory of

Retribution, attributes the decay of empires to the visitation of a

divine vengeance. The fall of an empire is the punishment of sin and

of wrong-doing. The pride and iniquity of the few, or the corruption

and ethical degeneration of the mass, involves the ruin of the State.

Regardless of the contradictions to this law in the life of the

individual, its supremacy in the life of empires has throughout man's

history been decreed and proclaimed. Hebrew thought was perplexed and

amazed from the remotest periods at the felicity of the oppressor and

the unjust man, and the misery of the good. But the sublime and

inspired rhetoric of Isaiah rests upon the assumption that the

punishment of wrong, uncertain amongst men, is sure amongst nations and

States.

In a more ethical form this conception is easily traced throughout

Greek and Roman thought. In St. Augustine it reappears in its original

shape, and invested with the dignity, the fulness, and the precision of

an historical argument. A Roman by birth, culture, and youthful

sympathies, loving the sad cadences of Virgil like a passion, admitted

by Cicero to an intimacy with Hellenic thought, he is, later in life,

attracted, fascinated, and finally subdued by the ideal of the

Nazarene, and by the poetry and history behind it. He sees Rome fall;

and what the fate of Babylon was to the Hebrew prophet the fate of Rome

becomes to Augustinus--the symbol of divine wrath, the punishment of

her pride, her idolatry, and her sin. Rome falls as Babylon, as

Assyria fell; but in the _De Civitate_, to which he devotes some

fifteen years of his life, is delineated the city which shall not pass

away.[3] The destruction of Rome, limited in time and space, coalesces

with the wider thought of the Stoics, the destruction of the world.

So to the Middle Age the fall of Rome was but an argument for the theme

of the passing away of earth itself and all earthly things like a

scroll. Before its imagination, as along a highroad, moved a

procession of empires--Assyria, Media, Babylon, Greece, Rome, Persia,

and at the last, as a shadowy dream of all these, the Empire of

Charlemagne and of the Othos. Their successive falls point to man's

obstinacy in sin, and the recurrence of the event to the nearness of

the Judgment.

The treatises of Damiani, Otho of Freisingen,[4] and of the Cardinal

Lothar, formulate the argument, and as late as the seventeenth century

Bossuet dedicates to this same theme an eloquence not less impressive

and finished than that of Augustine himself. In recent times this

theory influences strongly the historical conceptions of Ruskin and

Carlyle. It is the informing thought of Ruskin's greatest work, _The

Stones of Venice_. The value of that work is imperishable, because the

documents upon which it is based are by the wasting force of wind and

sun and sea daily passing beyond scrutiny or comparison. Yet its

philosophy is but an echo of the philosophy of Carlyle's second period,

and as ever, the disciple exaggerates the teachings of the master. The

bent of Carlyle's genius was nearer that of Rousseau than he ever

permitted himself to imagine. In the Cromwelliad Carlyle elaborates

the fancy that the one great and heroic period of English history is

that of Cromwell, and that in a return to the principles of that era

lies the salvation of England. Similarly Ruskin allots to Venice its

great and heroic period, ascribing that greatness to the fidelity of

the people of Venice to the standard of St. Mark and the ideal of

Christianism of which that standard was the emblem. But in the

sixteenth century Venice swerved from this ideal, and her fall is the

consequence.

In all such speculations a method has been applied to the State

identical with that indicated in the second lecture. They exhibit the

effort of the human mind to discover in the universe the evolution of a

design in harmony with its own conception of what individual life is or

ought to be. Genius, beauty, virtue, the breast consecrated to lofty

aims, are still the dearest target to disaster, and to the blind

assaults of fate and man. In individual life, therefore, the primitive

conception has been modified, but in the wider and more intricate life

of a State the endless variety of incidents, characters, fortunes, the

succession of centuries, and of modes of thought, literatures, arts,

creeds, the revolutions in political ideals, offer so complex a mass of

phenomena that the breakdown of the theory, patent at once in the

narrower sphere of observation, is here obscured and shielded from

detection. Man's intellect is easily the dupe of the heart's desire,

and in the brief span of human life willingly carries a fiction to the

grave. And he who defends a pleasing dream is necessarily honoured

amongst men more than the visionary whose course is towards the glacier

heights and the icy solitudes of thought.

Sec. 4. THE FALL OF EMPIRES: THE CYCLIC THEORY

The second theory is that of a cycle in human affairs, which controls

the rise and fall of empires by a law similar to that of the seasons

and the revolutions of the heavenly bodies. This theory varies little;

the metaphors, the figures by which it is darkened or made clearer

change, but the essential idea remains one in the great myth of Plato

or in the Indian epics, in the rigid steel-clasped system of Vico, or

in the sentimental musings of Volney. The vicissitudes are no more

determined by the neglect or performance of religious rites or certain

ethical rules. Man's life is regarded as part of the universal scheme

of things, and the fate of empires as subject to natural laws. The

mode in which this theory originates thus connects itself at once with

the mode of the Chaldean astrology and modern evolution.

It appears late in the development of Hebrew thought, and finds its

most remarkable expression in the fragment, the writer of which is now

not unfrequently spoken of as "Khoeleth."[5] "One generation passeth

away and another generation cometh; but the earth abideth for ever.

The sun also riseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place,

where he arose. The wind goeth towards the south and turneth about

unto the north, it whirleth about continually, and the wind returneth

again according to his circuits. The thing that hath been, it is that

which shall be; and that which is done, is that which shall be done,

and there is no new thing under the sun. Is there anything whereof it

may be said, See, this is new? it hath been already of old time, which

was before us. There is no remembrance of former things; neither shall

there be any remembrance of things that are to come with those that

shall come after."

The writings of Machiavelli reveal a mind based on the same deeps as

Khoeleth, brooding on the same world-wide things. Like him, he looks

out into the black and eyeless storm, the ceaseless drift of atoms;

like him, he surveys the States and Empires of the past, and sees in

their history, their revolutions, their rise and decline, but the

history of the wind which, in the Hebrew phrase, goes circling in its

circles, _sov[)a]v sov[=e]v_, and returneth to the place whence it

came, and universal darkness awaits the world, and oblivion universal

the tedious story of man. In work after work of Machiavelli, letters,

tales, dramas, historical and political treatises, this conception

recurs. It is the central and informing thought of his life as a

philosophical thinker. But unlike Vico, Machiavelli avoids becoming

the slave of a theory. He shadows forth this system of some dim cycle

in human affairs as a conception in which his own mind finds quiescence

if not rest. Its precise character he nowhere describes.

Amongst philosophical historians Tacitus occupies a unique position.

He rivals Dante in the cumulative effect of sombre detail and in the

gloomy energy which hate supplies. In depth and variety of creative

insight he approaches Balzac,[6] whilst in his peculiar province, the

psychology of death, he stands alone. His is the most profoundly

imaginative nature that Rome produced. Three centuries before the fall

of Rome he appears to apprehend or to forbode that event, and he turns

to a consideration of the customs of the Teutonic race as if already in

the first century he discerned the very manner of the cataclysm of the

fourth. Both his great works, the _Histories_ and the _Annals_, read

at moments like variations and developments of the same tragic theme,

the "wrath of the gods against Rome," the _deum ira in rem Romanam_ of

the _Annals_; whilst in the _Histories_ the theory of retribution

appears in the reflection, _non esse curae deis securitatem nostrum,

esse ultionem_, with which he closes his preliminary survey of the

havoc and civil fury of the times of Galba--"Not our preservation, but

their own vengeance, do the gods desire." It is as if, transported in

imagination far into the future, Tacitus looked back and pronounced the

judgment of Rome in a spirit not dissimilar from that of Saint

Augustine. Yet the Rome of Trajan and of the Antonines, of Severus and

of Aurelian, was to come, and, as if distrusting his rancour and the

wounded pride of an oligarch, Tacitus betrays in other passages habits

of thought and speculation of a widely different bearing. His

sympathies with the Stoic sect were instinctive, but in his reserve and

deep reticence he resembles, not Seneca, but Machiavelli or Thucydides.

A passage in the _Annals_ may fitly represent the impression of reserve

which these three mighty spirits, Tacitus, Thucydides, and Machiavelli,

at moments convey. "Sed mihi haec ac talia audienti in incerto

judicium est, fatone res mortalium et necessitate immutabili an forte

volvantur; quippe sapientissimos veterum, quique sectam eorum

aemulantur, diversos reperias, ac multis insitam opinionem non initia

nostri, non finem, non denique homines dis curae; ideo creberrime

tristia in bonos, laeta apud deteriores esse; contra alii fatum quidem

congruere rebus putant, sed non e vagis stellis, verum apud principia

et nexus naturalium causarum; ac tamen electionem vitae nobis

relinquunt, quam ubi elegeris, certum imminentium ordinem; neque mala

vel bona quae vulgus putet."[7]

And yet the theory of retribution had not been without its influence

upon Thucydides. It even forces the structure of his later books into

the regularity of a tragedy, in which Athens is the protagonist, and a

verse of Sophocles the theme. But his earlier and greater manner

prevails, and from the study of his work the mind passes easily to the

contemplation of the doom which awaited the destroyers of Athens, the

monstrous tyrannies in Syracuse, and Lacedaemon's swift ruin.

Another phase of the position of Tacitus deserves attention. It was a

habit of writers of the eighteenth century, in treating of the

vicissitudes of empires, to state one problem and solve another. The

question asked was, "Is there a law regulating the fall of empires?";

but the question answered, satisfactorily or unsatisfactorily, was, "Is

there a remedy?" Like the elder Cato, Tacitus seems in places to refer

the ruin which he anticipated to Rome's departure from the austerity

and simplicity of the early centuries. In the luxury of the Caesars he

discerns but another condemnation of the policy of Caius Julius.

The use which Gibbon has made of this argument is celebrated. In

Gibbon's life, indeed, regret for the Empire, for the Rome of Trajan

and of Marcus, exercises as strong a sway, artistically, as regret for

the Republic exercises over the art and thought of Tacitus. Both

desiderate a world which is not now, musing with fierce bitterness or

cold resignation upon that which was once but is no longer. Both

ponder the question, "How could the disaster have been averted? How

could the decline of Rome have been stayed?" Tacitus is the greater

poet--more penetrating in vision, a greater master of his medium,

profounder in his insight into the human heart. But a common

atmosphere of elegy pervades the work of both, and if Gibbon again and

again forgets the inquiry with which he set out, the charm of his work

gains thereby. A pensive melancholy akin to that of Petrarch's

_Trionfi_, or the _Antiquites de Rome_ of Joachim du Bellay, redeems

from monotony, by the emotion it communicates, the over-stately march

of many a balanced period.[8] But it were as vain to seek in Tasso for

a philosophic theory of the Crusades as seek in Gibbon a philosophic

theory of the decline of empires.

His artistic purpose was strengthened to something like a prophetic

purpose by the environment of his age, the incidents of his life, and

the bent of his own intellect. He combats the same enemy as Voltaire

waged truceless war upon--the subtle, intangible, omnipresent spirit of

insincerity, hypocrisy, and superstition, from which the bigotry and

religious oppression of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries

derived their power. And Gibbon's indebtedness to Voltaire is amazing.

There is scarcely a living conception in the _Decline and Fall_ which

cannot be traced to that nimble, varied, and all-illuminating spirit.

Even the ironic method of the two renowned chapters was prompted by a

section in the _Essai sur les Moeurs_.

Thus to the theory of Tacitus, the departure from the ancient

simplicity of life, Gibbon adds the theory of Zosimus.[9] With Zosimus

he affirms that the triumph of Christianism sealed the fate of Rome,

and in the Emperor Julian Gibbon finds the same heroic but ill-starred

defender of the past, as Tacitus found in the unfortunate Germanicus.

This conception informs Gibbon's work throughout, prompting alike the

furtive, malignant, or tasteless sketches of the great Pontiffs and the

great Caesars, and the finish, the studied care, the vivid detail

lavished upon the portraits of their enemies. Half-seriously,

half-smiling at his own enthusiasm, he seems to discern in Mohammed, in

Saladin, and the Ottoman power, the avengers of Julian and the Rome of

the Antonines.

And thus Ruskin, inspired by a mood of his great teacher, traces the

decline of Venice to its abandonment of Christianism, and Gibbon,

influenced by Voltaire and the environment of his age, traces the fall

of Rome to the adoption of Christianism.

Sec. 5. WHAT IS MEANT BY THE "FALL OF AN EMPIRE"?

Underlying both these classes of theories, the retributive and the

cyclic, and underlying much of the speculation both of the eighteenth

and of the nineteenth century upon the subject, is the assumption that

the decay of empires is accidental, or arises from causes that can be

averted, or from the operation of forces that can be modified. The

mediaeval conception of one empire upon the earth, which yet shall

endure forever in righteousness, influences even the mind of Gibbon.

He had studied Polybius, and Rome's indefeasible right to the

government of the world was the faith which Polybius had announced.

And in the hour of Judaea's humiliation and ruin her prophets had still

proclaimed a similar hope of everlasting dominion to Israel.

But, as the centuries advance, it grows ever clearer that regret or

surprise at the passing of empires is like regret or surprise at the

passing of youth. Man might as well start once more to discover the

elixir of life and alchemy's secrets as hope to found an empire that

shall not pass away.

To ponder too curiously the question why a State declines is like

pondering too curiously the question why a man dies. In the

vicissitudes of States we are on the threshold of the same Mystery as

in the vicissitudes of nature and of human life. The tracts and

regions governed by cause and effect are behind us. An empire, like a

work of art, is an end in itself, but duration in the former is an

integral portion or phase of that end. From the concept, "Empire,"

duration is inseparable, and the extent of that duration is involved in

the concept itself. Duration and modes, religious or ethical, are

alike determined from within, from the divine thought realizing itself

through the individual in the State. The curve of an empire's history

is directed by no self-existent, isolated causes. It is a portion of

the universe, evading analysis as the beauty of a statue evades

analysis, lost in the vastness of nature, in the labyrinths of the soul

which created and of the soul which contemplates its perfection.

Therefore regret for the fall of an empire, unless, as in the works of

a Gibbon or a Tacitus, it aids in transforming the present nearer to

the heart's desire, is vain enough. The Eros of Praxiteles and the

Athene of Scopas, like the Cena of Leonardo and the Martyr of Titian,

are beyond our reach, and with all our industry we shall hardly recover

the ninety tragedies of Aeschylus. But the moment within the soul of

the artist which these works enshrined, which by their inception and

completion they did but strengthen and prolong, that moment of vision

has not passed away. It has become part of the eternal, as the

aspirations, fortitudes, heroisms, endurances, great aims which Rome or

Hellas impersonates have become part of the eternal. Man, born into a

world which was not made for him, is perplexed, until in such moments

the end for which he was himself fashioned is revealed. The artist,

the hero, and the prophet give of their peace unto the world. Yet is

this gift but a secondary thing, and subject to cause, and time, and

change.

In the consummation of the life of a State the world-soul realizes

itself in a moment analogous to this moment in art. The form perishes,

nation, city, empire; but the creative thought, the soul of the State,

endures. As the marble or poem represents the supreme hour in the

individual life, the ideal long pursued imaged there, perfect or

imperfect, so the State represents the ideal pursued by the race. It

is the embodiment in living immaterial substance of the creative

purpose of the race, of the individual, and ultimately of the Divine.

The State is immaterial; no visible form betrays it. Athene or Roma

are but the arbitrary emblems of an invisible, ever changing life, most

subtle, most complex, yet indivisibly one, woven each day anew from

myriads of aspirations, designs, ideals, recorded or unrecorded. Those

heroic personalities, a Hildebrand, a Napoleon, a Cromwell, a

Richelieu, who usurp the attributes of the State, do but interpret the

State to itself, rudely or faultlessly. Philip and Alexander, Baber

and Akbar, are the men who respond to, who feel more profoundly than

other men, the ideal, the impulse which beats at the heart of the race.

The divine thought is in them more immanent than in other men. To

Akbar the vision of the continent from Himalaya to either sea, all

brought to the feet of Mohammed, of Islam, impersonated in himself, is

an ethereal vision like that which leads Alexander eastward beyond the

Tigris to spread far the name of Hellas. Akbar started as his

grandfather had started, and Baber's faith was not less sincere.[10]

But the contact with other races and other creeds diverted or

heightened this first purpose of the Mongol, and at the pinnacle of

earthly power, Akbar met and yielded to the temptation, which dazzled

for a moment even the steady gaze of Napoleon. Apprehending the unity

beneath the diversity of the religions of his various subjects, Hindoo,

Persian, Mohammedan, Christian, Akbar dared the lofty enterprise and

essayed to extract the common truth of all, selecting, as Julian had

done, twelve centuries before him, the sun as the symbol of universal

beneficence, and truth, and life. He failed, but failed greatly.

The distinctions of a great State, art, action, empire, supremacy in

thought, supremacy in deed, supremacy in conception of the ideal of

humanity, like rays emanating from the same divine centre, thither

converge again. Any attempt to explain their succession and decay in

terms of a mechanical law must thus lead either to the reserve of

Machiavelli, to the outworn fantasies of Bossuet, or to such formulas

as those of Ruskin and Gibbon, in which synchronous phenomena are woven

into a chain of causes and effects.

Even in the sphere of individual existence death is but a mode of human

thought, a name which has no counterpart in the frame of things. As

life is but a mode of the divine thought, so death is but a mode of

human thought, a creation of the intellect the more vividly to realize

itself and life. Every effect is in turn a cause. Therefore every

cause is eternal, an infinite series, existing at once successive and

simultaneous; for the effect is not the death of, but the continued

life of the cause. Universes and the soul of man are but

self-transformations of the first last Cause, the One, the Cause within

Cause immortal, effect within effect unending. "Man," it has been

said, "is the inventor of Nothingness. Nature and the Universe know it

not." The past wields over the present a power which could never be

derived from Death and Nothingness. No age, as was pointed out in the

first lecture, has felt this power so intimately as the present. As if

we had a thousand lives to live, we consume the present in the study of

the past, and sink from sight ourselves while still contemplating the

scenes designed for other eyes. Even our most living impulses we

interpret as if they were sacred runes carved by long-vanished hands,

so that it seems as if the dead alone lived, and the living alone were

dead.

But the soul unifies all things, and is then most in the present when

most deeply absorbed in the past. The soul of man is the true Logos of

the universe. It is the contemporary of all the ages, and to none of

the aeons is it a stranger. It heard the informing voice which

instructed the planets in their paths, which moulded the rocks, the

bones of the earth, and cast the sea and the far-stretched plains and

the hills about them like a covering of flesh. Therefore time and

death and nothingness are but shadows, which the intellect of man sets

over against the substance which lives and is eternally.

And thus in the vicissitudes of States, even more impressively than

elsewhere in the universal process of transformation which Nature is,

the daring metaphor of the Hebrew, "As a vesture shalt Thou change

them, and they shall be changed," seems realized. The death of a

State, the fall of an empire, are but phases in their history, by which

a complete self-realization is attained, or the perpetuation of their

ideals under other forms, as Egypt in Hellas, Hellas in Rome, is

secured.

In Portugal's short span of empire, her day of brief and troubled

splendour, her monarchs realize, even at the hazard of a temporary

eclipse of the nation's independence, the aspirations of the race,

which slowly arising, and growing in force and intensity, had become

the fixed, tyrannous desire of a people, until, in Camoens' terse

phrase of Manuel, "from that one great thought it never swerved."

Another policy and other aims than those which her monarchs

pursued--tolerance instead of fanaticism, prudence instead of heroism,

national patriotism instead of imperial, homely common sense instead of

glorious wisdom--all or any of these might have warded off the doom of

Portugal and of the house of Avis. Bur these things were not in the

blood of Lusitania, nor would this have been the nation of Vasco da

Gama and Camoens, of Alboquerque and Cabral. It is as vain to seek in

depopulation for the causes of the fall of Portugal as in the

Inquisition or the Papal power. Even Buckle, that mighty statistician,

would hardly risk the determining of the ratio which may not be

overstepped between the bounds of an empire and the extent of the

nation which creates it. If her yeomen forsook the fields and left the

soil of Portugal unfilled, if her chivalry forsook their estates, the

question confronts us: What is the character, the heart of a race which

acts in this manner? What is the ideal powerful enough to make the

hazard of a nation's death preferable to the abandonment of that ideal?

The nation which sent its bravest to die at Al-Kasr al Kebir[11] is not

a nation of adventurers. Nor do the instances of Phocaea, of the

Cimbri, or the Ostrogoths afford any analogy here. Dom Sebastian's

device fits not only his own career but the history of the race of

which at that epoch he was at once the king and the ideal hero--"A

glorious death makes the whole life glorious." And the genius of the

nation sanctioned his life and his heroic death. To Portugal Dom

Sebastian became such a figure as Frederick Barbarossa, dead on the

far-off crusade, had been to the Middle Age, and for two centuries,

whenever night thickened around the fortunes of the race, the spirit of

Dom Sebastian returned to illumine the gloom, showing himself to a few

faithful ones; and in very truth the spirit of his deeds and of their

fathers never died in the hearts of the Portuguese, inspiring whatever

is memorable in their later history.

Spain completes in the expulsion of the Moors the warfare, the Crusade,

which began with Pelayo and the remnant of the Visigoths. Spain, as

Spain, could not act otherwise, could not act as Germany acted, as

England acted. Venice, so far from abandoning the faith of the

Nazarene, as Ruskin fancied, barred of her commerce, seeing her power

pass to Portugal, did yet, solitary and unaided, face the Ottoman, and

for two generations made the Crusades live again. It is another

Venice, yet religion is not the cause of that otherness. She defies

Paul V in the name of freedom, in the days of Sarpi,[12] as she had

defied Innocent III in the name of empire in the days of Dandolo.

Hellas still lives, still forms an element, vitalizing and omnipresent,

in the life of States and in human destiny. Roman grandeur is not dead

whilst Sulla, Tacitus, Montesquieu, Machiavelli survive. To Petrarch

the Rome of the Scipios is more present than the Rome of the Colonnas,

and it numbers among its citizens Byron, Goethe, and Leopardi.

For like all great empires Rome strove not for herself but for

humanity, and dying, had yet strength, by her laws, her religion, her

language, to impart her spirit and the secret of her peace to other

races and to other times. In the world's _palaestra_ she had thrown

the _discus_ to a point which the empires that come after, dowered as

Rome was dowered, and by kindred ideals fired, must struggle to

surpass, or in this divine antagonism be broken.

For what does the fall of Rome mean, and what are its relations to this

Empire of Britain? In an earlier lecture I illustrated my conception

of the Rome of the fifth century in the similitude of a Goth bending

over a dead Roman, and by the flare of a torch seeking to read on the

still brow the secret of his own destiny. Rome does not die there.

Her genius lives on in the Gothic race, deep, penetrating, and

all-informing, and in the picked valour of that race, which for six

hundred years spends itself in forging England, it is deepest, most

penetrating, and all-informing. Roman definiteness of thought and act

were in that nation touched by mysticism to reverie and compassion.

From the ashes of the dead ideal of concrete justice, imaginative

justice is born. Right becomes righteousness, but the living genius

which was Rome still pulses within it. By the energy of feudalism the

ancient subjection of the individual to the State is challenged.

Freedom is born, but like some winged glory hovering aloft, rivets the

famished eyes of men, till at last, descending by the Rhine, it fills

with its radiance a darkened world. Religious oppression is stayed,

but, Phoenix-like, yet another ideal arises, and generations later,

what a temple is reared for it by the Seine! And now in this era, and

at this latest time, behold in England the glory has once more

alighted, as once for a brief space by the Rhine and Seine, but surely

to make here its lasting mansionry. For in very truth, in all that

freedom and all that justice possess of power towards good amongst men,

is not England as it were earth's central shrine and this race the

vanguard of humanity?

Rome was the synthesis of the empires of the past, of Hellas, of Egypt,

of Assyria. In her purposes their purposes lived. Mediaeval

imperialism strove not to rival Rome but to be Rome. In Britain the

spirit of Empire receives a new incarnation. The form decays, the

divine idea remains, the creative spirit gliding from this to that,

indestructible. And thus the destiny of empires involves the

consideration of the destiny of man.

[1] In Volkmann's edition of Plotinus, the sole attempt at a critical

text worthy of the name that has yet been made, the passage runs as

follows:

[Illustration: Greek text]

[2] Spinoza's answer to the "melancholici qui laudat vitam incultem et

agrestem" (iv Prop., 35, note), that men can provide for their needs

better by society than by solitude, hardly meets the higher criticism

of the State. Yet it anticipates Fichte's retort to Rousseau.

Spinoza, if this were written _circa_ 1665, has in view, perhaps, the

Trappists, then reorganized by Bossuet's friend, and perhaps also Port

Royal aux Champs.

[3] The writings of St. Augustine by their extraordinary variety, vast

intellectual range, and the impression of a distinct personal utterance

which flows from every page at which they are opened, exercise upon the

imagination an effect like that which the works of Diderot or Goethe

alone of moderns have the power to reproduce. The _De Civitate_ is his

greatest and most sustained effort, and though controversial in

intention it reaches again and again an epic sublimity both in imagery

and diction. The peoples and empires of the world are the heroes, and

the part which Augustine assigns to the God of all the earth has

curious reminiscences of the parts played by the deities in pagan

poetry. Over the style the influence of Virgil is supreme. Criticism

indeed offers few more alluring tasks than the attempt to gauge the

comparative effects of the Virgilian cadences upon the styles of the

men of after times who loved them most--Tacitus and St. Augustine,

Dante, Racine, and Flaubert.

[4] The _World-History_ of Otho of Freisingen was modelled upon the _De

Civitate_ of St. Augustine. He styles it the "Book of the Two Cities,"

_i.e._, Babylon and Jerusalem, and sketches from the mediaeval

standpoint the course of human life from the origin of the world to the

year A.D. 1146. His work on the Apocalypse and his impression of the

Last Judgment are a fitting close to the whole. He is uncritical in

the use of his materials, but conveys a distinct impression of his

habits of thought; and something of the brooding calm of a mediaeval

monastery invests the work. In the following year he started on the

crusade of Konrad III, his half-brother; but returning in safety, wrote

his admirable annals of the early deeds of the hero of the age, the

emperor Barbarossa.

[5] The origin, the meaning, the number, and even the gender of this

word have all been disputed. Thus the use of the original is

convenient as it avoids committal to any one of the numerous theories

of theologians or Hebraists. Delitzsch has sifted the evidence with

scrupulous care and impartiality, whilst Renan's monograph possesses

both erudition and charm.

[6] What figures from the _Comedie Humaine_ of Roman society of the

first century throng the pages of Tacitus--Sejanus, Arruntius, Piso,

Otho, Bassus, Caecina, Tigellinus, Lucanus, Petronius, Seneca, Corbulo,

Burrus, Silius, Drusus, Pallas, and Narcissus; and those tragic women

of the _Annals_--imperious, recklessly daring, beautiful or

loyal--Livia, Messalina, Vipsania, the two Agrippinas, mothers of

Caligula and of Nero, Urgulania, Sabina Poppaea, Epicharis, Lollia

Paulina, Lepida, Calpurnia, Pontia, Servilia, and Acte!

[7] In Richard Greneway's translation, London, 1598, one of the

earliest renderings of Tacitus into English, this passage stands as

follows:

"When I heare of these and the like things, I can give no certaine

judgement, whether the affaires of mortall men are governed by fate and

immutable necessitie; or have their course and change by chaunce and

fortune. For thou shalt finde, that as well those which were accounted

wise in auncient times, as such as were imitators of their sect, do

varie and disagree therein; some do resolutlie beleeve that the gods

have no care of man's beginning or ending; no, not of man at all.

Whereof it proceedeth that the vertuous are tossed and afflicted with

so many miseries; and the vitious (vicious) and bad triumphe with so

great prosperities. Contrarilie, others are of opinion that fate and

destinie may well stand with the course of our actions: yet nothing at

all depend of the planets or stars, but proceede from a connexion of

naturall causes as from their beginning. And these graunt withall,

that we have free choise and election what life to follow; which being

once chosen, we are guided after, by a certain order of causes unto our

end. Neither do they esteeme those things to be good or bad which the

vulgar do so call."

Murphy's frequent looseness of phraseology, false elegance, and futile

commentary, are nowhere more conspicuous than in his version of the

sixth book of the Annals and of this paragraph in particular.

[8] Life, Love, Fame, and Death are themes of Petrarch's _Triumphs_.

The same profound sense of the transiency of things, which meets us in

the studied pages of his confessional--the Latin treatise _De Contemptu

Mundi_--pervades these exquisite poems. Du Bellay's _Antiquities_,

which Spenser's translation under the title of _The Ruines of Rome_ has

made familiar, were written after a visit to Rome in attendance upon

the Cardinal du Bellay, and first published in 1558. The beautiful

_Songe sur Rome_ accompanied them. Two years later Du Bellay, then in

his thirty-fifth or thirty-sixth year, died. The preciousness of these

poems is enhanced rather than diminished if we imagine that the friend

of Ronsard endeavoured to wed the music of Villon's _Ballades_ to the

passing of empires and of Rome.

[9] In the generation succeeding that of St. Augustine, the fall of

Rome formed the subject of a work in six books by Zosimus, an official

of high rank at Constantinople. The fifth and sixth books deal with

the period between the death of Theodosius and the capture of the city

by Alaric (A.D. 395-410). Zosimus ascribes the disaster to the

revolution effected in the life and conduct of the Romans by the new

religion. The tone of the whole history is evidently inspired by the

brilliant but irregular works of the Syrian Eunapius whom hero-worship

and the regret for a lost cause blinded to all gave the imposing

designs of the Emperor Julian.

[10] Baber's own memoirs, _Memoirs of Zehir-ed-din Muhammed Baber,

emperor of Hindustan_, one of the priceless documents of history, show

the manner in which he conceived his mission. Here is his account of

the supreme incident in his spiritual life; "In January, 1527,

messengers came from Mehdi Khwajeh to announce that Sanka, the Rana of

Mewar, and Hassan Khan Mewati, were on their march from the west. On

February 11th I went forth to the Holy War. On the 25th I mounted to

survey my posts, and during the ride I was struck with the reflection

that I had always resolved to make an effectual repentance at some

period of my life. I now spoke with myself thus--'O my soul, how long

wilt thou continue to take pleasure in sin? Not bitter is repentance:

then taste it thou! Since the day wherein thou didst set forth on a

Holy War, thou hast seen Death before thine eyes for thy salvation.

And he who sacrificeth his life to save his soul shall attain that

exalted state thou wottest of.' Then I sent for the gold and the

silver goblets, and broke them, and drank wine no more, and purified my

heart. And having thus heard from the Voice that errs not, the tidings

of peace, and being now for the first time a Mussulman indeed, I

commanded that the Holy War shall begin with the grand war against the

evil in our hearts." Such was the mood in which, on the 24th of the

first Jemadi, A.H. 933, Baber proceeded to found the Mogul Empire.

[11] The battle of Al-Kasr al Kebir, in Morocco, about fifty miles

south of Tangiers, was fought on August 4th, 1578. The king, Dom

Sebastian, and the flower of the Portuguese nobility died on the field.

As in Scotland after Flodden, there was not a house of name in Portugal

which had not its dead to mourn.

[12] The genius of this great thinker, patriot, scholar, and historian,

along with the heroism of the war of Candia, "the longest and most

memorable siege on record," as Voltaire designates it, throw a dying

lustre over the Venice of the seventeenth century, which in painting

has then but such names as those of Podovanino and the younger

Cagliari. Sarpi's defence of Venice against Paul V, an attorney in the

seat of Hildebrand, occurred in 1605. It consists of two works--the

_Tractate_ and the _Considerations_--and probably of a third drawn up

for the secret use of the Council of Ten. Like Voltaire, Sarpi seems

to have lived with a pen in his hand. His manuscripts in the Venice

archives fill twenty-nine folio volumes. The first collected edition

of his works was published, not unfitly, in the year of the fall of the

Bastille.

LECTURE VII

THE DESTINY OF IMPERIAL BRITAIN AND THE DESTINY OF MAN

[_Tuesday, July_ 10_th_, 1900]

Though life itself and all its modes are transient, but shadows cast

through the richly-tinted veil of Maya upon the everlasting deep of

things, yet such dreams as those of perpetual peace and of empires

exempt from degeneration and decay, like the illusion of perpetual

happiness, the prayer of Spinoza for some one "supreme, continuous,

unending bliss," have mocked man from the beginning of recorded history

to the present hour. They are ancient as the rocks and their musings

from eternity, inextinguishable as the _elan_ of the soul imprisoned in

time towards that which is beyond time.

And yet the effect of these, as of all false illusions, is but to

render the value of Reality--I had almost said of the real

Illusion--more poignant. Indeed, "false" and "unreal" at all times are

mere designations we apply to the hours of dim and uncertain vision[1]

when tested by the standard which the moments of perfect insight afford.

Nothing is more tedious, yet nothing is more instructive, than the

study of the formulated ideals, the imagings of what life might be or

life ought to be, of poets or of systematic philosophers. Nothing so

instantly reconciles us to war as the delineations of humanity under

"meek-eyed Peace"; and to the passing of visible things, empires,

states, arts, laws, and this universal frame of things, as such

attempts as have been made to stay time and change, and abrogate the

ordinances of the world.

Was machst du an der Welt? sie ist schon gemacht.

Why shapest thou the world? 'twas shapen long ago.[2]

Nor does this result in the mood of Candide. The effort unconquered

and unending to behold the visible and the passing as in very truth it

is, leads to a deeper vision of the Unseen and of the Eternal as in

very truth it is.

Thus we are prepared to consider the following question. Given that

death is nothing, and the decline of empires but a change of form, will

this empire of Imperial Britain also decline and fall? Will the form

it now enshrines pass away, as the forms of Persia, Rome, the Empire of

Akbar, have passed away? The question resolves itself into two

parts--in what does the youth of a race or of an empire consist? And,

secondly, is it possible by any analogy from the past to measure or

gauge the possible or probable duration of Imperial Britain, to

determine to what era, say in the history of such an empire as Rome or

Islam, the present era in the history of Imperial Britain corresponds?

Sec.1. THE PRESENT STAGE IN THE HISTORY OF IMPERIAL BRITAIN

First of all with regard to the former question. Recent studies in

ethnology have made it clear that youth, and all that this term implies

of latent or realized energies, mental, physical, intellectual, is not

the inevitable attribute and exclusive possession of uncivilized or of

recently civilized races. Yet this assumption still underlies much of

the current speculation on the subject. Last century it was received

as an axiomatic truth. Thus in the time of Louis XV, when a romantic

interest first invested the American Indians, French writers saw in

them the prototypes of the Germans described by Tacitus. Not only

Voltaire and Rousseau, but Montesquieu himself, regard them curiously,

as if in the backwoods dwelt the future dominators of the world.

Comparisons were drawn between their manners, their religion, their

customs, and those of the Goths and the Franks, and _litterateurs_

indulged the fancy that in delineating the Hurons of the Mississippi

they were preparing for posterity a literary surprise and a document

lasting as the _Germania_. Such comparisons are still at times made,

but they are like the comparison between a rising and a receding tide;

both trace the same line along the sands, but it is the same tide only

in appearance. It is the contrast between the simplicity of childhood

and of senility, between the simplicity of a race dowered with

many-sided genius and of a race dowered with but one-sided genius. It

is neither in the absence of civilization, nor in its newness, that the

youth of a race consists; nor does the old age of a race consist in

refinement, nor capacity for the arts necessarily imply decline of

political energy. The victories of the Germans in 1870 were like

Fate's ironic comment upon the inferences drawn from their love of

philosophy. Abstract thought had not unfitted the race for war, nor

"Wertherism" for the battlefield.

But, as in the life of the individual, so in the life of a race, youth

consists in capacity for enthusiasm for a great ideal, capacity to

frame, resolution to pursue, devotion to sacrifice all to a great

political end. Russia, for instance, has only recently come within the

influence of European culture, but this does not make the Slav a

youthful race. The Slavonic is indeed perhaps the oldest people in

Europe. Its literature, its art, its music, the characteristics of its

society alike attest this. Superstition is not youth, else we might

look to the hut of the Samoyede even with more confidence than to the

cabin of the Moujik for the imperial race of the future. And

prolificness in a race does as surely denote resignation to be

governed, as the genius to govern others.

And the Slav, as we have seen, has at no period of his history shown

that "youth" which consists in capacity for a great political ideal,

either in Poland, or amongst the Czechs, or in Russia.

The present German empire assuredly exhibits in nothing the qualities

of ancient lineage; yet the race which composes it is the same race as

was once united under Hapsburg, under Luxemburg, under Hohenstauffen,

and under Franconian, as now under the Hohenzollern dynasty.

The United States as a nation bear the same relation to Britain as the

Moorish kingdom in Spain bore to the Saracenic empire of Bagdad. It is

a fragment, a colossal fragment torn from the central mass; but not

only in its language, its literature, its religion and its laws, but in

individual and national peculiarities, at least in the deeper moments

of history and of life, the original stock asserts itself. The State

is young; but the race is precisely of the same remoteness as Britain

and the Greater Britain.

Passing to the second point--at what epoch do we now stand as compared

with Rome or Islam? It is not unusual to speak of Britain as an aged

empire, but such estimates or descriptions commonly rest upon a

misapprehension, first, of the period in which the Nation of England

strictly speaking arises, and secondly, of the period in which the

Empire of Britain arises.

The traditional date of the landing of Hengist does not indicate a

moment analogous to the moment in the history of Rome marked by the

traditional date of the foundation of the city. The date 776 B.C.

marks the close of a process of transformation and slow revolving unity

extending over centuries, so that the era of Romulus and the early

kings, Numa, Ancus, and Servius, may be regarded as an epoch in Rome's

history analogous to the period in England's history between Senlac and

the constitutional struggle of the thirteenth century. The former is

the period in which the civic unity of Rome is completed. The latter

is the period in which the national unity of England is completed.

Rome is now finally conscious to itself of its career as a city, _urbs

Roma_, as England in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries is finally

conscious to itself of its career as a nation. Magna Carta and the

constitutional struggle which followed may be said to determine the

course of the national and political life of England as much as the

Servian Code founded the civic unity and determined the character of

the constitutional life of Rome.

And, as was pointed out in an earlier lecture, already in Rome and in

England there are premonitions, foreshadowings of the future. The

design of the city on the seven hills is the design of the eternal

city, and the devotion of the _gens Fabia_ announces the Roman legion.

And in those wars of Crecy and Poitiers, the constancy, the dauntless

heart, and the steady hand of the English archers, which broke the

chivalry of France, what is it but the constancy of Waterloo, the

squares, the charge, the Duke's words, spoken quietly as the words of

fate, decreeing an empire's fall, "Stand up, Guards!"? And in 1381,

the tramp of the feet of the hurrying peasants, sons and grandsons of

the archers of Crecy, in the great Revolt, indignant at ingratitude and

wrong, what is it but the prelude to the supremacy of the People of

England, to the Petition of Right, to Cromwell's Ironsides, to Chartism

and Reform Acts, and the Democracy, self-governing, imperial and

warlike of the present hour? So that even as a nation, about eighteen

generations may be said to sum England's life, whilst, as we have seen,

Britain's conscious life as an empire extends backwards but to three

generations or to four. Thus if the question were asked, With what

period in the history of Rome does the present age correspond? I

should say, roughly speaking, it corresponds with the period of Titus

and Vespasian, when Rome has still a course of three hundred years to

run; and in the history of Islam, with the period of the early

Abbassides, when the fall of the Saracenic dominion is still some four

centuries removed.

Does this justify us in inferring that the course which England has to

run will extend still over three centuries and that then England too

will pass away, as Rome, as the Saracenic empire, have passed away? So

far as the determination of the eras in our history which correspond in

development to eras in the history of Rome or of Islam is concerned,

the inference from analogy possesses a certain validity. And the

accidental or fixed resemblances between the empires of Islam,[3] Rome,

and Imperial Britain are numerous and striking enough to render such

comparisons of real significance to speculative politics. But the

similarity in structural expansion or in environment which can be

traced throughout the completed dramas of Rome and Islam is to be found

only in the initial stages of Imperial Britain. Then the argument from

analogy fails, and our judgment is at a stand.

Assuming that each imperial race starts its career dowered with a vital

capacity of definite range, and allowing for the necessary divergences

in their course between a civic and a national state. Imperial

Britain, regarded from its past, may be said in the present era to have

reached a stage represented by the era of Vespasian and Titus; but to

proceed further is perilous, so momentous is the distinction that now

arises between the circumstances of the two empires. During the

present century the vast transformations which have been effected by

science in the surroundings of man's physical life make all speculation

upon the duration of Imperial Britain by analogies drawn from the

duration either of Rome or of other empires, indecisive or rash.

The growth of the idea of freedom, and the modern interpretation of

that idea in the spirit of Condorcet, have, within the bounds of the

English nation itself, increased the intercourse between ranks to a

degree unparalleled in the ancient world. The self-recuperative powers

of the race have been strengthened by the course of its political and

religious history. Fresh blood adds new energy to effete stocks. The

effect of this restorative power from within is heightened in manifold

ways by such a circumstance as the enormous facilities of locomotion

which have arisen during the past two generations.

In the age of the first conscious beginnings of Imperial Britain, the

communication between the regions of the empire was as difficult as in

the Rome of Sulla; but the development of that consciousness has been

synchronous, not only with increased intercourse between the ranks of

the same nation, but with increased intercourse between all the various

climes of an empire upon which the sun never sets. From city to city,

from town to town, from province to province, from colony to colony,

emigration and immigration, change and interchange of vast masses of

the population are incessant. This increased intercommunication

between the various members of the race, the influences of the change

of climate upon the individual, aided by such imperceptible but

many-sided forces as spring from the diffusion of knowledge and

culture, mark a revolution in the vital resources and the environment

in the British, as distinguished from the Saracenic or Roman race, so

extraordinary that all analogy beyond the point which we have indicated

is impossible, or so guarded by intricate hypotheses as to be useless

or misleading.

Nature seems pondering some vast and new experiment, and an empire has

arisen whose future course, whether we consider its political or its

economic, its physical or its mental resources, leaves conjecture

behind. The world-stage is set as for the opening of a drama which, at

least in the magnitude of its incidents and the imposing circumstance

of its action, will make the former achievements of men dwindle and

seem of little account.

Sec. 2. THE DESTINY OF MAN

At this point we may fitly close our survey, and these "Reflections,"

by endeavouring to determine, not the remote future of Imperial

Britain, but its immediate task, Fate's mandate to the present, and as

we have considered Imperial Britain in its relations to the destiny of

past empires, pause for a moment in conclusion upon its relations to

the destiny of man.

To the ancient world, man in his march across the deserts of Time had

left felicity and the golden age far beyond him, and Rousseau's vision

of Humanity as starting upon a wrong track, and drifting ever farther

from the path of its peace, had charmed the melancholy or the despair

of Virgil and his great master in verse and speculation, Titus

Lucretius.

This conception of man's destiny as an infinite retrogression, Eden

receding behind Eden, lost Paradise behind lost Paradise, in the

dateless past, encounters us, now as a myth, now as a religious or

philosophic tenet, throughout the earlier history of humanity from the

Baltic to the Indian Sea, from the furthest Orient to the Western

Isles. Besides this radiant past even the vision of the abode which

awaits the soul at death seems dusky and repellent, a land of twilight,

as in the Etruscan legend, or that dominion over the shades which

Achilles loathed beyond any mortal misery.

But the memory or the imagination of this land far behind, upon which

Heaven's light for ever falls, the Asgard of the Goths, the Akkadian

dream of Sin-land ruled by the Yellow Emperor, the reign of Saturn and

of Ops, diminishes in power and living energy as the ages advance, and,

perishing at last, is embalmed in the cold and crystal loveliness of

poetry. In its place bright mansions, elysian groves, await the soul

at death. Heaven closes around earth like a protecting smile, and from

this hope of a recovered Paradise and new Edens amongst the stars,

which to Dante and his time are but the earth's appanage, man advances

swiftly to the desire, the hope, the certainty of a terrestrial

Paradise waiting his race in the near or remote future. Thus, as the

immanence of the Divine within the soul of man has deepened, and the

desire of his heart has grown nearer the desire of the world-soul, so

has the power of memory decreased and been transformed into hope. Man,

tossed from illusion to illusion, has grown sensitive to the least

intimations of Reality.

But these visions of Eden, whether located in a remote past, or in the

interstellar spaces, or in the near future, have certain

characteristics in common. From far behind to far in front the dream

has shifted, as if the Northern Lights had moved from horizon to

horizon, but it remains one dream. The earthly Paradise of the social

reformer, a Saint-Simon or a Fourier, of a world free from war and

devoted to agriculture and commerce, or of the philosophic

evolutionist, of a world peopled by myriads of happy altruists bounding

from bath to breakfast-room, illumined and illumining by their healthy

and mutual smiles, differs from the earlier fancies of Asgard and the

Isles of the Blest, not in heightened nobility and reasonableness, but

in diminished beauty and poetry. The dream of unending progress is

vain as the dream of unending regress.[4]

Critics of literature and philosophy have often remarked how sterile

are the efforts to delineate a state of perfect and long-continued

bliss, even when a Dante or a Milton undertakes the task, compared with

delineations of torment and endless woe. And Aeschylus has remarked,

and La Rochefoucauld and Helvetius bear him out, how much easier a man

finds the effort to sympathize with another's misery than to rejoice in

his joy.

Such contrasts are due, not to a faltering imagination, nor to the

depravity of the human heart. They are the recognition by the dark

Unconscious, which in sincerity of vision ever transcends the

Conscious, that in man's life truth dwells not with felicity, that to

the soul imprisoned in Time and Space, whether amongst the stars or on

this earth, perfect peace is a mockery. But in Time, misery is the

soul's familiar, anguish is the gate of truth, and the highest moments

of bliss are, as the Socrates of Plato affirms, negative. They are the

moments of oblivion, when the manacles of Time fall off, whether from

stress of agony or delight or mere weariness. Therefore with

stammering lips man congratulates joy, but the response of grief to

grief is quick and from the heart, sanctioned by the Unconscious;

therefore in the portraiture of Heaven art fails, but in that of Hell

succeeds.

It is not in Time that the eternal can find rest, nor in Space that the

infinite can find repose, and as illusion follows lost illusion, the

soul of man does but the more completely realize the wonder ineffable

of the only reality, the Eternal Now.

Sec. 3. THE FOUR PERIODS OF MODERN HISTORY AND THEIR IDEALS

The deepening of this conception of man's destiny as beginning in the

Infinite and in the Infinite ending, is one of the profoundest and most

significant features of the present age. Its dominion over art,

literature, religion, can no longer escape us. It is the dominant note

of the last of the four great ages or epochs into which the history of

the thought of modern Europe, in an ever-ascending scale, divides

itself. A brief review of these four epochs will best prepare us for a

consideration of the present position of Britain, and of the relations

of its empire to the actual conditions of Europe and humanity.

The First Age is controlled by the Saintly Ideal. The European of that

age is a visionary. The unseen world is to him more real than the

seen, and art and poetry exist but to decorate the pilgrimage of the

soul from earth to heaven. The new Jerusalem which Tertullian saw

night by night descend in the sunset; the city of God, whose shining

battlements Saint Augustine beheld gleam through the smoke of the

world-conflagration of the era of Alaric and Attila, of Vandal and

Goth, Frank and Hun; the Day of Wrath and Judgment which later times

looked forward to as certainly as to the coming of spring, are but

phases of one pervading aspiration, one passioning cry of the soul.

But the illusion which lures on that age fades when the ascetic zeal of

the saint is frustrated by the joy of life, and the crusader's valour

is broken on the Moslem lances, and the scholastic's indefatigable

pursuit of a harmonizing, a reconciling word of reason and of faith,

his ardour not less lofty than the crusader's to pierce the

ever-thickening host of doubts, discords, fears, fall all in ruins, in

accepted defeat or in formulated despair.

With the Second Age a new illusion arises, the _Wahn_ of religious

freedom. The ideal which Rome taught the world, upon which saint,

crusader, and scholar built their hopes, turned to ashes--but shall not

the human soul find the haven of its rest in freedom from Rome, in the

pure faith of primitive times? When the last of the scholastics was

being silenced by a papal edict and the consciousness of a hopeless

task, the first of the new scholars was ushering in the world-drama of

four centuries.

The world-historic significance of the Reformation lies in the effort

of the European mind to pierce, at least in the sphere of Religion,

nearer to the truth. The successive phases of this struggle may be

compared to a vast tetralogy, with a Prelude of which the actors and

setting are Huss and Jerome, the Council of Constance and Sigismund,

the traitor of traitors, who gave John Huss "the word of a king," and

Huss, solitary at the stake, when the flames wrapped him around,

learned the value of the word of a king. Martin Luther is the

protagonist of the first of the four great dramas that follow. Its

theme is the consecration of man to sincerity in his relations to God.

There, even at the hazard of death, the tongue shall utter what the

heart thinks.

The second drama is named _Ignatius Loyola_; the theme is not less

absorbing--"Art thou then so sure of the truth and of thy sincerity, O

my brother?" Whatever his followers may have become, Don Inigo remains

one of the most baffling enigmas that historical psychology offers.

From his grave he rules the Council, and the Tridentine Decrees are the

acknowledgment of his unseen sovereignty.

What tragic shapes arise and crowd the stage of the third drama--Thurn,

Ferdinand, Tilly, Wallenstein, Richelieu, Gustavus, Conde, Oxenstiern!

And when the last actors of the fourth drama, the conflict between

moribund Jesuitism and Protestantism grown arrogant and prosperous, lay

aside their masks in the world's great tiring-room of death, a new Age

in world-history has begun.

As religious freedom is the _Wahn_ of the Reformation drama, so it is

in political freedom that the Eternal Illusion now incarnates itself.

Let man be free, let man throughout the earth attain the unfettered use

of all his faculties, and heaven's light will once more fill all the

dark places of the world! This is the new avatar, this the glad

tidings which announce the French Revolution and the Third Age. Of

this ideal, the faith in which the French Girondins die is the most

perfect expression. What is this faith for which Condorcet and his

party perish, some by poison, some by the sword, some by the

guillotine, some in battle, but all by violent deaths--Vergniaud,

Roland, Barbaroux, Brissot, Barnave, Gensonne, Petion, Buzot, Isnard?

"Oh Liberty, what crimes are done in thy name!" was not a reproach,

but, in the gladness of the martyr's death which consecrated all the

life, it was the wonder, the disquiet of a moment yet sure of its peace

in some deeper reconcilement. Behold how strong is their faith! Marie

Antoinette has her faith, the injunction of her priest, "When in doubt

or in affliction, think of Calvary." Yet the hair of the Queen

whitens, her spirit despairs. The Girondinist queen climbing the

scaffold, not less a lover of love and of life than Marie

Antoinette--what nerves her? It is the star of the future and the

memory of Vergniaud's phrase, "Posterity? What have we to do with

posterity? Perish our memory, but let France be free!"

How free are their souls, what nobility shines in the eyes of these

men, light-stepping to their doom, immortally serene, these martyrs,

witnesses to an ideal not less pure, not less lofty than those other

two for which saint and reformer died! And their battle-march, which

is also their hymn of death, Shelley has composed it, the choral chant,

the vision of the future of the world, which closes _Hellas_.

This faith, in which the Girondins live and die is the hope, the faith

that slowly arises in Europe through the eighteenth century, in

political freedom as the regenerator, as the salvation of the world.

Voltaire announces the coming of the Third Age--"Blessed are the young,

for their eyes shall behold it"--and upon the ruins of the Bastille

Charles James Fox sees it arise. "By how much," he writes to a friend,

"is not this the greatest event in the history of the world!" Its

presence shakes the steadfast heart of Goethe like a reed. Wordsworth,

Schiller, Chateaubriand pledge themselves its hierophants--for a time!

The _Wahn_ of freedom, the eternal illusion, the dream of the human

heart! First to France, then to Europe, then to all the earth--Freedom!