the whole evolution of humanity,--their single history is not the whole
history of man; whereas their admirers are always apt to make it stand
for the whole history. Hebraism and Hellenism are, neither of them, the
_law_ of human development, as their admirers are prone to make them;
they are, each of them, _contributions_ to human development,--august
contributions, invaluable contributions; and each showing itself to us
more august, more invaluable, more preponderant over the other,
according to the moment in which we take them, and the relation in which
we stand to them. The nations of our modern world, children of that
immense and salutary movement which broke up the pagan world, inevitably
stand to Hellenism in a relation which dwarfs it, and to Hebraism in a
relation which magnifies it. They are inevitably prone to take Hebraism
as the law of human development, and not as simply a contribution to it,
however precious. And yet the lesson must perforce be learned, that the
human spirit is wider than the most priceless of the forces which bear
it onward, and that to the whole development of man Hebraism itself is,
like Hellenism, but a contribution.
Perhaps we may help ourselves to see this clearer by an illustration
drawn from the treatment of a single great idea which has profoundly
engaged the human spirit, and has given it eminent opportunities for
showing its nobleness and energy. It surely must be perceived that the
idea of immortality, as this idea rises in its generality before the
human spirit, is something grander, truer, and more satisfying, than it
is in the particular forms by which St. Paul, in the famous fifteenth
chapter of the Epistle to the Corinthians, and Plato, in the
_Phaedo_[457] endeavor to develop and establish it. Surely we cannot but
feel, that the argumentation with which the Hebrew apostle goes about to
expound this great idea is, after all, confused and inconclusive; and
that the reasoning, drawn from analogies of likeness and equality, which
is employed upon it by the Greek philosopher, is over-subtle and
sterile. Above and beyond the inadequate solutions which Hebraism and
Hellenism here attempt, extends the immense and august problem itself,
and the human spirit which gave birth to it. And this single
illustration may suggest to us how the same thing happens in other cases
also.
But meanwhile, by alternations of Hebraism and Hellenism, of a man's
intellectual and moral impulses, of the effort to see things as they
really are, and the effort to win peace by self-conquest, the human
spirit proceeds; and each of these two forces has its appointed hours of
culmination and seasons of rule. As the great movement of Christianity
was a triumph of Hebraism and man's moral impulses, so the great
movement which goes by the name of the Renascence[458] was an uprising
and reinstatement of man's intellectual impulses and of Hellenism. We in
England, the devoted children of Protestantism, chiefly know the
Renascence by its subordinate and secondary side of the Reformation. The
Reformation has been often called a Hebraizing revival, a return to the
ardor and sincereness of primitive Christianity. No one, however, can
study the development of Protestantism and of Protestant churches
without feeling that into the Reforrmation, too,--Hebraizing child of
the Renascence and offspring of its fervor, rather than its
intelligence, as it undoubtedly was,--the subtle Hellenic leaven of the
Renascence found its way, and that the exact respective parts, in the
Reformation, of Hebraism and of Hellenism, are not easy to separate. But
what we may with truth say is, that all which Protestantism was to
itself clearly conscious of, all which it succeeded in clearly setting
forth in words, had the characters of Hebraism rather than of Hellenism.
The Reformation was strong, in that it was an earnest return to the
Bible and to doing from the heart the will of God as there written. It
was weak, in that it never consciously grasped or applied the central
idea of the Renascence,--the Hellenic idea of pursuing, in all lines of
activity, the law and science, to use Plato's words, of things as they
really are. Whatever direct superiority, therefore, Protestantism had
over Catholicism was a moral superiority, a superiority arising out of
its greater sincerity and earnestness,--at the moment of its apparition
at any rate,--in dealing with the heart and conscience. Its pretensions
to an intellectual superiority are in general quite illusory. For
Hellenism, for the thinking side in man as distinguished from the acting
side, the attitude of mind of Protestantism towards the Bible in no
respect differs from the attitude of mind of Catholicism towards the
Church. The mental habit of him who imagines that Balaam's ass spoke, in
no respect differs from the mental habit of him who imagines that a
Madonna of wood or stone winked; and the one, who says that God's Church
makes him believe what he believes, and the other, who says that God's
Word makes him believe what he believes, are for the philosopher
perfectly alike in not really and truly knowing, when they say _God's
Church_ and _God's Word_, what it is they say, or whereof they affirm.
In the sixteenth century, therefore, Hellenism re-entered the world,
and again stood in presence of Hebraism,--a Hebraism renewed and purged.
Now, it has not been enough observed, how, in the seventeenth century, a
fate befell Hellenism in some respects analogous to that which befell it
at the commencement of our era. The Renascence, that great reawakening
of Hellenism, that irresistible return of humanity to nature and to
seeing things as they are, which in art, in literature, and in physics,
produced such splendid fruits, had, like the anterior Hellenism of the
pagan world, a side of moral weakness and of relaxation or insensibility
of the moral fibre, which in Italy showed itself with the most startling
plainness, but which in France, England, and other countries was very
apparent, too. Again this loss of spiritual balance, this exclusive
preponderance given to man's perceiving and knowing side, this unnatural
defect of his feeling and acting side, provoked a reaction. Let us trace
that reaction where it most nearly concerns us.
Science has now made visible to everybody the great and pregnant
elements of difference which lie in race, and in how signal a manner
they make the genius and history of an Indo-European people vary from
those of a Semitic people. Hellenism is of Indo-European growth,
Hebraism is of Semitic growth; and we English, a nation of Indo-European
stock, seem to belong naturally to the movement of Hellenism. But
nothing more strongly marks the essential unity of man, than the
affinities we can perceive, in this point or that, between members of
one family of peoples and members of another. And no affinity of this
kind is more strongly marked than that likeness in the strength and
prominence of the moral fibre, which, notwithstanding immense elements
of difference, knits in some special sort the genius and history of us
English, and our American descendants across the Atlantic, to the genius
and history of the Hebrew people. Puritanism, which has been so great a
power in the English nation, and in the strongest part of the English
nation, was originally the reaction in the seventeenth century of the
conscience and moral sense of our race, against the moral indifference
and lax rule of conduct which in the sixteenth century came in with the
Renascence. It was a reaction of Hebraism against Hellenism; and it
powerfully manifested itself, as was natural, in a people with much of
what we call a Hebraizing turn, with a signal affinity for the bent
which, was the master-bent of Hebrew life. Eminently Indo-European by
its _humor_, by the power it shows, through this gift, of imaginatively
acknowledging the multiform aspects of the problem of life, and of thus
getting itself unfixed from its own over-certainty, of smiling at its
own over-tenacity, our race has yet (and a great part of its strength
lies here), in matters of practical life and moral conduct, a strong
share of the assuredness, the tenacity, the intensity of the Hebrews.
This turn manifested itself in Puritanism, and has had a great part in
shaping our history for the last two hundred years. Undoubtedly it
checked and changed amongst us that movement of the Renascence which we
see producing in the reign of Elizabeth such wonderful fruits.
Undoubtedly it stopped the prominent rule and direct development of that
order of ideas which we call by the name of Hellenism, and gave the
first rank to a different order of ideas. Apparently, too, as we said of
the former defeat of Hellenism, if Hellenism was defeated, this shows
that Hellenism was imperfect, and that its ascendency at that moment
would not have been for the world's good.
Yet there is a very important difference between the defeat inflicted on
Hellenism by Christianity eighteen hundred years ago, and the check
given to the Renascence by Puritanism. The greatness of the difference
is well measured by the difference in force, beauty, significance, and
usefulness, between primitive Christianity and Protestantism. Eighteen
hundred years ago it was altogether the hour of Hebraism. Primitive
Christianity was legitimately and truly the ascendant force in the world
at that time, and the way of mankind's progress lay through its full
development. Another hour in man's development began in the fifteenth
century, and the main road of his progress then lay for a time through
Hellenism. Puritanism was no longer the central current of the world's
progress, it was a side stream crossing the central current and checking
it. The cross and the check may have been necessary and salutary, but
that does not do away with the essential difference between the main
stream of man's advance and a cross or side stream. For more than two
hundred years the main stream of man's advance has moved towards knowing
himself and the world, seeing things as they are, spontaneity of
consciousness; the main impulse of a great part, and that the strongest
part, of our nation has been towards strictness of conscience. They have
made the secondary the principal at the wrong moment, and the principal
they have at the wrong moment treated as secondary. This contravention
of the natural order has produced, as such contravention always must
produce, a certain confusion and false movement, of which we are now
beginning to feel, in almost every direction, the inconvenience. In all
directions our habitual causes of action seem to be losing
efficaciousness, credit, and control, both with others and even with
ourselves. Everywhere we see the beginnings of confusion, and we want a
clue to some sound order and authority. This we can only get by going
back upon the actual instincts and forces which rule our life, seeing
them as they really are, connecting them with other instincts and
forces, and enlarging our whole view and rule of life.
EQUALITY[459]
When we talk of man's advance towards his full humanity, we think of an
advance, not along one line only, but several. Certain races and
nations, as we know, are on certain lines preëminent and representative.
The Hebrew nation was preëminent on one great line. "What nation," it
was justly asked by their lawgiver, "hath statutes and judgments so
righteous as the law which I set before you this day? Keep therefore and
do them; for this is your wisdom and your understanding in the sight of
the nations which shall hear all these statutes and say: Surely this
great nation is a wise and understanding people!" The Hellenic race was
preëminent on other lines. Isocrates[460] could say of Athens: "Our city
has left the rest of the world so far behind in philosophy and
eloquence, that those educated by Athens have become the teachers of the
rest of mankind; and so well has she done her part, that the name of
Greeks seems no longer to stand for a race but to stand for intelligence
itself, and they who share in our culture are called Greeks even before
those who are merely of our own blood." The power of intellect and
science, the power of beauty, the power of social life and manners,--
these are what Greece so felt, and fixed, and may stand for. They are
great elements in our humanization. The power of conduct is another
great element; and this was so felt and fixed by Israel that we can
never with justice refuse to permit Israel, in spite of all his
shortcomings, to stand for it.
So you see that in being humanized we have to move along several lines,
and that on certain lines certain nations find their strength and take a
lead. We may elucidate the thing yet further. Nations now existing may
be said to feel or to have felt the power of this or that element in our
humanization so signally that they are characterized by it. No one who
knows this country would deny that it is characterized, in a remarkable
degree, by a sense of the power of conduct. Our feeling for religion is
one part of this; our industry is another. What foreigners so much
remark in us--our public spirit, our love, amidst all our liberty, for
public order and for stability--are parts of it too. Then the power of
beauty was so felt by the Italians that their art revived, as we know,
the almost lost idea of beauty, and the serious and successful pursuit
of it. Cardinal Antonelli,[461] speaking to me about the education of
the common people in Rome, said that they were illiterate, indeed, but
whoever mingled with them at any public show, and heard them pass
judgment on the beauty or ugliness of what came before them,--"_e
brutto_," "_e bello_,"--would find that their judgment agreed admirably,
in general, with just what the most cultivated people would say. Even at
the present time, then, the Italians are preëminent in feeling the power
of beauty. The power of knowledge, in the same way, is eminently an
influence with the Germans. This by no means implies, as is sometimes
supposed, a high and fine general culture. What it implies is a strong
sense of the necessity of knowing _scientifically_, as the expression
is, the things which have to be known by us; of knowing them
systematically, by the regular and right process, and in the only real
way. And this sense the Germans especially have. Finally, there is the
power of social life and manners. And even the Athenians themselves,
perhaps, have hardly felt this power so much as the French.
Voltaire, in a famous passage[462] where he extols the age of Louis the
Fourteenth and ranks it with the chief epochs in the civilization of our
race, has to specify the gift bestowed on us by the age of Louis the
Fourteenth, as the age of Pericles, for instance, bestowed on us its art
and literature, and the Italian Renascence its revival of art and
literature. And Voltaire shows all his acuteness in fixing on the gift
to name. It is not the sort of gift which we expect to see named. The
great gift of the age of Louis the Fourteenth to the world, says
Voltaire, was this: _l'esprit de société_, the spirit of society, the
social spirit. And another French writer, looking for the good points in
the old French nobility, remarks that this at any rate is to be said in
their favor: they established a high and charming ideal of social
intercourse and manners, for a nation formed to profit by such an ideal,
and which has profited by it ever since. And in America, perhaps, we see
the disadvantages of having social equality before there has been any
such high standard of social life and manners formed.
We are not disposed in England, most of us, to attach all this
importance to social intercourse and manners. Yet Burke says: "There
ought to be a system of manners in every nation which a well-formed mind
would be disposed to relish." And the power of social life and manners
is truly, as we have seen, one of the great elements in our
humanization. Unless we have cultivated it, we are incomplete. The
impulse for cultivating it is not, indeed, a moral impulse. It is by no
means identical with the moral impulse to help our neighbor and to do
him good. Yet in many ways it works to a like end. It brings men
together, makes them feel the need of one another, be considerate of one
another, understand one another. But, above all things, it is a promoter
of equality. It is by the humanity of their manners that men are made
equal. "A man thinks to show himself my equal," says Goethe, "by being
_grob_,--that is to say, coarse and rude; he does not show himself my
equal, he shows himself _grob_." But a community having humane manners
is a community of equals, and in such a community great social
inequalities have really no meaning, while they are at the same time a
menace and an embarrassment to perfect ease of social intercourse. A
community with the spirit of society is eminently, therefore, a
community with the spirit of equality. A nation with a genius for
society, like the French or the Athenians, is irresistibly drawn towards
equality. From the first moment when the French people, with its
congenital sense for the power of social intercourse and manners, came
into existence, it was on the road to equality. When it had once got a
high standard of social manners abundantly established, and at the same
time the natural, material necessity for the feudal inequality of
classes and property pressed upon it no longer, the French people
introduced equality and made the French Revolution. It was not the
spirit of philanthropy which mainly impelled the French to that
Revolution, neither was it the spirit of envy, neither was it the love
of abstract ideas, though all these did something towards it; but what
did most was the spirit of society.
The well-being of the many comes out more and more distinctly, in
proportion as time goes on, as the object we must pursue. An individual
or a class, concentrating their efforts upon their own well-being
exclusively, do but beget troubles both for others and for themselves
also. No individual life can be truly prosperous, passed, as Obermann
says, in the midst of men who suffer; _passée au milieu des générations
qui souffrent_. To the noble soul, it cannot be happy; to the ignoble,
it cannot be secure. Socialistic and communistic schemes have generally,
however, a fatal defect; they are content with too low and material a
standard of well-being. That instinct of perfection, which is the
master-power in humanity, always rebels at this, and frustrates the
work. Many are to be made partakers of well-being, true; but the ideal
of well-being is not to be, on that account, lowered and coarsened. M.
de Laveleye,[463] the political economist, who is a Belgian and a
Protestant, and whose testimony, therefore, we may the more readily take
about France, says that France, being the country of Europe where the
soil is more divided than anywhere except in Switzerland and Norway, is
at the same time the country where material well-being is most widely
spread, where wealth has of late years increased most, and where
population is least outrunning the limits, which, for the comfort and
progress of the working classes themselves, seem necessary. This may go
for a good deal. It supplies an answer to what Sir Erskine May[464] says
about the bad effects of equality upon French prosperity. But I will
quote to you from Mr. Hamerton[465] what goes, I think, for yet more.
Mr. Hamerton is an excellent observer and reporter, and has lived for
many years in France. He says of the French peasantry that they are
exceedingly ignorant. So they are. But he adds: "They are at the same
time full of intelligence; their manners are excellent, they have
delicate perceptions, they have tact, they have a certain refinement
which a brutalized peasantry could not possibly have. If you talk to one
of them at his own home, or in his field, he will enter into
conversation with you quite easily, and sustain his part in a perfectly
becoming way, with a pleasant combination of dignity and quiet humor.
The interval between him and a Kentish laborer is enormous."
This is, indeed, worth your attention. Of course all mankind are, as Mr.
Gladstone says, of our own flesh and blood. But you know how often it
happens in England that a cultivated person, a person of the sort that
Mr. Charles Sumner[466] describes, talking to one of the lower class, or
even of the middle class, feels and cannot but feel, that there is
somehow a wall of partition between himself and the other, that they
seem to belong to two different worlds. Thoughts, feelings, perceptions,
susceptibilities, language, manners,--everything is different. Whereas,
with a French peasant, the most cultivated man may find himself in
sympathy, may feel that he is talking to an equal. This is an experience
which has been made a thousand times, and which may be made again any
day. And it may be carried beyond the range of mere conversation, it may
be extended to things like pleasures, recreations, eating and drinking,
and so on. In general the pleasures, recreations, eating and drinking of
English people, when once you get below that class which Mr. Charles
Sumner calls the class of gentlemen, are to one of that class
unpalatable and impossible. In France there is not this incompatibility.
Whether he mix with high or low, the gentleman feels himself in a world
not alien or repulsive, but a world where people make the same sort of
demands upon life, in things of this sort, which he himself does. In all
these respects France is the country where the people, as distinguished
from a wealthy refined class, most lives what we call a humane life, the
life of civilized man.
Of course, fastidious persons can and do pick holes in it. There is just
now, in France, a _noblesse_ newly revived, full of pretension, full of
airs and graces and disdains; but its sphere is narrow, and out of its
own sphere no one cares very much for it. There is a general equality in
a humane kind of life. This is the secret of the passionate attachment
with which France inspires all Frenchmen, in spite of her fearful
troubles, her checked prosperity, her disconnected units, and the rest
of it. There is so much of the goodness and agreeableness of life there,
and for so many. It is the secret of her having been able to attach so
ardently to her the German and Protestant people of Alsace,[467] while
we have been so little able to attach the Celtic and Catholic people of
Ireland. France brings the Alsatians into a social system so full of the
goodness and agreeableness of life; we offer to the Irish no such
attraction. It is the secret, finally, of the prevalence which we have
remarked in other continental countries of a legislation tending, like
that of France, to social equality. The social system which equality
creates in France is, in the eyes of others, such a giver of the
goodness and agreeableness of life, that they seek to get the goodness
by getting the equality.
Yet France has had her fearful troubles, as Sir Erskine May justly says.
She suffers too, he adds, from demoralization and intellectual stoppage.
Let us admit, if he likes, this to be true also. His error is that he
attributes all this to equality. Equality, as we have seen, has brought
France to a really admirable and enviable pitch of humanization in one
important line. And this, the work of equality, is so much a good in Sir
Erskine May's eyes, that he has mistaken it for the whole of which it is
a part, frankly identifies it with civilization, and is inclined to
pronounce France the most civilized of nations.