veracity hardly known before, is yet rarely militant. We must not look
for explicit pacifist or international ideas; but as little do we find
jingo patriotism or hymns of hate. The author of the German hymn of hate
was a much better poet than anyone who tried an English hymn in the same
key, and the English poets who could have equalled its form were above
its spirit. Edith Cavell's dying words 'Patriotism is not enough' cannot
perhaps be paralleled in these poets, but they are continually
suggested. They do not say, in the phrase of the old cavalier poet, that
we should love England less if we loved not something else more, or that
something is wanting in our love for our country if we wrong humanity in
its name. But the spirit which is embodied in these phrases breathes
through them; heroism matters more to them than victory, and they know
that death and sorrow and the love of kindred have no fatherland. They
'stand above the battle' as well as share in it, and they share in it
without ceasing to stand above it. The German is the enemy, they never
falter in that; and even death does not convert him into a friend. But
for this enemy there is chivalry, and pity, and a gleam, now and then,
of reconciling comradeship.
'He stood alone in some queer sunless place
Where Armageddon ends,'--
the Englishman whom the Germans had killed in fight, to be themselves
slain by his friend, the speaker. Their ghosts throng around him,--
'He stared at them, half wondering, and then
They told him how I'd killed them for his sake,
Those patient, stupid, sullen ghosts of men:
At last he turned and smiled; smiled--all was well
Because his face would lead them out of hell.'
Finally, the poet himself glories in his act; he knows that he can beat
into music even the crashing discords that fill his ears; he knows too
that he has a music of his own which they cannot subdue or debase:
'I keep such music in my brain
No din this side of death can quell,
Glory exulting over pain,
And beauty garlanded in hell.'
To have found and kept and interwoven these two musics--a language of
unflinching veracity and one of equally unflinching hope and faith--is
the achievement of our war-poetry. May we not say that the possession
together of these two musics, of these two moods, springing as they do
from the blended grip and idealism of the English character, warrants
hope for the future of English poetry? For it is rooted in the greatest,
and the most English, of the ways of poetic experience which have gone
to the making of our poetic literature--the way, ultimately, of
Shakespeare, and of Wordsworth. But that temper of catholic fraternity
which finds the stuff of poetry everywhere does not easily attain the
consummate technique in expression of a rarer English tradition, that of
Milton, and Gray, and Keats. Beauty abounds in our later poets, but it
is a beauty that flashes in broken lights, not the full-orbed radiance
of a masterpiece. To enlarge the grasp of poetry over the field of
reality, to apprehend it over a larger range, is not at once to find
consummate expression for what is apprehended. The flawless perfection
of the Parnassians--of Heredia's sonnets--is nowhere approached in the
less aristocratically exclusive poetry of to-day. But the future, in
poetry also, is with the spirit which found the aristocracy of noble art
not upon exclusions, negations, and routine, but upon imagination,
penetration, discovery, and catholic openness of mind.
SOME BOOKS FOR CONSULTATION
Pellissier, _Le Mouvement Littéraire au XIXme Siècle_.
Brunetière, _La Poésie Lyrique au XIXme Siècle_.
Eccles, F.Y., _A Century of French Poets_.
Vigié-Lecocq, _La Poésie Contemporaine_.
Phelps, _Advance of English Poetry in the Twentieth Century_.
Muret, _La Littérature Italienne d'aujourd'hui_.
Ladenarde, _G. Carducci_.
Symons, _The Symbolist Movement in Literature_.
Jackson, _The Eighteen Nineties_.
McDowall, _Realism_.
Aliotta, _The Idealist Reaction against Science_.
Soergel, _Die deutsche Litteratur unserer Zeit_.
Bithell, _Contemporary German Poetry_ (Translated).
Halévy, _Charles Péguy_.
FOOTNOTES:
[Footnote 3: The temper of the two realists was no doubt widely
different. 'C'est en haine du réalisme', wrote Flaubert, 'que j'ai
entrepris ce roman. Mais je n'en déteste pas moins la fausse idéalité,
dont nous sommes bercés par le temps qui court' (_Corresp._ 3, 67).]
[Footnote 4: _Causeries du Lundi_, 1850 f.]
[Footnote 5: _Histoire de la littérature anglaise_, 1863.]
[Footnote 6: But a Wilde who wrote no _De Profundis_ and no _Ballad of
Reading Gaol_.]
[Footnote 7: _La Forge_: dedicated to Gaston Paris, the greatest
_forgeron_ of his generation in the love of Old French.]
[Footnote 8: _Rime Nuove_: Classicismo e Romantismo.]
[Footnote 9: _Midi_.]
[Footnote 10: _La Paix des Dieux_.]
[Footnote 11: For this and the other verse-translations the writer is
responsible.]
[Footnote 12: Even the 'music' was far removed from the simplicity of
pure song. The song of these poets was an incantation. Nay, painting
itself witnessed a corresponding revolt against the 'eloquence' of the
pseudo-realists--the 'far away dirty reasonableness', as Manet dubbed
it, which missed the essential vision by using the worn-down accepted
phrases of the public.]
[Footnote 13: _Au jardin de l'Infante: Veillée_.]
[Footnote 14: To some types of Irish imagination French Naturalism, it
is true, was no less congenial; hence the rift between the realist and
the spiritual Irishmen delightfully played on in Max Beerbaum's cartoon
of Yeats presenting the _Faery Queene_ to George Moore.]
[Footnote 15: Aliotta, _The Idealistic Revolt_, p. 116. Cf. the account
of the analogous views of Boutroux and Renouvier in the same chapter.]
[Footnote 16: Keats, no doubt, also aspired to the life of action. But
in him the two moods were disparate, even in conflict; in Brooke they
were seemingly fused.]
[Footnote 17: Eighteenth-century observation, in the person of
Goldsmith, had found no worthier epithet for the great Flemish river
than 'lazy', and the modern tourist is likely to find this by far the
more 'characteristic'. But which had the best chance of seeing truly,
the life-long companion and lover, or the stranger, sad, lonely, and
longing for home?]
[Footnote 18: _Les Saintes du Paradis_.]
[Footnote 19: Cf. for instance the situation of Signe, in the grip of
the brutal _préfet_, with that of Beatrice, in _The Changeling_, in the
hands of De Flores.]
V
HISTORICAL RESEARCH
G.P. GOOCH
The scientific study of history began a hundred years ago in the
University of Berlin. Preparatory work of the highest importance had
been accomplished by laborious collectors like Baronius and Muratori,
keen-sighted critics such as Mabillon and Wolf, and brilliant narrators
like Gibbon and Voltaire. But it was not till Niebuhr, Böckh, and above
all Ranke preached and practised the critical use of authorities and
documentary material that historical scholarship entered on the path
which it has pursued with ever-increasing success for the last three
generations. It is my task to-day to direct your attention to some of
its main achievements during the last half-century.
The outstanding feature of our time has been the immense increase in the
material available for the knowledge and interpretation of every stage
and chapter in the life of humanity. Primitive civilization has been
definitely brought within the circle of historical study. The
discoveries of Boucher des Perthes, Pitt-Rivers, and their successors
have thrown back the opening of the human drama tens if not hundreds of
thousands of years, and we recreate prehistoric man from skull and
weapon, language and legend. Anthropology has become a science, and the
habits and beliefs of our savage ancestors have been rendered
intelligible by the piercing insight of Tylor and Sir James Frazer. In
its boundless erudition, its constructive imagination, and its wealth of
suggestion, the _Golden Bough_ stands forth as perhaps the most notable
contribution of the age to our knowledge of the evolution of the human
race.
Among the most sensational events of the nineteenth century was the
resurrection of the Ancient East. We now know that Greece and Rome, far
from standing near the beginning of recorded history, were the heirs of
a long series of civilizations. Our whole perspective has been changed
or should be changed by the discovery. The ancient world thus revealed
by the partnership of philology and archaeology ceases to be merely the
vestibule to Christian Europe, and becomes in point of duration the
larger part of human history.
The story opens with Champollion's decipherment of the bilingual tablet
discovered more than a century ago at the Rosetta mouth of the Nile. The
key once fitted to the lock, the whole civilization of ancient Egypt lay
open to the explorer. A secure chronological basis was supplied by
Lepsius, and systematic excavation was commenced by Mariette, who was
named by the Khedive Director of Antiquities and established the Cairo
Museum. The work of the three great founders of Egyptology has been
carried forward during the last half-century by an international army of
scholars. The interpretation of the ancient scripts has reached a
technical mastery unknown to the pioneers, and the genius of Brugsch
unlocked the door to demotic, which Champollion had never thoroughly
mastered. But the triumphs of philology have been surpassed by the
conquests of the spade. The closest friend of Mariette's later years was
Maspero, who succeeded him as Director of Antiquities, and whose most
sensational find was the tombs of the Kings near Thebes. Equally eminent
as excavator, philologist, and historian, Maspero was the first to
popularize Egyptology in France, as Flinders Petrie, the greatest
excavator since Mariette, has popularized it in England. Until twenty
years ago the curtain rose on the pyramid-builders of the Fourth
dynasty. We have now not only recovered the earlier dynasties, but
neolithic and palaeolithic Egypt emerges from the primitive cemeteries.
The immense accession of new material has enabled Eduard Meyer to
construct something like a definite chronology; but though marvellous
progress has been made in our knowledge of the Early, Middle, and New
Empires, a great gap remains between the sixth and the eleventh
dynasties, and the period of the Hyksos is still tantalizingly obscure.
Egyptian history in the light of the latest discoveries may be best
studied in the judicial pages of Breasted, the foremost of American
Egyptologists.
The revelation of Assyrian civilization through Rawlinson's decipherment
of cuneiform and the excavations of Botta and Layard in the middle of
the nineteenth century was followed by a concerted attack on Babylonia.
It was clear from the Nineveh tablets that most of the literary
treasures of Assyria were merely copies of Babylonian originals; and
when in 1877 de Sarzec, French Vice-Consul at Basra, bored into the
mounds at Tello, the ancient Lagash, in Southern Babylonia, the most
eager anticipations were surpassed. Texts had been found which Rawlinson
pronounced to be pre-Semitic; but for the purpose of history the
Sumerians were discovered at Tello. When de Sarzec died in 1901 he had
opened a new chapter of history. The palaces of Sargon and Sennacherib,
at which the world had marvelled in the 'forties, appeared relatively
modern beside the vast antiquity of the Chaldean city. The chain of
human experience lengthened before our eyes when it was realized that as
Assyrian culture derived from Babylonia, so a large part of Babylonian
culture, including the art of writing, was inherited by the Semites from
the Sumerians.
While de Sarzec was busy at Tello, an American expedition was sent to
Nippur under the lead of Peters and Hilprecht; and the long array of
magnificent volumes which embody the results of the mission, including
the thousands of tablets found in the temple library, constitutes the
most important source of our knowledge of Northern Babylonia. Still more
recently a German mission under Koldewey commenced the systematic
excavation of Babylon itself; but its operations were interrupted by the
outbreak of the Great War. Though no monuments have been brought to
light in Babylonia comparable in magnificence to those of Khorsabad and
Nineveh, Babylonian culture towers above its neighbour. Since the
discovery in the royal library of Nineveh of a cylinder containing the
story of the Flood, no find has aroused such world-wide interest as that
of the Code of Hammurabi, unearthed by de Morgan at Susa in 1901. The
massive block of diorite, eight feet high, containing 282 paragraphs of
laws, revealed in a flash a complex, refined, and orderly civilization.
After expelling the Elamites about 2250 B.C. Hammurabi united North and
South Babylonia into a single State, and, desiring that uniform laws
should prevail, issued the code which bears his name. During the last
decade the exploration of Assyria has been resumed after a long
interval, and the city of Assur, the first capital, has been unearthed
by the German Oriental Society. We thus learn of Assyria before the days
of its greatness, when it was still a subject province under Babylonian
Viceroys.
The history of the lands watered by the Tigris and the Euphrates, which
was almost a blank half a century ago, may now be tentatively
reconstructed. The vast mass of official correspondence, judicial
decisions, and legal documents, taken in conjunction with the evidences
of religion, science, and art, reveal a startlingly modern society a
thousand years before Rameses and two thousand years before Pericles.
Babylonia proves to have been to the ancient East what Rome was one day
to be to Europe. The Tel-el-Amarna letters prove the unchallenged
supremacy of its culture over vast areas, and the revelation of the
religious debt of the Jews sets the Old Testament in a new frame. So
rapid is the pace of excavation and interpretation that all but the most
recent narratives of the Ancient East are out of date. If we master
Leonard King's sumptuous volumes on Babylonia and the latest edition of
the first volume of Eduard Meyer's incomparable _History of Antiquity_,
we need go no farther afield.
Scarcely if at all less remarkable has been the discovery of an advanced
civilization in Crete in the second and third millenniums before Christ.
While in Egypt and Mesopotamia the frontiers of knowledge were pushed
back, in Crete an unknown world was brought to light. Its romantic
interest was intensified by the establishment of an historic foundation
for one of the most celebrated legends of the ancient world. How the
Minotaur devoured the tribute of youths and maidens in the labyrinth,
how Ariadne, daughter of Minos, fell in love with Theseus and gave him a
sword to slay the Minotaur and a thread to retrace his steps, was known
to every Greek child and has thrilled the imagination of the centuries.
The exploration of the city called by Homer 'Great Knossus' was among
the ambitions of Schliemann; but it was carried out by Sir Arthur Evans,
whose labours have outlined a series of chapters in Cretan history
extending two thousand years before the destruction of the palace about
the year 1400. Though the Minoan language still defies attack, the
frescoes, sculptures, and objects of art tell their tale of a luxurious
and peace-loving community, closely connected with Egypt and forming one
of the main sources of the Greek culture of a later age.
Most of us are old enough to remember the thrill of excitement when Susa
and Knossus, if not Tello or Thebes, yielded up their romantic secrets;
but the generation now growing to manhood may experience similar
emotions as it watches the ghost of the Hittite Empire materialize
before its eyes. The meagre references in the Old Testament have been
supplemented by Assyrian and Egyptian inscriptions, revealing an
important Power in Northern Syria and Asia Minor for a thousand years
before it was swallowed up by Assyria. During the last twenty years
Hittite remains, marked by crude vigour rather than by a sense of
beauty, have been discovered all over Asia Minor and in the northern
reaches of the great Mesopotamian plain. In 1911 the British Museum
undertook the excavation of Carchemish on the Euphrates, the capital of
the North Syrian sector of the Empire; but the most precious results
have been achieved by Winckler at Boghaz Keui, the capital of the
Cappadocian portion of the Hittite dominions, which yielded a library of
20,000 tablets of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, now stored in
the museum at Constantinople. A few bilingual inscriptions have
furnished valuable clues; but the world still eagerly awaits the coming
of a new Champollion to unlock the doors of the treasure-house. Winckler
himself died in 1913; but in 1915 the Austrian Professor Hrozny startled
the world by proclaiming his conviction that Hittite was an
Indo-European language. Whether or no his contention is confirmed,
orientalists of both hemispheres are hot in pursuit, and it is no rash
prophecy that within a decade scholars will read Hittite as they now
read cuneiform and hieroglyphics, and new chapters of incalculable
importance will be added to the story of the Ancient East.
The recovery of the political and religious history of the empires
surrounding Palestine has run parallel with the application of critical
methods to the Jewish scriptures. To read Ewald's _History of the People
of Israel_, which was regarded as dangerous by pious folk in the middle
of last century, is to realize the progress of Semitic studies. The
great revolution in our conception of the Old Testament which rendered
Ewald out of date was accomplished by Wellhausen's _Prolegomena to the
History of Israel_. That the arrangement of the Canon was utterly
misleading, that the Prophets were earlier than the priestly code and
that the Psalms for the most part were later than both, was proclaimed
in the writings and lectures of Vatke and Graf, Kuenen and Reuss; but it
was not till their discoveries were confirmed and elaborated by
Wellhausen that they won their way, and it was generally recognized that
their reconstruction alone rendered the religious development of the
Jews intelligible. This outline was shortly after filled in by Stade in
the first critical history of Israel; but his emphasis on the falsity of
tradition was overdone, and subsequent critics, while accepting the late
redaction of the law, have argued that parts of it are far older, in
substance if not in form, than Wellhausen and his disciple were prepared
to allow.
The history of the Jews owes much less to archaeological research on the
arena of their historic life than Egypt or Mesopotamia. No splendid
buildings or sculptures have been brought to light, and the inscriptions
are few. But British, American, and German excavators have flashed light
far back into the third millennium, and a partial excavation of
Jerusalem has revealed a network of prehistoric tunnels and aqueducts.
The historic life of Gezer has been minutely revealed by Macalister,
with the strata of seven cities reaching back to the neolithic age. The
most piquant result of his excavations has been to rehabilitate the
Philistines, the makers of the most artistic objects found in the debris
of two thousand years. Far more light, however, has been thrown on the
religious customs and beliefs of the Jews by discoveries beyond their
borders. The notion firmly held by our fathers that Israel was one of
the oldest of civilizations and formed a world by itself has vanished
into thin air; for an older and vaster civilization has been discovered
to which she owed not only her science but the larger part of her
religion. The dimension of the debt to Babylonia has been and continues
to be fiercely argued by conservative and radical critics; but its
recognition has sufficed to revolutionize the study of early Israel and
to provide a new background for the religious history of the world. The
relation of the beliefs and practices of the Jews to those of other
branches of the Semitic family was boldly explored by Robertson Smith,
and has lately been illuminated by the epoch-making volumes of Sir James
Frazer on the _Folklore of the Old Testament_.
The history of Greece, like the history of the Jews, presents a very
different aspect to that which was offered to the readers of Grote,
Thirlwall, and even Curtius. Schliemann's discoveries at Troy, Tiryns,
and Mycenae unearthed Mycenaean civilization and gave an incalculable
impetus to archaeological research; but the brilliant amateur was almost
pathetically incompetent to interpret the treasures he had brought to
light, and much of his work has had to be done again by Dörpfeld.
Despite the achievements of archaeology, however, the period before
Solon remains very dark. Barely second in importance to the discoveries
of Schliemann was the Aristotelian treatise on the Constitution of
Athens, which was given to the world in 1891 by Sir Frederick Kenyon and
has been most authoritatively interpreted by Wilamowitz, the greatest of
living Hellenists. With the growing mass of new literary material,
inscriptions, coins, and papyri, the exploration of sites, the recovery
of innumerable objects of art and fresh light streaming from Asia Minor
and Crete, new attempts to write the history of Greece have been made.
Professor Bury's narrative, at once scientific and popular, has
summarized for English readers the assured results of research; but the
most authoritative survey is that contained in the Greek volumes of
Eduard Meyer's vast survey of antiquity. 'For the great tasks of
history', he writes, 'salvation is only to be found when it becomes
conscious of its universal character, in ancient as well as in modern
times. Only by treating Greece in connection with the Mediterranean
peoples can its real nature be seized.' This colossal task, which proved
beyond the strength of Duncker, has been performed by the Berlin
Professor, the only scholar of our time who could have accomplished it
single-handed. The dazzling picture of Athenian democracy painted by
Grote has faded away; and Beloch, following in the footsteps of Droysen,
dwells with greater satisfaction on the diffusion of Greek influence
through the conquests of Alexander.
Greek culture has received no less attention than Greek politics. The
Homeric problem continues to exert an irresistible attraction. Every
expert from Wilamowitz to Gilbert Murray and Walter Leaf adds to our
comprehension of the epic; but no positive results have been
established, and Holm uttered the gloomy prophecy that we shall never
know whether Homer existed, who he was, or what he wrote. On the other
hand we have gained a deeper insight into the early mind and soul of
Greece, thanks in large measure to a group of English scholars with Jane
Harrison at their head. Rohde's _Psyche_, the most illuminating treatise
on any branch of Greek religion, has traced the conception of
immortality through the ages. The later editions of Zeller's _Philosophy
of the Greeks_, first published in 1851, kept pace with the progress of
scholarship, and remains one of the glories of German scholarship. The
more recent work of the Austrian Gomperz has won almost equal
popularity, without placing its predecessor on the shelf. In the realm
of literature the most interesting event has been the recovery of the
poems of Bacchylides and Herondas, fragments of Sappho and Pindar,
Euripides and Sophocles and Menander; and the Oxyrhynchus Papyri, which
have already produced undreamed-of treasures, may well have in store for
us further glad surprises. The attempt to assess the influence of
economic factors, courageously undertaken by Böckh and somewhat
neglected after his death, has in recent years been renewed, with the
fruitful results familiar to us in Zimmern's realistic picture of Athens
in the fifth century.