The Origins and Destiny of Imperial Britain Part 8

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 const.i.tuent atoms, nevertheless that unity must partake of the nature of its const.i.tuent 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.

-- 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 G.o.d be reconciled with the destiny He a.s.signs 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 G.o.d 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 compa.s.sion 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 a.s.sumption 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...o...b..t, 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 pa.s.sing 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 sh.o.r.es it once had dwelt, awaking within it strange memories, and gradually by the acc.u.mulation 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 s.p.a.ces 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 rus.h.i.+ng storm of the present, the soul has about it strange intimacies, it has within it preparations drawn from that fellows.h.i.+p 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 s.p.a.ces 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 ident.i.ty 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 s.p.a.ce.

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 s.p.a.ce, 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 t.i.tian, 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 G.o.d'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 G.o.d and took its way alone through the lonely s.p.a.ces, 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 a.n.a.lytic 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...o...b..t 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 astonis.h.i.+ng 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 a.s.siduous efforts to reduce them to a system, and compel speculation to have recourse to such false a.n.a.logies and misleading resemblances as those to which reference has in these lectures more than once been made.

-- 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 G.o.d," 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 const.i.tuent and the const.i.tuted 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 h.e.l.l, 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 s.h.i.+neth 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 ill.u.s.tration 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 a.s.sumes, 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 h.e.l.lenes. 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 t.i.tian 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 ident.i.ty 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 ill.u.s.tration, 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 t.i.tian 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 ka poiesis+, here are one.

-- 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 s.p.a.ce.

Hebrew literature, affected by the revolutions of a.s.syria, 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 ma.s.s, 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 a.s.sumption 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 pa.s.sion, admitted by Cicero to an intimacy with h.e.l.lenic 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 a.s.syria fell; but in the _De Civitate_, to which he devotes some fifteen years of his life, is delineated the city which shall not pa.s.s away.[3] The destruction of Rome, limited in time and s.p.a.ce, 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 pa.s.sing away of earth itself and all earthly things like a scroll. Before its imagination, as along a highroad, moved a procession of empires--a.s.syria, 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 doc.u.ments upon which it is based are by the wasting force of wind and sun and sea daily pa.s.sing 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 a.s.saults 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 ma.s.s of phenomena that the breakdown of the theory, patent at once in the narrower sphere of observation, is here obscured and s.h.i.+elded 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.

-- 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 pa.s.seth 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 c.u.mulative 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 G.o.ds 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 G.o.ds desire." It is as if, transported in imagination far into the future, Tacitus looked back and p.r.o.nounced 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 pa.s.sages 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 pa.s.sage 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 n.o.bis 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 pa.s.ses 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 antic.i.p.ated 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 Ta.s.so for a philosophic theory of the Crusades as seek in Gibbon a philosophic theory of the decline of empires.