Recent Developments in European Thought Part 8

The revelation of a.s.syrian 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 a.s.syria 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 antic.i.p.ations were surpa.s.sed. Texts had been found which Rawlinson p.r.o.nounced 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 a.s.syrian 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, const.i.tutes 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 ma.s.sive 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 a.s.syria has been resumed after a long interval, and the city of a.s.sur, the first capital, has been unearthed by the German Oriental Society. We thus learn of a.s.syria 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 ma.s.s of official correspondence, judicial decisions, and legal doc.u.ments, 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 Hitt.i.te Empire materialize before its eyes. The meagre references in the Old Testament have been supplemented by a.s.syrian and Egyptian inscriptions, revealing an important Power in Northern Syria and Asia Minor for a thousand years before it was swallowed up by a.s.syria. During the last twenty years. .h.i.tt.i.te 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 Hitt.i.te 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 Hitt.i.te 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 Hitt.i.te 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 Dorpfeld.

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 Const.i.tution 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 h.e.l.lenists. With the growing ma.s.s 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 a.s.sured 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 scholars.h.i.+p, and remains one of the glories of German scholars.h.i.+p. 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 a.s.sess the influence of economic factors, courageously undertaken by Bockh 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.

The history of Roman studies since Niebuhr is largely the record of the activity of a single man. The most personal and popular of Mommsen's works, the _Roman History till the death of Caesar_, the greatest effort of his genius though not of his scholars.h.i.+p, was published as far back as 1854, and carried his name all over the world. He next turned to special departments of research, pouring forth in rapid succession his treatises on Chronology, Coinage, the Digest, and above all the _Staatsrecht_, the largest and in his opinion the most important of his works, and perhaps the greatest const.i.tutional treatise in historical literature. Meanwhile the _Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum_, which he edited for the Berlin Academy, was the main occupation and the most enduring monument of his life. He had devoted himself to Latin epigraphy and had edited the Sammite and Neapolitan inscriptions before the publication of the Roman History. The first instalment of the Corpus appeared in 1863, and the great scholar lived to hail the appearance of nearly twenty volumes, half of them edited by himself. The Inscriptions rendered possible a history of the Empire, and the whole world hoped that the master would write it; but he contented himself with a survey of the provinces. The closing years of his life were devoted to a gigantic treatise on Roman Criminal Law, and to editions of Jordanes, Ca.s.siodorus, the Theodosian Code and the Liber Pontificalis, thus enlarging the sphere of his operations till Rome was swallowed up in the Middle Ages. His publications extended over sixty years. There is no immaturity in his early works and no decline in the later. The imaginative and critical faculties met and balanced, large vision mating with a genius for detail. The complete a.s.similation and reproduction of a cla.s.sical civilization of which scholars have dreamed ever since Scaliger has been achieved by Mommsen alone. Rome before Mommsen was like modern Europe before Ranke. We may truly say of him, as was said of Augustus, that he found it of brick and left it of marble.

Mommsen, like Ranke, was the founder of a school; and his inspiration has been felt by every worker in the field of Roman studies. His successors naturally confine themselves to some special province or period. Gaetano de Sanctis is far advanced in the most ambitious history of the Republic that has been attempted in the last half-century.

Ferrero's _Greatness and Decline of Rome_, though frowned on by scholars, aroused world-wide interest by interpreting the fall of the Republic in terms of economics and psychology. The political and social crises which fill the century from Sulla to Augustus, he argues, were due to the change of customs caused by the augmentation of wealth, expenditure, and needs. Of greater value are the attempts to fill in different sections of the vast canvas of Imperial Rome, such as Gardthausen's monumental survey of the reign of Augustus, Camille Jullian's volumes on Gaul, and Professor Haverfield's slender monographs on Britain. Roman life and culture have been diligently explored; but the extreme paucity of materials makes the recovery of the atmosphere of the early Republic almost impossible. The most daring attempt was made by Fustel de Coulanges in _La Cite Antique_, which offered a complete interpretation of early society in terms of religion. Less harmonious but more convincing pictures of religious life have been painted by Warde Fowler, while the civilization of the Empire has been successively a.n.a.lysed in the fascinating and authoritative works of Friedlander, Boissier, and Dill. Meanwhile archaeology contributes a steady stream of new material. Boni's excavations in the Forum and on the Palatine have produced sensational results. The unveiling of Pompeii moves slowly forward, and that of Ostia, the port of Rome, has begun. The resurrection of Herculaneum should be witnessed by the next generation if not by our own.

A more difficult because a more controversial problem than the Roman Empire is its contemporary, the early Christian Church. In the middle decades of last century Baur treated the rise of Christianity as an historical phenomenon, leaving his hearers to determine for themselves whether it was human or divine; but his influence proved more enduring than his writings. Weiszacker, his successor at Tubingen, in his _Apostolic Age_, described with consummate scholars.h.i.+p and pa.s.sionless serenity the life and organization of the early Christian communities.

The necessity of a careful study of the soil out of which Christianity has grown is now generally recognized, and great scholars such as Schurer and Pfleiderer have re-created the religious atmosphere into which Christ was born. The const.i.tution of the primitive Church, too long hotly discussed by the champions of rival sects, has been studied with welcome impartiality by Lightfoot and Hatch. But no man, alive or dead, can boast of such achievements as Harnack. His History of Dogma, his vast survey of Christian Literature till Eusebius, his narrative of the Expansion of Christianity before the conversion of Constantine, are inseparable companions of the student who means business. The treasures of the catacombs have been revealed by De Rossi, to whom we also owe the publication of the Christian Inscriptions of Rome. The history of the early Christian communities in the outlying provinces of the Empire has been enriched by Ramsay's explorations in Asia Minor. While the best work naturally goes into monographs, comprehensive narratives are occasionally attempted by scholars of the first cla.s.s. Renan's sparkling volumes have enjoyed immense popularity, and some of them may still be read with profit; but, like his History of the Jews, they belong rather to literature than to science. If we desire a readable summary of the scholars.h.i.+p of the last half-century we may turn to the Volumes of the Catholic d.u.c.h.esne or, better still, to those of the late Professor Gwatkin.

Imperial Rome and the Christian Church meet and blend in the Byzantine Empire, the later history of which appeared to Gibbon 'a tedious and uniform tale of weakness and misery'. Its services to civilization and the greatness of many of its rulers were revealed to the world by Finlay, whose narrative was acclaimed by Freeman as the most considerable work of English historical literature since the _Decline and Fall_. In the half-century that has elapsed since its completion, the exploration of a thousand years has gone busily forward. The lead was taken in France by Rambaud, Schlumberger, and Diehl, the latter of whom was rewarded for his efforts by his appointment as first occupant of the Chair created in Paris in 1899. Greater than any of the three was Krumbacher, the prince of German Byzantinists, for whom a Chair was founded at Munich in 1892, and whose encyclopaedic survey of Byzantine literature is beyond comparison the most important single work in this field of historical study. England is worthily represented by Professor Bury, whose narrative of the Empire has already reached the ninth century.

Byzantium has emerged from the scholars.h.i.+p of two generations no longer decadent and inert but the mother of great statesmen and soldiers, the home of culture while Central and Western Europe was plunged in darkness, the rampart of Christian Europe for a thousand years against the Arab and Turk, the educator of the Slavonic races. Freeman truly remarked that Constantinople was for ages the seat of the only regular and systematic Government in the world. Its administrative machine was the most elaborate yet invented by man, and the Court was to mediaeval Europe what Versailles was to the rulers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It was indeed a bureaucratic despotism in which liberty was unknown, and, except in art, its spirit was imitative; but to preserve Greek culture during the barbarism of the Middle Ages and to defend it against the repeated a.s.saults of Islam was to deserve well of civilization.

While the Byzantine Empire carried over important elements from the cla.s.sical world, Western and Central Europe pa.s.sed under the dominion of ideas which were as foreign to those of Greece and Rome as they are to the conceptions of to-day. We have outgrown the blind contempt of the eighteenth century and the gus.h.i.+ng enthusiasm of the Romantic Movement; but it is still a difficult task to form a just estimate of the character of the thousand years that began with Augustine and ended with Macchiavelli. It is true that our materials grow from year to year; that the criticism of original authorities as taught in the ecole des Chartes has become something like an exact science; that thanks to Lord Bryce the Holy Roman Empire has become intelligible; that the structure and function of inst.i.tutions have been patiently a.n.a.lysed by Waitz and Stubbs, Fustel de Coulanges and Vinogradoff, Maitland and Gierke; that literature and art, scholasticism and the Universities, have found their chroniclers and interpreters; that every ruler and every State, every treaty and every council, may be studied in monographs innumerable. But the Middle Ages were above all the reign of the Catholic Church; and we are still far from agreement as to the merits and influence of that venerable inst.i.tution which, be it human or divine, occupies a unique place in the story of civilization.

In the middle decades of last century the history of the mediaeval Church was related from very different standpoints in the widely-read works of Neander and Milman; but it was only with the opening of the Vatican archives by Pope Leo XIII in 1881 that it became possible to set forth the whole story of the Papacy and to understand the working of the machinery of Catholicism. So vast is the acc.u.mulation of official acts and doc.u.ments, and such technical training is required for the task, that we shall have to wait many years till the material is surveyed in its entirety and its results made available for the use of the historian. Some idea of the value of the Registers may be gained from the Master of Balliol's pregnant lectures on Church and State in the Middle Ages, based on the 8,000 doc.u.ments of the eleven years of the rule of Innocent IV in the middle of the thirteenth century. The study of these doc.u.ments, he tells us, stirred him to admiration of the organization of the Papacy, and convinced him of its enormous superiority over its secular contemporaries as a centre not merely of religion but of law and government; but he adds that he derived an equally profound impression of the abuses which ate into the heart of the system, of the growing bitterness which it inspired, and of the devastating effects of the pa.s.sion to erect a powerful princ.i.p.ality in the heart of Italy.

No Protestant historian is tempted to glorify the record of the Papacy in the last two centuries before the Reformation; but it is generally agreed that in the earlier half of the Middle Ages the example and influence of the Church were a bright light s.h.i.+ning in a dark world.

This notion has been recently challenged by Mr. Coulton, who, angered by the special pleading of Cardinal Gasquet and other professional apologists, hotly denounces the exaltation of the Ages of Faith. The Middle Ages, he complains, are the one domain of history into which, in England at any rate, the scientific spirit has not yet penetrated.

Taking as his text the autobiography of the Franciscan Fra Salimbene, the most precious authority for the ordinary life of Catholic folk at the high-water mark of the Middle Ages, he draws a sombre picture of manners and morals and maintains that hideous vices existed in all the Orders long before the thirteenth century. 'Imagination', he cries, 'staggers at the moral gulf that yawns between that age and ours.' His condemnation of the life and influence of the Church re-echoes in somewhat shrill tones the verdict of Henry Charles Lea, whose ma.s.sive treatise on the Inquisition was rightly described by Lord Acton as the most important contribution of the New World to the religious history of the old, and whose volumes on Sacerdotal Celibacy const.i.tute a formidable indictment of mediaeval Catholicism.

Next to the origins of Christianity the most controversial of the larger problems of history is the Reformation; and here Protestants of all schools are ranged in a solid phalanx against Catholics. That the Church was in need of reform is agreed by both sides; but the Catholic contends that the evils to be remedied have been fantastically exaggerated, that there was no need for a revolt, and that the revolution inaugurated by Luther left Germany far worse than it found her. Realizing that the Protestant view most authoritatively presented in Ranke's cla.s.sical work on the Reformation held the field, Janssen compiled a cultural history of the German people from the end of the Middle Ages to the outbreak of the Thirty Years War. Based throughout on original sources, and ill.u.s.trating his thesis from every angle, his eight ma.s.sive volumes were hailed with grat.i.tude and enthusiasm by Catholics all over the world. No Catholic historical work of the nineteenth century, and certainly no attack on the Reformation since Bossuet's _Variations of Protestantism_, obtained such resounding success or led to so much controversy.

Janssen's object was to show that the fifteenth century was not a period of moral or intellectual decrepitude, with a few 'Reformers before the Reformation' crying like voices in the wilderness, but an era of healthy activity and abounding promise. He describes the flouris.h.i.+ng state of religious and secular education, the vitality of art, the comfort of the peasantry, and the prosperity of the towns. On reaching the sixteenth century, he denounces the paganism of the Humanists and paints a terrible picture of the material and moral chaos into which Germany was plunged by the Lutheran revolt. The later volumes are devoted to the era of the Counter-Revolution and present a canvas of unrelieved gloom, immorality and drunkenness, ignorance, superst.i.tion and violence. Thus the story which opened with the bright colours of the fifteenth century closes in deep shadows, and the moral is drawn that Germany was ruined not by the Thirty Years War but by the Reformation.

Protestant historians fell upon the audacious iconoclast with fierce cries of anger, and had no difficulty in exposing his uncritical use of authorities, his habit of generalizing from isolated particulars, and his suppression of facts damaging to his own side. But though it was a dexterous polemic, not a work of disinterested science, Janssen's book has made it impossible for any self-respecting Protestant to write on the Reformation without knowing and weighing the Catholic side. Of similar tendency though of far higher value is the monumental work in which Pastor is narrating the story of the Renaissance and sixteenth-century Popes from the Vatican archives, which neither Ranke nor Creighton had been able to employ. No really objective picture of the Reformation can be painted by Catholic or Protestant; but a good deal of firm ground has been won, and the writings of Kawerau, the greatest of Lutheran scholars, inspire us with a confidence that no writings of the last generation deserved.

Though Ranke's chief works had been published before the period to which this lecture is confined, his influence can be traced in almost every writer on modern history during the last half-century. His greatest service to scholars.h.i.+p was to divorce the study of the past from the pa.s.sions of the present, and, to quote the watchword of his first book, to relate what actually occurred. A second was to establish the necessity of founding historical construction on strictly contemporary authorities. When he began to write in 1824 historians of high repute believed memoirs and chronicles to be trustworthy guides. When he laid down his pen in 1886 every scholar with a reputation to make had learned to content himself with nothing less than the papers and correspondence of the actors themselves and those in immediate contact with the events they describe. A third service was to found the science of evidence by the a.n.a.lysis of authorities, contemporary or otherwise, in the light of the author's temperament, affiliations, and opportunity of knowledge, and by comparison with the testimony of other writers. There can be no better preparation for the perils and responsibilities of authors.h.i.+p than to study the critical a.n.a.lyses of Guicciardini and Sarpi, Clarendon, Saint-Simon, and many another, scattered through the sixty volumes of the master. And finally he taught by precept and practice the necessity of exploring the relations of States to one another and of measuring the interaction of foreign and domestic policy.

These sound principles have been applied by the scholars of all countries who have jointly built up the history of the last four centuries. We may study the Tudors under the guidance of Pollard, the Stuarts under Gardiner and Firth, the Hanoverians under Lecky, without fear that we are being misled or that essential facts are being withheld from our notice. We continue to admire the literary brilliance of Macaulay and Carlyle, Motley and Froude; but we are instinctively aware that their partisans.h.i.+p is out of date. The same cooling process has taken place in France, where the pa.s.sions and tempers of Thiers and Michelet have tended to yield place to the calm lucidity of which Mignet and Guizot were the earliest masters. There is, it must be confessed, a good deal of the old Adam in Taine's elaborate study of Jacobinism, in Ma.s.son's innumerable volumes on Napoleon, and even in Aulard's priceless contributions to our knowledge of the French Revolution; but such works as Lavisse's full-length portrait of Louis XIV, Segur's volumes on Turgot and Necker, Sorel's ma.s.sive treatise on Europe and the Revolution, and Vandal's incomparable presentation of the Consulate rank as high in scholars.h.i.+p as in literature.

The unification of Germany after fierce struggles within and without naturally deflected historical scholars.h.i.+p from the path marked out by Ranke, who had grown to manhood in the era of political stagnation following the downfall of Napoleon. The master's Olympian serenity was deplored by the group of hot-blooded scholars who are collectively known as the Prussian School, and who were firmly convinced that the princ.i.p.al duty of historians was to supply guidance and encouragement to their fellow-countrymen in the national and international problems of the time. In his gigantic work on the History of Prussian Foreign Policy, Droysen, the eldest of the Triumvirate, calls four centuries to witness that the Hohenzollerns alone, from their unswerving fidelity to German interests as a whole, were fitted to restore the Empire. He worked exclusively from Prussian archives, and history seen exclusively through Prussian spectacles was bound to be one-sided. No student of European history would contest the value of his researches; but his interpretation of Prussian policy in terms of German nationalism was at once recognized as a fundamental error, and has long been abandoned. The second member of the group, Sybel, himself one of the three favourite pupils of Ranke, revolted in middle life, and in his two great treatises on the era of the French Revolution and the foundation of the German Empire championed the policy of the Hohenzollerns and delivered slas.h.i.+ng attacks on France and Austria, their rivals and antagonists.

The last and greatest of the triumvirate, Treitschke, the Bismarck of the Chair, devoted his life to a history of Germany in the nineteenth century which occupies the same unique place in the affections of German readers as Macaulay's unfinished masterpiece enjoys throughout the English-speaking world. Unlike the works of Droysen and Sybel, the _German History_ was far more than a political narrative, and presented an encyclopaedic picture of national development. His theme was the conflict of the forces which were promoting and opposing the transformation of his country into a powerful Empire, and he judges men and states by the measure in which they promoted or obstructed that purpose. On the one side stands Prussia, feeling her way to the realization of her historic task, on the other the middle and smaller states, aided and abetted by the arch-enemy Austria and deeply infected with the doctrinaire liberalism of France. Treitschke's stage is a battlefield, with the historian looking down and encouraging his friends with loud cries of applause. Such methods could not survive the realization of the aim which they had done so much to a.s.sist, and with Treitschke's death in 1896 the Prussian School disappeared. Its members were the political schoolmasters of Germany at a time of uncertainty and discouragement, and they braced their countrymen to the efforts which culminated in the creation of a mighty Empire. If the purpose of history is to stir a nation to action, Droysen, Sybel, and Treitschke are among the greatest masters of the craft. If its supreme aim is to discover truth and to interpret the movement of humanity, they have no claim to a place in the first cla.s.s. The stream, temporarily deflected by their powerful influence, began to return to the channel which Ranke had marked out for it. Such works as Moriz Ritter's narrative of the Counter-Reformation and the Thirty Years War, Koser's biography of Frederick the Great, Max Lehmann's biographies of Scharnhorst and Stein, and Erich Marcks' studies of Bismarck and his master are as notable for their judgement as for their erudition.

The cooling process noted in the Old World has also occurred in the New, and America of the twentieth century smiles at Bancroft's complacent idealization of the Puritan colonies. Even the slavery struggle, the ashes of which are scarcely yet cold, has found in James Ford Rhodes a historian who can do justice to Jefferson Davis and Lee no less than to Lincoln and Grant. But no American scholar compares in world-wide influence with Mahan, whose study of Sea-Power in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, published in 1889, not only founded a school of naval history but was inwardly digested by distinguished pupils in both hemispheres, among them the Emperor William II and Theodore Roosevelt.

The Admiral's writings owe their importance not to research, for few new facts are brought to light, but to the new angle from which familiar events are envisaged. Occasionally, perhaps, the element of sea-power in the determination of a particular result is over-emphasized at the expense of other factors; but he was the first to seize the wider bearings of naval history and to make the general reader aware of its momentous significance.

The scope of history has gradually widened till it has come to include every aspect of the life of humanity. No one would now dare to maintain with my old master Seeley that history was the biography of States or with Freeman that it was merely past politics. The growth of nations, the achievements of men of action, the rise and fall of parties remain among the most engrossing themes of the historian; but he now casts his net wider and embraces the whole opulent record of civilization. The influence of nature, the pressure of economic factors, the origin and transformation of ideas, the contribution of science and art, religion and philosophy, literature and law, the material conditions of life, the fortunes of the ma.s.ses--such problems now claim his attention in no less degree. He must see life steadily and see it whole. We must master such revealing works as Lecky's histories of Rationalism and Morals, Burckhardt's and Symonds' interpretations of the Italian Renaissance, Sainte-Beuve's full-length portrait of the Jansenists, Morley's studies of Voltaire, Rousseau and the Encyclopaedists, Dean Church's sketch of the Oxford Movement, and Merz's survey of European Thought in the nineteenth century, if we are to understand the throbbing life of the human spirit. We must measure the operation of economic factors and forces and profit by the faithful labours of Schmoller and Thorold Rogers, Cunningham and Kovalevsky, the Webbs and the Hammonds, if we are to visualize the life of the unnumbered and the unknown who have done the routine work of the world.

The fifty years roughly sketched in this lecture witnessed an immense and almost immeasurable advance in historical studies. The technique needed to turn raw materials into the finished article kept pace with the supply, and men learned to write the history of their own country, their own party, and their own beliefs, as impartially as that of other lands and other creeds. But the Great War has ravaged the placid pastures of scholars.h.i.+p no less than the fields of France and Belgium.

Too many historians in every belligerent country have lost their heads and degenerated into shrieking partisans. International co-operation in the pursuit of truth, which is the condition of progress in history no less than in science, has been rudely shattered by the clash of arms.

With all but the calmest minds, national self-consciousness and national self-righteousness have rendered frankness in dealing with the record of our late allies and fairness in dealing with our late enemies difficult if not impossible. Many years will elapse before the European atmosphere regains the tranquillity in which alone the disinterested pursuit of truth can nourish. Meanwhile it is a source of legitimate satisfaction that while the world was rocking to its foundations two English historians, Sir Adolphus Ward and Mr. William Harb.u.t.t Dawson, were narrating the development of Germany in the nineteenth century with a steadiness of pulse unsurpa.s.sed in the piping times of peace. The historian is a man of flesh and blood and may love his country as ardently as other men; but, if he is to be worthy of his high calling, he must trample pa.s.sion and prejudice under his feet and walk humbly and reverently in the temple of the G.o.ddess of Truth.

FOR REFERENCE

Gooch, _History and Historians in the Nineteenth Century_ (Longmans).

VI

POLITICAL THEORY

A.D. LINDSAY

Political Philosophy or the philosophical theory of the State has closer relations with history than any other branch of philosophical inquiry.

It is indeed distinguished from history in that it can disregard the success or failure, the historical development of this or that state.

For it is concerned not with historical happenings but with ideals, not with the varying extent to which different states have approximated or fallen short of their purpose, but with that purpose itself, not, in short, with states but with _the_ State. Yet this need not involve that the ideal, _the_ State, is always and everywhere the same. Ideals are born of historical circ.u.mstances and fas.h.i.+oned to meet historical problems, and the would-be timeless ideals which political philosophers have put before us have always borne clear marks of the country and time of their origin. The ideal which men have set themselves in political organization has varied from time to time. That such variation is inevitable will be clear if we ask ourselves what we can possibly mean by an ideal state. That states fall short of their ideal because of the imperfections of their citizens is clear enough. All political life demands a certain standard of moral behaviour, of capacity to work for a common good, and an understanding of the results of our own and other people's actions. Were human selfishness completely overcome, the state would still be necessary to correct individual shortsightedness. The policeman, exempt from the cares of apprehending criminals, would still be needed to control traffic. But imagine, not that all citizens attained a certain standard of moral and intellectual behaviour, as the ideal demands, but that they were all perfectly good and perfectly wise, should we need any kind of government at all? Is not the supposition of perfection so far removed from any state of affairs we can really think of or plan for, that it cannot enter into our reckoning, ideal or practical? Every ideal takes certain facts of human life for granted whilst it tries to improve others. All ideal states, Plato's as well as others, a.s.sume certain facts about human nature and human society. These facts may and do vary. The Greek city state a.s.sumed that a state must be small, if it was to have the intensive life they demanded. The Roman Empire was a denial of the anarchy to which the Greek ideal had led, but it lost in intensity what it gained in extent. All political ideals a.s.sume a certain sociological background on which the state is based and from which spring the problems which the state is intended to solve. As this sociological background varies from time to time, _the_ State, the purpose which men set before themselves in political organization, will vary also. The Greek city state and the mediaeval state were not different approximations to the same ideal. They were the expressions of different ideals. They rested on different a.s.sumptions, e.g. as to the place of authority in society. With the disappearance at the Reformation of one of the great a.s.sumptions on which the mediaeval state had been based, a new theory of the state was inevitable. The national state of the seventeenth century was something new in history, and Hobbes differs from Aristotle, not because Hobbes is perverse and Aristotle right, though Hobbes often is perverse, but because the political problems which Hobbes and Aristotle had to face were not the same.

Two great historical facts at the end of the eighteenth century, the French Revolution and the Industrial Revolution, profoundly modified the basis of political organization. The modern state in consequence differs in many important respects from any that have preceded it. It does not rest on the common acceptance of authority, either religious, as did the mediaeval state, or personal, as did the seventeenth-century state.

Unlike the Greek city state, it is large. Its administration is concerned with millions who cannot be in personal relations to one another, or share the same intensive life.

With the nineteenth century, then, a new chapter in the development of political theory begins as the peculiar problems of the modern state develop. Professor Dicey, in his _Law and Opinion in England_, has divided the century into two periods of political thought--Individualism and Collectivism--one marking the decrease, the other the increase of the power and authority of the state. When our period begins, the day of individualism was pa.s.sing. Ever since the Reformation it had, in spite of Burke, dominated political theory. Two forces had given it strength--one idealistic, one scientific. It represented the revolt of the individual conscience against the claims of authority, and as such was a theory which attempted to limit the power of government over the individual, whether by an appeal to natural rights in Locke and Tom Paine, or to the greatest happiness of the greatest number in the Utilitarians, or to the super-eminent value of individual liberty as set forth in John Stuart Mill's n.o.ble panegyric. The French Revolution gave a notable impetus to this side of individualism, with its pa.s.sionate a.s.sertion of the principle that political inst.i.tutions exist for man, not man for political inst.i.tutions, and that all government must be tested by the life which it enables each and every one of its citizens to live. Individualism in this sense is concerned with the discovery of principles by which the power of government over the lives of its members may be limited. It is not necessarily a theory of the nature of society. Hobbes, however, was an individualist as well as Locke, and for Hobbes the individual was the scientific unit from which societies and states were built up--the starting-point for a scientific treatment of society. As the French Revolution gave a fresh impulse to idealistic individualism, the Industrial Revolution reanimated the scientific, for it displayed the economic man, Hobbes's hero, come to life and a respectable member of society. With him came the growth of political economy, apparently the first really scientific study of man. From Political Economy Darwin borrowed the conception of the struggle for existence and the survival of the fittest, and from the new biology the doctrine of Evolution through individual compet.i.tion returned to reinforce with the prestige of the new science the economists'

conception of society.

For the first half of the nineteenth century all the forces inspiring individualism seemed to work together, for economics and biology breathed a benevolent optimism which promised that if the scientific forces of individualism were left to work unchecked by state restriction, they would of themselves produce that individual liberty and free development which idealistic individualism desired.

The development of the industrial revolution, however, soon made economic optimism impossible, and with its decay idealistic and scientific individualism parted company. The former retained its concern for individual liberty but came to see that its ideal was as much threatened by economic dependence as by state control, that the choice for most members of society was not one between state interference and no interference at all, but between the state controlling or not controlling the power of interference possessed by the economically superior members of society. On such principles Henry Sidgwick justified an extensive system of state control of industry, and for such reason the strongest supporters of the rights of the individual have been found among Socialists.

Scientific individualism, which found its unit in the economic man and sought to absorb in economics both ethics and politics, was not in essence affected by the discrediting of economic optimism. It painted the struggle between individuals in gloomy instead of in attractive colours, its 'scientific' prepossessions inclined it to a determinism which led easily to the economic theory of history and even, by a curious conversion of opposites, to the 'scientific socialism' of Karl Marx. In its essence it is a denial of the real existence of politics.

For it is a theory of society which denies the possibility of a will for the common good and therefore the possibility of political ideals.