Chapter I

The study of history, which in the nineteenth century became no longer the province of a few specialists, but an almost universal pursuit carried on in hundreds of schools, and seemingly essential to the welfare of the State, is only of value if we are able to use historical criteria, the values of the past, as a means not only of judging but also of directing the latent powers of the present and the future. In most cases, however, to-day, history is studied merely for the purpose of recovering the past; and in order to bring the past into relation with the present day, something more than the pure historical sense is needed. For the process called history is in reality irreversible; we cannot go back to any specific age in the past and live in it even if we would, for the simple reason that we are the past plus--or minus--something. The only conception of human progress that is philosophically correct is not a conception of objective external progress at all: actually it is probable that we exercise no more control over nature--and this despite our machines and labour-saving inventions--than our most remote and savage ancestors exercised with their magical rituals to ensure a supply of game, or the earth’s fertility. If we have progressed at all, it is solely in subjective curiosity, range of knowledge, and interest in our own destiny. Through progress in research, depth of speculation, we have become something different from the peoples of the past. We have added to their experience other experiences of our own. We now face larger, more complex, and more world-embracing problems than any Greek of the age of Pericles ever envisaged. We must think more,--though whether our thinking will lead to such good results may well be doubted--than any of our forefathers thought during the whole course of their lives.

The superficial study of history on the other hand leads merely to the shallow modern view that history has already organised the world and done our thinking for us. We may develop this view optimistically or pessimistically, but the results are equally vicious. If we take the point of view that history has made us the heirs of the ages, and set us on the summit of human progress, we sink into a Philistine acceptance of evils that will lead inevitably to disastrous self-complacency and to such catastrophes as the recent European War. It was in fact in Germany in the nineteenth century that this view of history developed, under Fichte and Hegel, and against its optimism Nietzsche wrote the best of his early essays. But one can find much of this same Philistine complacency with what history has already achieved, in such countries as America to-day, and it is partly with the aim of destroying it, that I have embarked on this study. On the other hand if we regard history more pessimistically as a series of magnificent efforts which somehow came to nothing, we fall into no less serious an error. The outcome of such a belief is to beg the entire question of our present-day existence. We become nostalgically romantic over some specific period in the past, say Ancient Greece or the thirteenth century, and ascribe all our inability fully to recapture the period in question to something which we call “modern capitalism,” or the Renaissance, or democracy, or evangelical Christianity. In any case we transfer our own responsibility for the present day to the shoulders of some scapegoat--and thereby absolve ourselves. But no one is really ever absolved from taking part in history. The process of thinking of history in terms of the past alone, tends to an act of wish-fulfilment; by it we merely make of history that which we have already wished history to be.

In order to correct this error in perspective, we must cease to regard history as a mere procession of events, and learn to look upon it from the standpoint of art and religion; these being not only humanity’s highest and noblest, but also humanity’s ultimate and most completely absolute values. From this standpoint the record of history is anything but a record of progress. Rather is it a series of fluctuations; periods of depression and stagnation alternating with periods of great hope and activity. That we have struck a period of stagnation to-day seems only too probable; the last thirty years of the nineteenth, and the first thirty years of the twentieth century have carried us far towards thorough-going religious and artistic chaos. But we cannot redeem that chaos by returning to an order and discipline of the mind which fitted the more limited intellectual and spiritual interests of yesterday, as so many of our academic critics would have us do. To revive humanism or scholasticism is useful, and to be commended as a valuable antidote to nineteenth century utilitarianism and naturalism; but all the scholasticism and humanism in the world cannot bring back the thirteenth century as it was, nor restore us to the fifteenth. We have to pick our way through the twentieth century degeneration of values and chaos with but this consideration to console us: that it was precisely when the values of the ancient world, in Greece, Rome and Judea, were at their most degraded and chaotic that Christianity was born. Certainly we no longer look forward to a repetition of that particular event; but the event towards which the world is at present tending may be at least of equal significance to man as the dawn of Christianity. Let us for the moment keep an open mind on the matter.

Meanwhile, what we have to do is to read history with a fresh understanding of its symbolic import. To do this we need only concentrate attention on the values above-mentioned; the values of art and religion. We are best able in them to study the great cultures of the world in their symbolic relation to each other. We see in them how each culture has its own special symbol or set of symbols, that differentiates it from the whole. This science of comparative and symbolical history will inevitably lead us to the present day as the natural terminus of our investigation. Our object in studying history will become largely the task of sifting out the values of the past from the rubbish with which the present day has overlaid them. We will see that the past contains in essence the present, that the present merely repeats or transforms the past, and that where it fails to do so, it fails through a lack of understanding of permanent human values. By studying the essence of the past, we do our utmost towards redeeming the failures of the present, and directing the forces of the future. We may even some day become masters of the future, if we set ourselves resolutely to learn the fate of those forces that have been found hostile, in past ages, to the movement of life.

2

About no word of the historian’s vocabulary has there been so much argument and so little agreement as about the word “civilization.” There are those who, with Spengler, would take it to denote the final stage of every great culture; a stage of which the chief features are overcrowding in great cosmopolitan cities, decline of agriculture, predominance of finance, prevailing economic crises, and the rule of dictatorships and mobs; a rapid decline of the fine-arts into sterile repetition of worn-out patterns and formulas; religion as a mere question of conventional state worship, not as a creative popular force; an increasing search for banal pleasures and barren distractions; a growing economic distress caused by pressure from below. Others, even more radical than Spengler, would qualify civilization as a disease, and postulate a return to savagery as its only possible cure. But even savagery, as we know, is not without formal culture; and civilization, if we are to use the word at all, is a development of formal culture. Perhaps the best definition of civilization is that of Gobineau; “a state of relative stability, in which multitudes bind themselves to seek peacefully the satisfaction of their needs, and refine their intelligence and their morals.” The crucial point of this definition is to be found in the word “stability.” This stability is achieved by the general adoption of one system of religion, of one style of art and architecture, of one system of rule. Its nature is expressed alike in great public monuments, in details of domestic life, and in the preservation of written records and calendar-measurements. It is above all, a _state_; fluctuating according to economic conditions, invasions from without, expansions or contractions of effort, fresh racial intermixtures. And as such, its past manifestations display many of the leading characteristics of its recent manifestations which appear in every newspaper to-day.

There is no doubt for example that ancient Babylonia and Egypt are, in comparison with such culture as their neighbours possessed, to be ranked as civilizations of a high order. Both achieved the state of stability that Gobineau postulates. And this state had as a basis in each case, a common geographical and racial element. Both were, above all, river cultures lying in close proximity to great desert wastes. Into the Nile valley, as into the flood region of the Euphrates and the Tigris, came an alien migration of Semitic culture. This Semitic element, strongly monotheistic in tendency, worked as an influence towards the final fusion of the local and tribal cults of the indigenous peoples into a common mythological and ethical structure which persisted for many centuries. But in each case the result was entirely different. In Ancient Egypt, the Semitic influence, which was exerted in successive waves of invasion from a period perhaps antedating history down to the Hyksos kings, found a very highly mixed congeries of races: in part dolmen-building pacific Berbers, in part lightly-skinned and more warlike Lybians, the whole more or less overlaying totemistic negro tribal confederations. The result was a civilization of monumental power and splendour, the remains of which had to wait for the dawn of the nineteenth century before being investigated, and whose renewed influence on the world at large now stands at a maximum. The leading characteristics of this civilization were, first, the universal belief in personal immortality, leading to a special cult of the tomb; second, the combined cult of the sun-disk and of vegetation, expressed in the two great official religions of Amen-ra and Osiris; third, the division of the country into forty districts or nomes, corresponding probably to ancient tribal divisions, and the sway exerted over each of these divisions by some entirely local god, usually of animal form, representing the vestigial cult of some totemistic deity. The greatness of Egypt rested therefore on the fusion of two religious ideas of a high order that sprung from without; the cult of the suffering vegetation-god, with its belief in immortality, Aryan in essence and mystical in expression, symbolised in the trinity of Osiris, Isis and Horus; and the sun-cult, highly rationalistic and warlike, Semitic in essence, symbolised in the disk and boat of Amen-ra. Both of these rested upon, without disturbing, a foundation of primitive African totemism.

The development of the Babylonian belief sprang from an entirely different source. Here the Semitic invaders found an already rooted population probably of Mongolian stock, highly cultivated, and the comparison of the resultant Babylonian-Assyrian culture with the Egyptian is the comparison of that which is primarily Asiatic with that which is primarily European. There is a close parallel between the Babylonian ziggurat with its receding terraces and the great Asiatic terraced shrines, of which the Altar of Heaven in Pekin is the latest example; there is even closer parallel between the belief in elemental spirits, devas, and demons of the Babylonians and the same thing in the Chinese, Thibetans, and Japanese. There the austere and not specifically creative imagination of the Semite worked again as a precipitant, fusing the original non-tribal, non-totemistic diversity of cult into a pantheon of fixed superior powers. The oldest gods, Ea, the fish-shaped god of the waters, Anu, the god of the sky, Enlil (Bel of Nippur), god of the Earth, were left undisturbed; but their cult became less important than that of the later group, each of whom became associated with a planet. Sin, the moon-god, Shamash, the sun-god, Marduk, the conquering war-god of Babylon itself, who became associated with the planet Jupiter, Nebo, the god of divination, associated with Mercury, and Ishtar, the goddess of fertility, associated with the morning and evening star of Venus, were the chief divinities of developed Babylonian-Assyrian worship. Each of these represents some supernatural magical force of the heavens, rather than of the earth. The Babylonian faith paid little attention to personal immortality, much to obedience to law and custom. Its chief religious documents are magic incantations, moral precepts, epic tales of the creation and the destruction of the world. Shamanism, the cultivation of the magic powers whereby the priesthood strove to become one with the unseen and invisible world of spiritual influences, was universal in Babylon, and practically unknown in Egypt, where its place was taken by totemism. Thus one may say that the Babylonian faith was super-rational, the Egyptian a sub-rational one.

These differences are no less climatic than racial. The plain of Mesopotamia, backed by the barren and terrible desert ranges of Persia and Armenia, lies at the mercy of the elements. Even the floods of the Euphrates and Tigris, that bring down the disintegrated loess from those mountains, and make thereby the rich soil of Mesopotamia, are uncontrollable torrents, which successive races have vainly tried to stem by constructing great irrigation and canal systems to obviate disaster. The climate itself is one of sudden sharp changes: torrential rains followed by intense heat, icy winds succeeding torrid blasts from the Persian Gulf. Under such conditions, the type of worship developed would be naturally that of the elements, regarded as superior powers: the “host of heaven” of the ancient Chaldees whose imagination so powerfully influenced the Old Testament. On the other hand, in Egypt the climate is uniform, the only outward change being the three months of flood followed by nine months of dry weather. Rain is practically unknown, and the surrounding deserts are for the most part adequate defence against invasion. The only danger is in reality internal; the danger of physical slackness and enervation brought about by interbreeding in a hot subtropical climate. The importation of fresh blood from without thus becomes from time to time a necessity to the Egyptian, as it is a danger of the first order to the Babylonian. During the course of ancient history from the first dynasty to the twenty-second, the Egyptians present the spectacle (except for the period of Amenophis IV) of a political and religious uniformity; in Babylonia the religious basis alone was uniform; politically the country was subject to violent and disruptive changes.

3

To an intelligent European coming to maturity on the threshold of the sixteenth century, the world must have seemed in a state of crisis and unrest comparable only to that which it had already gone through when the power of ancient Rome in the fifth century broke before the combined assaults of the barbarians. We, looking back on that age from the standpoint of our equally perplexing modern problems, regard that time as the culmination of the Renaissance; but to those who lived in it (if we except a few classical humanists and scholars) it must have appeared as if the end of the world, expected for many centuries, was at last at hand. The Middle Ages had passed away, with none of their hopes realised, or aims achieved. Not only had Christianity failed in wresting the Holy Sepulchre from the hands of the infidel, but the infidel himself, in the person of the Turk, had succeeded in overthrowing the last shadowy power of the Eastern Roman Empire, had made himself master of Constantinople, and was now threatening Europe. The trade route with the East that had upheld the glory of Genoa and Venice was cut off by Turkish galleys; the boundaries of Europe stopped at the littoral of the Mediterranean and the Adriatic. The old dream of the Middle Ages, which Dante had been the last to express, of a unified Holy Roman Empire, sanctified by the blessing of the Vicar of Christ, to take the place of the warring nationalities which the ancient Pagan Empire had left behind as wrecks in its wake, had now at last completely disappeared. France had become a powerful nationality, so powerful as to be able to invade Italy and dictate terms to the Church. The German Empire, always at war with its great feudal electors, was practically bankrupt. England, practical, hard-headed and inclined to heresy, had but recently settled a long feud between the rival houses of York and Lancaster, and was rapidly reviving in power under the sway of the shrewd Tudors. The only power that was not either indifferent or hostile to the claims of the mediæval faith was that of Spain, and that lay behind the barrier of the Pyrenees, and was further isolated by having to struggle with its own domestic Moorish problem.

Moreover, along with the dream of the Holy Roman Empire, the opposite dream of making the Pope himself the universal ruler of Europe, had utterly vanished. The ambitious nobles of Italy were engaged in buying and selling the most exalted of all Christian offices, with the avowed aim of making themselves masters over the peninsula. At the present moment, the Borgia family, by means of wholesale bribery, violence, and outrage had seized upon the sacred office. One unyielding Dominican, Savonarola, had condemned them to the utmost from the very centre of Florence, but he had been silenced. Everywhere the attitude of mind that had been fundamental to the Middle Ages, that this world was but an anteroom and preparation for something far more important, eternal bliss or eternal damnation, was fading away. God had given the world to men; it was for them to enjoy it.

Meantime, an enormous rift was about to appear on the face of European Christianity itself. The whole structure of the Christian faith whose foundations, soaked in the blood of martyrs, lay underneath the debris of the Roman Empire itself, and whose mighty walls had been guided upward by the great monastic effort of the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries; this whole structure which had burst forth into springing magnificence of vaults and pinnacles under the great popular Gothic awakening of the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries, now displayed a tiny rift at the summit. Within fifty years from the coming of the sixteenth century, everything lay in ruin. In the north the altars were stripped, the monasteries despoiled or destroyed, the vernacular psalms and the Bible took the place of the liturgy. In the south, the basilica of St. Peter, the most sacred shrine of mediæval Christianity itself, fell, to be replaced by a pompous shrine dedicated to the temporal splendour of that papacy that could no longer command obedience over half of Europe. The sombre prophecies of the Apocalypse seemed about to be fulfilled. The “abomination of desolation” stood in the holy place; or rather, there was no more a holy place that was not already become an abomination of desolation. Thanks to the invention of printing, the wary ambition of pushful princes, and the steady uprise of the merchant-classes to positions of rank and power, Mammon was gaining more adherents every day in his long battle with God. Savonarola had already called in question the authority of the Pope, an example which innumerable Protestants were soon to follow.

Into this tortured, desperate, final scene of the mediæval world, in which the power that had directed the Middle Ages, the power of mystic, legendary Christianity was seeking fanatically for destruction in the embrace of death, while a newer more terrible Mars and Venus uprose from the past to dispute about the new-born Renaissance, there suddenly came the rumour of two tiny and inconspicuous events somewhere in the unknown territory that lay beyond the boundaries of men’s maps and minds. Three ships guided by an obscure Genoese pilot and a shrewd Spanish navigator, had gone out into the Atlantic to look for an island called Antillia which was rumored to exist somewhere westward of the Canaries; two of them had returned, having apparently not discovered this island, but with the knowledge of having sailed far beyond, stumbling apparently upon the further Indies, which no one had seen or heard of since Marco Polo had been there far back in the thirteenth century. And twenty years earlier, in 1472, an embassy from Ivan III, the quasi-independent ruler of a territory called Muscovy which lay somewhere beyond the forests and swamps of Poland, and about which nobody knew anything except that it was presumably of the Greek Orthodox faith, but had paid tribute to Tartar infidels for untold centuries, suddenly turned up in Rome and demanded the hand of Zoë, niece of the last Christian ruler of Constantinople, from the Pope, who had taken her under his protection. At this time the council of Florence was sitting, debating whether the Eastern and the Western Churches could not be re-united in view of the fact that the Turk had taken Constantinople and was threatening Europe itself. It was naïvely supposed that to marry Zoë to this Eastern schismatic would further this object. So Zoë was sent on her long journey to Moscow, with a Latin prelate, Cardinal Antonio, for a guide, to discuss the question of the re-union of the Churches. In the upshot, Zoë married Ivan, but there was no re-union, and Cardinal Antonio returned to Italy in discomfiture. From these two insignificant events--both, be it noted, engineered and pushed forward by Italians--we chart the entire course of what is known as modern world-history.

4

The difference between ancient, mediæval, and modern history is only a difference of degree, not of kind. Human beings, and what is still more, human experiences, have been essentially the same in all ages; and it is not the least of our romantic errors of adolescence to think of the Greeks or the Elizabethans as beings belonging to an entirely different species from the men we every day see about us. The differences between one type of man and another are everywhere differences in spiritual perception; and this has been always a question of a few exceptionally favoured individuals as against a commonplace and indistinguishable mob. It must be admitted, however, that Christianity did much to heighten the spiritual perception even of the multitude; historically Christianity enlarged the bonds of the spiritual by taking in more of the actual. Before Christianity, the gods were terrible powers to be placated, and human life had no relation to their life. The gift Christianity gave to the world was a dim and vague, but vast, notion that the roots of the physical and the spiritual lay closely together, insofar as God had already become Man for man’s sake. This perception, that perfection lay in and through Christ, culminated in the great spiritual climax of the Christian drama, the thirteenth century. After that period there was rapid and sure decline. There was not again to be the birth of another saviour through a Virgin, nor did the figure that the cathedrals had dimly foreseen as standing before their altars, the figure of the king-bishop, tiaraed with the three crowns of earth, purgatory, and heaven, and belted with the sword of justice, take shape in actual flesh. Instead of the bells and incense that were to usher in the Holy Grail procession, there arose the charnel-vault order of corruption, and the clank of bones beneath the armour of the knight; instead of the bridal song of the Lamb and the Church, Gothic arches resounded with the mocking psalmody of the _Dies Irae_ and the Dance of Death. Slowly but with irresistible power, men turned away from the Uprisen Judge that they had fancied would again come to judge the World; and in Italy, parent of civilizations, the Popes themselves began with the aid of Mars and Venus to dream of refounding Rome. In the jewelled crucifix that hung about the neck of Alexander VI was set an antique cameo, representing a nude Venus. Thus the old gods returned, not to be worshipped as material, but as spiritual powers. A few men here and there babbled strange news of new-found Indies, and remote Muscovy. These were perhaps the terrestrial paradise; the new heaven and earth proclaimed by the Evangelist.

If we turn from the scene of the sixteenth century to the middle of the eighteenth, we find that the entire structure of Christian Europe is changed. The rift that was to shatter the whole work of the Middle Ages has developed, leaving Europe half Catholic, half Protestant. In each case, a full century of fanaticism has burned through, leaving rationalistic aches, tolerant scepticisms, polite lip-service to formula, or naked barbarism and desperation. The power of Ancient Rome has not been reborn in the person of the Pope; he may be pontifex, but not beyond the states of the Church itself. The true ruler of European mankind is now a periwigged, middle-aged Pallas, who has set aside her shield and helmet and is busy attempting chemical experiments, doing the grand tour, building baroque churches, and writing fugues and chamber-music. Meanwhile beyond the borders of Europe are barbarians with other gods: to the East the incalculable force of great Muscovy, sated with the blood of Sweden and Poland; to the West, the equally incalculable wilderness of the American Continent swallowing up hosts of migrating English, French and Spaniards. In them men will inevitably find again the spiritual symbols transformed and enlarged, whose ancient manifestations still sleep underground in the valley of the Nile and the Tigris. In them will re-awaken to rule over the earth the spiritual flame of Egypt and Assyria.

Thus at the outset of our enterprise, to attach to our side all those who are willing to use their imaginations in the study of man, and to frighten away those who have no imagination and no need to use it for anything, we inevitably set a myth to take the place of human history. And indeed, could we in any case do better? What are the Greeks to us to-day but the myths of Prometheus, of the warfare between the Olympians and the Titans, of the Argonauts, and the fatal struggle around Troy? All the meaning of Hellas--perhaps the whole course of Hellenic history--is contained in these stories. What are the Romans but the story of the Sabine Women, of the geese of the Capitol, of the death of Regulus, of Horatius at the bridge? What is India but the great chaotic conflict between gods and men set out in the Ramayana? History is not alone the parroting of meaningless dates and facts, a mere branch of ethnology or economics, or the study of picturesque and powerful personalities. When all these are assimilated and done with, history emerges as a series of symbols each infused with profound spiritual meaning. It is through myth alone that man finds guidance in his weary march through the vale of despair and the heights of glory. Some day someone will write the great myth of our modern world: the story of man striving to tame the machine he has invented: some day there may even be recorded the myth of the entire planet we inhabit. Let it, like the myth we are about to spin, find rest at last in the archives of some superhuman and undying memory.