One of the things that set a modern man wondering is the nature of the survivor of our time.
It is customary to say that all human things decay and end; and if you will take a period long enough of course it is true, for at last the world itself shall dissolve. But when men point to dead Empires, as Egypt or Assyria are dead, or when they point to a fossilised civilisation, as it seems, according to travellers, that certain civilisations of the East are fossilised, or when they point to little broken cities where once were famous towns, one is tempted to remember that to all these there is an exceptional glorious sort which is ourselves. Atlantic Europe, the Europe that was made by the Christian Faith and in the first four centuries of ourera, lives on from change to change in a most marvellous way, and for now two thousand years has not seemed capable of decline. You have in the history of it resurrection after resurrection, and through all those rapid and fantastic developments, transformations far more rapid and far more fantastic than any other of which we have record, a sort of inner fixity of type remains, like the individual soul of the man which makes him always himself in spite of accident and in spite of the process of age; only, Europe differs from such metaphor in this, that it is like some man not subject, it would seem, to mortality.
This thought to which I perpetually return, occurred to me as I handled a book on Paris, the illustrations of which were impressions gathered by a Japanese artist. Such a contrast will call up in the minds of many the contrast between something very old and something very new. A reader might say as he glanced at this book: "Here is one of the most ancient things we have, the Oriental mind, and it is looking atone of the freshest and most modern things we have, modern Paris."
I confess that to me the contrast is of another kind. I should say: "Here is something which is, so far as its inner force goes, immovable, the Oriental mind; and this is how it looks at the most mobile thing on earth, the heart of Gaul—yet the mobile thing has a history almost as long as, and far more full than, the immobile thing."
Upon a central page of this book I found a really splendid bit of drawing. It is an impression of the Statue of the Republic under a cold dawn. Now when one thinks what that statue means, what portion of the stoical philosophy re-arisen after so many centuries it embodies, what furious combats have raged round that idea: I mean combats, not debates: pain, not rhetoric; men dying in great numbers and desiring to kill others as they died. When one considers that statue but the other day, with the raging mob of workmen round it, and when one suddenly remembers that the whole thing isafter all only of the last hundred years—what a multiplicity of life this chief of our European cities possesses in one's eyes!
The admirable pictures in this book are drawn as nearly in the European manner as one could expect, but the feeling is an unchanging feeling which we know in Eastern things. The mind is like deep and level water, never stirred by wind: a big lake in a crater of the hills. But the thing drawn is as moving and as living as the air.
I wonder whether this artist, as he stood and drew, felt as a European feels when he stands and draws in any one of our immemorial sites: by the Pool of London, or at the top of the rue St. Jacques, or in the place of the Martyrdom at Toulouse, or looking at the most ancient yellow dusts of Toledo from over the tumbling strength of the Tagus? He may have felt it ... perhaps ... for all his work, even the little introduction that he has written shows that astonishing adaptability and exceedingly rapid intelligence which are the marks ofthe Japanese to-day. But if he felt it he must have felt it by education. For us it is in our blood. We stand upon those sites and we feel ourself in and part of a stream of life that seems almost incapable of ending. And that brings me back to where I began, How much longer will our civilisation endure?
Will it end? It has many enemies, most of them unconscious, has modern Europe.
It has men within it who imagine that the correction of some large abuse and the withdrawal of some considerable part of its fabric in the correction of that abuse, is a matter concerning only their one generation. These men visibly put in peril the balance of that civilisation by their very enthusiasm.
It has a lesser number of other enemies within itself; enemies more dangerous, who do believe that some quite new thing wholly alien to the soul of Europe can be imposed upon that soul. These men are always for anarchy; they delight in emphasising all that seems to diminish the responsibility and the freedom of citizens, andit is their pleasure to accelerate every tendency which may destroy, from whatever side, our permanent solution of domestic and of natural things: families, properties, armies.
The common faith which was, as it were, the cement of our civilisation has been hit so hard that some do ask themselves openly the question that was only whispered some little time ago—whether the cement still holds. It is quite certain that if that last symbol and reality disintegrates, if the Catholic Church leaves it, Europe has come to an end.
But these questions are not yet to be met by any reply. And when I ask myself those questions, and I always do when I see the Seine going by the walls that were Cæsar's parleying ground with the chiefs, Dionysius's prison, Julian's office, Dagobert's palace, and which have been subject to everything from Charlemagne to the Bourbons, and which have (within the memory of men whom I myself have known) ended the Monarchy and seen passing by a wholly new society—when I ask myself thosequestions, I answer less and less with every year.
Time was, in the University, say twenty years ago, one would have said: "It is all over. Everything that can destroy us has triumphed." Time was, say ten years ago, in the heat of a particular struggle which raged all over the West, one could have said with the enthusiasm of the fight, that continuity would win. But to-day, whether because one has accumulated knowledge or because things are really more confused, it is difficult to reply.
* * * * *
A man with our knowledge and our experience of what Europe has been and is, standing in the grey and decayed Roman city of the Fifth Century, and watching the little barbarian troop riding into Lutetia, might have said that a gradual darkness would swallow us all, especially since he knew that just beyond the narrow seas in Eastern Britain a dense pall then covered the corpse of the Roman civilisation.
A man working on the Tour St. Jacques, thelast of the Gothic, might have seen nothing but anarchy and the end of all good work in the change that was surging round him: the Huguenots, the new Splendour, the cruelty and the making of lies.
Certainly those who were present in Parisbeforethe 10th of August,'92, thought an end had come, and believed the Revolution to be a most unfruitful and tempestuous death; imagining Europe to have no hope but in the possible extinction of the flame.
All three judgments would have been wrong. And when one takes that typical Paris again, and handles it and looks at it and thinks of it as the example and the symbol of all our time; just as one is beginning to say "The thing is dying," the memory of similar deaths that were not deaths in the past returns to one and one must be silent.
Never was Europe less conscious of herself, never did she more freely admit the forces that destroy, than she admits them to-day. Never was evil more insolently or more glaringly inpower; never had it less fear of chastisement than in the whirlwind of our time. If that whirlwind is mechanical, and if this vast anarchic commerce, these blaring papers, these sudden fortunes, these frequent and unparalleled huge wars, are the breaking up of all that once made Europe, then the answer to the question is plain: but it may be that these are things not mechanical but organic: seeds surviving in the ruin which will grow up into living forms. We shall see.
It is curious that the Scientific Spirit has never tabulated any research, even superficial, upon the human type of charlatan.
It is the essence of a charlatan that he aims at the results of certain excellences in the full consciousness that he does not possess those excellences. The material upon which he works is twofold: the ignorance and the noble appetite for reverence in his fellow men.
Where animals are concerned the Scientific Spirit has tabulated a good deal of careful research in this department. We know fairly well the habits of the Cuckoo. What seemingly harmless organisms are poisonous to us, and why, we have discovered and can catalogue. The successful deception practised for purposes of secrecy or greed by such and such a creature,we can discover in our books. But no one has tabulated the human charlatan.
An admirable example upon which one can test the whole theory of charlatanism is the ridiculous Lombroso.
To begin with you have the name. He was no more of an Italian than Disraeli, or than the present Mayor of Rome: but his Italian name deceives and is intended to deceive, not necessarily that it was assumed, but that it was paraded as national. Hundreds of honest men thought themselves praising the Italian character and Italian civilisation when the newspapers (themselves half duped) had persuaded them to blow the trumpet of Lombroso.
One of the characteristics of the charlatan is that he parades the object with which he desires to dupe you, and simultaneously hides his methods in pushing the thing forward. The purveyor of cheap jewellery in Whitechapel does this. He lets you have the glitter of his article full and strong. Where he got it, of his own connection with it, and what it is, you learnlast in the business or not at all. The whole process is one of suggestion, or, as our forefathers called it, "hoodwinking." Lombroso was true to type in this regard.
The European Press was deluged one day with notices, praise, reviews of a book which was calledDegeneration. It was a tenth-rate book, but we were compelled to hear of it. No words were fine enough to describe its author. We learnt that his name was Nordau. There was no process of logic in the book, there was no labour. Where it asserted (it was a mass of assertions) it usually trespassed on ground which the author could not pretend to any familiarity with. Those who are already alive to the international trick were suspicious and upon their guard from the very moment that they smelt the thing. The infinitely larger number who do not understand the nature of international forces were taken in. For one man who read the farrago a hundred were taught to magnify the name of Nordau. Only when this process of suggestion had well sunk in did thepublic casually learn that the said Nordau was a connection of Lombroso's.
A book of greater value (which is not saying much) proceeded from the pen of one Ferrero. It proposed an examination of the Roman Empire and the Roman people. Its thesis was, of course, a degradation of both. For one man who so much as saw that book, a hundred went away with the vague impression that a certain great Ferrero dominated European thought. He gave opinions (among other things) upon the polity of England so absurd and ignorant that, had the process of suggestion not run on before, those opinions would only have attained some small measure of notoriety from their very fatuousness. But the international trick had reversed the common and healthy process of human thought. We were not allowed to judge the man by his work; no, we must accept the work on the authority of the man; only after the trick had been successfully worked did it come out that Ferrero was a connection of Lombroso's.
Lombroso's own department of charlatanry was to attack Christian morals in the shape of denying man's power of choice between good and evil.
In another epoch and with other human material to work upon his stock-in-trade would have taken some other form, but Lombroso had been born into that generation immediately preceding our own, whose chief intellectual vice was materialism. A name could be cheaply made upon the lines of materialism, and Lombroso took to it as naturally as his spiritual forerunners took to rationalist Deism and as his spiritual descendants will take to spurious mysticism. We shall have in the near future our Lombrosos of the Turning Table, the Rapping Devil, and the Manifesting Dead Great Aunt—indeed this development coincided with his own old age—but as things were, the easiest charlantry in his years of vigour was to be pursued upon Materialist lines, and on Materialist lines did the worthy Lombroso proceed. His method was childishly simple, and we ought to blush for ourtime or rather for that of our immediate seniors that it should have duped anybody—but it was far from childishly guileless.
When the laws are chiefly concerned in defending the possessions of those already wealthy, and when society, in the decline or depression of religion, takes to the worshipping of wealth, those whom the laws will punish are generally poor. Such a time was that into which Lombroso was born. No man was executed for treason, few men were imprisoned for it. Cheating on a large scale was an avenue to social advancement in most of the progressive European countries. The purveying of false news was a way to fortune: the forestaller and the briber were masters of the Senate. The sword was sheathed. The popular instinct which would repress and punish cowardice, oppression, the sexual abominations of the rich, and their cruelties, had no outlet for its expression. The prisons of Europe were filled in the main with the least responsible, the weakest willed, and the most unfortunate of the verypoor. We owe to Lombroso the epoch-making discovery that the weakest willed, the least responsible, and the most unfortunate of the very poor often suffer from physical degradation. With such an intellectual equipment Lombroso erected the majestic structure of human irresponsibility.
Two hundred men and women are arrested for picking pockets in such and such a district in the course of a year. The contempt for human dignity which is characteristic of modern injustice permits these poor devils to be treated like so many animals, to be thrashed, tortured, caged, and stripped: measured, recorded, dealt with as vile bodies for experiment. Lombroso (or for that matter any one possessed of a glimmering of human reason) can see that of these two hundred unfortunate wretches, a larger proportion will be diseased or malformed, than would be the case among two hundred taken at random among the better fed or better housed and more carefully nurtured citizens. The Charlatan is in clover! He gathers hisstatistics: twenty-three per cent. squint, eighteen per cent. have lice—what is reallyconclusiveno less than ninety-three per cent. suffer from metagrobolisation of the hyperdromedaries, which is scientist Greek for the consequences of not having enough to eat. It does not take much knowledge of men and things to see what the Charlatan can make of such statistics. Lombroso pumps the method dry and then produces a theory uncommonly comfortable to the well-to-do—that their fellow-men if unfortunate can be treated as irresponsible chattels.
There is the beginning and end of the whole humbug.
With the characteristic lack of reason which is at once the weakness and the strength of this vicious clap-trap, a totally disconnected—and equally obvious—series of facts is dragged in. If men drink too much, or if they have inherited insanity, or are in any other way afflicted, by their own fault or that of others, in the action of the will, they will be prone to irresponsibilities and to follies; and where suchirresponsibilities and follies endanger the comfort of the well-to-do, the forces of modern society will be used to restrain them. Their acts of violence or of unrestrained cupidity being unaccompanied by calculation will lead to the lock-up. And so you have another stream of statistics showing that "alcoholism" (which is Scientist for drinking too much) and epilepsy and lunacy do not make for material success.
On these two disparate legs poses the rickety structure which has probably already done its worst in European jurisprudence and against which the common sense of society is already reacting.
Fortunately for men Charlatanry of that calibre has no very permanent effect. It is too silly and too easily found out. If Lombroso had for one moment intended a complete theory of Materialist morals or had for one moment believed in the stuff which he used for self-advertisement, he would have told us how physically to distinguish the cosmopolitan and treasonable financier, the fraudulent company-worker, thetraitor, the tyrant, the pornographer, and the coward. These in high places are the curse of modern Europe—not the most wretched of the very poor. Of course Lombroso could tell us nothing of the sort; for there is nothing to tell.
Incidentally it is worthy of remark that this man was one of those charlatans who are found out in time. Common sense revolted and in revolting managed to expose its enemy very effectively while that enemy was still alive. A hundred tricks were played upon the fellow: it is sufficient to quote two.
After a peculiarly repulsive trial for murder in Paris, a wag sent the photograph of two hands, a right hand and a left hand, to the great criminologist, telling him they were those of the murderer, and asking for his opinion. He replied in a document crammed with the pompous terms of the scientific cheap-jack, hybrid Greek and Latin, and barbarous in the extreme. He discovered malformations in the fingers and twenty other mysteries of his craft, which exactly proved why these hands were necessarilyand by the predestination of blind Nature the hands of a murderer. Then it was that the wag published his letter and the reply with the grave annotation that the left hand was his own (he was a man of letters) and the right hand that of an honest fellow who washed down his carriage.
The other anecdote is as follows: Lombroso produced a piece of fatuous nonsense about the Political Criminal Woman. He based it upon "the skull of Charlotte Corday"—which skull he duly analysed, measured, and labelled with the usual regiment of long and incomprehensible words. Upon the first examination of the evidence it turned out that the skull was no more Charlotte Corday's than Queen Anne's—a medical student had sold it to a humble Curiosity Shop, and the dealer, who seems to have had some intellectual affinity with the Lombroso tribe, had labelled it for purposes of sale, "The Skull of Charlotte Corday." Lombroso swallowed it.
The Ass!
The use of analogy, which is so wise and necessary a thing in historical judgment, has a knack of slipping into the falsest forms.
When ancient civilisation broke down its breakdown was accompanied by the infiltration of barbaric auxiliaries into the Roman armies, by the settlement of Barbarians (probably in small numbers), upon Roman land, and, in some provinces, by devastating, though not usually permanent, irruptions of barbaric hordes.
The presence of these foreign elements, coupled with the gradual loss of so many arts, led men to speak of "the Barbarian invasions" as though these were a principal cause of what was in reality no more than the old age and fatigue of an antique society.
Upon the model of this conception men, watching the dissolution of our own civilisationto-day, or at least its corruption, have asked themselves whence those Barbarians would come that should complete its final ruin. The first, the least scholarly and the most obvious idea was that of the swamping of Europe by the East. It was a conception which required no learning, nor even any humour. It was widely adopted and it was ridiculous. Others, with somewhat more grasp of reality, coined the phrase "that the barbarians which should destroy the civilisation of Europe were already breeding under the terrible conditions of our great cities." This guess contained, indeed, a half-truth, for though the degradation of human life in the great industrial cities of England and the United States was not a cause of our decline it was very certainly a symptom of it. Moreover, industrial society, notably in this country and in Germany, while increasing rapidly in numbers, is breeding steadily from the worst and most degraded types.
But the truth is that no such mechanical explanation will suffice to set forth the causes of acivilisation's decay. Before the barbarian in any form can appear in it, it must already have weakened. If it cannot absorb or reject an alien element it is because its organism has grown enfeebled, and its powers of digestion and excretion are lost or deteriorated; and whoever would restore any society which menaces to fall, must busy himself about the inward nature of that society much more than about its external dangers or the merely mechanical and numerical factors of peril to be discovered within it.
Whenever we look for "the barbarian," whether in the decline of our own society or that of some past one whose historical fate we may be studying, we are looking rather for a visible effect of disease than for its source.
None the less to mark those visible effects is instructive, and without some conspectus of them it will be impossible to diagnose the disease. A modern man may, therefore, well ask where the barbarians are that shall enter into our inheritance, or whose triumphs shall, if it bepermitted, at least accompany, even if they cannot effect, the destruction of Christendom.
With that word "Christendom" a chief part of the curious speculation is at once suggested. Whether the scholar hates or loves, rejects or adopts, ridicules or admires, the religious creed of Europe, he must, in any case, recognise two prime historical truths. The first is that that creed which we call the Christian religion was the soul and meaning of European civilisation during the period of its active and united existence. The second is that wherever the religion characteristic of a people has failed to react against its own decay and has in some last catastrophe perished, then that people has lost soon after its corporate existence.
So much has passion taken the place of reason in matters of scholarship that plain truths of this kind, to which all history bears witness, are accepted or rejected rather by the appetite of the reader than by his rational recognition of them, or his rational disagreement. If we will forget for a moment what we maydesirein thematter and merely consider what weknow, we shall without hesitation admit both the propositions I have laid down. Christendom was Christian, not by accident or superficially, but in a formative connection, just as an Englishman is English or as a poem is informed by a definite scheme of rhythm. It is equally true that a sign and probably a cause of a society's end is the dissolution of that causative moral thing, its philosophy or creed.
Now here we discover the first mark of the Barbarian.
Note that in the peril of English society to-day there is no positive alternative to the ancient philosophic tradition of Christian Europe. It has to meet nothing more substantive than a series of negations, often contradictory, but all allied in their repugnance to a fixed certitude in morals.
So far has this process gone that to be writing as I am here in public, not even defending the creed of Christendom, but postulating its historic place, and pointing out that theconsiderable attack now carried on against it is symptomatic of the dissolution of our society, has about it something temerarious and odd.
Next look at secondary effects and consider how certain root institutions native to the long development of Europe and to her individuality are the subject of attack and note the nature of the attack.
A fool will maintain that change, which is the law of life, can be presented merely as a matter of degree, and that, because our institutions have always been subject to change, therefore their very disappearance can proceed without the loss of all that has in the past been ourselves.
But an argument of this sort has no weight with the serious observer. It is certain that if the fundamental institutions of a polity are no longer regarded as fundamental by its citizens, that polity is about to pass through the total change which in a living organism we call death.
Now the modern attack upon property and upon marriage (to take but two fundamental institutions of the European) is precisely of this nature. Our peril is not that certain men attack the one or the other and deny their moral right to exist. Our peril rather is that, quite as much as those who attack, those who defend seem to take for granted the relativeness, the artificiality, the non-fundamental character of the institution which they are apparently concerned to support.
See how marriage is defended. To those who would destroy it under the plea of its inconveniences and tragedies, the answer is no longer made that, good or ill, it is an absolute and is intangible. The answer made is that it is convenient, or useful, or necessary, or merely traditional.
Most significant of all, the terminology of the attack is on the lips of the defence, but the contrary is never the case. Those opponents of marriage who abound in modern England will never use the term "a sacrament," yet howmany for whom marriage is still a sacrament will forego the pseudo-scientific jargon of their opponents?
The threat against property is upon the same lines. That property should be restored that most citizens should enjoy it, that it is normal to the European family in its healthy state—all this we hear less and less. More and more do we hear it defended, however morbid in form or unjust in use, as a necessity, a trick which secures a greater stability for the State or a mere power which threatens and will break its opponents tyrannously.
The spirit is abroad in many another minor matter. In its most grotesque form it challenges the accuracy of mathematics: in its most vicious, the clear processes of the human reason. The Barbarian is as proud as a savage in a top hat when he talks of the elliptical or the hyperbolic universe and tries to picture parallel straight lines converging or diverging—but never doing anything so vulgarly old-fashioned as to remain parallel.
The Barbarian when he has graduated to be a "pragmatist," struts like a nigger in evening clothes, and believes himself superior to the gift of reason, or free to maintain that definition, limit, quantity and contradiction are little childish things which he has outgrown.
The Barbarian is very certain that the exact reproduction in line or colour of a thing seen is beneath him, and that a drunken blur for line, a green sky, a red tree and a purple cow for colour, are the mark of great painting.
The Barbarian hopes—and that is the very mark of him—that he can have his cake and eat it too. He will consume what civilisation has slowly produced after generations of selection and effort but he will not be at the pains to replace such goods nor indeed has he a comprehension of the virtue that has brought them into being. Discipline seems to him irrational, on which account he is for ever marvelling that civilisation should have offended him with priests and soldiers.
The Barbarian wonders what strangemeaning may lurk in that ancient and solemn truth, "Sine Auctoritate nulla vita."
In a word, the Barbarian is discoverable everywhere in this that he cannotmake; that he can befog or destroy, but that he cannot sustain; and of every Barbarian in the decline or peril of every civilisation exactly that has been true.
We sit by and watch the Barbarian, we tolerate him; in the long stretches of peace we are not afraid.
We are tickled by his irreverence, his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creeds refreshes us: we laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond: and on these faces there is no smile.
We permit our jaded intellects to play with drugs of novelty for the fresh sensation they arouse, though we know well there is no good in them, but only wasting at the last.
Yet there is one real interest in watching the Barbarian and one that is profitable.
The real interest of watching the Barbarianis not the amusement derivable from his antics, but the prime doubt whether he will succeed or no, whether he will flourish. He is, I repeat, not an agent, but merely a symptom, yet he should be watched as a symptom. It is not he in his impotence that can discover the power to disintegrate the great and ancient body of Christendom, but if we come to see him triumphant we may be certain that that body, from causes much vaster than such as he could control, is furnishing him with sustenance and forming for him a congenial soil—and that is as much as to say that we are dying.
An apprehension of the past demands two kinds of information.
First, the mind must grasp the nature of historic change and must be made acquainted with the conditions of human thought in each successive period, as also with the general aspect of its revolution and progression.
Secondly, the actions of men, the times, that is the dates and hours of such actions, must be strictly and accurately acquired.
Neither of these two foundations upon which repose both the teaching and the learning of history is more important than the other. Each is essential. But a neglect of the due emphasis which one or the other demands, though both be present, warps the judgment of the scholar and forbids him to apply this science to its end, which is the establishment of truth.
History may be called the test of true philosophy, or it may be called in a very modern and not very dignified metaphor, the object lesson of political science; or it may be called the great story whose interest is upon another plane from all other stories because its irony, its tragedy and its moral are real, were acted by real men, and were the manifestation of God.
But whatever brief and epigrammatic summary we make to explain the value of history to men, that formula still remains an imperative formula for them all, and I repeat it: the end of history is the establishment of truth.
A man may be ever so accurately informed as to the dates, the hours, the weather, the gestures, the type of speech, the very words, the soil, the colour, that between them all would seem to build up a particular event. But if he is not seized of the mind which lay behind all that was human in the business, then no synthesis of his detailed knowledge is possible. He cannot give to the various actions which he knows their due sequence and proportion; heknows not what to omit, nor what to enlarge upon, among so many, or rather a potentially infinite number of facts, and his picture will not be (as some would put it) distorted: it will be false. He will not be able to use history for its end, which is the establishment of truth. All that he establishes by his action, all that he confirms and makes stronger, is untruth. And so far as truth is concerned, it would be far better that a man should be possessed of no history than that he should be possessed of history ill-stated as to the factor of human motive.
A living man has to aid his judgment and to guide him in the establishment of truth, contemporary experience. Other men are his daily companions. The consequence and the living principles of their acts and of his own are fully within his grasp.
If a man is rightly informed of all the past motive and determining mind from which the present has sprung, his information will illumine and expand and confirm his use of thatpresent experience. If he know nothing of the past his personal observation and the testimony of his own senses are, so far as they go, an unshakable foundation. But if he brings in aid of contemporary experience an appreciation of the past which is false because it gives to the past a mind which was not its own, then he will not only be wrong upon that past, but he will tend to be wrong also in his conclusions upon the present. He will for ever read into the plain facts before him origins and predetermining forces which do not explain them and which are not connected with them in the way he imagines. And he will easily come to regard his own society, which as a wholly uninstructed man he might fairly though insufficiently have grasped, through a veil of illusion and of false philosophy, until at last he cannot even see the things before his eyes. In a word, it is better to have no history at all than to have history which misconceives the general direction and the large lines of thought in the immediate and the remote past.
This being evidently the case one is tempted to say that a just estimate of the revolution and the progression of human motive in the past is everything to history, and that an accurate scholarship in the details of the chronicle, in dates especially, is of wholly inferior importance. Such a statement would be quite false. Scholarship in history, that is an acquaintance with the largest possible number of facts, and an accurate retention of them in the memory, is as essential to this study as of that other background of motive which has just been examined.
The thing is self-evident if we put an extreme case. For if a man were wholly ignorant of the facts of history and of their sequence, he could not possibly know what might lie behind the actions of the past, for we only obtain communion with that which is within and that which is foundational in human action by an observation of its external effect.
A man's history, for instance, is sound and on the right lines if he have but a vague andgeneral sentiment of the old Pagan civilisation of the Mediterranean so long as that sentiment corresponds to the very large outline and is in sympathy with the main spirit of the affair. But he cannot possess so much as an impression of the truth if he has not heard the names of certain of the great actors, if he is wholly unacquainted with the conception of a City State, and if the names of Rome, of Athens, of Antioch, of Alexandria, and of Jerusalem have never been mentioned to him.
Nor will a knowledge of facts, however slight, be valuable; contrariwise it will be detrimental and of negative value to his judgment if accuracy in his knowledge be lacking. If he were invariably inaccurate, thinking that red which was blue, inverting the order of any two events and putting without fail in the summer what happened in winter, or in the Germanies what took place in Gaul, his facts would never correspond with the human motive of them, and his errors upon externals would at once close his avenues of access towards internal motive andsuggest other and non-existent motive in its place.
It is, of course, a childish error to imagine that the knowledge of a time grows out of a mere accumulation of observation. External things do not produce ideas, they only reveal them. And to imagine that mere scholarship is sufficient to history is to put one's self on a level with those who, in the sphere of politics, for instance, ignore the necessity of political theory and talk muddily of the "working" of institutions—as though it were possible to judge whether an institution were working ill or not when one had no ideal that institutions might be designed to attain. But though scholarship is not the source of judgment in history, it is the invariable and the necessary accompaniment of it. Facts, which (to repeat) do not produce ideas but only reveal or suggest them, do none the less reveal and suggest them, and form the only instrument of such suggestion and revelation.
Scholarship, accurate and widespread, hasthis further function: that it lends stuff to general apprehension of the past, which, however just, is the firmer, the larger and the more intense as the range of knowledge and its fixity increase. And scholarship has one more function, which is that it connects, and it connects with more and more precision in proportion as it is more and more detailed, the tendency of the mind to develop a general and perhaps justly apprehended idea into imaginary regions: for the mind is creative; it will still make and spin, and if you do not feed it with material it will spin dreams out of emptiness.
Thus a man will have a just appreciation of the thirteenth century in England; he will perhaps admire or will perhaps be repelled by its whole spirit according to his temperament or his acquired philosophy; but in either case, though his general impression was just, he will tend to add to it excrescences of judgment which, as the process continued, would at last destroy the true image were not scholarship there to come in perpetually and check him in his conclusions.He admires it, he will tend to make it more national than it was, to forget its cruelties because what is good in our own age is not accompanied by cruelty. He will tend to lend it a science it did not possess because physical science is in our own time an accompaniment of greatness. But if he reads and reads continually, these vagaries will not oppress or warp his vision. More and more body will be added to that spirit, which he does justly but only vaguely know. And he will at last have with the English thirteenth century something of that acquaintance which one has with a human face and voice: these also are external things, and these also are the product of a soul.
Indeed—though metaphors are dangerous in such a matter—a metaphor may with reservation be used to describe the effect of the chronicle, of research and of accurate scholarship in the science of history. A man ill provided with such material is like one who sees a friend at a distance; a man well provided with it is like a man who sees a friend close at hand. Both arecertain of the identity of the person seen, both are well founded in that certitude; but there are errors possible to the first which are not possible to the second, and close and intimate acquaintance lends to every part of judgment a surety which distant and general acquaintance wholly lacks. The one can say something true and say it briefly: there is no more to say. The other can fill in and fill in the picture, until though perhaps never complete, it is asymptotic to completion.
To increase one's knowledge by research, to train one's self to an accurate memory of it, does not mean that one's view of the past is continually changing. Only a fool can think, for instance, that some document somewhere will be discovered to show that the mass of the people of London had for James II an ardent veneration, or that the national defence organised by the Committee of Public Safety during the French Revolution was due to the unpopular tyranny of a secret society. But research in either of these cases, and a minute andincreasing acquaintance with detail, does show one London largely apathetic in the first place, and does show one large sections of rebellious feeling in the armies of the Terror. It permits one to appreciate what energy and what initiative were needed for the overthrow of the Stuarts, and to see from how small a body of wealthy and determined men that policy proceeded. It permits one to understand how the battles of '93 could never have been fought upon the basis of popular enthusiasm alone; it permits one to assert without exaggeration that the autocratic power of the Committee of Public Safety and the secrecy of its action was a necessary condition of the National defence during the French Revolution.
One might conclude by saying what might seem too good to be true: namely, that minute and accurate information upon details (the characteristic of our time in the science of history) must of its own nature so corroborate just and general judgments of the past, that through it, when the modern phase of wilfuldistortion is over, mere blind scholarship will restore tradition.
I say it sounds too good to be true. But three or four examples of such action are already before us. Consider the Gospel of St. John, for instance, or what is called "the Higher Criticism" of the old Hebrew literature, and ask yourselves whether modern scholarship has not tended to restore the long and sane judgment of men, which, when that scholarship was still imperfect, seemed to imperil.
I have long desired to make some protest against the attitude which the Very Learned take towards literary evidence. I know that the Very Learned chop and change. I know that they are in this country about fifty years behind the Continent. I know that their devotion to the extraordinary unintelligent German methods will soon be shaken by their discovery that new methods are abroad—in both senses of the word "abroad": for new methods have been abroad, thank Heaven, for a very long time.
But I also know that a mere appeal to reason will be of very little use, so I propose here to give a concrete instance, and I submit it to the judgment of the Very Learned.
The Very Learned when they desire to fix the date or the authenticity or both of a piece of literature, adopt among other postulates, these:
(1) That tradition doesn't count.
(2) That common sense, one's general knowledge of the time, and all that multiplex integration which the same mind effects from a million tiny data to a general judgment, is too tiny to be worthy of their august consideration.
(3) That the title "Very Learned" (which gives them their authority) is tarnished by any form of general knowledge and can only be acquired by confining oneself to a narrow field in which any fool could become an absolute master in about two years.
These are their negative postulates in dealing with a document.
As to their positive methods, of one hundred insufficient tricks I choose in particular these:
(1) The establishment of the date of the document against tradition and general air, by allusion discovered within it.
(2) The conception that all unusual events recorded in it are mythical, and therefore necessarily anterior to the document.
(3) The supposition that religious emotion, or indeed emotion of any kind, vitiates record.
(4) The admission of a single piece of correlative documentary evidence to destroy the reader's general judgment.
(5) The fixed dogma that most writers of the past have spent most of their time in forging.
Now to test these nincompoops I will consider a contemporary document which I know a good deal about, calledThe Path to Rome. It professes to be the record of a journey by one H. Belloc in the year 1901 from Toul in Lorraine to Rome in Italy. I will suppose that opus to have survived through some accident into a time which preserved few contemporary documents, but which had, through tradition and through a knowledge of surrounding circumstance, a popular idea of what the opening of the twentieth century was like, and a pathetic belief that Belloc had taken this journey in the year 1901.
This is how the Very Learned would proceed to teach the vulgar a lesson in scepticism.
"A critical examination of the document has confirmed me in the conclusion that the so-calledPath to Romeis composed of three distinct elements, which I will call A, W, and [Greek: theta]." (See my article E.H.R., September 3, 113, pp. 233et seq.for [Greek: theta]. For W, see Furth in Die Quellen Critik, 2nd Semestre, 3117.)
Of these three documents A is certainly much earlier than the rather loose criticism of Polter in England and Bergmann upon the Continent decided some years ago in the Monograph of the one, and the Discursions which the other has incorporated in hisNeo-Catholicism in the Twenty-Second Century.
The English scholar advances a certain inferior limit ofA.D.2208, and a doubtful superior limit ofA.D.2236. The German is more precise and fixes the date of A in a year certainly lying between 2211 and 2217. I need not here recapitulate the well-known arguments with which this view is supported (See Z.M. fs.(Mk. 2) Arch., and the very interesting article of my friend Mr. Gouch in the Pursuits of the A.S.) I may say generally that their argument reposes upon two considerations:
(1) TheCentime, a coin which is mentioned several times in the book, went out of circulation before the middle of the twenty-first century, as we know from the only extant letter (undoubtedly genuine) of Henri Perro to the Prefect of Aude.
This gives them their superior limit. But it is the Inferior Limit which concerns us most, and here the argument reposes upon one phrase. (Perkins' edition, p..) This phrase is printed in italics, and runs, "Deleted by the Censor."
It is advanced that we know that a censorship of books was first established in America (where, as I shall show,The Path to Romewas written) in the year 2208, and there is ample evidence of the fact that no such institution was in actual existence before the twenty-second century in the English-speaking countries,though there is mention of it elsewhere in the twenty-first, and a fragment of the twentieth appears to allude to something of the kind in Russia at that time. (Baker has confused the Censorship ofBookswith that ofPlays, and an unknown form of art called "Morum"; probably a species of private recitation.)
Now Dr. Blick has conclusively shown in his critical edition of the mass of ancient literature, commonly known asThe Statute Book, that the use of italics is common to distinguishlaterinterpolation.
This discovery is here of the first importance. Not only does it destroy the case for the phrase, "Deleted by the Censor," as a proof of an Inferior Limit, 2208, but in this particular instance it is conclusive evidence that we have interpolation here, for it is obvious thatafterthe establishment of a Censorship the right would exist to delete a name in the text, and a contemporary Editor would warn the reader in the fashion which he has, as a fact, employed.
So much for the negative argument. Wecan be certain after Dr. Blick's epoch-making discovery that even the year 2208 is not our Inferior Limit for A, but we have what is much better, conclusive evidence of a much earlierSuperiorLimit, to which I must claim the modest title of discoverer.
There is a passage in A (pp. 170-171) notoriously corrupt, in which a dramatic dialogue between three characters, the Duchess, Major Charles and Clara, is no longer readable. All attempts to reconstitute it have failed, and on that account scholars have too much tended to neglect it.
Now I submit that though the passage is hopelessly corrupt its very corruption affords us a valuable indication.
The Duchess, in a stage indication, is made to address "Major Charles." It is notorious that the term "Major" applied to a certain functionary in a religious body probably affiliated to the Jesuits, known to modern scholars under a title drawn from the only contemporary fragment concerning it, as "Old Booth'sRamp." This society was suppressed in America in the year 2012,and the United States were the last country in which it survived.
No matter how correct, therefore, the text is in this passage, we may be certain that even the careless scribe took the contemporary existence of a "major" for granted. And we may be equally certain that even our existing version of A incorporated in the only text we possess, was not written later than the first years of the twenty-first century. We have here, therefore, a new superior limit of capital importance, but, what is even more important, we can fix with fair accuracy a new inferior limit as well.
In the Preface (whose original attachment to A is undoubted) we have the title "Captain Monologue," p. XII (note again the word "Captain," an allusion to "Booth's Ramp,") and in an anonymous fragment (B.M. m.s.s., 336 N., (60)), bearing the title, "Club Gossip," I have found the following conclusive sentence: "He used to bore us stiff, and old Burton invented a brand new title for him, 'CaptainMonologue,' about a year before he died, which the old chap did an hour or two after dinner on Derby Day."
Now this phrase is decisive. We have several allusions to "dinner" (in all, eight, and a doubtful ninth, tabulated by Ziethen in hisCorpus. Ins. Am.). They all refer to some great public function the exact nature of which is lost, but which undoubtedly held a great place in political life. At what intervals this function occurred we cannot tell, but the coincident allusion to Derby Day settles it.
The only Lord Derby canonized by the Church died in 1960 and the promulgation of Beatification (the earliest date that would permit the use of the word "day" for this Saint) was issued by Pope Urban XV in May, 2003. It is, therefore, absolutely certain that A was written at some time between the years 2003 to 2012. Nearer than that I do not profess to fix it; but I confess that the allusion (p. 226) to drinking coffee coupled with the corresponding allusion to drinking coffee in a license issuedfor a Lockhart's Restaurant in 2006 inclines me to that precise year as the year in which A appeared, or at any rate was written.
I think in the above I have established the date of A beyond dispute.
I have no case to bring forward of general conclusions, and I know that many scholars will find my argument, however irrefutable, disturbing, for it is universally admitted that excluding the manifestly miraculousEpisodes of the Oracle,The Ointment of Epinal,The View of the Alps over a Hundred Miles, etc., which are all of them properly referred to in W. and [Greek: theta] respectively, A itself contains numerous passages too closely connected with the text to be regarded as additions, yet manifestly legendary—such as the perpetual allusions to spirits, and in particular to a spirit called "Devil," the inordinate consumption of wine, the gift of tongues, etc. etc. But I submit that a whole century, especially in a time which pullulated with examples of credulity, such as the "Flying Men," "The Telephone," "WirelessTelegraphy," etc., is ample to allow for the growth of these mythical features.
I take it, therefore, as now established, that A in its entirety is not later than 2012 and probably as early as 2006. Upon W I cannot yet profess to have arrived at a decision, but I incline to put it at about forty years later, while [Greek: theta] (which includes most of the doggerel and is manifestly in another style, and from another hand) is admitted to be at least a generation later than "W" itself.
In a further paper I shall discuss the much-disputed point of authorship, and I shall attempt to show that Belloc, though the subject of numerous accretions, was a real historical figure, and that the author of A may even have worked upon fragments preserved by oral tradition from the actual conversation of that character.
That is how the damned fools write: and with brains of that standard Germans ask me to deny my God.
"I asked Old Biggs (as the Duke of Racton used to be called) what he thought of Charlie Wilson. Old Biggs answered, 'Man like that's one of two things: aFanatic or a Fanatic.' I thought this very funny."—St. Germans Sporting Memoirs, Vol. II, p. 186.
"I asked Old Biggs (as the Duke of Racton used to be called) what he thought of Charlie Wilson. Old Biggs answered, 'Man like that's one of two things: aFanatic or a Fanatic.' I thought this very funny."—St. Germans Sporting Memoirs, Vol. II, p. 186.
This is a kind of man whom we all love and yet all desire to moderate. He is excessive only in good, but his excess therein is dangerous. He proceeds from less to more; first irritated, then exasperated, then mad. He will not tolerate the necessary foibles of mankind. No, nor even their misunderstandings. He himself commonly takes refuge in some vice or other, but a small one, and from this bastion defends himself against all comers.
The Fanatic will exaggerate the operations of war. If it be necessary in the conquest of a province to murder certain women, he will cry shame blindly, without consideration ofmartial conditions or remembrance that what we do in war is absolved by indemnities thereafter following. It is the same with the death of children in warfare, whether these be starved to death in concentration camps or more humanely spitted, or thrown down wells, or dealt with in some other fashion, such as the braining of them against walls and gateposts: nothing will suit the Fanatic in these matters but a complete and absolute abstention from them, without regard to strategy or tactics or any other part of military science. Now many a man shall argue against practices of one sort or another, as against excesses. But the Fanatic is nothing so reasonable, being bound by a law of his nature or rather a lack of law, to violent outburst with no restraint upon it, and to impotent gnashings.
It is so also in affairs of State when peace reigns, for the Fanatic is for ever denouncing what all men know must be and making of common happenings an uncommon crime.Thus, when a minister shall borrow of a money-lender certain sums which this last generously puts before him without condition or expense, what must your Fanatic do, but poke and pry into the whole circumstance, and when the usurer has his just reward, and is made a Peer to settle our laws for us, the Fanatic will go vainly about from one newspaper to another seeking which shall print his foolish "protest" (as he calls it). Mark you also that the Fanatic is quite indifferent to this: that his foolishness is of no effect. He will roar in an empty field as loud as any bull and challenge all men to meet him, and seems well pleased whether they come or no.
It is of the fanatical temper to regard some few men as heroes, or demigods, and then again, these having failed in something, to revile them damnably. Thus by the old religious sort you will find the Twelve Apostles in the Gospel very foolishly revered and made much of as though they were so many Idols, but let one of these (Judas to wit) show statesmanship and a manlysense, and Lord! how the Fanatic does rail at him!
So it is also with foreign nations. The Fanatic has no measure there and speaks of them as though they were his province, seeing that it is of his essence never to comprehend diversity of circumstance or measure. Thus our cousins oversea will very properly burn alive the negroes that infest them in those parts, and their children and young people will, when the negro has been thus despatched, collect his bones or charred clothing to keep the same in their collections, which later they compare one with another. This is their business not ours, and has proved in the effect of great value to their commonwealth. But the Fanatic will have none of it. To hear him talk you might imagine himself a negro or one that had in his own flesh tasted the fire, and in his rage he will blame one man and another quite indiscriminately: now the good President of these people (Mr. Roosevelt as he once was), now the humble instrument of justice who should have put a matchto the African. And all this without the least consideration of those surrounding things and haps which made such dealing with negroes a very necessary thing.
There is nothing workable or of purpose in what this man does. He is for ever quarrelling with other men for their lack of time or memory or even courtesy to himself, for on this point he is very tender. He wearies men with repeating to them their own negotiations, as though these were in some way disgraceful. Thus if a man has taken a sum of money in order to write of the less pleasing characters of his mother; or if he has sold his vote in Parliament, or if he has become for his own good reasons the servant of some one wealthier than he, or if he has seen fit to deal with the enemies of his country, the Fanatic will blurt out and blare such a man's considered action, hoping, it would seem, to have some support in his mere raving at it. But this he never gets, for mankind in the lump is too weighty and reasonable to accept any such wildness.
There is no curing the Fanatic, neither with offers of Money nor with blows, nor is there any method whatsoever of silencing him, save imprisonment, which, in this country, is the method most commonly taken. But in the main there is no need to act so violently by him, seeing that all men laugh at him for a fool and that he will have no man at his side. Commonly, he is of no effect at all, and we may remain his friend though much contemptuous of him, since contempt troubles him not at all. But there are moments, and notably in the doubt of a war, when the Fanatic may do great ill indeed. Then it is men's business to have him out at once and if necessary to put him to death, but whether by beheading, by hanging, or by crucifixion it is for sober judges to decide.
The Irish are very fanatical, and have driven from their country many landlords formerly wealthy who were the support and mainstay of all the island. It may be seen in Ireland how fanaticism can impoverish. Upon the other hand, the people of the Mile End Road andround by the north into Hackney Downs and so southward and westward into the City of London by Houndsditch are not fanatical at all, and enjoy for their reward an abounding prosperity.