FOOTNOTES:
[22] Sophocles, Antigone, 449-57 (Jebb's translation).
[23] Herodotus, iii. 38.
VI
THE COMMON ELEMENTS IN EUROPEAN LITERATURE AND ART
For some hundred years past it has been common to lay great stress upon the importance of national characteristics in art. This has been very natural, for they represent one main aspect and justification of the revolt against the conception of the one permanent and immutable standard of perfection of the Neo-classicists of the Renaissance. Lessing and Herder, who were the critical protagonists of the new world, had indeed a knowledge and admiration of ancient art which was probably superior to that of the classicists, but they refused to admit that art was bound to follow the forms of antiquity, and maintained rather that its forms would necessarily change with the changing conditions of the world, and with the varying characteristics of different nationalities or races.
From their time down to our own, then, this conception of art, as being coloured or affected strongly and continually by nationality, has become almost a commonplace of criticism, and it will not be denied that there is real importance in the conception. For though nothing is really art which is not distinctive and personal and unique, yet just so far as the personality of the artist is conditioned by his nationality, so far also will his artistic work reflect the characteristics of his nation or country. And yet, while this is true, it really needs very little consideration to see that when we consider a great work of art, we are very little concerned with the question of the nationality of the artist, but with something which is deeper and larger than his nationality. The great artist no doubt represents life under the forms or terms of his concrete experience, but it is life and the world itself which he represents. He is not greatly concerned with the merely superficial or passing aspects of human nature and the world, but with that which is essential and continuing under these terms.
It may indeed be urged that there is some real and fundamental difference between the art of the East and that of the West, but as we have come to know eastern art better, we have become more doubtful even of this, and are rather impressed with the unity of the artistic expression even of East and West. I am far from wishing to say that nationality or race has no significance in art, but I think that we have been in danger of greatly exaggerating its importance. I am at least certain that we have very constantly made too much of the supposed differences in the literature and art of the different European countries, and that we must make clear to ourselves that European art and literature are really one.
It is not unimportant to observe this at the present time, to consider whether literature and art are dividing or uniting forces. As far as we can understand, what indeed seems a little unintelligible, the Germans desire to impress upon Europe their culture or civilization, an attempt as absurd as it would be impossible, for German culture is, after all, only a part of the great European civilization, and the part cannot take the place of the whole. But on the other hand it is not less important for us to understand that what we desire to do is not to destroy those elements which Germany contributes to European civilization, but only that they should take their natural and appropriate place in that greater unity which is enriched and enlarged by the contribution of every separate national society. European art is one; that is, the common characteristics are far more important than the national differences. And further, we often take to be national, characteristics which happen to show themselves at one time in one place, while they may have existed at another time in another place. The history of European art is in a great measure the history of successive influences or movements which were for the most part common to all Europe, but which did not always exactly synchronize in the different European countries.
So far as there is such a thing as nationalism in literature it is wholly modern, while in mediaeval literature and art there is hardly anything of it. This may seem strange to those who imagine that it is only the railway and the steamship which have brought the world together, but the truth is that the movement of ideas and fashions was probably at least as rapid in the Middle Ages as it is to-day. However this may be, the fact is, I think, clear, that when we come to examine mediaeval literature we find that it is practically homogeneous, that whether we look at it in England or France, in Germany or in Scandinavia, it has practically the same qualities. I do not speak of Italy yet, for Italian literature is the latest-born of the great European literatures, it has not at least come down to us in any forms earlier than those of the thirteenth century.
Mediaeval literature is known to us primarily under two forms, the heroic epic and the romance, and it is to these that we must first turn our attention. We know the heroic epic in different languages throughout a period which extends roughly from the eighth to the twelfth centuries. The earliest example is the English Beowulf; among the latest are the German Nibelungenlied and some of the French Chansons de Geste, which belong to the end of the twelfth century. This epic literature is not least interesting to us because it has, as far as we can judge, no trace of that great classical influence of which you have already heard, and which plays so great a part in the later developments of European literature. Now what is the epic? Its materials are the stories of northern mythology, the traditions of the great migrations which overthrew the Roman empire in the west, and the legends which grew up round the name of Charles the Great. They are stories of the gods and demigods, of the Burgundian and the Hun, of the English people possibly while still settled on the Baltic coasts, of the conflicts of the Frank and the Saracen, of the earliest settlers in Iceland; and they vary in their temper and their tone.
But they all represent the sense of the glory and splendour of the great fighting man, of the stout heart, which rises with rising danger and is never so great or so splendid as when it faces overwhelming odds and defies the inexorable fates. The epic poet is so possessed by this sense of the greatness of human nature that it does not matter much even whether the man is wrong or perverse: he loves the obstinacy of Roland, who will not, till too late, sound his horn to call Charlemagne and his armies, but prefers to face the enemy, and if need be to die, by himself, rather than to ask for help; he is filled with the sense of the magnificence of the stark figure of Hagen, who had indeed treacherously murdered the great Siegfried, but whose heart is so high and his hand so heavy, that when he is overpowered, and Chriemhilda at last avenges upon him the murder of her husband, the old knight standing by kills Chriemhilda herself—it was not meet that so great a fighter should be slain by a woman. These are the men of the epics.
And beside them stand the figures of women great and gracious, women for whose love men die and perish, but who themselves also can hate and love passionately and fiercely. It has sometimes been said by those who only know the epics in one or other of the various languages, that women and the love of women have no place in the epic, but belong to the romance, but this is a mistake. In the mediaeval epic there is little talk about emotion, but in the Nibelungenlied and in some of the Icelandic sagas the woman is, like Helen in the Homeric epic, the motive and source of all the action.
The epic is the story of great and heroic figures, abstracted in that sense from the common or ordinary circumstances of life, but the background of the action is always realistic and even detailed in its realism, so that, just as again in the Homeric poems, we can frequently reconstruct the life and manners of the time to which the poems belong from that which they tell us. And it is impossible to say that there is any really national difference between the epics as we find them in different languages; they are indeed the expression of the temperament and personality of the great artists who produced them, and they are each unique and individual in proportion to the greatness of their authors, but in their general characteristics they are the same.
There are few changes in the history of literature more remarkable than that which came over European art in the later years of the eleventh century and the beginning of the twelfth. The epic is concerned with the world of action, the romance is occupied almost exclusively with the world of feeling and emotion. For this is the real character of the romance. It has sometimes been said that the essence of the romance lies in the strange and mysterious circumstances of the world, in stories of mystery and wonder, of fairyland and magic. And it is quite true that it often uses these forms of human experience. But this is not its real quality. From the story of Tristan and the 'lais' of Mary of France, down to the Vita Nuova of Dante, that with which it is occupied is the human heart, its hopes and fears, its joys and sorrows, its exultation and despair. We have only to read the earliest and greatest forms in which the story of Tristan and Iseult have come down to us to see this for ourselves. It is indeed true that we can see or that we can conjecture that behind the present romance there may have lain an epic story of the hero's actions, but what we see now is nothing but the story of the 'infinite passion', the 'infinite pain' of the human heart. It is the story of their fatal love, of the passion which drives them out of the homes of men into the wilderness, the fatal passion which separation only makes deeper, which nothing can change, nothing can end, the story of a man and woman to whom the world is well lost for love. And if you wish to see the whole meaning of life as the romance actually understood it, you have but to turn again to that 'lai' of Mary of France, which tells us in a few lines how Tristan and Iseult, long parted, succeed in meeting in the forest for a few moments—meet and then part—and over it all there is nothing but a certain exquisite sentiment of love and pain, of love and tears.
This romance poetry is indeed strange, so strange that no one has yet succeeded in finding or explaining its real origin. Only the day before, the great artists were singing the gallant deeds of men, but now they can see nothing, think of nothing but the human heart. And what is perhaps strangest of all, this great reality of feeling, of passion, is presented under the form of a world almost wholly unreal and conventional. The men and women of the epic were great heroic figures, of larger stature, of greater passions than the common run, but they were quite real people, moving and acting in the real world. The figures of romance are for the most part, but for the intense reality of their love, the unreal, conventional figures of a world of knights and ladies, of unreal and conventional actions. We understand the epic world, we see and recognize their people, their dwellings, their ways of acting and thinking, but the romantic knights and ladies are mere conventions.
The truth is that the chivalrous or romantic world is unreal, partly perhaps because the artists are occupied with nothing but the emotions, and profound though these are, it is perhaps because of their abstraction that the romance ended in the strange allegorical movement of the thirteenth century. In the hands of the later and lesser poets, the romantic method finally loses almost all sense of personality, and becomes a picture and analysis of abstract emotion. It is to these abstractions that Guillaume de Lorris gave a new life and a singular grace in the personifications of the Romance of the Rose, and the charm and grace of his art carried Europe off its feet, so that for nearly three hundred years it tended to dominate European poetry. Even the greatest artists of these centuries, Dante and Chaucer, at least started with this method, and at the very end of the fifteenth century William Dunbar in Scotland still used it with grace and vivacity.
But I have lingered too long in the Middle Ages. I have done so because, if we could only make more clear to ourselves the homogeneity of the Europe out of which we all came, it would, I think, greatly help to clear up the superstitious exaggeration of the conception of nationality in art. There is not time to deal with it, or we might stay to observe that the characteristic of mediaeval literature is that of all mediaeval art and life. To myself, indeed, it is clear that the notion that the people of the Middle Ages desired or worked for a unified political organization is indeed a great mistake. But, on the other hand, it is equally certain that in general civilization, as in religion, there was a real unity, and that it was only very slowly indeed that the self-conscious nationalities of the modern world were formed out of the welter of the confused races and tribes of Europe: indeed, in some parts of Europe this development was not reached till the nineteenth century and in south-eastern Europe it is only coming to-day.
European art still transcends nationality; in its essence it is differentiated by the personality of the artist, not by the distinction of nationality. This may seem at first sight a paradox, for you may be inclined to say that surely the modern national literatures are in many ways different, you will say that there is surely some great difference between Dutch and Italian painting, some great contrast between English and French poetry. Many people used to speak, perhaps some do still, of the warm and passionate and romantic south, and of the cold and ungracious and passionless north. But this is merely a delusion. Dante is not more imaginative or passionate than Shakespeare.
What is it then which has produced this impression? The answer to the question and the best evidence of the unity of European art will perhaps be found in examining some of the great movements in its history, since the time when the civilization of the Middle Ages reached its highest point in the thirteenth century.
With the fourteenth century we come to the beginning of a movement which culminated in the greatest literature of the modern world, in the drama of England and Spain. But its beginnings are at first sight strangely different from its fulfilment, and it is almost impossible therefore to find any phrase or term under which we can justly represent it. The first great master of the new world was Dante, but not the Dante of the exquisite sentiment but artificial form of the Vita Nuova, but the great imaginative realist of the Divine Comedy, the artist who could portray the passion and pain of Francesca and her lover, and with equal power the masterful figure of Farinata, whose dauntless soul not hell itself could quell; who could pass from the vivid drama of the fierce contemporary life of Italy to the infinite peace of those to whom 'la sua voluntade è nostra pace'. For indeed it is this which places Dante among the supreme poets of the world, that there is no aspect of the reality of human life and experience which is strange to him, and which the greatness of his imagination cannot make living to us. It has often been said that Dante is the greatest and most representative artist of the Middle Ages, but so far as this is true, and it is only partially true, it may make plain to us that there are no boundaries of time in art any more than of race or country. Dante is the first great artist of a new world, but it was not till three centuries had passed, it was not until Shakespeare, that the whole meaning of the new literature was made clear. The new literature has been thought to begin with two great artists, an Italian and an Englishman: with Boccaccio in the south and Chaucer in the north.
What is, then, the characteristic quality or note of the Decameron and the Canterbury Tales? It is not, as some absurd persons think, to be discovered in the licentiousness or grossness of some of these tales, this only represents one aspect of their realism, and indeed in this they do little more than continue the characteristics of what we know as the 'Fabliaux' of the Middle Ages. The quality of the new art lies just in this, that there is nothing in human life which is uninteresting or insignificant to these great artists, that they are bound by no traditions, hampered by no conventions. They had begun as artists of romance, and the romantic sentiment of life never ceased to interest and move them, but they had learned to go beyond the romantic conventions, and to find the material of their art in everything which was part of the reality of life. To them, as to the other tale-writers of these centuries, it was quite immaterial whether they were retelling a story which had come down from immemorial antiquity, or relating something which had happened but yesterday in their own town or village, and they knew nothing of distinctions of class or rank or circumstance; it is the universal human interest which arrests them. The example which we shall find most representative is that which is to us English people the most familiar, that is the 'Prologue' to the Canterbury Tales. Was there ever anything greater of its kind than this? Who can ever forget these figures: the Knight, the Franklyn, the Prioress, the Wife of Bath? As we read there passes before us all the company of human life, wise and foolish, grave and gay, good and bad. Chaucer and Boccaccio are the greatest artists of what has often been called the 'realistic' type, they are at least very easy to distinguish from the epic and romantic artists.
They are great artists, but it is also clear enough that their powers and their insight into human life were limited. What they began was carried out to its fulfilment by the great dramatists of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. For this is indeed the relation of the tale-writers to the dramatists, that they furnish the materials upon which the dramatists built up their presentation of human life, or rather, the elements which are transformed by the imagination of the great dramatists from bare 'realism' into the highest expression of reality. No doubt the dramatists take into their work other materials and influences, but the substantial quality whether of the tragedy or the comedy is intimately related to that of the tales. How often were the great dramas built up on materials which they drew from Bandello or the other Italians who continued the tradition of Boccaccio, or from similar northern sources. But the great dramatists gave their stories a life, a passion, a breadth and fullness which is far removed from that of their sources. In their hands, or rather in their creative imagination, we see not merely the external circumstance, the bare fact, but we see all the fullness and completeness, all the exquisite grace and beauty, all the passion and terror of human experience. We may call Boccaccio and Chaucer 'realists', but it is only in Marlowe and Webster, and above all in Shakespeare, that we reach reality itself.
We all know the world of Shakespeare, how he ranges from Falstaff to Hamlet, from Bottom to Lear, from Mrs. Quickly and Doll Tearsheet to Rosalind and Imogen and Cordelia; we know how to Shakespeare, and in a lesser degree to some of the other great Elizabethans like Marlowe and Webster, there is nothing common and insignificant in life, nothing which the creative imagination of the artist cannot transform, transmute, from mere dross into pure gold. We say, and we say rightly, that here is the greatest thing that England has brought forth, and we think of it as representing the splendid youth and the first maturity of a great nation.
But now, do we remember and understand that alongside of the English drama there is another drama, not indeed so great as that of Shakespeare, but greater, I think, than that of any other Elizabethan, the drama of Spain, of Lope de Vega and Calderon, a drama of the same character, inspired by the same spirit, living under the power of the same creative imagination, a drama in which the same vivid reality is informed by the same breath of magical romance. In the tragedy of Lope de Vega, in the comedies of Calderon, with all the distinctive individuality of the great artists, and of each great work of art, we have a poetic drama which is in its essential characteristics the same as that of England.
And yet how different were the circumstances of the two nations, Spain was decadent, bankrupt, defeated; England was rising to the supreme heights of its greatness under Elizabeth and Cromwell. At the end of the sixteenth century, Spain had passed its splendid meridian and was falling into the grey obscurity of a clouded evening. It had quickly lost the great place which for a few years it had held in the world, every day brought a new failure, every year a new disaster; the great Armada had perished miserably on the dunes of Flanders and Holland, on the cliffs of Scotland and Ireland; a handful of valiant Dutchmen had defied its power and broken its wealth; the real enemy of Spain, that is France, had gathered itself together after forty years of ruin and misery, and had driven out the Spanish power. Indeed, so great, so overwhelming, was—as we can now see it—the ruin, that Philip II, who to the English imagination has stood for the embodiment of cruel and masterful malignity, has become to the historical student one of the tragic figures in history, a sincere, stupid, bigoted man, vainly striving to hold together the great empire which had been created by Ferdinand and Isabella, by Cortez and Pizarro and Charles V.
England, on the other hand, was rising from obscurity to its place as the mistress of the seas; Englishmen were raiding and plundering the New World, which Spain and Portugal had looked on as their own; England was sending out its sailors and merchants to all the seas, and to all lands, from the frozen north to the Indies.
And again, Spain was possessed by a fierce and passionate love for the old religious order, it was the one country in which devotion to the forms and conceptions of mediaeval religion had proved unshakeable, while England was the representative power of the new religious temper, and was soon to hold almost the foremost place in the new intellectual life of Europe.
And yet the drama of Spain is in all its most essential and intimate characteristics the same as that of England; represents on the one side the same overwhelming sense of the tragic conflicts of life, the same sense of the greatness, the splendour of human nature, which is most triumphant when most it seems to fail; and on the other side at least something of that exquisite, that almost unimaginable grace of the romantic comedy, of the world of Portia and Viola and Beatrice and Miranda. I do not think that the unity of the great art of Europe, the comparative insignificance of merely national characteristics and historical circumstances can find a more convincing illustration.
I could wish that I were able to deal adequately with the parallel movements of painting and sculpture during these centuries, but I have neither the capacity nor is there now the time to deal with them. This much only may be said, that the movement of these arts is very closely parallel during these centuries, from the fourteenth to the seventeenth, to that of literature. I cannot discuss the characteristics of mediaeval sculpture and painting, but I would remind you that the notion that these were merely conventional and abstract is just as mistaken as the notion that mediaeval literature deals only with conventions or allegories. It is of course obviously true that the ecclesiastical or religious purpose served by the greater part of the decorative art of the Middle Ages which has survived to us, limits and restrains its subjects and its forms. But no one who is at any pains to consider mediaeval sculpture and mosaic painting can fail to see that alongside of much which became conventional, and was fixed in what has been called the 'Byzantine' style, there is an immense amount of work both in sculpture and in mosaic which expresses the determination of the mediaeval artist to represent the world as he experienced and saw it, and that the main obstacle to the free expression of this spirit was not the acquiescence or satisfaction of the mediaeval artist in conventional forms, but the lack of technical dexterity. This will become evident to any one who will turn his attention, in studying the mosaics, from what are no doubt the somewhat conventional and hieratic figures of saints and angels to the realistic attempts to portray the stories of the Bible. And it will be clear to any one who will study, for instance, the sculpture of Wells or Amiens or Chartres that by the thirteenth century the artists were rapidly learning how to represent the world as they knew it, and something of its grace and beauty. If we say that the history of the plastic arts in Europe from the fourteenth to the seventeenth centuries is the history of the discovery and presentation first of reality, and then of reality as transformed by the highest imaginative conception of beauty, this must not be understood to mean that reality and beauty had been absent from those arts in the Middle Ages.
If then we trace the development of Italian art, we shall first observe in such work as that of Masaccio in the Brancacci chapel at Florence just the same characteristic interest in the appearance and the varieties of human life as we find in the work of Boccaccio and Chaucer, and in the succession of the great Tuscan and Umbrian and Venetian painters and sculptors the same transformation of the bare reality of life by the magic of the imaginative sense of beauty and of passion as in the great drama. It is not, I think, merely fanciful to say that the real counterpart of the English and Spanish drama is to be found in the Italian painters and sculptors of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and in the Flemish artists of the early seventeenth. It is certainly true that each of these great artists had his own individual and distinctive genius, but the exquisite grace and beauty of the Umbrians and Tuscans have never been matched save in the romantic comedy of Shakespeare, and the presentation of the tragic passion of the human soul in King Lear has only once been equalled, and that is in the dreadful beauty and horror of the Night and Day, the Evening and the Morning of Michelangelo.
I do not think I need say much about the classical movement in art and literature, for we all know that it was international. It was begun by Petrarch, not indeed the Petrarch of the sonnets, for these are only a later form of the Troubadour lyric, and do not show any special trace of the classical influence, but the Petrarch whose letters were the first summons of Europe to a new and indefatigable work of the rediscovery of the ancient world. It was an Italian with whom the classical movement began, but it was only in the hands of two northern artists that it achieved a satisfying development in literature: the one a Frenchman, Racine, the other an Englishman, Milton. Neither are, I imagine, really classical at all, but of the two, Milton, as he was by far the more learned in ancient art, was also probably nearer to the ancient world both in form and in spirit.
Nor need I say anything about the deplorable ravages of the movement of good taste and common sense, which produced Boileau and, in some measure, Pope. It did some good, but far more evil, but happily it is long past and dead and done with, and we can afford to remember the little good and to forget the evil. Good or evil, it was at least very clearly a European and not a national movement.
I must ask you now to consider the extraordinary changes which passed over Europe in the eighteenth century, to trace the beginnings of that change which culminated in what we generally call the Romantic movement.
We all know, though not as well as we should, the work of Defoe, and beside Defoe there stands a painter whom also we all know, the great Hogarth. We all at least have read Robinson Crusoe, and we have probably all seen Hogarth's engravings of the good and bad apprentices, and the series of paintings in the National Gallery known as the 'Marriage à la mode'.
What is it now that we find in Defoe and Hogarth? An infinite multitude of detail—we all remember the 'three Dutch cheeses' and the 'fowling-pieces' which Robinson carefully ferried on his raft from the wreck to the island—an unsparing presentation of all the ugly and sordid realities of life; you might almost say, by preference the ugly realities, the squalid vices, the stupid and brutal ferocity of human nature. It is not a pretty or a pleasing world which we see in Hogarth or in Defoe's Colonel Jack. But they are great artists. If you see human nature often on its most repulsive side, in its harshest and most repellent form, at least you see in their novels or pictures, the world as they saw it in the streets and taverns, in the police courts and prisons of their day, as for that matter you can still see it everywhere in town or country. The world which they see may often, perhaps usually, be ugly, but at least there is no conventional prettiness, there is no smug veneer of an artificial good taste which refuses to call a spade a spade, and which deliberately turns away from those things in life which are irritating to its sense of decorum and propriety.
Here there is something new, and we can imagine a defender of the nationalist conception of art saying that here at last we have an obvious example of the revolt of northern realism against the southern or classical grace. But there could not be a greater delusion. For though it is true that the new realism was not fully developed all over Europe until the eighteenth century, it had its beginnings in the sixteenth century, and not in the 'cold' north, but in the 'romantic' south. The first signs of the new movement are to be found not in England or in Flanders, but in Spain in the sixteenth century. It was the Lazarillo de Tormes, the first of the Picaresque novels which struck the new note, which turned from the fantastic and conventional world of the romances in which Don Quixote had nourished his soul, and from the heroic world of beauty and grace of the dramatists, to the bare and hard reality of the life of the beggar and the vagabond. Not even Defoe himself ever surpassed the clearness and precision of the Lazarillo, and it was the first work of a type, whose slow development can be traced in almost every country in Europe: in England, in the realistic attempts of Greene and Nash and Deloney, in Germany in Simplicissimus, in France in the Roman comique of Scarron and in the Gil Blas of Le Sage, who was an almost exact contemporary of Defoe.
And all this can be traced just as clearly in the history of painting. The great Italian painting had ended with the gorgeous magnificence of the Venetian school, with Giorgione and Titian and Tintoretto, and its mastery passed for a few years to Flanders, to Rubens and Vandyck; but in the painting of Spain and of the Low Countries in the later seventeenth century we find ourselves in another world. The little beggar boys of Murillo may perhaps show a somewhat mannered realism, but the Spanish painting, as a whole, while it would be absurd to try to describe it under any one phrase, shows very clearly the determination to present the reality of the world under terms which are very different from those of the great Italians of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. And when we turn to the art of the Low Countries in the latter part of the seventeenth and in the eighteenth centuries, leaving for the moment out of account the new art of landscape painting, we find ourselves in the same world as that of Defoe and Hogarth.
What was this, then, that had come to European art and literature? Clearly what we see is the transition from the heroic world of the tragedy, from the splendid beauty and force of the Italian painters, from the infinite grace of the romantic comedy, to some other artistic apprehension of the world. The movement was not indeed wholly dependent upon a reaction, but in its development it corresponds with the reaction against the continuance of a great tradition which had become merely a convention, when it had lost its vitality and sincerity. The best examples of this may perhaps be found in Dryden's attempt to carry on the heroic tradition in English tragedy, and in Voltaire's strenuous and meritorious efforts to continue the work of Racine and Corneille. They meant well, and their tragic dramas are not without merit, but it is clear enough that they could not bend the bow of Ulysses. They were great artists, as we can see clearly enough in Absalom and Ahitophel, or in Candide, but their genius lay in other directions. 'Il faut cultiver notre jardin' is a great judgement of life, one very wholesome and necessary for all time, but it was not the mood of Othello or of Hamlet.
European art had to come down from the empyrean, and though the descent was great, yet it gained new life by once again touching mother earth.
No doubt, however, the harsh reality of Hogarth and Defoe was not the whole of life, and, by a strange transition, before the middle of the eighteenth century we find the novelists and, though they are less important, the dramatists, turning from the faithful and minute study of the outward appearance and form of things to the study of sensibility and emotion, and the world, which had seemed so hard and unmoved, was dissolved in tears.
We find this a strange and even a ridiculous spectacle, the men who had prided themselves on their common sense and reasonableness, whose literature had sparkled with wit and epigram, blubbering and crying like great children; but whatever we think of it, that is what happened. The first artist of the new type was a Frenchman, Marivaux, and his Vie de Marianne is a study of a young woman who is the embodiment of sensibility and self-consciousness, an amiable and virtuous girl, who is hardly able to enjoy the good that life brings her, for fear lest she should miss the opportunity of renunciation. The first great novel of sentiment is also French, the Abbé Prévost's Manon Lescaut, and here indeed we are in the deep waters of affliction; there are but few moments between the beginning and the end of his sad story when the hero is not in tears. And yet it is a great novel, for there are few studies of human nature, as absorbed and almost lost in emotion, which are more moving.
These novels, however, which appeared between 1730 and 1740, are overshadowed by the works of the great Englishmen, by Richardson and Sterne and Goldsmith, for these are not artists of England alone, but of all Europe, known and loved and imitated in every country in Europe. The sorrows of Clarissa, the pathetic or maudlin humour of Sterne, the idyllic grace and gentle laughter of Goldsmith, these, as they moved every heart, influenced even the greatest of European artists. The influence of Clarissa on Rousseau, of Goldsmith on Goethe and Jean Paul Richter need no exposition.
The sentimental movement reached almost its highest level in the great and morbid genius of Rousseau, who was himself the living embodiment of the movement. Far more than even his creations, more than Julie or Saint-Preux, was he himself possessed by an emotionalism which finally became a disease. But, strangely enough, it was the Olympic genius of Goethe which gave its supreme form to the treatment of life under the terms of feeling. In Werther this whole phase of art passed beyond itself into the tragedy of the vain and hopeless efforts of an honest but over-sensitive nature to control his emotion and to master his life. Not indeed that it was with Werther the movement ended: it was continued in Byron: it was perhaps the most important element in what the Germans call specifically their Romantische Schule, and in the work of the French Romantic artists from Chateaubriand to Alfred de Musset. If you wish to see it in painting you have only to look at the work of Greuze, and at the engravings in our grandmothers' 'Forget-me-nots'. In spite of all its absurdities this sentimental movement played a great part in preparing men for the great revolution itself, for it opened men's hearts, it set free their emotions; if the realism of Defoe and Hogarth had enabled men to escape from convention and the mannerisms of good taste into a world of reality, the emotional movement gave this reality fullness and content, represented a larger and more intimate apprehension of life.
This brings us to another aspect of the art of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, to the poetry and painting of 'nature', to the beginnings of that great artistic movement which culminates in Wordsworth and Turner, and whose influence dominated all Europe in the eighteenth century and continues to do so in our own time. It seems a strange thing, but it is true, that it was not till the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that there appeared a school of painting which took landscape, and a poetry which took 'nature' specifically for its subject. There is indeed frequent reference to 'nature' in the poetry of the Middle Ages and of the sixteenth century, and this is often significant in the early English poetry and charming in the romances and in Petrarch and Chaucer, while in Dante and the Elizabethans, and especially in Shakespeare, it reaches an almost incomparable beauty; yet in all these it is, as in the backgrounds of the great Tuscan and Umbrian painters, exquisite and significant and true, but not the prime subject which engages their attention.
There are indeed two great poets in whom we begin to feel that the background begins to be almost as important as the figures of the foreground; Spenser is genuinely interested in his stories of chivalry and honour, and in his moral allegory, but we sometimes wonder whether the most important thing in his poetry is not the chequered light and shade of his forests, the picturesque splendour of his castles, and the gloom of his caverns and dungeons. Spenser's poetry is like a tapestry on which indeed some story of human life is presented, but which is in the end a great work of decorative art, to which the immediate subject contributes form and pattern and colour, but in which it is in a measure lost.
In Milton the matter is different: no one can doubt that he is a great artist of human life and fate; even if Paradise Lost were to leave us in some uncertainty, the Samson would convince us all. But, while I think this is true, it is also clear that not only in the grace of his earlier poetry, but in the maturity of his genius, in the Lycidas and even in the Paradise, Milton is at least as great an artist of nature and its beauty as he is of life. And near Milton there stands a poet, lesser indeed, but individual and unique, that is Henry Vaughan, who had unhappily strayed into the 'metaphysical' maze, and who helplessly enough tries to endue himself with the giant armour of Donne, but who, when he is himself, is one of the most exquisite and gracious poets of nature.
We may perhaps, without being fanciful, find a parallel to these poets in the great Venetian painters of the sixteenth century, in whose work we see the landscape of Venetia and the Cadore compelling more and more our attention, as not a mere background, but as an integral part of the picture; but it was not till the seventeenth century and the Flemish and Dutch painters that we see the transition complete, and the artist sets before us not some scene in human life, but simply the beauty and splendour of 'nature' herself.
It was not till Thomson began to publish The Seasons in 1726 that the development was complete in poetry. Thomson is a difficult poet to appreciate rightly, for though his subject was 'nature' his method was often as conventional and artificial as that of any Augustan; but he was a lover of the fields and woods, and his imagination, if it is not very powerful, is often very sincere. What was begun by Thomson was carried on with greater sincerity and reality by Cowper, and was transformed by the imagination of Gray and Collins. We sometimes think of this development as specifically English, and it is true that in Wordsworth and Shelley the poetry of nature grew into something which is unique and unmatched, but we must not think of the poetry of Wordsworth as though it were the only form under which nature can be presented. That would be to ignore the qualities, in England of Keats and Tennyson, and in Europe of great artists in whom the treatment of nature assumed other forms. The great poetry of nature began in England, but it was carried on in all the European countries, and for more than a century it was dominated mainly by the genius of Rousseau in France and of Goethe in Germany. I cannot here pretend to deal with the treatment of nature in Rousseau, or with the outcome of his influence first in Bernardin de Saint-Pierre and Chateaubriand, and then in the elegiac beauty of Lamartine and de Musset's Nuits; nor can I deal with the poetry of nature in Goethe, and its lesser but often beautiful expression in the German 'Romanticists', and in Heine. It is only possible here to remind ourselves that neither the poetry nor the painting of nature belongs to any one country, but is an intimate part of all modern art.
And thus at last we come to the great revolution itself, that great revolution in art and thought and life, of which the political and social revolution is one form, and of which we are all the children. In this, all the elements of which we have been thinking are gathered up and come to perfection; reality, sentiment, nature. And this was of no one country or nationality. The first and also the greatest artist of the revolution is Goethe himself, for it all culminates and reaches its highest expression in Faust. The passion for freedom, for the complete experience of life, for life itself, and not mere knowledge or mere words—this is the motive which drives Faust till he is willing to make his bargain with any power which will give him this. The infinite, the insatiable desire of the human soul, which can never be wholly satisfied, which can never reach its term, this is the passion which possesses Faust, this is the rock upon which the hopes of the poor devil are shipwrecked, the poor devil who in the limitation of the merely critical and negative temper cannot understand that Faust can never be satisfied, will never say to the moment, 'Verweile doch, du bist zu schön.' For the drama of Faust is not a drama of damnation, but of redemption, and though the breadth and scope of the whole conception pass beyond all presentation in complete and rounded form, the great tragedy of Gretchen takes us from the splendid but abstract world of ideas into the simplest experience of human life, where Faust becomes human through love itself, but too slowly, too late to avert the tragedy.
If Goethe represents the great humane conceptions of the revolution most profoundly, Wordsworth comes very near him in the depth of his knowledge of humanity, and in his supreme sense of the unity of all life and nature with the living spirit who is in all things; and the great romantic artists of France are governed by the same sense of nature and love and the spiritual, and in Victor Hugo this reaches a level only just below that of Goethe himself.
You must not misunderstand me, nationality has real meaning, it has something akin, but distantly, to personality; but in the main it affects the more superficial aspects of art. In painting and sculpture the European artists use a language which we can all understand, imagine life and nature under terms which we all feel and know to be true. And, though in literature the language creates a real difference, and causes a difficulty in recognizing the unity which lies behind the difference, yet the moment we begin to overcome that difficulty we find ourselves in a world intelligible, familiar, moving to us all; and intelligible just in proportion to the greatness of the artist.
It is idle for us to dispute about the relative greatness of our national arts, for their greatness lies not in national idiosyncrasies, but in the personality of the artist, and in the single, the unique quality of the particular works of art, and these belong not to this country or nation or to that, but to us all. It is not to Frenchmen only that the intellectual passion of Pascal, or the hatred of shams and the love of the honest man of Molière or of Voltaire, appeal, but to us all. It is not only Germans who understand the splendour of human experience, and the infinite pathos of the mistakes of the human heart, but we all. And the spectacle of the tempest in the heart of Lear, that tempest of the soul, of which the storms of nature are but a faint reflection, or the exquisite serenity and humanity of the recognition of Cordelia, these are not the prerogative possessions of England, but they speak to the heart and soul of the whole world.
We may be divided from each other by many things, material or political, but in the supreme art and poetry we rise above all these distinctions and are only men and women, with the earth under our feet and the heavens above us.
BOOKS FOR REFERENCE
The subject treated in the essay may be considered in relation to the following works:
Beowulf; The Song of Roland; The Nibelungenlied.
Tristan and Iseult (Thomas, or Béroul); Mary of France, Lais.
Dante, Divina Commedia.
Boccaccio, Decameron; Chaucer, Canterbury Tales.
Shakespeare; Lope de Vega; Calderon.
Defoe, Robinson Crusoe; Le Sage, Gil Blas.
Marivaux, Marianne; Prévost, Manon Lescaut.
Richardson, Clarissa; Goethe, Werther.
Goethe, Faust; Wordsworth, Michael, &c..
Victor Hugo, Légende des Siècles.
There are English translations of the greater number of these.
VII
SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY AS UNIFYING FORCES
Some political thinkers have taken the State for the highest form of human association. Humanity is for them a mere abstract idea. It is no organized whole; owns, they think, no common allegiance, pursues no common aim. To find such an organized whole, such an allegiance, such an aim, we must look to the State and to nothing beyond it. We find such a whole in Germany, in France, in England, but not in anything common to the three and to other States as well. This opinion, due in its modern shape to Hegel and his followers, is false to history, false in political theory, and mischievous in ethics, but it is nowhere more false than in relation to the world of thought. The essential unity of Western civilization as an intellectual, moral, and spiritual commonwealth is indeed illustrated—unfortunately illustrated as it happens—by this very theory of the State which denies it. For the theory is of German make. It arose out of the historical conditions of Prussia in the early years of the nineteenth century, was fostered in Germany by the peculiar method by which the unity of the nation was effected, and, setting out from its home, has permeated much of the thought of the West, effectively combating the Liberal humanitarianism which was the especial contribution of England to the movement of the nineteenth century. The reaction of the German idea of the State on the English conception of liberty is the dominating influence of the last forty years in English political thought and progress. There can hardly be a more striking testimony to the reality of that unity which the theorists who embody it seek to depreciate or deny.
When we speak of unity in this connexion we may mean one of three things. There is a unity of character or type. There is the unity involved in continuous unbroken descent from a common origin, and there is unity of effective interconnexion and mutual dependence. These senses of the term unity are confused by some writers, but must clearly be distinguished before any useful inquiry can be made. Unity of character, for example, is a different thing from continuity of historical development, for a civilization might radically change its character in the course of generations. It might lose all the specific features of its own family and come into closer resemblance with others of quite distinct parentage. Again unity of character is not the same thing as the effective interconnexion and co-operation of different centres. On the contrary, such co-operation is of most value where there is marked difference of character, where, for instance, a lack of a quality in one nation is counteracted by a surplus in another. Thus these three forms of unity are distinct, but if distinct they are not unrelated. Naturally, where there is a common origin, many traits of the primitive unity of character are likely to persist, and where there is effective intercommunication, many differences may be rubbed off. So, where we start with unity of origin, we are likely to find some measure of unity in other respects, and this is what we do find, in fact, in the case of Western civilization. It does possess a certain unity of character, and this is largely due to unity of origin, and is maintained in spite of marked divergences, which have not impeded an effective intercommunication but have tended rather to add interest and value to the results which that intercommunication has produced.
There is a certain unity of character running through all civilization, and indeed through all humanity. Certain fundamental institutions and principles of organization are common to East and West, to the ancient and modern world, to civilization and savagery, and there is not the least evidence that the similarities are the result of historic connexion. On the contrary, they arise from a human nature which is fundamentally the same, adjusting itself to conditions of life which are fundamentally the same. But of course it is only the broadest and most general characters that are thus common to all the world. Within them there is every sort and degree of specific difference. There are types within types, worlds within worlds, and what we call Western civilization is one of these. That is to say, it is at the present day a family or group of nations sharing in common certain things which distinguish it from the rest of the world, such things, for instance, as a certain degree of social order, a certain outlook upon life, certain fundamentals of religion and ethics, and an industrial organization based on applied science. Now to mention any of these points is at once to provoke a criticism. In each respect, it will be said, the nations of Western Europe and the lands that have been colonized from them differ vastly among themselves. The social order of Germany is by no means that of England. The industrial development of southern Italy is very different from that of Belgium. The Prussian outlook upon life—this in particular will be emphasized just now—is quite another thing from the French. This is true enough, but once again it means only that there are further specific differences within the genus. We could pursue the differences as far down as we like. For the United Kingdom, say, is by no means one homogeneous whole. Even within England alone deep contrasts reveal themselves between the agricultural South and the industrial North. Yet we do not hesitate to think of the English character, English institutions, the English type as distinct from the rest of the world, and we are right in so doing because there is a real unity pervading all the differences. Just in the same way at a higher remove there is a certain unity of character pervading the deeper and wider differences that appear in the various centres of Western civilization.
SECTION II.—UNITY OF ORIGIN
This unity of character is very largely due to continuous descent from a common cultural ancestor. The civilization of the West is fundamentally one not because the peoples of the West are one racially. They are not so. They comprise every branch of the Aryan family and a considerable admixture of quite other stocks. Their civilization owes its common characteristics mainly to a common origin and continued interaction. That is why it is in the mass a community of ideas, for ideas pass from man to man and from nation to nation more readily than institutions, more readily far than character, more readily perhaps than anything except material goods. In the realm of ideas Western civilization forms a single commonwealth of informal but of exceeding democratic constitution. This freedom, indeed, it owes in large measure to its international character, for there are constantly arising local and temporary dictators, arbiters of fashion in the ideas of politics, philosophy, and even of science. Within a narrow circle such a dictator often has it all his own way, but it is seldom that he can maintain a prolonged ascendancy throughout the international commonwealth unless there is some pretty solid foundation for his doctrine.
This commonwealth has its foundations in the past. It derives in the first instance from the unity of mediaeval Christendom, where it enjoyed the advantage of a common language of learning, the gradual loss of which is imperfectly compensated by the possession of two or three modern languages alone by the educated man of the present day. Through mediaeval Christendom and through the Arabic schools, which can hardly be regarded as a part of Western civilization but in the Middle Ages were rather its teachers, it derives from the Greco-Roman world, and through the Greco-Roman world from the Greeks themselves. The Greeks in their turn were aware that they owed the rudiments of their science to the ancient civilizations of the Nile and the Euphrates. Thus in the intellectual world there is a continuity stretching back six thousand years or more to the beginnings of recorded civilization. More than once the continuity is nearly broken, but some strand is always preserved, and it is in this continuity in the world of ideas that we get the main evidence of such progress as human history reveals.
The foundations of material civilization were laid in Egypt and in Babylonia, where the progress made in agriculture and the industrial arts implies a considerable body of empirical knowledge of physics and chemistry at an early date. We have Egyptian textbooks of arithmetic dating from the eighteenth and perhaps from the twelfth dynasty. We have texts dealing with the rudiments of geometry. Empirical chemistry appears to be of Egyptian origin, the word itself is referred to the Egyptian term for black earth—and to have passed to the Arabs, who made it into a quantitative science, without greatly interesting the scientific mind of Greece. Careful astronomical records extending over thousands of years were kept both in Egypt and Babylonia, and upon them a considerable body of astronomical knowledge was built up. But there is no evidence of a scientific interest detached at once from theology and industry. In theology itself Egyptian learning early became dissatisfied with the popular deities, and sought for a unity of the godhead either in some one supreme deity such as the sun or, more often, in a mystical identification of all the gods as so many incarnations or impersonations of a single principle. But though these and kindred speculations were not without influence on Greek thought, the entire achievement of Egypt in this direction, so far as known to us, was of little importance as compared with that of other oriental civilizations.
Thus without underestimating a debt which the Greeks themselves acknowledged, it remains true to regard science and philosophy alike as in essence an original creation of the Greek genius. What grew up in Greece during the sixth and fifth centuries B.C. was the spirit of disinterested inquiry proceeding on rational methods. By the term disinterested I mean detached from ulterior objects. Geometry for the Greek was something more than the art of land measurement, astronomy something more than a means of regulating the calendar or foretelling an eclipse. It was a study of the nature of the heavens, an attempt to penetrate the construction of the material universe. So with geometry. It might begin as an investigation of the relations of particular triangles, squares, and oblongs, but it developed into an attempt to grasp the nature of space relations and to understand them as depending on simple common principles. This is to say that in the hands of the Greeks these subjects first became sciences. But a still greater subject also became in their hands matter for disinterested rational inquiry. They developed what Aristotle called the science of Reality, or, as we call it, Philosophy—the attempt to approach by the rational criticism of experience the problem of the nature and origin of the universe and of man's place therein. They propounded the fundamental questions which still occupy the highest intellects of mankind. They laid the foundations of method and bequeathed to Europe the terminology which all exact thinking requires. Even when we speak of method we are using an Aristotelian term, and when we distinguish one subject from another we are employing the Latin translation of the word which Aristotle introduced. In a word, modern thought, scientific and philosophic alike, has a unitary origin. It is derived from the Greek.
The mode of this derivation is not simple, and would require considerable space to examine in detail. In outline it must suffice to say that the Greek culture was spread over the Eastern Mediterranean through the conquests of Alexander, and that as its capital Alexandria gradually replaced Athens. It flowed westward with the Roman conquests, when, as the Roman poet said, captured Greece took captive her barbarous conqueror and introduced the arts into rustic Latium. It shared in the general decline which accompanied the rebarbarization and final collapse of the Roman Empire. But now occurred a division in the stream of historic tendency. The fortunes of East and West were separated. The Western Empire was overrun by Germanic tribes, and after the sixth century the tradition of the old culture was maintained for the most part in the monasteries. Greek was forgotten in the West. Greek authors were known only in Latin translations, and science and philosophy came to a standstill. In the East the Mohammedan conquests brought the Arabs into touch with Greek learning. They preserved the tradition and extended the work, and it was the contact with Arabic culture through the crusades which initiated the first renaissance in the West in the twelfth century. There followed the epoch of the great mediaeval systems, the rediscovery of Aristotle and the attempt to fuse the Christian faith with the Aristotelian system. The later Middle Age was the period at which Western civilization was most distinctly a cultural unit, the scene of a great attempt to unify all the aspects of life, the religious, the philosophic, the political, on the basis of a religious faith made articulate and systematic with the aid of Greek philosophy, speaking the Latin tongue as the common possession of all educated men.
The paradox of thought is that while unity is its ideal, freedom is its necessary condition, and endless divergence the inevitable consequence. There could not be much thinking about matters of faith without heresy, nor about matters of politics without disaffection, rebellions and new political grouping. Heresy and schism broke up the mediaeval unity and reinforced the political tendencies making towards the modern state system. The rise of modern literature displaced the classics from their unique position as literary models. After the seventeenth century the habit of writing in the vernacular tended more and more to oust Latinity, and culture in each country began to assume more of a distinctively national character. Specific national characteristics began to appear in science and philosophy as well as in literature and education, and a large part of the history of modern thought depends on the partial independence on the one hand and the frequent interactions on the other of these centres.
SECTION III.—UNITY OF INTERCONNEXION
This brings us to the third sense in which unity can be predicated of a cultural group. The unity that depends on the interconnexion of distinct parts implies some differences of character. Western civilization has lost something of the unity of character which it owed to its common origin, though it still retains enough of it to figure as a single whole in contrast to the rest of the world. We may be sure that the differences between German, French, and English seem much less marked to the intelligent Chinese than they are to Germans, Frenchmen, and English themselves. We ourselves habitually think of China and Japan together as denizens of the Far East, and it is only personal acquaintance which makes us begin to mark the differences between them. Few Europeans, I imagine, get as far in their discrimination as to appreciate the distinctions between the Northern and Southern Chinese, which are as clear to the Chinese themselves as the difference between English and Scottish is to us. Western civilization does retain a generic unity of character, though national differences have had an increasing influence in the sphere of thought. Meanwhile the unity of interconnexion has on the whole grown closer with the spread of education, the multiplication of learned magazines and the facilities of travel. One of the most interesting chapters in the development of modern thought can be written, as Dr. Merz has shown by example as well as by precept, on the theme of the mutual influence of the great national centres of thought, and in particular of France, England, and Germany. These nations might seem as though designed, whether by nature or by the unconscious hand of political history, to be half-willing, half-reluctant complements to each other. English common sense, French lucidity, German idealism; English liberty, French equality, German organization; English breadth, French exactitude, German detail,—how much poorer the world would be if any one of these had been allowed to develop on its own lines without the criticism of the other two. What a special providence gave the easy-going Englishman a northern neighbour to lecture him on German metaphysics in his own tongue and compel him to the definiteness which he instinctively detests. Without Scotland as a link, the connexion between English and German thought would hardly have been effective and continuous, and it was a Scotsman who aroused the greatest of German metaphysicians—himself of Scottish descent—from his dogmatic slumbers.
This international division of labour is more significant in the regions of metaphysics and political thought than of physical science. To science, every modern nation has contributed both great names and useful journeyman work. Through the medium of the learned reviews and of periodical congresses science has become more and more international. It is still possible now and again for a great discovery like that of Mendel or an important hypothesis like that of the kinetic theory of gases to be ignored for a whole generation. But this does not seem to depend especially on difficulties of language or of international communication. There is a queer element of arbitrary fashion in the scientific world which every now and then decrees that certain people shall be ignored, no matter how sound their work, or that certain hypotheses shall be treated as matters of faith, no matter how flimsy their structure. Man does not all at once become a creature of pure reasoning by assuming the robe of science and entering the laboratory. But national prejudices are not pre-eminent among the forces which dictate these fashions. Indeed in the English intellectual world there operates, if anything, a certain anti-national prejudice. It has sometimes been easier for an Englishman to get a hearing in Germany than in England, and it is certain that in many subjects a respect is paid to German writers which they would not have been able to win if they had written either in French or in English. This is due to a certain encyclopaedic minuteness which is the peculiar property of German industry. If you want an exhaustive negative, I remember an archaeologist saying once, you must go to the Germans. That is to say, on almost any subject you will find some German, and a German only, who has taken the trouble to go through the whole matter from beginning to end, not attending merely to what is interesting or important, but writing down all that is to be found out in all the authorities bearing on that subject. And this work will be insufferably tedious and, taken by itself, may be very unilluminating. But it is much less tedious for the reader than it was for the writer, and, if suitably indexed, such a work will in permanence serve as a guide-book to those who are going to exercise real thought and insight upon that subject. It is the element of disinterested drudgery which the Germans have contributed to science. Not that they have lacked men of genius, but that they have added to genius that which, Carlyle notwithstanding, it so often lacks—the infinite capacity for taking pains. Take up any scientific treatise in any language and on almost any subject, cast your eye down the references to authorities in the footnotes on a few pages at random, and you will find probably three out of four of those cited bearing German names. They will outbalance English, American, French, Dutch, and Italian added together. If you pass from quantity to quality, if you take the leading ideas contributed to the subject, you will find the balance redressed. Here French and English and others hold their own, and perhaps a little more than their own. But in bulk of work, and especially in the faithful, unrepaying service of the hard dry fact, the Germans have set a standard to the world. It may be that their very merit is due in part to a lack of certain qualities as well as to a superabundance of others. There is a want of proportion in some of these vast Teutonic treatises that takes the heart out of the English student. Some witty person has said that German science consists in demonstrating over again with enormously elaborate apparatus what an Englishman has already made plain enough to any sensible person with the aid of a gingerbeer bottle and an old sardine tin. But I suspect there is another side to the question. The German has probably worked out his figures to the twentieth decimal where the Englishman was content with the second, and it may always turn out that the twentieth decimal has its value. Be that as it may, the co-operation of both types of mind is necessary, and patient endeavour in the elaboration of detail is the peculiar function which the German academic tradition has developed in the service of the general cause of the advancement of learning.
In more speculative thought the equipoise of international co-operation reveals itself in the changes which national thought has undergone under foreign influence. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries English and Scottish metaphysics developed in the main on lines of their own. It was the heyday of the so-called English school of experience. This school was influential in France, and in Germany acted as the ferment which dissolved the older academic tradition and stimulated the growth of the new idealism. German idealism first became an influence in England through the medium of Coleridge and later of Carlyle. But it had little effect on the national philosophy except in shaking the younger Mill out of the narrow rut in which he had been educated and contributing to his thought that stream of influence which throughout life he tried in vain to merge harmoniously with the paternal teaching. But in the last third of the nineteenth century new channels of influence were opened. The authority of Green at Oxford and of Caird in the Scottish universities brought the tide of Hegelian influence, on the ebb in Germany, in full flood over the intellectual world of Great Britain and America. English empiricism was rapidly swept out of existence. Mill and Spencer, the dominating figures of the sixties and seventies were reduced to the position of dummies used for target practice by beginners. Being intelligible they could be read by the first-year student, and the exposition of their fallacies provided an easy task for the lecturer's wit. There was none so poor to do them reverence, or if any did he was relegated to a fourth class in the Final Schools. It would be a very interesting study in our object to analyse the Anglo-Scottish idealism in close relation to the German original, and measure the changes which a philosophy undergoes in the process of assimilation by a people of very different intellectual tradition. Lack of sympathy with German and particularly with Hegelian idealism disqualifies me from the task, but this much in spite of this lack I can see. The German philosophers had a hold on those large and general ideas which the English mind seems instinctively to distrust, and which English philosophy had sought to resolve away into component parts. The Englishman as a philosopher is by nature very much like the Englishman as a mechanic or as a business man. He wants to touch and see, to test and handle, before he is convinced of reality. 'I desire that it be produced' is the frequent remark of Hume—Scotsman in some respects, but very English in this—whenever he is dealing with some conception not readily verifiable in experience. English philosophy left to itself was not inclined to do justice to the subtler, more evasive notions that are not readily defined. It did not allow enough for what we may call the imponderable elements. German idealism has had just the opposite fault. It has been too ready to take its thoughts for realities, too prone to use large and perhaps vague conceptions as if they were solid coin and not tokens that needed a good deal of scrutiny to determine their value. We may see an example in a branch of political thought which has been a good deal under discussion of late. To some German thinkers the conception of the State presents itself in a manner which by no means comes natural to the Englishman. To the German the State is an entity as obvious, real, and apparent as the individual citizen. It is not just the head of Germany, or the sixty-five millions of Germans, or the Kaiser, or the army, or the Government. It is just itself, the State, and it has attributes and powers, is the object of duties and possessor of rights just like any Hamburg merchant or Prussian Junker. To the natural Englishman all this seems half mystical, half superficial. Talk to him of the State and if he is to grasp the conception at all he must get it into terms of persons or things. He pictures it perhaps as the Government, perhaps simply as the income-tax collector, perhaps as the miscellaneous millions living in the United Kingdom. If he discusses its well-being, its success or its failure, he does so under the reserve that all this is a shorthand for the well-being of great numbers of men and women. If its honour and good faith are in question what he will ask is whether Sir E. Grey fulfilled a definite pledge at a given moment after the manner of an English gentleman. Now for my own part, whether through national prejudice or not, I believe this habit of checking and resolving large conceptions to be the safest and most scientific way of dealing with them. Yet I can also see that it may lead to a good deal of crudity and may lead men to ignore important elements for which they cannot readily find some concrete expression. In this very matter of the State, for example, we are dealing with an organization of individuals, and if our way of talking about it makes us overlook the flesh and blood of which it is composed, the other way may obscure in our minds the vital differences introduced by the very fact of organization. The Germans have often seen the wood more clearly when the Englishman was more careful to distinguish and name the trees. So I cannot doubt that it will prove in the end to have been good for us to have been compelled by a few leading thinkers to go to school with the Germans for a couple of generations, even at the cost of the temporary depreciation of much that was most vital in our own social philosophy. Perhaps the best thing that can be wished for Germany, and through her for Europe, in the next generation, is that she should learn as much from our tradition as we have learned from her.
The whole history of political thought in the last two centuries is a study of complex interactions between processes going forward in each of the leading nations. The liberalism of Locke and the principles of the Whig revolution profoundly influenced France, and the very fact that distance lent them enchantment and allowed them to be idealized gave them a value as a stimulus to the French critic of absolute government which they could hardly exercise at home, where their real limitations were better known. The French revolution bore on the entire thought of Europe, alike by sympathy and antipathy, producing the reactionary philosophies of Burke in England and of Hegel in Germany, and the endeavour to formulate a new and safer line of Radicalism by Bentham. Philosophical Radicalism expressed in the main by the distinct but related Manchester school had two generations of development in England, and was felt as a real influence abroad during the period of comparative peace that followed Waterloo and that raised men's hopes of an era that should put wars aside and devote itself to the essential progress of mankind. French influences again, particularly that of Comte acting through J.S. Mill, brought new life into this school as the first flush of its youth was fading. Finally, as we have seen, German influences overwhelmed it, and England, fascinated as much by the prestige of Germany as by her thought, gravitated more and more to the doctrine of the self-contained, military, Protectionist, all-powerful State. In this story of political thought events have been no less potent than arguments. The failure and success of institutions, the victories and defeats of countries identified with certain principles have repeatedly brought new strength and resolution to the adherents or opponents of those principles as the case might be in all lands. The successive steps by which Italy secured unity and freedom were a perpetual encouragement to believers in national right and liberal government throughout the middle of the century. The triumph of Germany in 1870 was a victory for autocratic power, for discipline, for unscrupulous statesmanship, for blood and iron, which effected a conversion, only half conscious and very slow in producing its result, but all the more complete for that reason, in the attitude of men to fundamental questions of social ethics. Looking back on the hundred years that separate the two European cataclysms, the historian will discover a rise of liberal and humanitarian opinions to ascendancy in the earlier period and a reaction against them towards the close. The causes of such a change are multifarious and tangled, but he will, I believe, recognize the year 1870 and the victory of Bismarck as the dividing line. May it be so that he will find in the present war another turning-point from which a new movement is to begin.
Be this as it may, we may rest assured that the political thought of Europe, like its philosophy and its science, will go forward or backward as a unity. It may move by peaceful and friendly co-operation or by the stimulus of embittered rivalry. But its many centres are related by so many strands of connexion that the movement in any one of these is reflected in the rest. The liberties of England are fostered by the emancipation of the Alsatian, the Slovak, or the Pole. They are enfeebled by the victories of political autocracy or the military machine. Thinkers, it may be said, ought to be above these mundane influences. Philosophy should deal with what is in itself and eternally rational and just and wise. But philosophy as it exists on earth is the work of philosophers, who, authority tells us, suffer as much from toothache as other mortals, and are, like others, open to the impressions of near and striking events and to the seductions of intellectual fashion. Yet, if the larger thought is worth anything, it should enable those who follow it to look a little further beyond the present and a little deeper below the surface differences that distract the kindred peoples. If the thinkers are true to their thought it may be that from them will come the beginnings of the healing process which Europe will need. Much is being and will be said of the political reconstruction which is needed to restore and secure the civilized order. But the commonwealth of thought will revive of itself from the day when peace is concluded. German physiology will not be less learned, German scientists will not be less expert, German chemists will not be less pre-eminent because their military lords have plunged Europe into a disastrous war. We shall need their services, shall watch their experiments, read their records, and utilize their brains as before. Perhaps it may be some years before the international congresses can be resumed, but the internationalism of learning will revive of itself, against our wills if not by and with our wills, and in the world of science, and in this world alone, the event of war will make no difference. Conqueror and conquered will work at the same task and meet as equals. The scientific demonstration knows no more of the nationality of its originator than of his caste or colour, age or sex. In this one real democracy the idea, the hypothesis, the proof, whatever it may be, stands or falls on its own merits with no questions asked as to its ancestors or country of origin. In the growth of this commonwealth war is but a momentary check. Its destiny is to become wider in extent, closer in its interconnexions, and not less rich in the diversities of its national centres. Whether it is also destined to grow into a political unity the future must decide. At least we can say that for any such unity it provides the only sure and solid foundation.
BOOKS FOR REFERENCE
Merz, History of European Thought in the 19th Century. W. Blackwood.
Marvin, The Living Past. Clarendon Press.
VIII
THE UNITY OF WESTERN EDUCATION
I have been asked to address you on the Unity of Education in Western Europe. The task is not an easy one, for what do we mean by unity? It would be easy for me to spend my time in talking on the technical aspect of the subject; I could deal with curriculum and organization, with school buildings and class-rooms, black-boards, and all the material of schoolmastering, and could show you how great is the similarity in these matters in all civilized countries. I doubt, however, whether this would interest you; I doubt whether this is the unity of which you are in search. You would tell me that you asked for unity and I had given you uniformity. Uniformity you can have anywhere; in modern life all is standardized and stereotyped; you have it in the great hotel and the Atlantic liner—there you have men of all nations, they do the same thing at the same time, they eat the same food and wear the same clothes; you find it in the factory and on the battle-field. Go to a textile factory, whether in Oldham or in Chemnitz, or in Bombay, the processes are the same and the product is the same, except as there may be more or less adulteration.
And so in education, if you care to do so, you can find the mechanical uniformity of modern civilization. A new form of school-desk makes the round of the world as quickly as a new chemical process or a new battleship. The pictures on the walls of the rooms may be the reproduction of some modern German work, and the atlases you use may be second-rate copies of the products of Gotha or Leipzig; you can have, too, uniformity in time-table and curriculum; but, after all, this uniformity may be merely superficial. Go along the streets of an old town and you may see the regular façade of a modern street, but behind this you will find all the variety of the mediaeval buildings which it encloses—the façade is mere paint and stucco.
Uniformity is not necessarily unity, and unity is not inconsistent with variety. That which I presume we are searching for is a more fundamental, spiritual, and intellectual unity—internal not external; not a painted and stucco resemblance, but a unity of origin and of life.
Let us see what we can learn from history.
The history of European education is centred round two institutions, the School and the University. Both have their origin in the remote past, and both have maintained themselves with singular fidelity to their original type.
The School goes back to the very origin of our civilization; if we are to understand its nature, we must transfer ourselves in thought to those early days when the first missionaries planted in the Somerset valleys and on the stern Northumberland coast the Cross of Christ. They came to a people still on the verge of barbarism, with a language still unformed by literature, with a religion that gave no clue to the mysteries of life by which they were oppressed. They came to these men full of the enthusiasm of the Gospel—coming not only as teachers of religion, but as the apostles of a higher civilization, for they had behind them the awful name of Rome.
Wherever they came, among their first duties was to found schools in which to train men who would succeed them; we must always remember that the education which they gave had one supreme object—it was to bring up the boys of the rude and barbarous communities in which they found themselves, to become teachers and servants of the Church. The substance of the teaching was always the same, whether in Spain, in Gaul, in Ireland or in Britain; it was the Bible, the services of the Church, and the writings of the Fathers. It was by the school that the boys were initiated into the common system of Western Christendom, and were made citizens of the greater world the centre of which was in Rome.
But if the substance and the object was identical throughout Europe, so always was the form in which the teaching was given; at a time when all learning and all religion came from Rome, the foundation of knowledge was the Latin tongue. In these early days was established the tradition that still subsists; the gateway to learning and to culture lay by the narrow road of the Latin grammar. The schoolboy who still tells out his longs and shorts can compare them with the ruder efforts of his Saxon forefathers thirteen centuries ago. Never have authors attained a fame and a circulation equal to that of the great grammarians who, during the decline of the Empire, codified the rules of Latin speech; generation after generation passed, and down almost to our own days every schoolboy began his career on the lines laid down in the works of Donatus and Priscian.
We must, however, guard ourselves against a mistake into which it would be easy to fall. It is true that in the early mediaeval days education was based on the study of the Latin language; and it was only through literature that the language could be learnt. The study of classical literature as we understand it was, however, far removed from the ideals of this time. The most authoritative teachers never neglected to warn their pupils against the moral dangers which arose from the study of heathen writers; Ovid and Cicero were only admitted under protest, and they were merely the stepping-stone to the study of Augustine and Prudentius.
On this common basis—the Bible, the Church, and the Latin language—was then established the education of Western Europe, and the form it then assumed it retained for over a thousand years, almost without change. By this a common cast was given to the intellect, and the nations were disciplined by common spiritual teaching. It was extraordinarily effective. It kept down, and in many countries almost destroyed, the vigorous and aspiring local and national life which, in every country, was striving after self-expression. In our own country this effect was most conspicuous. The English, illiterate though they might be, were not without the promise of a great future. In the remains of the Saxon poems we can see the beginnings of what under happier circumstances might have grown into a great national literature. Its origins were deep seated in the life of the people. It proved itself quickly able to absorb the new teaching of the Gospel, and, as the Christian Epics show, here was the basis on which might have been built a national interpretation of Christianity. All that was required was the adoption of English as the language of the Church and the School. The beginning was made when Alfred, during the few years which he secured from the Danish inroads, began his great work of founding an English literature in which the teaching of the Church and the works of antiquity were included. The attempt was ruined for the time by the renewal of the Danish inroads, permanently by the Norman Conquest. For William brought with him not only his French knights, but also Italian priests. Once more, under the influence of Lanfranc and his successors, the Church and the School were brought under the full control of the revived power of Rome, and all prospect of a spontaneous and indigenous national intellectual life was destroyed. Unity was re-established, and the School was the instrument by which England was fully incorporated in the culture and religion of the Western Church.
As it was with the School so also with the university. The second, as the first, was the creation of the Church, and even more conspicuously it was the vehicle for fostering and maintaining the control of common institutions and a common learning, and thereby of crushing out the rich variety of local life which everywhere was springing up. In its very constitution the University of Paris, the mother and model of all later universities (at least in northern Europe), showed its international character; the students who flocked to it from all countries were organized in 'nations' a system which, at least in name, still remains in many of the universities to this day; the whole instruction was and remained in Latin, and the whole course of instruction was a long apprenticeship to the study of theology. It was from the universities that emanated the great system of philosophy in which a Frenchman as Abelard, an Italian as Thomas of Aquinas, an Englishman as William of Ockham each took his part.
We may regard with admiration the great intellectual achievements of the Scholastic philosophy which, for over two centuries, dominated the official education, but we must not forget that its ascendancy implied the exclusion from all public recognition of the local and national thought and literature which now, as before, was struggling into life. The Troubadours and the Minnesänger, the Chanson de Roland and the Nibelungenlied, the Chronicles of Froissard, Chaucer, and Piers Plowman, each of them so full of fresh vigorous local life, were not only outside the official system of education, but in their essence opposed to it. This was clearly seen as soon as the free and uncontrolled mind was directed to the highest subjects of thought. National idiosyncrasies, as they found expression in the domain of philosophy and theology, produced results different from the established teaching of the school. To the Church truth was always one and the same. Truth was one, error was manifold; in unity was salvation, and divergence was heresy. And so every attempt at national and local thought was not only suppressed in education, but fell under the ban of discipline. In Languedoc the Albigenses ventured the assertion of their independence; Huss in Bohemia, in England Wyclif. What happened? The Albigenses were massacred, Huss was burnt, Wyclif was condemned, and his followers suffered under the new law of heresy.
This system, which had originated as a part of a great spiritual movement, long outlived its usefulness. It became an intolerable tyranny. Its effects were to be seen in the teaching of the humblest grammar school, and every boy who began the study of the Latin grammar was being initiated into the abstractions or the Scholastic logic. It became a dead and iron crust by which the mind of man was confined, and it was the school and the university which were the peculiar institutions by which this system was maintained. Unity of education there was, but at what a price had it been won.
One thing had, however, been secured: the common Christian basis of our modern civilization had been stamped upon the peoples; so long as Europe remains Europe this cannot be forgotten or obliterated. No nation can repudiate its own past, and, whether they will or no, all Western nations are irrevocably bound together by the ties of the home in which their childhood and youth was passed.
At last the change came: it came in that double revolution which we call the Renaissance and the Reformation. In considering them we must confine ourselves as closely as we can to their effect on education.
The revival of learning was essentially an educational movement, it had from the beginning to do primarily with the school. It had as its object a complete change both in the subject-matter and in the spirit of education. Always it drew its inspiration from the literature of Greece, and this meant the fullest freedom of the human intellect, freedom of speculation, freedom of inquiry on the conditions of human life, and in particular it was a revolt from the ascetic ideas of the mediaeval Church; it was the assertion of the dignity of the body and mind of man. Now whereas in Italy, its original home, this took a warp definitely antagonistic to Christian faith and Christian ethics, in Northern Europe the new classical learning was harmonized with Christianity, and classical learning was applied to the interpretation of the Bible. It was the synthesis of what mediaeval Europe had regarded as irreconcilable opponents. That was the inspiration of the school reform, and this is the guiding principle of all higher education for the next three centuries. It was a movement that originally was not local or national but European, and in its first form was not in opposition to the maintenance of the ecclesiastical unity of Western Europe. The figure in whom it reaches its clearest expression is that of Erasmus. Standing at the transition between two epochs, he was the last of the great European scholars, and belongs to the undivided Catholic Church as much as did Abelard or Anselm. The wandering scholar of the Renaissance, without father, without mother, completely freed from ties of family or country, at home equally in Deventer or Cambridge, in Basel or in Paris or in Rome, without even a native language, for to him Latin was the only vernacular (he has, I believe, left no word written in any other language), he saw the vision of a Europe still united in obedience to the one Church, but a Europe in which the culture of the humanist would go side by side with the common faith inherited from early days.
The hopes of Erasmus were not to be fulfilled. It is indeed true that he laid the foundation on which the recognized and official scheme of education has continued almost to our own day; the Latin schools of Germany and the Grammar Schools of England were each alike conducted on the basis of the Church and the classics, but even before the foundations had been completed the real unity was gone. The Renaissance was met by two forces, each stronger than itself, and the common stream was broken into a number of smaller currents. These have since increased in strength till the sense of the common origin has almost disappeared.
The common mediaeval system (and in this the spirit of the Renaissance was still mediaeval) depended on the common Church, and especially in education, in the use of Latin as the universal language of learning. During the sixteenth century both were overthrown. Luther was stronger than Erasmus, and the new languages, Italian, French, Spanish, English, quickly began to encroach on the claims of Latin to be the one language of the school.
The religious revolution need not detain us. It is sufficient to recall that in many parts of Europe the divergence of creed tended to become if not identical with, at least closely to follow the boundaries of states and nations. In every land the school was still strictly under the control of the Church, acting now as the delegate of the temporal ruler, and in each country a whole body of teaching and discipline was evolved, the result of which was a fundamental difference in the attitude of mind. The English bishops, the German consistories, the Scotch presbytery, set their seal on the schools, as much as did the Jesuits and Port Royal in France. The Shorter Catechism, the English Prayer Book, the German hymns, each gave a distinct character to the religions of the country, and this character was the basis of the teaching in the schools.
Religion, which had been the great unifier, became the chief engine of separation.
Equally important was the growth of national literature. This indeed goes back far beyond the sixteenth century, but none the less it is from this time that the writers not only of imagination, but also of learning, began to express themselves each in his own vernacular. Sir Thomas More, it is true, wrote his Utopia in Latin, but it was in English that it had its great circulation. Bacon used both languages, but it is on English editions of his works that his fame chiefly rests. In particular we find that works on religion and theology are now produced not only in Latin, but one hundred years before Hooker would have discoursed on 'ecclesiastical polity' in the learned language, and Pascal would never have thought of using French for discussing the philosophy of the Jesuits.
The influence of these changes upon the school is remarkable. Strictly speaking, for many generations they seemed to have little immediate effect upon it. In every country in Europe Latin remained both the subject and the vehicle of higher education, but it is just for this reason that we find that, during the seventeenth century and the greater part of the eighteenth, the schools are more and more falling out of touch with the intellectual life of the times. They continued in the old way; for them Shakespeare and Milton, Montaigne and Molière, Cervantes and Tasso, seemed to have written in vain. They maintained the form of an older period, but they had lost the spirit by which it had been inspired. Their learning remained purely classical; but even though the new national literature was long in winning for itself a definite place in the recognized school system, the growth of this literature and the evolution of national consciousness of which it was a part could not in fact take place without altering the whole spirit of the teaching. If we are to understand how this was we must keep in mind one of the chief characteristics of what is called a classical education.
The study of the classics means the study of the whole life of the two great nations of antiquity as preserved in the extant literature. Now this does not contain a definite and formulated doctrine, it does not even, as might be said of the Middle Ages, mean one attitude towards the world; it opens to the student a field of extraordinary wealth and variety, and from this each will take that which he is able to appropriate. To one it may be the mysticism of the Cambridge Platonists, to another the frank and pagan joy in life of Anacreon and Horace. Rousseau and Grote will each in his own way appropriate the lesson of Liberty, while others will turn to the story of the militant and dominant aristocracy of Rome. Goethe and Keats, Milton and Gibbon, Berkeley and Schopenhauer, will each draw their inspiration from the classics, but the result will not be to make them resemble one another, it will be to give vigour, decision, form, resolution, and dignity to the qualities of each.
And as it is with individuals, so it is with nations. The schools of all nations maintained their classical curriculum; boys still began, and often ended, their schooling with the Latin grammar, but this did not mean, as it had meant in the earlier days, that the influence was the same. There was indeed little in common between what we may venture to call the pedantry of Germany and the superficial elegancy of the Jesuit schools. And so the classical basis did not prevent the school assuming a national complexion. Let me give one illustration of the manner in which the classical teaching could take a markedly national spirit. Perhaps the most effective classical teaching that we find in the eighteenth century is that at Eton, and it was on it that was founded the great school of oratory and statesmanship. It was on Cicero and Homer and Demosthenes that Pitt and Fox and Canning and Gladstone (for the tradition continued to his day) formed their minds and their style, but they emerged from their training above all Englishmen, but Englishmen who had learnt how to give to their own national feelings a dignity of expression and nobility of form equal to that of the exemplars whom they had studied.
Now just as the finest expression of the English national spirit is found in those whose school training had been based on the classics, just as the Girondists based their revolutionary doctrines on Hellenic models, so almost at the same time the great political awakening of Germany and Prussia was inspired by what has been called the second Renaissance; and yet how profound is the divergence between Wellesley and Pitt, Humboldt and Stein, St. Just, Demousin, and Vergniaud; all were children of the common classical tradition, but how different is the use to which they put it. During the centuries that passed between the Renaissance and the Revolution, the education of the different countries had then in fact been drifting far apart. What has been done during the nineteenth century has been openly to carry into effect changes which had long been overdue and were already to a large extent operative.
It was inevitable that the new literature and thought would eventually find its way into the schools and universities. Before this change had been accomplished, a fresh and even stronger influence asserted itself. Democracy had come, and a democracy which based the state on the principle of nationality. It seized on the school as the means to hold the minds of men in fief, just as had the mediaeval Church, and in doing so enforced and perpetuated the national differences.
In the eighteenth century rulers troubled themselves little about matters apparently of such minor importance as the languages in which their subjects conversed and read. Even the French did not try to touch the German-speaking inhabitants of Alsace, and Copenhagen could become a centre of German letters, while French maintained itself at the Court of Berlin. All this was changed by the Revolution, and Napoleon was the first deliberately to convert the whole fabric of French schools and the university into an instrument for the organized propaganda of the cult of the Empire. Since then there is scarcely a government (always except that of England, which alone has been strong enough to rest on the native and undisciplined political sense of the people) which has not followed in his path. In particular when the state is founded on the nation the school is used to develop in the children the full consciousness of nationality. That institution that was for so long the home of European unity has become the most useful agent for the perpetuation and exaggeration of national differences. It is in the school that the immigrant to the United States is taught to reverence the institutions of his new fatherland, and from generation to generation the school labours to keep alive the memory of the half-forgotten struggle of the new republic and the British monarchy. In France each successive government has used the school to force on the nation its interpretation of the national history and ideals. And the victories of Prussian armies were cemented and confirmed by the official exposition of the Prussian state and the cult of the Hohenzollern. To the school is transferred the conflict between the doctrines of authority and the revolution, of the secular state and of the Kingdom by the Grace of God. Every nation rightly struggling to be free has seen in the school the instrument for securing the allegiance of the young, and the school has become the centre of political struggle. In Trieste and in Poland, in Alsace and in Macedonia, we find kings and politicians contending for the minds and souls of children, and it is in the school, the college, and the university that has been prepared the conflict that is now devastating Europe.
What has been done in the nineteenth century has really been only to carry into effect the change which was long overdue and was implicit in earlier years. The national culture and national authors have at length forced their way into the schools, and the result has been that institutions which originally in reality, and for so long in appearance, were the vehicles for the expression of the common European civilization, have been almost entirely won over to the cause of the national expression.
This is indeed inevitable. Education, as we have seen, can only be effective when it is the vehicle for strong beliefs, and is informed by the conscious expression of an attitude towards the world. Now, in modern days, the consciousness of a common European spirit has, in fact, almost disappeared. In its place we find the intense consciousness of the nation. Even religion has become national, and God has once again become a tribal deity. The new consciousness of the common interests of what is called Labour have no recognition in the approved teaching. If the work of the school was not to be merely the dead instruction in useless knowledge, if the work was to be directed towards informing the minds of the pupils with ideals and beliefs, it was only in the idealization of the national thought that this could be attained.
Is the older union of thought to be permanently lost? If not, you must find it again in some higher synthesis. There are many who would do so in the pursuit of mathematics and the natural sciences; in them, at least, no divisions of country can be found. The student in his chemical laboratory, the doctor in his hospital, the mathematician in his study, finds his colleagues in every country in the civilized world, and it matters not to him whether the next step in penetrating the secrets of nature have been made in Vienna, or in Paris, or Amsterdam, or Bologna.
There are many who believe that on this basis will be established the Union of Civilization. If we look, however, more critically, we may find reason to doubt whether this optimistic view is justified. I do not share this hope and this belief, I do not look forward to a spiritual and intellectual unity of the nations established on the basis of scientific education. It is, indeed, impossible to over-estimate not only the practical but also the intellectual influence of what we may call the scientific spirit. It is indeed true that those who are accustomed to the careful and systematic investigation of causes, who have been trained from their earliest years to recognize in the pomp and pageantry of the external world—and even to some extent in the working of the human mind and the structure of human society—the orderly sequence of natural law, will have a type and character of mind essentially different from those who have not passed through this discipline. The civilization (I scarcely dare to use the word culture) of those nations who have this in common will have a unity of their own, and will differ fundamentally from their own past and from that of other races.
On the other hand there are two considerations that I should like to put before you, as leading to a less important position, the one arising from the practical nature of science, the other connected with its essential intellectual origin.
It is a characteristic of all work in physical science that however it may originate in the pure desire for truth, it is very quickly available for practical use, personal comfort, the acquisition of wealth, and national efficiency. The physicist who calculates the stresses and strains of an aeroplane finds that in teaching man how to control nature he is also providing the means for his struggle, whether in peace or war, in commerce or on the battle-field. We soon find that the progress of technical skill is curiously inoperative in its effect on human thought and feeling. Men remain the same whether they ride in a coach, or a train, or a motor-car; it matters little whether they use bows and arrows, or rifles, or hand-grenades, or liquid fire.
Now in education it is the technical side of scientific progress which almost inevitably becomes most prominent, and the greater the advance in knowledge the more will this be true. The wider the domain of knowledge the greater is the number of those who will be chiefly occupied with the use of the processes and materials that have been discovered and the smaller is the proportion of those who will have reached the border of the known, and will begin the work of exploration into the unknown. That is, the greater will be the number of those who are the servants and not the masters of science. A unity of a certain kind we shall have, the unity of those who have learned to pilot an aeroplane, to apply X-rays, to extract the phosphate from iron, or to test cattle for tubercle. All this may produce a uniformity in the machinery of life, it passes by untouched the motives of action, the beliefs, affections, and interests. How many illustrations of this do we see around us! What more glorious illustration of the power of the human intellect can be found than the later developments of electricity, but scarcely had the discoveries been made when we find them seized upon by the man of affairs, and wireless telegraphy becomes the subject of speculation on the Stock Exchange, and a chief instrument of war. That which the chemist finds in his laboratory is, within a few years, sometimes even a few months, found again in the factory, and perhaps on the field of battle.
Do not let it be supposed that I would underrate the possibility of a deeper unity, but if we would find it we must carry our analysis further back. The progress of science is in truth not a cause but a result, not an ultimate fact but the symptom of a state of mind. It springs from that which was brought into Europe consciously at the Renaissance and which we may call the spirit of Greece. It is that to which we owe not only the investigation and subjection of nature, but equally with it all progress in every department of thought, the analysis of society, whether political or economic, the investigations of the working of human reason, the probing of human passions, and their record in art and literature.
What is this spirit? Is it not the confidence in the spirit of man, the spirit which in intellectual matters bends to no authority, and recognizes no limit to its enterprise, which probes all things, tests all things, and follows fearlessly where the argument leads it? This is what I mean by the spirit of Greece, it is that which Sophocles has immortalized. Of all this, what we call science is but a part, perhaps at present the most striking and important part, but still a part only; to look to it as the key of our civilization and the sole basis of our education would be to set up a partial and, therefore, a false ideal. An ideal, moreover, which, if pursued to its logical conclusion, would become the basis for the most appalling tyranny, by which the free spirit of investigation, to which we owe all our scientific progress, would be buried in the structure that itself had reared. For what is the end to which it must lead? Is it not a society which is held together by technical skill, a society of organized efficiency, where each individual holds his place, not as a living spirit, but as a slave of the great machine, tied throughout his life to the perfect performance of his limited and specialized task? I can imagine such a society; it is the ideal which some modern German writers have definitely put before us. It may be that this will be the Europe of the future, a Europe with a common government and a universal system of education by which each child will be trained to take his allotted part in an organized slavery. I hope I shall not live to see it.
None the less, a unity there is, but it is a deeper unity than this. It is the unity inherited from the past. Here we may find, not indeed a superficial uniformity, but a real unity of life and spirit. No civilization can repudiate its own origin, and whatever the future may have in store the childhood of Europe was nourished on the Bible and Christianity, and in the more mature years there was added the impulse to the boldest use of the human intellect that came from Greece. These two elements give us that which is the peculiar characteristic of Western Europe, and as we are told that the growth of each individual repeats the evolution of the race, so the education of each individual repeats in childhood and boyhood the education of the nation. It is from these two elements that the whole of modern culture springs, and it is from them that again and again they regain their strength.
And if we recollect this we need not be much disturbed by our apparent differences and misunderstandings. After all, they are the necessary result of freedom, and what do the Bible and Greece mean but moral and intellectual freedom? We want no formal and artificial unity: to us change, progress, conflict and division are the breath of our life. Just as the cluster of little towns in the Aegean islands and valleys prized before all things their political and intellectual independence, so is it with these small countries nestling on the shores of the Atlantic. Politically they have always refused to acquiesce in the establishment of any common authority over them, whether it comes from outside or even from among themselves, and so also they always repudiate the ascendancy of any single or partial intellectual doctrine. Each party and each nation adds its own contribution; all have a common origin, and all spring from the same root. Since the bonds have been relaxed and the dominion of the Universal Church overthrown, we see nothing from the rivalry of political systems and passing schemes of thought; they chase each other like the storms which arise from the Atlantic and pass in quick succession over our shores. It is this change and succession which is to us the breath of our life: we know nothing of the steady static weather of the great continents, where rain and drought have each their measured and settled space: and we know nothing, and will know nothing, of the formal and authoritative rule combining all Europe into one realm, whether political or intellectual. For we know that unity and permanence does not belong to this life, and our nearest approach to truth is to be found not in a settled system but in the thousandfold interactions of half-truths and partial systems.
Life like a dome of many-coloured glass
Stains the white radiance of eternity
Until death shatters it to fragments.
A unity there is, but it is the unity of the countless and varied flowers that carpet the meadows in spring, the unity of the common spirit of life which animates them all.
BOOKS FOR REFERENCE
Leach, The Schools of Medieval England. Methuen.
Mullinger, J. Bass, The Schools of Charles the Great.
Paulsen, Geschichte des gelehrten Unterrichts.
Rashdall, Universities in the Middle Ages. Clarendon Press.
Foster Watson, Grammar Schools. Cambridge University Press
Woodward, Erasmus. Cambridge University Press.
IX
COMMERCE AND FINANCE AS INTERNATIONAL FORCES
Commerce and finance are departments of life in which mankind approaches nearer to unity than in any other. They are practical expressions of the instinct of self-preservation which is the first law of nature. They spring straight from the acquisitiveness which is a universal characteristic of human nature and indeed of animal and vegetable nature. Every living thing wants to acquire food. Adam Smith indeed restricts the trading instinct to mankind. 'The propensity', he says, 'to truck, barter, or exchange one thing for another ... is common to all men and to be found in no other race of animals, which seem to know neither this nor any other species of contracts. Two greyhounds in running down the same hare have sometimes the appearance of acting in some sort of concert. Each turns her towards his companion or endeavours to intercept her when his companion turns her towards himself. This, however, is not the effect of any contract, but of the accidental concurrence of their passions in the same object at that particular time. Nobody ever saw a dog make a fair and deliberate exchange of one bone for another with another dog.'[24]
Mr Cannan, in his edition of the Wealth of Nations, very judiciously points out in a note on this passage that 'it is by no means clear what object there could be in exchanging one bone for another'. Probably if one rummaged the literature of dog stories one would find plenty of examples of commerce between dogs, and when they perform tricks to get food, we detect the germ of the exchange of a service for a commodity.
When a bee takes honey from a flower and leaves in exchange the pollen from a flower of an opposite sex, it may be said to be at once a merchant, a carrier, and a matrimonial agent, and the brilliant colours with which flowers attract these merchants have been compared to the advertising posters of the human trader. But however the case may be in the animal and vegetable world, there can be no question that the trading instinct appears at a very early stage of human development. In boys the instinct to trade or swop articles appears long before they feel any inclination to fall in love or to give much serious thought to religion. The classical example is given by Mark Twain, who relates how Tom Sawyer exchanged one of his own teeth, which had been pulled out that morning, for a tick in the possession of Huckleberry Finn, and then 'the two boys separated, each feeling wealthier than before'. In fact, of course, they both were wealthier than before, because each had got something that he wanted more than the article with which he had parted; and this pleasant result sums up the whole genesis and basis of commerce.
But though commerce is thus merely an expression of an instinct which is primitive and universal, it does not follow that it is its only or even its earliest expression. Perhaps its earliest and most natural expression was through robbery, with or without violence. A primitive savage who saw something that he wanted would probably, if strong enough, hit its owner on the head and take it, and this short and simple method of acquisition still occasionally reappears in the realms of the most highly civilized diplomacy. Nevertheless, at a very early stage its limitations became obvious, and quite at the dawn of recorded history we find commercial transactions referred to as an established branch of human intercourse. The Old Testament story has not gone far before it tells us of buying and selling. In the twenty-third chapter of Genesis we find a very interesting bargain recorded between Abraham and Ephron. Sarah had died in Kirjath-arba:
'the same is Hebron in the land of Canaan: and Abraham came to mourn for Sarah, and to weep for her. And Abraham stood up from before his dead, and spake unto the sons of Heth, saying, I am a stranger and a sojourner with you: give me a possession of a buryingplace with you, that I may bury my dead out of my sight. And the children of Heth answered Abraham, saying unto him, Hear us, my lord: thou art a mighty prince among us: in the choice of our sepulchres bury thy dead; none of us shall withhold from thee his sepulchre, but that thou mayest bury thy dead. And Abraham stood up and bowed himself to the people of the land, even to the children of Heth. And he communed with them, saying, If it be your mind that I should bury my dead out of my sight; hear me, and intreat for me to Ephron the son of Zohar, that he may give me the cave of Machpelah, which he hath, which is in the end of his field; for as much money as it is worth he shall give it me for a possession of a buryingplace amongst you. And Ephron dwelt among the children of Heth: and Ephron the Hittite answered Abraham in the audience of the children of Heth, even of all that went in at the gate of his city, saying, Nay, my lord, hear me: the field give I thee, and the cave that is therein, I give it thee; in the presence of the sons of my people give I it thee: bury thy dead. And Abraham bowed down himself before the people of the land. And he spake unto Ephron in the audience of the people of the land, saying, But if thou wilt give it, I pray thee, hear me: I will give thee money for the field; take it of me, and I will bury my dead there. And Ephron answered Abraham, saying unto him, My lord, hearken unto me: the land is worth four hundred shekels of silver; what is that betwixt me and thee? bury therefore thy dead. And Abraham hearkened unto Ephron; and Abraham weighed to Ephron the silver, which he had named in the audience of the sons of Heth, four hundred shekels of silver, current money with the merchant.'
In this very early and curious example of a bargain we find the seller continually expressing reluctance to sell and asking the buyer to accept as a gift the commodity that he wants. It appears from the sequel that this is merely an example of Oriental politeness. At any rate, the end of the bargain was that Abraham paid the money, four hundred shekels of silver, which is described as 'current money with the merchant', thus apparently showing that this system of payment in metals was already a regular feature of commercial transactions. Coined currency had not yet been developed, for we may note that Abraham weighed the silver.
When we come to the days of Solomon we find something like a developed international trade. The fifth chapter of the first book of Kings describes how Solomon, on taking the throne of his father, sent to Hiram, king of Tyre, and stated his purpose to build a house unto the name of the Lord his God, asking Hiram to send his servants to hew cedar trees out of Lebanon, and saying that he would give hire for Hiram's servants according to all that he should appoint. Hiram replied that he would do all that Solomon desired concerning timber of cedar and concerning timber of fir. 'My servants shall bring them down from Lebanon unto the sea: and I will convey them by sea in floats unto the place that thou shalt appoint me, and will cause them to be discharged there, and thou shalt receive them: and thou shalt accomplish my desire, in giving food for my household. So Hiram gave Solomon cedar trees and fir trees according to all his desire. And Solomon gave Hiram twenty thousand measures of wheat for food to his household, and twenty measures of pure oil: thus gave Solomon to Hiram year by year.'
According to this arrangement it would appear that Solomon paid for the timber that he imported by exporting to Hiram wheat and oil, but it is shown in a later chapter that the transaction was not a purely commercial one. At the end of twenty years, when Solomon had finished the building of the temple, he gave Hiram as further consideration twenty cities in the land of Galilee, 'and Hiram came out from Tyre to see the cities which Solomon had given him; and they pleased him not. And he said, What cities are these which thou hast given me, my brother? And he called them the land of Cabul [explained in the margin as meaning "displeasing" or "dirty">[ unto this day. And Hiram sent to the king sixscore talents of gold.'[25]
Apart from this transaction between the two kings, Solomon appears to have developed a very considerable foreign trade, presumably exporting wheat and oil and other agricultural products. His imports appear to have been various. Chapter ten of the first book of Kings states that 'the king had at sea a navy of Tharshish with the navy of Hiram: once in three years came the navy of Tharshish, bringing gold, and silver, ivory, and apes, and peacocks.' ... 'And the king made silver to be in Jerusalem as stones, and cedars made he to be as the sycomore trees that are in the vale, for abundance. And Solomon had horses brought out of Egypt, and linen yarn: the king's merchants received the linen yarn at a price.'
The whole question of Solomon's balance of trade is a very interesting one, and deserves the attention of some Hebrew scholar who may be able to throw light upon it. In these days it is rather difficult to see how a purely agricultural country could have found the means of paying for all these articles of pure luxury which Solomon imported so freely. It must be noted, however, that 'all the earth sought to Solomon, to hear his wisdom, which God had put in his heart. And they brought every man his present, vessels of silver, and vessels of gold, and garments, and armour, and spices, horses, and mules, a rate year by year'. From this it appears that Solomon was able to exchange his wisdom for a very considerable part of the imports which came into his country, and so perhaps we may take it that Solomon's wisdom is the earliest recorded example of what is now known as an invisible export. A modern equivalent would be the articles which English writers contribute to American newspapers and are paid for, ultimately, by the shipment to England of American wheat and cotton. It is also interesting to note in these days, when personal economy and simplicity of life are so freely preached, that Solomon's very luxurious imports were followed by evil consequences, imports of an enormous number of strange women, and a consequent turning away of his heart after false gods.
When we come to secular history, the very first chapter of the first book of the first history ever written deals with a question of commerce. Herodotus, who has been called the Father of History, opens his work with a few introductory words stating that 'these are the researches which he publishes in the hope of thereby preventing the great and wonderful actions of the Greeks and Barbarians from losing their due meed of glory, and withal to put on record what were their grounds of feud'. And then he plunges straight into his story, as follows: 'According to the Persians best informed in history, the Phoenicians began the quarrel. This people, who had formerly dwelt on the shores of the Erythræan Sea, having migrated to the Mediterranean and settled in the parts which they now inhabit, began at once, they say, to adventure on long voyages, freighting their vessels with the wares of Egypt and Assyria. They landed at many places on the coast, and among the rest at Argos, which was then pre-eminent above all the states included now under the common name of Hellas. Here they exposed their merchandise, and traded with the natives for five or six days; at the end of which time, when almost everything was sold, there came down to the beach a number of women, and among them the daughter of the king, who was, they say, agreeing in this with the Greeks, Io, the child of Inachus. The women were standing by the stern of the ship intent upon their purchases, when the Phoenicians, with a general shout, rushed upon them. The greater part made their escape, but some were seized and carried off. Io herself was among the captives. The Phoenicians put the women on board their vessel, and set sail for Egypt. Thus did Io pass into Egypt, according to the Persian story, which differs widely from the Phoenician: and thus commenced, according to their authors, the series of outrages.'[26]
Commerce is thus a striking example of the unity of mankind, being a practically universal form of human activity which arises as soon as man verges from the earliest stages of barbarism. In the case of individuals it is easy to see how this desire to exchange commodities between one individual and another meant so great an increase in human efficiency that it had only to be thought of to be universally adopted. The primitive savage, doing everything for himself, building his own hut, killing or finding his own food, and making his own clothes, such as they were, was an extremely versatile and self-sufficing person. At the same time the comforts that he enjoyed were probably not very satisfactory. His hut was almost certain to be draughty and to let in rain through the roof; his hunting and finding of food must have very often left him with his larder empty, and the state of his wardrobe was probably simple rather than satisfying. It would inevitably happen that certain members of the tribe would show greater efficiency than others in doing a certain one of these various businesses which are essential even to the simplest form of human life. Thus the tendency to specialization begins to show itself. The skilful hut-builder builds huts not only for himself but for other members of the tribe; he acquires further skill by constant practice and the huts are more quickly built and better when finished. The other tribesmen, in effect, pay him by supplying him with a certain amount of food and clothes. The tendency for specialization would make very rapid progress, and it is easy to see how at a very early date and in the most primitive communities there would be bowyers, arrow-makers, and leather-dressers, and how various kinds of artificers would arise, supplying the wants of the community in some special line, and receiving from the community all the commodities which they required apart from those which they produced themselves. The individuals of the community thus become mutually dependent, and live by one another's production. Hence comes unity, and with it a fresh cause of disunion, owing to the likelihood of quarrelling over the exchanges effected.
As progress developed and the communities at a greater distance became acquainted with one another's wants and the various kinds of goods that certain districts supplied, this tendency to specialization and consequent exchange of goods would grow in an ever-widening circle. Instead of the tribe being a commercial unity, the zone in which the interchange of goods went on would widen as far as the geographical and other boundaries allowed it. In the same country one district would be found to be specially well adapted for agriculture, and another for pasture; another, being well supplied with metals, would naturally provide a race of smiths and producers of rough tools for industry, and the exchange of commodities between districts with these various capacities would mean that the specialization of production would go steadily further, and that a whole town or village would be found in which the great majority of the inhabitants were at work upon one particular form of industry, relying for the other kinds of commodities that they required upon the activity of a similar community living in the next valley or on the other side of the river. This widening-out process would naturally extend itself over the borders of different countries. Obstacles to this process would be found in the differences of language and probably in the difficulties of transport. On the other hand, it would be greatly stimulated by the different ideas of value that prevailed in different communities. Value depends upon the extent to which anybody wants a thing, also on what he thinks it is worth, that is to say, the number of commodities in his possession with which he is prepared to part in order to secure it. Obviously commodities coming in from foreign countries, and being unknown or rare in the country in which they are offered, if they are otherwise at all attractive, possess a certain amount of what is called scarcity value, which makes them easily saleable by adventurous merchants who arrive with the cargo.
The stories of fortunes made by merchants who travelled among simple native tribes with cargoes of glass beads and were able to exchange these gaudy baubles for gold or rubber or other commodities which are valuable in civilized countries, have often been told, and opportunities for trading of this kind must have been very much more frequent when communication was comparatively difficult. Value to a great extent being determined by local convention and local habit, the profits of the trader were likely to be considerably increased the further he got from his home market. If he took away with him plenty of things which were in abundant supply at home and consequently cheap, he would almost certainly be able to bring back a large number of things which were plentiful in a far-away community, and consequently cheap for him to acquire, and scarce in his own district and consequently sure of a good market. This difference of standard of value in different countries was a great stimulus to foreign trade, also a great help to bringing mankind together, though it sometimes ended in disillusionment. It has been asserted that even within the memory of man an English merchant traded with a primitive community in which gold and silver were exchangeable weight for weight. For some years he did a very pleasant and profitable trade by taking a cargo of silver and bringing back with him the same weight in gold, the value of which in England happened to be sixteen times as great, or more. Unfortunately, when he made his last voyage he was met at the mouth of the river by a friendly native, who informed him that the community was waiting for him with tomahawks, and he hastily put to sea again. For the rest of his life he cherished a grievance against this curious people with which he had dealt, according to his own view, on perfectly equitable terms, having sold them a commodity at a price to which they were accustomed, and which they regarded as quite correct, with the result that they proposed to murder him because they found that the price was not in accordance with that current in other parts of the world.
By this business of exchange of commodities between one community and another, the process of specialization or division of labour which has already been referred to as its basis has been developed to extraordinary lengths. Its effect has been to increase enormously the wealth available, while at the same time the concentration of the individual has narrowed down his work so that he now no longer specializes on making one commodity, but on making a part of a fraction of a commodity.
Adam Smith's chapters on division of labour are so well known that there is no need to point out the very great economic benefits that arise from it. Clearly, any man who spends all his working time upon one particular process of productive activity acquires thereby a skill and rapidity in carrying out his part of the operation which would be impossible to any worker who has to carry the manufacture of an article from the beginning to its end. Just as we saw, when the primitive savage left off doing everything for himself and took to building huts for the rest of the community, that the huts became much more water-tight and comfortable, so the process goes still further, and building becomes very much more rapid and very much more cheap and efficient when a large number of specialists are set to work on the various very different processes required for the construction of a house. The consequence is that the production of goods is very greatly cheapened and made much more rapid, but at the same time the worker tends to become an artisan instead of a craftsman, and his work is likely to be much more monotonous and much more trying. Instead of seeing his product grow under his hand from its beginning to its end, with constant changes in the nature of its call on his energy and care, he is employed during the whole of his working time on some mechanical process, with the result that he himself becomes something very like a machine. What he has gained in the power to make and acquire commodities cheaply and quickly is offset to a certain extent by the less interesting and varied nature of his work.
It also follows that as the worker becomes a specialist he becomes dependent upon other members of the community for the supply to him of a large number of things which he requires for his own existence. If he spends his life in making one commodity or in making part of one commodity, it is clear that his requirements of all the things that are necessary for life apart from what he makes himself can only be satisfied by the willingness of the community to take the commodity that he makes in payment for those which it produces and of which he is in need. When he works for himself, he only makes things that he knows himself to need; when he works to sell to others, he has to speculate on the hope that the others will want what he makes.
Commerce thus not only shows the unity of mankind by being a universal feature of his existence, but increases that unity by making each individual dependent upon the exertions of his fellows, and on their willingness to take from him stuff which he is turning out; but if commerce thus promotes unity, it also tends to create a certain amount of friction and disagreement between one man and another when differences of opinion arise concerning the value of the product which each man is making, that is to say, concerning the amount of goods which the rest of the community is prepared to give him in exchange.
This consideration is also very strongly evident with regard to international trade. Here the division of labour is assisted by the difference in the products of different countries. There can be no doubt that the exchange of commodities between one nation and another tends to bring them together and to promote unity and harmony of interests. At the same time it is also likely to be fruitful in quarrels and bickering. We saw that Hiram was very much dissatisfied with the cities in Galilee which Solomon presented to him in the course of their semi-commercial transactions. He appears to have retaliated by making Solomon a very handsome present in gold; but Hiram seems to have been a very exceptional person, and it is probable that most traders who are dissatisfied with the consideration received would not have been so generous in expressing themselves.
International commerce has also been a fruitful cause of disunion rather than unity when various nations have quarrelled with one another concerning the right to trade with a third people. If one nation is trading with another greatly to its profit, it feels that it has a grievance when it finds that a neighbouring nation is sending cargoes to the same destination and undercutting it and taking the cream of the trade. After religion, it is probable that trade has produced more bloodshed than any other form of human activity. At the same time there can be no doubt that on the whole its influence has been strongly on the side of unity and that it has done more to break down international barriers than any other influence that has operated in the course of history. The trader, as such, believes entirely and whole-heartedly in the unity of mankind. All that he wants to do is to buy his products as cheaply as he can and to sell them at the best possible price. Whether he buys at home or abroad, or whether he sells at home or abroad, is a matter of complete indifference to him except that, as has been shown, owing to variations in value in different parts of the world, he is probably likely to be able to make larger profits from foreign trade than in commerce at home. National preferences sometimes induce him to encourage home industry by buying home products when foreign goods would have paid him better, but in so far as this happens, he ceases to be a trader as such and becomes a mixture of trader and patriot. As buyers and sellers, however, mankind is, on the whole, singularly free from international prejudices. It was thought at one time that importation of foreign goods into England would be considerably checked by insisting upon marks of origin, that is to say, that imported goods should be stamped as such. This expectation, however, seems to have been entirely disappointed, since most buyers were not concerned with the question of the country whence the commodity that they bought came, and only considered whether it suited their purses and was what they wanted. Sometimes there is actually a prejudice in favour of foreign goods, and, curiously enough, this is found to be so even in countries in which a protective policy has been very highly developed. It is, or was a few years ago, common to see in American newspapers, flaming advertisements heralding sales of imported goods, which were definitely stated to be such obviously because the sellers thought that they were likely to be able to sell them better because they were stated to be so. It is also a proud boast of English manufacturers that in many countries on the Continent it is common, or was until quite lately, for native manufacturers to sell their goods more easily in their home markets by describing them as English. Political and national prejudice seems to be overruled by the common human desire for something new and strange, and consequently, in spite of all friction that has arisen from international trade, and of the number of wars which have had their origin in commercial questions, there is good reason for the assertion that on the whole commerce has been a mighty promoter of intercourse among the nations and of the unity of mankind. If it had not been for commerce, the cheapening and quickening of communication could never have been carried out. The trader goes first, and after him the traveller and the tourist.
This claim can be made with perhaps even more certainty when we proceed to the realm of finance. If commerce is international and unifying, finance is perhaps even more so. Finance, of course, arises out of commerce and is an essential part of its machinery. By finance we mean the machinery of money—money-dealing and money-lending. Money becomes necessary as soon as the exchange of commodities, which is the meaning of trade, becomes fairly developed. At first, primitive peoples exchanged their commodities one for another, but a difficulty arose when out of a pair of possible traders one had something which the other wanted but the other had not. For example, if the arrow-maker had arrows to sell and wanted to buy fish, there obviously could be no bargain if his friend who wanted to buy arrows had only got deerskins to give in exchange. It was essential to the development of trade that some commodity should be hit on which could always be taken in exchange and so form a circulating medium. We have seen from the twenty-third chapter of Genesis that a certain weight of silver had in Abraham's time begun to assume this function. Economic text-books tell us that many other commodities had the form and function of money before the metals came into use. Until quite lately there were many places in which the use of an agreed medium of exchange had not been adopted to facilitate the purposes of commerce. Jevons begins his very interesting book on money by relating how
Some years since, Mdlle Zélie, a singer of the Théâtre Lyrique at Paris, made a professional tour round the world, and gave a concert in the Society Islands. In exchange for an air from Norma and a few other songs, she was to receive a third of the receipts. When counted, her share was found to consist of three pigs, twenty-three turkeys, forty-four chickens, five thousand cocoa-nuts, besides considerable quantities of bananas, lemons, and oranges. At the Halles in Paris, as the prima donna remarks in her lively letter, ... this amount of live stock and vegetables might have brought four thousand francs [£160], which would have been good remuneration for five songs. In the Society Islands, however, pieces of money were very scarce; and as Mademoiselle could not consume any considerable portion of the receipts herself, it became necessary in the meantime to feed the pigs and poultry with the fruit,'[27] and so her receipts consumed one another.
This is an example of the inconvenience which the invention of money overcame. In primitive communities it took the form of cowry-shells or tobacco or gunpowder or any commodity which was in universal request in the place. All the seller wanted to do was to be able to obtain for his product a certain amount of stuff which he could rely on being able to exchange for other things that he wanted. In the end the precious metals, with their strong appeal to human vanity, and their utility for adorning temples and so propitiating divine favour, ousted all other commodities which had been used for money; and they are now to a great extent ousted by pieces of paper, which still, however, represent claims to so much gold.
The discovery of a circulating medium enormously facilitated the progress of commerce, and it was not long before a class of people grew up who specialized in this particular form of business and became financiers and moneylenders. Bankers and financiers were known in Rome and Athens, and we know that some machinery existed by which the monetary claims of one country on another could be settled by something that fulfilled the functions of the modern bill of exchange. The actual provision of metallic currency has from the earliest times been almost entirely under the control of the government which took into its own hands, as an essential part of the police protection which it gives to the people, the coining of currency, stamping the coin in such a way that anybody who took one might know that he was getting a certain weight of a precious metal. But the money-dealing business very soon developed the machinery of credit by which anybody who had an enterprise or a venture out of which he expected to make an attractive profit could, if he had sufficient property to pledge, provide himself with the means to finance it between the day that he started on his operations and the day when he brought home his profits: and this business also became international, though not, perhaps, as rapidly as commerce had overstepped the boundaries between one people and another.
In the Merchant of Venice we find Antonio trading with all the countries of the then known world,
From Tripolis, from Mexico, and England,
From Lisbon, Barbary, and India,
but we do not find that Shylock was lending money on at all the same international scale. When communication was slow, difficult, and untrustworthy, money-lending at a distance was made very risky, because it was impossible for the lender to keep the watchful eye on the borrower's operations and credit that is required if he is to feel comfortable in his venture. For a Lombard Street banker to lend money to a merchant in Cheapside payable at a year hence was, until comparatively lately, a much safer enterprise than to lend it to a merchant in Paris, because the local borrower was always under the lender's observation. If he were overtrading or living on too lavish a scale it would at once be noticed and reported.
Nevertheless, international finance made steady progress through somewhat obscure beginnings. We know that Philip II of Spain was heavily indebted to moneylenders all over the Continent, and that by his famous repudiation he carried consternation throughout Europe.[28] Edward III was also heavily indebted to Florentine bankers, and he also omitted to pay his debt; and it is said that the descendants of the Florentine bankers still have a claim against the English Crown in consequence[29]; but it was not until after the creation of stock exchanges and the machinery of a public market in securities that international finance became a question of general importance.
Here also the effect has been for unity combined with a good deal of disunion. Twenty years ago it used to be said that feeling in the Western States of America was very strongly anti-English because most of the Western farmers were indebted to English moneylenders, and on the whole it may be said that the relations between the borrower and lender are not likely to be so friendly and so likely to promote unity as those between buyer and seller. There is really no logical reason why this should be so: the basis of the bargain between the two is exactly the same. In commercial transactions one man sells to another because the other man wants something that he has got more than he does. It is exactly the same with the borrower and lender of money. A man borrows because he wants money and is prepared to pay a rate of interest for it. The lender lends because he has money to lend and wants to earn interest on it. Nevertheless there is something in this relationship which seems to produce discord. It is not many years since the Australian newspapers used to talk of England as John Bull Cohen, implying that the English money market made more than it ought to do by developing, with the help of its financial resources, the production and commerce of the young countries of the world. Perhaps it is human to feel a grudge against a creditor, because the money has to be paid back, whereas a commercial bargain is done with. Nevertheless, after allowing for all the friction that money-lending seems to produce, there can be no question that the establishment of the international market in securities has enormously widened the world's output of commodities, and it has greatly promoted that unity of interests which has brought mankind together more than anything else.
Englishmen are always supposed to be particularly insular. Nevertheless, any one who looks at the Official List daily published by the London Stock Exchange and sees the enormous number of Government and municipal loans from all parts of the world, the number of foreign railways, and the number of foreign enterprises of all kinds which are dealt in on the London Stock Exchange, cannot avoid the conclusion that this practice of investing money abroad, which has been followed here to a greater extent than in any other country, must have very greatly widened the Englishman's horizon and forced him to confess that at least from one point of view dwellers in foreign countries have some right to exist. At any rate, in practice English investors not only have shown that they do not recognize international barriers, but there have even been times when foreign securities have actually been preferred to English. A few years ago it was reported by stockbrokers that many of their clients would not invest money at home and insisted whenever possible that it should be placed abroad. To such an extent has this process been carried on that it is now calculated by statisticians that no less than four thousand millions of English money have been placed outside England, about one-half of this having been lent to foreign countries, and about one-half to our own colonies. Here again, as in commerce, there arises a possibility of quarrelling, not only between the lender and borrower but also between rival groups of lenders in different countries. When an economically backward country is being developed with the assistance of capital from nations which are at a further stage of economic progress, the moneylender is supposed to acquire a certain amount of political prestige and privilege which makes other nations, which have an eye to increasing their influence in the borrowing country, jealous concerning such operations. A curious example was presented not long ago by China. China wanted to borrow, and probably the only countries which had any genuine surplus of capital available for export were England and France. Nevertheless, owing to the political side issues involved, Russia, Germany, and the United States also all insisted on taking part in the business of lending money to China. China was compelled to borrow more money than it wanted, so that all these so-called civilized Powers could share in the operation, and the absurdity of the position was increased by the fact that some at least of the Powers which lent the money would have had to borrow it somewhere before they could do so.
This freedom with which England has furnished financial resources to the rest of the world is sometimes called in question as having had, or being likely to have, bad effects upon the activity of production at home. It is quite clear that the progress of international commerce and the division of labour among nations by which commodities of all kinds have been very greatly cheapened could not have been carried out if England and other comparatively far developed countries had not supplied the necessary capital for the development of the relatively backward parts of the earth. If English money had not gone into building railways in America, Canada, Argentina, Australia, and all over the world, and supplying capital to the farmers and others who opened up these countries, food could not have been nearly as cheap as it is or as it was before the war, and clothes and other necessaries of life would have been at a very different price. In fact, it may be said that if England had not acted as she has, as the world's financier, the development of the world's trade to anything like its present scale would have been altogether impossible. If we could feel sure that the distribution of the world's production had been as satisfactory as the wonderful increase in its output, there would be no question that all classes in England had been very greatly benefited by its financial activities abroad. As it is, it is sometimes argued that English capital going abroad stimulates production in other countries and increases the demand for labour there, but that the demand for labour in England and its reward might have been on a higher scale if English capital had been kept at home. This is a question which is, happily perhaps, outside my province at present, but it is one which demands serious attention. This much can be said, that the years in which English capital has gone abroad with the greatest rapidity have also been those in which our export trade has been most active, and it is obvious that this must be so, because when England exports capital it does so in the form of lending money either to a foreign Government or to a foreign municipality, or to some company, English or foreign, which is conducting some enterprise in a foreign country.
In whatever way the money is lent the result is that the country to which it is lent is given so much buying power in England and consequently its demand for English goods is to that extent stimulated. It does not follow, of course, that the whole amount of money that it borrows is actually spent in England. It is possible that the Canadian railway which is raising money in England may spend it by buying steel rails in Belgium, but in practical fact the net result is that somebody or other abroad is given a claim on England which finally, by some roundabout process, takes effect in a demand for English goods and services. At the same time, when one does admit that international finance is essential to international commerce and that the specialization, which is an essential product of commerce, is thereby quickened, we have to remember that the objections, such as they are, which can be put forward against the division of labour among individuals cannot be overlooked altogether when the division of labour is applied to nations.
Dr. Bowley, in his book on England's foreign trade, puts the matter dramatically as follows:—
The limit to the indefinite division of labour is to be found in the social, intellectual, and moral objections to specialization. It is not pleasant to contemplate England as one vast factory, an enlarged Manchester, manufacturing in semi-darkness, continual uproar, and at intense pressure for the rest of the world. Nor would the Continent of America, divided into square, numbered fields, and cultivated from a central station by electricity, be an ennobling spectacle.'[30]
This is a picturesque expression of the objections to the unity of mankind if carried too far through the process of specialization. While admitting their force, it is not necessary to admit that the specialization process need go quite to that length. Even if England became one vast factory, it need not necessarily follow that it must work in semi-darkness, continual uproar, or at intense pressure, but it is all to the good that a specialist of Dr. Bowley's eminence should call our attention to certain things which have to be guarded against. On the other hand, we may contend that if England became one vast factory, it would only do so because it paid it so well to do so, that that vast factory might be made more in accordance with William Morris's ideal than the picture of Inferno drawn by Dr. Bowley. We might imagine England one vast Garden City, dotted over with factories, each of which might be as beautiful as a cathedral, embowered and surrounded by fruit trees and gardens, in which a highly educated and technically trained population would work for five or six hours a day, and spend the rest of their time in intellectual leisure and healthy exercise and home life under ideally happy conditions.
It is interesting to note that the result of the present war is likely, if anything, to check the export of capital for a time, not only owing to the very obvious reason that for the present all our available capital is going into the war and for some time to come will have to go into expenses connected with the war, but also because this war has set a new precedent with regard to the duty of belligerents in the matter of making payments to one another. In olden times, when war was a gentlemanly business, trade and finance were very little interrupted by it. At the time of the Crimean War the Russian Government punctually paid the interest due on Russian loans to English holders and thereby established a prestige amongst English investors which was cherished for several decades. Now that nations have taken to going to war with tooth and nail, throwing their whole available population into the field and using every possible device, military, commercial, and financial, to beat their enemies, any such pleasant decencies as paying money due from one country to another in the shape of interest or otherwise have been abandoned. When the war is over it is possible that investors will remember this fact to a certain extent and will be more chary than they were before of investing their money abroad, at any rate in any country with which there is the remotest possibility of our being involved in war.
War has also shown the great inconvenience that arises when the mutual dependence of nations one on another for certain products leaves them crippled because international exchange is interrupted. International trade and finance, in their full and free development, have been shown to depend on the assumption that peace is secure. Unless the present war should be so ended as to secure peace for all time, it seems likely that all nations will aim at being able to rely, at least for the essentials of life and of defence, on home production or on a supply from countries with which war may be regarded as impossible. If this be so, then unity through trade and finance will be less universal, but more close-knit in its narrower scope.
BOOKS FOR REFERENCE
A.L. Bowley, England's Foreign Trade. Swan Sonnenschein.
C.K. Hobson, The Export of Capital. Constable.
W.S. Jevons, Money and the Mechanism of Exchange. Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co.
Smith's Wealth of Nations, chs. i-iv.