Similarly in Rome, two centuries sever the Rome which rose from Cannae from the Rome which administered Egypt and Hispania. And in Islam four generations languish in misery before the true policy of the Abbassides displays itself, striking into the path which it never abandoned.
In England then the influence of this epoch of tragic insight, and of its transforming force, advances imperceptibly, unnoted across two generations, yet the true sequence of cause and effect is unquestionable. The England which, towards the close of the eighteenth century, presents itself like a fate amongst the peoples of India, bears within itself the wisdom which in the long run will save it from the errors, and turn it from the path, which the England of the Plantagenets followed in Ireland and in France. The national consciousness of England, stirred to its depths by its own suffering, its own defeats, its own humiliations, comes there in India within the influence of that which in the life of a State, however little it may affect the individual life as such, is the deepest of all suffering. England stands then in the presence of a race whose life is in the memories of its past; its literature, its arts, its empires that rise and dissolve like dreams; its religions, its faiths, with all their strange analogies, dim suggestions, mysterious as a sea cavern full of sounds. Hard upon this experience in India comes that of the farther East, comes that of Egypt, that of Africa in the nineteenth century. How can such a fortune fail to change the heart, the consciousness of a race, imparting to it forces from these wider horizons, deepening its own life by the contact with this manifold environment? He who might have been a de Montfort, a Grenville, or a Raleigh, is now by these presences uplifted to other ideals, and by these varied and complex influences of suffering, and the presence of suffering, raised from the sphere of concrete freedom and concrete justice to the higher realm ruled by imaginative freedom, imaginative justice, which Sophocles, in the choral ode of the Oedipus, delineates, "the laws of sublimer range, whose home is the pure ether, whose origin is God alone."
§ 3. THE LAW OF TRAGEDY: ITS SECOND ASPECT
The second mode or aspect in which the Law of Tragedy as applied to history reveals itself in the life of a State, corresponds to the moment of intenser vision in the individual life, when the soul, exalted by "compassion and terror," discerns the deeper truth, the serener ideal which henceforth it pursues as if impelled by the fixed law of its being. There is a word coined by Aristotle which comes down the ages to us, bringing with it as it were the sound of the griding of the Spartan swords as they leapt from their scabbards on the morning of Thermopylae, the +enérgeia tês psychês+—the energy of the soul. This energy of the soul in Aristotle is the vertù of Machiavelli, the spring of political wisdom, the foundation of the greatness of a State. It is the immortal energy which arises within the consciousness of a nation, or in the soul of an individual, as the result of that hour of insight, of pity, of anguish, or contrition. It is the heroism which adverse fortune greatens, which antagonism but excites to yet sublimer daring.
In Rome this displays itself, both in policy and in war, in the centuries that immediately succeed Cannae. Nothing in history is more worthy of attention than the impression which Rome in this epoch of her history made upon the minds of men, above all, upon the mind of Hellas. Its expression in Polybius is remarkable.
Polybius, if not one of the greatest of thinkers on politics, has a place with the greatest political historians for all time. It was his work which Chatham placed in the hands of his son, the younger Pitt, as the supreme guide in political history. Polybius has every inducement to abhor Rome, to judge her actions with jealous and unfriendly eyes. His father was the companion of Philopoemen, the heroic leader of the Achaean league, sometimes styled "the last of the Greeks," the Kosciusko of the old world. Polybius himself is a hostage in Rome, the representative of a defeated race, a lost cause; and yet after years of study of his conquerors, possessing every means for a just estimate of their actions and motives in the senate, on the battlefield, in the intimacies of private life, the conviction of his heart becomes that there in Rome is a people divinely appointed to the government, not of Hellas merely, but of the whole earth. The message of his history, composed with scrupulous care, and a critical method rare in that age, is that the very stars in their courses fight for Rome, whether she wages war against Greek or against Barbarian, that hers is the domination of the earth, the empire of the world, and it is to the eternal honour of Greece that it accepted this message. The Romano-Hellenic empire is born. Other men arise both to the east and to the west of the Adriatic, in whom the Greek and Roman genius are fused, who pursue the ideal and amplify or adorn the thought which Polybius was the first to express immortally. It inspires the rhetoric of Cicero; and falls with a kind of glory on the verse of Virgil—
Excudent alii spirantia mollius aera,
credo equidem, vivos ducent de marmore vultus,
orabunt causas melius, caelique meatus
describent radio et surgentia sidera dicent:
tu regere imperio populos Romane memento;
hae tibi erunt artes; pacisque imponere morem,
parcere subjectis et debellare superbos.
The tutor of Hadrian makes it the informing idea of his parallel "Lives," and gives form and feature to a grandeur that else were incredible. It appears in the duller work of the industrious Dion Cassius, and in the fourth century forges some of the noblest verse of Claudian. And as we have seen, it is enshrined nine centuries after Claudian in the splendid eloquence of the De Monarchia, and yields such spent, such senile life as they possess, to the empires of Hapsburg and Bourbon. Thus this divine energy, which after Cannae uplifts Rome, riveting the sympathies of Polybius, outlives Rome itself, still controlling the imaginations of men, until its last flicker in the eighteenth century.
Where in the history of England, in the life of England as a State, does this energy, exalted by the hour of tragic vision, manifest itself? Recollect our problem; it is by analysis, comparison, and contrast, to discover what is the testimony of the past to Britain's title-deeds of empire.
Great races, like great individuals, resemble the giants in the old myth, the gigantes, the earth-born, sons of Gaia, who, thrown in the wrestle, touched her bosom, and rose stronger than before defeat. England stood this test in the sixteenth century, rising from that long humiliating war with France, that not less humiliating war with Scotland, greater than before her defeat. This energy of the soul, quickened by tragic insight, displays itself not merely in the Armada struggle but before that struggle, under various forms in pre-Armada England.