The Evolution of States

by J. M. Robertson

It is significant that Grote's anti-rationalistic critics make no attempt to gauge the respective effects of "tyrannic" and democratic or oligarchic rule on the inner life of men, which is what Grote chiefly considered. Neither is this, the vital issue, once faced in the essay of Hegewisch "On the Epoch of Roman History most Fortunate for the Human Race" (French trans. by Solvet, 1834), or in the encomiums of Gibbon, Mommsen, and Renan, before cited (p. 89, note). As has been shown above, there is no instance of a new and great intellectual development taking its rise or visibly going forward (save as at Alexandria under the Ptolemies) under the auspices of even a good despot in antiquity; though such a despot might at times usefully preserve the peace and cherish writers and artists. Here, then, is a sociological clue that should be followed. The reasonable inference seems to be that democratic conditions, other things being equal, tend most to elicit human faculty.

And where in modern times certain of the less democratic nations may be said to have developed certain forms of culture more widely and energetically than do certain of the more democratic States—as Germany her learned class, in comparison with France and England and the United States; or modern Russia in comparison with the States in the matter of the higher fiction—it can easily be shown (1) that these developments arise not in virtue of but in reaction against autocracy, and (2) that they were possible only in virtue of the evocative influence of communities living more freely. Modern communities differ vitally from the ancient in that printing has created a species of intercourse which overleaps all political and geographical restrictions, so that a politically tyrannised community can yet receive and respond to the stimulus of another. But the stimulus is still indispensable. Thus the intellectual expansion of France after the death of Louis XIV[358] drew germinally from the culture of the England of the day; and that of Germany later in the century was equally a sequence from that and from the ferment in France. Given the cluster of independent States, each with its court and its university, which made up the Germany of the period, the revived spirit of free thought bore the more and the better fruit because of the multitude of the reactions involved in the circumstances. For the time, the slackened and lightened petty autocracies counted for intellectual democracy, though even Kant was made to feel the pressure of censorship. It was not regal or ducal rule that made Lessing or Herder or Schiller or Goethe; and it was not mere kingly encouragement that bred scholars like Hermann and Wachsmuth and Buttmann and Bekker and Boeckh and Heeren and Ottfried Müller. The school of Tübingen was the outcome of a movement that proximately began in English Deism; and even the personal bias of Frederick counted for much less in the evolution than the general contagion of European debate. In the University of Berlin, organised after Jena, the inspiring principle was that of intellectual freedom; and the moving spirits took express pains to guard against the tyranny of convention which they saw ruling in the universities of England. For the rest, the production of a very large class of scholarly specialists in Germany was made possible primarily by the number of universities set up in the days of separatism, and secondarily by the absence of such economic conditions (all resting on possession of coal and maritime situation) as drew English energy predominantly to industry and commerce. It is true that if a democratic society to-day does not make express economic provision for a scholarly and cultured class, it is likely to lack such, because the leisured or idle class in all countries grows less capable of, and less inclined to, such intellectual production as it contributed to the serious literature of England during the nineteenth century. But such economic provision has been still more necessary in monarchic communities. Finally, at every stage Germany has been reacted upon by France and England; and it is notable that while, in the last generation, under a strengthening militarism and imperialism, the number of trained German specialists was maintained, the number of Germans able to stir and lead European thought fell off.[359]

In the same way the phenomenon of a group of great novelists in the autocratic Russia of our own age is no fruit of autocracy, save in the sense that autocratic government checks all other forms of criticism of life, all liberal discussion, and so drives men back on artistic forms of writing which offer no disturbing social doctrine. And the artistic development itself is made possible only by the culture previously or contemporaneously accumulated in other and freer communities, from whose mental life the cultivated Russian draws his. It was to some extent a similar restrictive pressure that specially developed the drama in France under the Third Empire. Apart from the peculiar case of the Italian cities of the Renaissance, discussed hereinafter, the most that can be said for the "tyrant" in modern Europe is that Richelieu and Colbert promoted science in France; that the German principalities of the eighteenth century fostered music at their courts; that George III did much for Handel in England; and that the King of Bavaria did still more for Wagner. On the other hand, the system of national and municipal theatres on the Continent was an essential adjunct even in this regard; and the mere comparative freedom accorded to the drama in Elizabethan England, at a time when surplus intellectual energy lacked other stimuli, sufficed to develop that art in one generation to a degree never so speedily reached elsewhere, save in republican Athens. Where the "tyrant" is most useful is in such a civilisation as that of the Saracens, for which autocracy is the only alternative to anarchy, and where, on a basis of derived culture, he can protect and rapidly further the useful arts and all manner of special studies. But even he cannot command a great intellectual art, or an inwardly great literature.[360] It will hardly be pretended that the freethinking which went on in Moslem Persia and Spain in the eighth and later centuries was evoked by the Caliphs, though some of them for a time protected it. The Ptolemies for a while fostered science at Alexandria; but under Roman rule—surely as tyrannous—it died out. And even under the Ptolemies science was a hothouse plant which never throve in the open.

It is clear, then, that first the rule of Alexander and his successors, and later the rule of Rome, over Greece and the Græcised East, put a check on the intellectual forces there, against which there was no counteractive in existence. There remained no other free communities whose culture could fecundate that of the Greek and other cities held in tutelage.

The city of Rhodes, which recovered its independence at the death of Alexander, and maintained its self-government down till the Roman period, was, in point of fact, latterly distinguished for its art (Mahaffy, Greek Life and Thought, pp. 334-38), thus illustrating afresh the value of free life as an art stimulus; but its pre-eminently commercial activity, as in the case of Corinth, and as later in the case of Venice, kept it relatively undistinguished in literature. Rich merchants commissioned pictures and statues, but not philosophies or books. Holm (Eng. trans. iv, 492) calls Rhodes a seat of philosophy, etc., naming Theophrastus and Eudemus. But they both studied and settled at Athens.

From the whole history there emerges the demonstration of what might reasonably be put a priori—that for a whole community, once self-governing, to acquiesce in an all-embracing foreign despotism meant the settling of lethargy on half of its mental life.[361] What the thinkers left in Greece could do was to lend philosophic ideas and method to the jurists at work on the problem of adapting Roman law to the needs of a world-empire, and this was done to good purpose; but it was the last genuine task that the circumstances permitted of. To discuss vitally the problems of politics would have meant challenging the despotism. There remained, it is true, philosophy and the arts; and these were still cultivated; but they finally subsisted at the level of the spirit of a community which felt itself degenerate from its past, and so grew soon hopelessly imitative. No important work, broadly speaking, can ever be done save by men who, like the most gifted Greeks of the palmy days (innovating in drama and improving on the science of the foreigner), feel themselves capable of equalling or transcending the past;[362] and that feeling seems to have become impossible alike for the students and the sculptors of Greece soon after the Macedonian conquest, or at least after the Roman. Plato and Pheidias, Aristotle and Praxiteles, Æschylus and Epicurus, figured as heights of irrecoverable achievement; and the pupillary generations brooded dreamily over Plato or drew serenity from Epicurus as their bent lay, and produced statues of alien rulers, or of the deities of alien temples, where their ancestors had portrayed heroes for the cities and Gods for the shrines of Greece. Beneath the decadence of spirit there doubtless lay, not physiological decay, as is sometimes loosely assumed, but a certain arrest of psychological development—an arrest which, as above suggested, may be held to have set in when the life and culture of the "family women" in the Greek cities began decisively to conform to the Asiatic standard, the men cultivating the mind, while the women were concerned only with the passive life of the body. In this one matter of the equal treatment of the sexes Sparta transcended the practice of Athens, her narrow intellectual life being at least the same for both; and to this element of equilibrium was probably due her long maintenance of vigour at the level of her ideal.

[As, however, the Spartan women, whatever their training, could not finally live the martial life of the men, the results of their chiefly animal training were not exemplary. See the question vivaciously discussed by De Pauw, Recherches philosophiques sur les Grecs, 1787, ptie. iv, sect. x, § 1—a work which contains many acute observations, as well as a good many absurdities. The Spartan women, it appears, were in a special degree carried away by the Bacchic frenzy. Aelian, Var. Hist. iii, 42. Cp. Aristotle, Politics, ii, 9 (and other testimonies cited by Hermann, Manual of the Political Antiquities of Greece, § 27, 12), as to their general licence.]

The arrested psychological development, it need hardly be added, would tend to mean not merely unoriginal thinking among those who did think, but finally a shrinkage of the small number of those who cared greatly for thinking. Even in the independent period, the mental life of Greece drew perforce from a relatively small class—chiefly the leisured middle class and the exceptional artificers or slaves who, in a democratic community, could win culture by proving their fitness for it. Under the Roman rule the endowed scholars (sophists) and artists alike would tend to minister to Roman taste, and as that deteriorated its ministers would. Rome, it is easy to see, went the downward intellectual way in the imperial age with fatal certainty; and her subject States necessarily did likewise at their relative distance. Finally, when Christianity became the religion of the Empire, all the sciences and all the fine arts save architecture and metal-work were rapidly stupefied, the Emperor vetoing free discussion in the fifth century, and the Church laying the dead hand of convention on all such art as it tolerated, even as the priesthood of Egypt had done in their day. It is positively startling to trace the decline of the fine arts after the second century. On the arch of Constantine, at Rome, all the best sculpture is an appropriation from the older arch of Trajan: under the first Christian emperor there are no artists capable of decently embellishing his monument in the ancient metropolis. All the forms of higher faculty seem to have declined together; and as the decay proceeded the official hostility to all forms of free thought strengthened.

[See Finlay, History of Greece, as cited, i, 284-85, as to the veto on discussion by Theodosius. In the next century Justinian suppressed the philosophic schools at Athens. Finlay, in one passage (i, 221), speaks of them as nearly extinct before suppression; but elsewhere (pp. 277-81) he gives an entirely contrary account. There are too many such contradictions in his pages. Cp. Hertzberg, Geschichte Griechenlands seit dem Absterben des antiken Lebens, 1876, i, 78-84.]

By the time of Constantine, even the coinage had come to look like that of a semi-barbarian State; and thought, of course, had already stagnated when Christianity conquered the "educated" classes. But these classes themselves were speedily narrowed nearly to those of the priests and the bureaucracy, save in so far as commerce maintained some semi-leisure. Barbarian invasion and imperial taxation combined in many districts to exterminate the former leisured and property-owning class. It is indeed an exaggeration to say that "the labourer and the artisan alone could find bread ... and, with the extinction of the wealthy and educated classes, the local prejudices of the lower orders became the law of society."[363] But the last clause is broadly true. In this society the priest, with his purely pietistic tastes and knowledge, became the type and source of culture.