And pass inside the church, where Tudor and Edwardian, and Norman and Saxon, have each poured out their souls; in which every stone seems saturated with their longings; where pleadings and rejoicings seem to mutely fill the dead air; where the walls have echoed every bride and every infant and every mourner through all the changing generations; where Fæder ure has yielded to pater noster before even our familiar supplications were ever heard. This indeed holds us as if it were a place where we can actually live with the past selves that have made us, and be at one with those who would have craved to see us in the ages beyond them.
And if past loves and hopes seem thus to give their life to the lasting walls, how fearful is the breath of terror that clings round every stone of the Colosseum. One single mangled death there made ten thousand fiends of men who sat on those benches; and every year had its thousands of such agonies, through all the centuries. The mass of horror beyond all thought that dwells in that arena, is only exceeded by the thousandfold fire of cruelty that has burnt on those seats around. The place is hell petrified.
And, within a stone’s throw of that, how the whole past, from which our present ages have sprung, lives before us in the Forum. The triumphs where the beauty of Greek art served but to make the clumsy westerner gape; where the noblest blood of other lands,—Perseus, Caractacus, Zenobia,—has stood abased; where the barbaric Goth has fiercely joyed in splendid pillage of its wondrous wealth; where Theodoric and Karl had each hoped to restore the shattered decay, with the rough material of their own kin, which needed yet a thousand years of hewing; a space of greater hopes and dreads, greater successes and failures, than any other acre that we know.
And yet, before all this, there passed age after age of men, who built up civilisations which we just begin to perceive. The golden splendour of Mykenae, the earlier magnificence of Minoan Knossos, the delicate wares of still older Crete, all live with the same life as ourselves, all are precious to us as if we had made them, all make us fellow minds with those who thought and fashioned and treasured such things in like manner to ourselves.
Turn now to our own land, and on a wide western moor stand within a ring of grey stones, which our own flesh and blood there placed in faith and trust, for something greater than the cares of daily life; so far from us in generations, so far from us in thoughts, that we can hardly grasp the pulse of the same life with them, and feel what they felt. Yet it draws us like those sounds which were the first music to man, the sough of the wind in the wood, and the lap of the wave on the shore, ever the sweetest yet to ourselves. And the grey stones still touch us and bind our thoughts and our love of all our forefathers to themselves in elemental memories.
What underlies all this fascination of the past? What is it that thus moves men
In thinking of the days that are no more?
It is the same great attraction, whether it be a personal memory, or the being of our forefathers, or a page strong with past life in some history, or the handling of the drinking bowls of the oldest kings of the earth as they come from the dust of Egypt. It is but one sense in varied forms. It is the love of life.
In primal seas first sprang that love of life,—of preservation, of continuity of life. Even long before man it led to the moral growth of self-sacrifice, of affection, of social union. In man it led the Stoic on to the brotherhood of all men, and the responsibility of man for man. It has led the modern forward to the brotherhood of all existing life, the responsibility for the animal as well as the man. It now leads us on to clinging to the life of our ancestors, their being, and their natures; and beyond that to the fascination of all history, as being the continuity of life, the ever-shifting changes of the one great chain which we see around us at its present stage, and of which we form part. The man who knows and dwells in history adds a new dimension to his existence; he no longer lives in the one plane of present ways and thoughts, he lives in the whole space of life, past, present, and dimly future. He sees the present narrow line of existence, momentarily fluctuating, as one stage, like innumerable other stages that have each been the all-important present to the short-sighted people of their own day. He values the present as the most complete age of history for study, as explaining the past. He values the past as the long continuity that has brought about the result of the present, in which he happens to breathe. He lives in all time; the ages are his, all live alike to him; the present is not more real than the past, any more than the room in which he sits is more real than the rest of the world. Cleaving to that one stream of life which branch by branch has flowed through so many channels in all the ages, and still runs on into the future, he can give account of the Fascination of History.