J. M. Robertson

GREECE

§ 1

It is still common, among men who professedly accept the theory of evolution, to speak of special culture developments, notably those of sculpture and literature in Greece, art in medieval Italy, and theocratic religion in Judea, as mysteries beyond solution. It may be well, then, to consider some of these developments as processes of social causation, in terms of the general principles above outlined.

[A rational view was reached by the sociologists of the eighteenth century, by whom the question of culture beginnings was much discussed—e.g., Goguet's De l'origine des lois, des arts, et des sciences, 1758; Ferguson's Essay on the History of Civil Society, 1767; and Hume's essay on the Rise and Progress of the Arts and Sciences. At the end of the century we find the solution scientifically put by Walckenaer: "Ainsi le germe de gÉnie et des talens existe dans tous les tems, mais tous les tems ne sont pas propres À le faire Éclore" (Essai sur l'histoire de l'espÈce humaine, 1798, 1. vi, ch. xx, Des siÈcles les plus favorables aux productions de gÉnie, pp. 348, 349). In England forty years later we find Hallam thus exemplifying the obscurantist reaction: "There is only one cause for the want of great men in any period—nature does not think fit to produce them. They are no creatures of education and circumstances" (Literature of Europe, pt. i, ch. iii, § 35). A kindred though much less crude view underlies Sir Francis Galton's argument in Hereditary Genius. Cp. the present writer's paper on "The Economics of Genius," in The Forum, April, 1898 (rep. in Essays in Sociology, vol. ii), and the able essay of Mr. Cooley, there cited. My esteemed friend, Mr. Lester Ward (Dynamic Sociology, ii, 600, 601), seems to me, as does Mill (System of Logic, bk. vi, ch. iv, § 4; cp. Bain, J.S. Mill, p. 146), to err somewhat on the opposite side to that of Hallam and Galton, in assuming that faculty is nearly equal in all, given only opportunity.]

And first as to Greece. As against the common conception of the Hellenic people as "innately" artistic, it may be well to cite the judgment of an artist who, if not more scientific in his method of reaching his opinion, has on the whole a better right to it in this case than has the average man to his. It is a man of genius who writes[319]: "A favourite faith, dear to those who teach, is that certain periods were especially artistic, and that nations, readily named, were notably lovers of art. So we are told that the Greeks were, as a people, worshippers of the beautiful, and that in the fifteenth century art was ingrained in the multitude....Listen! There never was an artistic period. There never was an Art-loving nation." This, which was sometime a paradox, is when interpreted one of the primary truths of sociology.

Our theorist goes on to describe the doings of the first artist, and the slow contagion of his example among men similarly gifted, till the artistic species had filled the land with beautiful things, which were uncritically used by the non-artistic; "and the Amateur was unknown—and the Dilettante undreamed of." Such is the artist's fairy tale of explanation. The probable fact is that the "first artists" in historic Greece were moved to imitative construction by samples of the work of foreigners. If, on the other hand, we decide that the "race" had evolved relatively high artistic capacities before it reached its Greek or Asian home,[320] it will still hold good that the early Ægean evolution owed much to ancient Oriental and Egyptian example. The Greeks as we know them visibly passed from primitive to high art in all things. Having first had fetish Gods of unshapen stone, they made Gods in crudely human shape, at first probably of wood, later of stone. So with vases, goblets, tables, furniture, and ware of all sorts, all gradually developing in felicity of form up to a certain point, whereafter art worsened. What we require to know is the why of both processes.

Pace the artist, it is clear that artistic objects were multiplied mainly because they were in steady economic demand. The shaping impulse is doubtless special, and in its highest grades rare; but there must also have been special conditions to develop it in one country in the special degree. That is to say, the faculty for shaping, for design, was oftener appealed to in Greece than elsewhere, and was allowed more freedom in the response, thus reaching new excellence. The early Greeks can have had no very delicate taste, satisfied as they were with statues as primitive as the conventional Assyrian types they copied.

Prof. Burrows, in his valuable work on The Discoveries in Crete (1907), somewhat confuses one of his problems by assuming that, on a given chronological view, the creators of the early Ægean civilisation were "the most progressive and artistic part of the race" (p. 193). No such assumption can be valid on any chronology. Every "part" of a race, broadly speaking, has the same total potentialities. The determinants are the special evocative conditions, which may be either culture contacts or economic fostering. A rational view of the growth of Greek art is put by Dr. Mahaffy, despite his endorsement of Mr. Freeman's extravagant estimate of Athenian intelligence:—"However national and diffused it [art] became, this was due to careful study, and training, and legislation, and not to a sort of natural compulsion.... As natural beauty was always the exception among Greek men, so artistic talent was also rare and special" (Social Life in Greece, 3rd ed. p. 430). All the remains, as well as every principle of sociological science, go to support this view of the case. When Reber asserts (Hist. of Ancient Art, Eng. tr. 1883, p. 264) that "the very first carvings of Greece had a power of development which was wanting in all the other nations of that period," he is setting up an occult principle and obscuring the problem. The other nations of that period were not in progressive stages; but some of them had progressed in art in their time. And many of the "very first" Greek works—that is, of the "historic" period, as distinguished from the "Minoan"—are enormously inferior to some very ancient Egyptian work.

The development of taste was itself the outcome of a thousand steps of comparison and specialisation, art growing "artistic" as children grow in reasonableness and in nervous co-ordination. And the special conditions of historic Greece were roughly these:—

(1) The great primary stimulus to Greek art, science, and thought, through the contact of the early settlers in Asia Minor with the remains of the older Semitic civilisation,[321] and the further stimuli from Egypt.

(2) Multitude of autonomous communities, of which the members had intercourse as kindred yet critical strangers, emulous of each other, but mixing their stocks, and so developing the potentialities of the species.

(3) Multitude of religious cults, each having its local temples, its local statues, and its local ritual practices.

(4) The concourse in Athens, and some other cities, of alert and capable men from all parts of the Greek-speaking world,[322] and of men of other speech who came thither to learn.

(5) The special growth of civic and peaceful population in Attica by the free incorporation of the smaller towns in the franchise of Athens. Athens had thus the largest number of free citizens of all the Greek cities to start with,[323] and the maximum of domestic peace.

(6) The maintenance of an ideal of cultured life as the outcome of these conditions, which were not speedily overridden either by (a) systematic militarism, or (b) industrialism, or (c) by great accumulation of wealth.

(7) The special public expenditure of the State, particularly in the age of Pericles, on art, architecture, and the drama, and in stipends to the poorer of the free citizens.

Thus the culture history of Greece, like the political, connects vitally from the first with the physical conditions. The disrupted character of the mainland; the diffusion of the people through the Ægean Isles; the spreading of colonies on east and west, set up a multitude of separate City-States, no one of which could decisively or long dominate the rest. These democratic and equal communities reacted on each other, especially those so placed as to be seafaring. Their separateness developed a multitudinous mythology; even the Gods generally recognised being worshipped with endless local particularities, while most districts had their special deities. For each and all of these were required temples, altars, statues, sacred vessels, which would be paid for by the public[324] or the temple revenues, or by rich devotees; and the countless myths, multiplied on all hands because of the absence of anything like a general priestly organisation, were an endless appeal to the imitative arts. Nature, too, had freely supplied the ideal medium for sculpture and for the finest architecture—pure marble. And as the political dividedness of Hellenedom prevented even an approach to organisation among the scattered and independent priests, so the priesthood had no power and no thought of imposing artistic limitations on the shapers of the art objects given to their temples. In addition to all this, the local patriotism of the countless communities was constantly expressed in statues to their own heroes, statesmen, and athletes. And in such a world of sculpture, formative art must needs flourish wherever it could ornament life.

We have only to compare the conditions in Judea, Persia, Egypt, and early Rome to see the enormous differentiation herein implied. In Mazdean Persia and Yahwistic Judea there was a tabu on all divine images, and by consequence on all sculpture that could lend itself to idolatry.[325] (This tabu, like the monotheistic idea, was itself the outcome of political and social causation, which is in large part traceable and readily intelligible.) In Italy, in the early historic period, outside of Etruria, there had been no process of culture-contact sufficient to develop any of the arts in a high degree; and the relation of the Romans to the other Italian communities in terms of situation and institutions[326] was fatally one of progressive conquest. Their specialisation was thus military or predaceous; and the formal acceptance of the deities of the conquered communities could not prevent the partial uniformation of worship. Thus Rome had nearly everything to learn from Greece in art as in literature. In Egypt, again, where sculpture had at more than one time, in more than one locality, reached an astonishing excellence,[327] the easily maintained political centralisation[328] and the commercial isolation made fatally for uniformity of ideal; and the secure dominion of the organised priesthood, cultured only sacerdotally, always strove to impose one stolid conventional form on all sacred and ritual sculpture,[329] which was copied in the secular, in order that kings should as much as possible resemble Gods. Where the bulk of Greece was "servile to all the skyey influences," physically as well as mentally, open on all sides to all cultures, all pressures, all stimuli, Egypt and Judea and Persia were relatively iron-bound, and early Rome relatively inaccessible.

Finally, as militarism never spread Spartan-wise over pre-Alexandrian Greece, and her natural limitations prevented any such exploitation of labour as took place in Egypt, the prevailing ideal in times of peace, at least in Attica, was that of the cultured man, ?a?????a???, supported by slave labour but not enormously rich, who stimulated art as he was stimulated by it. Assuredly he was in many cases a dilettante, if not an amateur, else had art been in a worse case.

It is to be remembered that in later Greece, from about the time of Apelles, all free children were taught to draw (Pliny, Hist. Nat. xxxv, 36, 15); and long before, the same authority tells us, art was taken up by men of rank. The introduction of painting into the schools at Sicyon took place about 350 B.C., and thence the practice spread all over Hellas. Aristotle, too (Politics, v [viii], 3), commends the teaching of drawing to children, noting that it enables men to judge of the arts and avoid blunders in picture-buying—though he puts this as an inferior and incidental gain. Thus the educated Greeks were in a fairly good sense all dilettanti and amateurs. On the whole subject see K.J. Freeman, Schools of Hellas, 1908, pp. 114-17.

§ 2

In literature Greek development is as clearly consequent as in art. The Homeric poems are the outcome of a social state in which a class of bards could find a living by chanting heroic tales to aristocratic households. Lyric genius is indeed something specially incalculable; and it is startling to realise that about the time of the rude rule of Peisistratos at Athens, Sappho in Lesbos was not merely producing the perfect lyrics which to this day men reckon unmatched, but was the centre of a kind of school of song. But Lesbos was really the home of an ancient culture—"the earliest of all the Æolic settlements, anterior even to KymÊ"[330]—and Sappho followed closely upon the lyrists Pittakos and Alkaios. So that here too there is intelligible causation in environment as well as genius. In other directions it is patent. The drama, tragic and comic alike, was unquestionably the outcome of the public worship of the Gods, first provided for by the community, later often exacted by it from rich aspirants to political power. Greek drama is a clear evolution, on the tragic side, from the primitive ritual of Dionysos, Beer-God or Wine-God; individual genius and communal fostering combining to develop a primitive rite into a literary florescence.[331] For all such developments special genius is as a matter of course required, but potential genius occurs in all communities in given forms at a given culture stage; and what happened in Athens was that the special genius for drama was specially appealed to, evoked, and maintained. Æschylus in Egypt and Aristophanes in Persia must have died with all their drama in them. Further, as Grote has so luminously shown,[332] the juridical life of Athens, with its perpetual play of special pleading in the dikasteries, was signally propitious to the spirit of drama. The constant clashing and contrast of ethical points of view, the daily play of eristic thought, was in itself a real drama which educated both dramatists and audience, and which inevitably affected the handling of moral problems on the stage. Athens may thus be said to have cultivated discussion as Sparta cultivated "Laconism"; and both philosophy and drama in Greece are steeped in it. Myths thus came to be handled on the stage with a breadth of reflection which was nowhere else possible.

Historiography, science, and philosophy, again, were similarly fostered by other special conditions. Abstract and physical science began for Greece in the comparison and friction of ideas among leisured men, themselves often travelled, living in inquisitive communities often visited by strangers. What Egypt and Syria and Phoenicia had to give in medical lore, in geometry, and in astronomy, was assimilated and built upon, in an atmosphere of free thought and free discussion, whence came all manner of abstract philosophy, analytical and ethical. Plato and Aristotle are the peaks of immense accumulations of more primitive thought beginning on the soil laid by Semitic culture in Asia Minor; Socrates was stimulated and drawn out by the Athenian life on which he didactically reacted; Hippocrates garnered the experience of many medical priests. History was cultivated under similar conditions of manifold intercourse and intelligent inquisitiveness. Herodotus put down the outcome of much questioning during many travels, and he had an appreciative public with similar tastes.[333] The manifold life of Hellas and her neighbours, Egypt, Persia, Syria, was an endless ground for inquiry and anecdote. The art of writing, acquired long before from Phoenicia, was thus put to unparalleled uses; and at length the theme of the Peloponnesian war, in which all the political passions of Hellas were embroiled for a generation, found in Thucydides a historian produced by and representative of all the critical judgment of the critical Athenian age. Plutarch, in a later period, condenses a library of lesser writers.

Thus in respect of every characteristic and every special attainment of Greek life we can trace external causation, from the geographical conditions upwards, without being once tempted to resort to the verbalist explanation of "race qualities" or "national genius." If Hellas developed otherwise than Phoenicia from any given date onwards, the causes lay either in the environment or in the set previously given to Phoenician life by its special antecedents, which in turn were determined by environment. To suppose that "the Greeks" started primordially with a unique connatural bent to a relatively "ideal" method of life, preferring culture to riches and art to luxury, is to entail the further assumption of a separate biological evolution from the pre-human stage. To put the problem clearly, let us say that if we suppose the ancestors of the Greeks three millenniums before Homer to have been planted in Australia, with none of the domesticable animals which have played so decisive a part in the development of human societies, there is no good reason to think that the "race" would have risen to any higher levels than had been reached by the Australian aborigines at the time of their discovery by Europeans. One of the most remarkable things about those aborigines is their disproportionately high cranial capacity, which seems compatible with a mental life that their natural environment has always precluded. Many plain traces of gross primeval savagery remain in Greek literature and religion; and to credit all Greek progress to a unique racial faculty is to turn the back upon all the accumulating evidence which goes to show that from the first entrance of the Greeks into Greece they blended with and assimilated the culture of the races whom they found there.[334] The futility of the whole racial thesis becomes evident, finally, the moment we reflect how unequal Greek culture was; how restricted in Hellas, how special to Athens was it on the intellectual side when once Athens had reached her stature; how blank of thought and science was all Hellenic life before the contact of Semitic survivals in Ionia; how backward were many sections of the pagan Hellenic stock to the last; and how backward they have been since the political overturn in antiquity.

Should the general line of causation here set forth be challenged, it will suffice, by way of test, to turn to the special case of Sparta. If it were "Greek character" that brought forth Greek art, letters, and science, they ought to have flourished in Greek Sparta as elsewhere. It is, however, the notorious historic fact that during all the centuries of her existence, after the pre-Lycurgean period, Sparta contributed to the general deed of man virtually nothing, either in art or letters, in science or philosophy.

In the story of Hellas, Sparta stands almost alone among the peoples as yielding no foothold to the life of the mind, bare of nearly all memory of beauty,[335] indigent in all that belongs to the spirit, morally sterile as steel. Yet "the Dorians of Laconia are perhaps the only people in Greece who can be said to have preserved in any measure the purity of their Greek blood."[336] Before such a phenomenon the dogma of race-character instantly collapses, whereas in terms of the reaction of conditions the explanation is entirely adequate. As thus:—

1. Sparta was by situation one of the most secluded of the Greek States. In the words of Euripides, it was "hollow, surrounded by mountains, rugged, and difficult of access to an enemy."[337] Compared in particular with Athens, it was not only landward and mountain-walled, but out of the way of all traffic.[338]

2. From the first the Spartans were balanced in a peculiar degree by the strength of the Achaians, who were in the Peloponnesus before them, the hostilities between the invaders and the older inhabitants lasting longer in the valley of the Eurotas than anywhere else.[339] The Spartan militarism was thus a special product of circumstances, not a result of Doric "character," since other Dorian communities did not develop it.

3. Being thus so little open to commercial influence, and so committed to a life of militarism, Sparta was susceptible of a rigidity of military constitution that was impossible elsewhere in the Hellenic world, save to some extent in the similarly aristocratic and undeveloped communities of Thessaly and Crete, each similarly noted for unintellectuality. Whatever be the political origins of these societies, it is clear that that of Sparta could not have been built up or maintained save under conditions of comparative isolation.

4. As regards Sparta, the specialisation of all life on the military side developed a spirit of peculiar separateness and arrogance,[340] which clinched the geographical influence. Where Greeks of all States were admitted to the Eleusinian festivals, Sparta kept hers for her own people.[341] This would limit her literary mythology, and by consequence her art.

5. Not only does military specialism preclude, so far as it goes, more intellectual forms of activity: it develops in the highest degree the conservative spirit[342] when thoroughly rooted in law and custom. Nor is it any more favourable to moral feeling in general.[343]

As offset to all this it may be urged that the middle unenfranchised class (the Perioikoi) in Sparta, the Penestai in Thessaly, and the ordinary citizens in Crete, were in some ways superior types to part of the similar classes of Attica; while the slaves, as having some military life, were, despite the flavour of the name "Helot," above the average.[344] But even if that were so, it would not affect the problem as to culture development, and its solution in terms of the primary and secondary conditions of life for the given communities.

§ 3

Such being, in brief, the process of the building up of culture for Greece, it remains to note the causes of the process of retrogression, which also connects broadly with the course of politics. Indeed, the mere expansion of Hellenistic life set up by the empire-making of Alexander might alone account for a complete change in the conditions and phases of Greek civilisation. In the new Hellenistic world wealth and power were to be won with ease and with amenity[345] where of old there was only an alien barbarism, or at least a society which to the cultured Greek was barbaric. When such cities as Alexandria and Antioch beckoned the Greek scholar of small means, impoverished Athens could hardly retain him. Her extorted revenue in her most powerful period,[346] as we saw, was the source of her highest flight of artistic splendour; and even after the Peloponnesian War, with greatly lessened power, Athens was the most desirable dwelling-place in Hellas. After Alexander, all this was insensibly changed: Athens, though for a time filled with Greeks enriched by the plunder of Persia, must needs gradually dwindle to the point at which the slight natural advantages of her soil, industry, and situation would maintain her; and the life of ideas, such as it finally was, passed inevitably to Alexandria, where it was systematically encouraged and protected, in the fashion in which well-meaning autocrats do such things. But while these new developments were not inconsiderable, and included some rare felicities, they were on the whole fatally inferior to the old, and this for reasons which would equally affect what intellectual life was left in Greece proper.

The forces of hindrance were political and psychological;[347] and they operated still more powerfully under the Romans than under the successors of Alexander. The dominance of the Greeks over the other races in the eastern provinces did not make them more than a class of privileged tools of Rome; and they deteriorated none the less.[348] When for the stimulating though stormy life of factious self-government there was substituted the iron hand of a conqueror, governing by military force, there was need of a new and intelligent discipline if the mental atmosphere were not to worsen. All civilisation, in so far as it proceeds from and involves a "leisured class," sets up a perpetual risk of new morbid phases. Men must have some normal occupation if their life is to be sound; and where that occupation is not handicraft it can be kept sound and educative only by the perpetual free effort of the intelligence towards new truth, new conception, and new presentment.[349] Nor can this effort conceivably take place on any wide scale, and with any continuity, save in a community kept more or less generally alert by the agitation of vital issues. For a generation or two after Alexander, it is true, there is no arrest in the production of good philosophic minds among the Greeks; indeed, the sudden forcing back of all the best remaining minds on philosophy, as the one mental employment left to self-respecting men of leisure,[350] raised the standards of the study, and led to the ethical systems of Epicurus and Zeno, certainly fit in their way to stand beside those of Plato and Aristotle. So, too, the thrusting back of the drama (which in the hands of Aristophanes had meddled audaciously with every public question) on the study of private life, developed in the highest degree the domestic and psychological bent of the later comedy,[351] very much as the autocracy has developed the novel in contemporary Russia. But the schools of Epicurus and Zeno, both of which outlasted in moral credit and in moral efficacy that of Plato,[352] and the new comedy of Menander, alike represent the as yet unexhausted storage of the mental energy generated by the old political life; and the development is not prolonged in either case. Evidently something vital was lost: only a renewal of the freer life could make possible a continuous advance in intellectual power.

On this it is important to insist, as there are plausible grounds for contrary inferences, which are often drawn. All supposed exceptions to the law, however, will be found on analysis to be apparent only. A tyranny may indeed give economic encouragement to art and culture, and a republic may fail to do so; but the work of the tyranny is inevitably undone or kept within a fixed limit by its own character; while, if the free community be but fairly well guided, its potentialities are unlimited. This is the solution of much modern dispute between the schools of laissez-faire and protection. A Velasquez, who might otherwise have been condemned to seek his market with coarser wares, may develop to perfection at the court of an autocrat of fine taste; but even he partly depends for his progress on intelligent communion, which the autocrat in this case chances to yield him. And from Velasquez onward there is no progress. So, in autocratic Assyria, sculpture reaches a certain point and becomes for ever conventionalised. In Egypt it conforms more or less exactly to the general stereotyping of life. We may grant, with some emphatic qualifications, that in some cases "with the tyrant began the building of large temples, ... the patronage of clever handicrafts, the promoting of all the arts,"[353] and that he may have patronised men of letters; but as regards the temples it is certain that in Hellas he was not the chief temple-builder; and it is also quite certain that the tyrant never evolved a single generation of important writers, thinkers, and artists, any more than of intelligent, self-respecting, and self-governing citizens. The latter constituted, in fact, the necessary nutritive soil for the former in the communities of antiquity.[354] It has been said[355] that "at the end of the third century of Rome, when its inhabitants had hardly escaped from the hands of Porsena, Syracuse contained more men of high genius than any other city in the world. These were collected at the court of the first Hiero, during his short reign of ten years, and among them were the greatest poets of the age: Pindar ... Simonides ... Æschylus." This is true; but Hiero had not been the means of evolving the powers of any one of the three. Pindar is manifestly the product of the diversified life of the free States; Simonides, though much patronised by aristocrats, began to "find himself" as a chorus teacher at Carthea in Ceos, won countless prizes at the Greek festivals,[356] and spent only the latter part of his life with Hiero; Æschylus is the product of the Attic theatre. Not the tyranny, but democracy, had been the alma mater. It is true that Athens after Æschylus played the "despot city" in finance, but she so far preserved at home the democratic atmosphere, in which, according to Demosthenes, slaves had more freedom of speech than citizens in many other places.[357] Lesbos had her oscillations between oligarchy and despotism; but the group in which Sappho stood was that of Pittakos and Alkaios—the elected ten-years dictator who finally laid down his dictatorship, and the fierce singer who assailed him. Not in the "Roman peace" of a fixed despotism did Lesbian song reach its apex.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A cultured modern Greek apologist of the Byzantine Empire[364] has anxiously sought to combine with the thesis that Christianity is a civilising force, the unavoidable admission that Byzantine civilisation was intellectually stationary for a thousand years. It is right that every possible plea for that ill-famed civilisation should be carefully attended to, even when it takes the form of reminding us[365] that after all the sixth century produced Procopius and Agathias; the seventh, George of Pisidia; the eighth, John of Damascus; the ninth, Photius; and so on—one man or two per century who contrived to be remembered without being annalised as emperor. Of rather more importance is the item that Christian Constantinople at one point, following Egyptian and Roman precedent, improved on the practice of heathen Athens, in that the women of the imperial court and of the upper classes seem to have received a fair share of what culture there was.[366] It is further a matter of bare justice to note that Byzantium had all along to maintain itself against the assaults of Persia, of Islam, of barbarism, heathen and Christian, and of Latin Christendom. But there must all the same be made the grieving admission that "We certainly do not find in the Byzantine authors the same depth and originality which mark the ancient writers whom they copied";[367] and that this imitation "was unhappily the essential weakness of Byzantine literature." That is to say, the intelligence of the Christian Empire, like that of the Greece of the post-Macedonian and the Roman domination, looked back to pagan Athens as to an irrecoverable greatness. In that case, if we are to assume comparative equality of culture between the sexes, there is no escape from the conclusion that Christianity was in itself a force of fixation or paralysis, the subsequent counteraction of which in Europe was a result of many causes—of any cause but the creed and lore itself. The creed, in fact, was a specific cause of isolation, and so of intellectual impoverishment. As was well said by Gibbon, the mental paralysis of the Byzantines was "the natural effect of their solitary and insulated state."[368] The one civilisation from which Byzantium might latterly have profited—the Saracen—was made tabu by creed, which was further the efficient cause of the sunderance of Byzantine and Italian life.

Had the external conditions, indeed, permitted of the maintenance of the earlier manifold Empire of Constantine, the mere conditions of social diversity which prepared the countless strifes of speculative sects in Egypt and Syria might have led to intellectual progress, were it only by arousing in the more rational minds that aversion to the madness of all the wrangling sects which we detect in Procopius.[369] The disputes of the Christians were indeed the most absurd that had ever been carried on in the Greek tongue; and in comparing the competing insanities it is hard to imagine how from among themselves they could have evoked any form of rational thought. But as in Northern Europe in a later age, so in the Byzantine Empire, the insensate strifes of fanatics, after exhausting and decimating themselves, might have bred in a saner minority a conviction of the futility of all wars of creed—this if only external peace could have been secured. But the attacks, first of Persia and later of Islam, both determined religious enemies, with whom, on Christian principles, there could be no fruitful intercourse, shore away all the outlying and diversified provinces, leaving to Byzantium finally only its central and most homogeneous section, where the power of the organised Church, backed by a monarchy bent on spiritual as on political unity, could easily withstand the slight forces of intellectual variation that remained. The very misfortunes of the Empire, connected as they were with so many destructive earthquakes and pestilences,[370] would, on the familiar principle of Buckle, deepen the hold of superstition on the general mind. On the other hand, the final Christianising of the Bulgarian and Slav populations on the north, while safeguarding the Empire there, yielded it only the inferior and retarding culture-contact of a new pietistic barbarism, more childish in thought than itself. We can see the fatality of the case when we contemplate the great effort of Leo the Isaurian in the eighth century to put down image-worship by the arm of the executive. No such effort could avail against the mindless superstition of the ignorant mass, rich[371] and poor, on whom the clerical majority relied for their existence. A Moslem conqueror, with outside force to fall back upon, might have succeeded; but Leo was only shaking the bough on which he sat.[372] It seems clear that the Iconoclastic emperors were politically as well as intellectually progressive in comparison with the orthodox party. The worshipped images which they sought to suppress were artistically worthless, and they aimed at an elevation of the people. "If the Iconoclastic reformers had had their way, perhaps the history of the agricultural classes would have been widely different. The abolition of the principle which the first Christian emperors had adopted, of nailing men to the clod, was part of the programme which was carried out by the Iconoclastic emperors and reversed by their successors."[373] Thus did it come about that Christian Byzantium found the rigid intellectual equilibrium in which it outlasted, at a lower level of mental life, the Caliphate which sought its destruction, but only to fall finally before the more vigorous barbarism of the Turks.

[319] Whistler, The Gentle Art of Making Enemies, 1890, pp. 138, 139.