The Law of Civilization and Decay/Chapter XII

by Brooks Adams

Apparently nature needs to consume about three generations in perfecting the selection of a new type. Accordingly the money-lenders did not become absolute immediately after Waterloo, and a period of some sixty years followed during which the adventurers kept up a struggle, wherein they were aided by the discoveries of gold near the middle of the century. Seemingly they met their final defeat at Sedan, for the decay of the soldier, which had been in progress since the fall of Napoleon, reached a point, after the collapse of the Second Empire, even lower than after the consolidation of Rome.

From Alaric to Napoleon the soldier had served as an independent vent to energy. Often, even when opposed to capital, he had been victorious, and the highest function of a leader of men had been, in theory at least, military command. The ideal statesman had been one who, like Cromwell, Frederic the Great, Henry IV., William III., and Washington, could lead his followers in battle, and, on the Continent, down to 1789, the aristocracy had professedly been a military caste. In France and Germany the old tradition lasted to within a generation. Only after 1871 came the new era, an era marked by many social changes. For the first time in their history the ruler of the French people passed admittedly from the martial to the monied type, and everywhere the same phenomenon appeared; the whole administration of society fell into the hands of the economic man. Nothing so radical happened at Rome, or even at Byzantium, for there the pressure of the barbarians necessitated the retention of the commander at the head of the State; in Europe he lost this importance. Since the capitulation of Paris the soldier has tended to sink more and more into a paid official, receiving his orders from financiers with his salary, without being allowed a voice even in questions involving peace and war. The same fate has overtaken the producing classes; they have failed to maintain themselves, and have become subjects of the possessors of hoarded wealth. Although the conventions of popular government are still preserved, capital is at least as absolute as under the Caesars, and, among capitalists, the money-lenders form an aristocracy. Debtors are in reality powerless, because of the extension of that very system of credit which they invented to satisfy their needs. Although the volume of credit is gigantic, the basis on which it rests is so narrow that it may be manipulated by a handful of men. That basis is gold; in gold debts must be paid; therefore, when gold is withdrawn, the debtor is helpless and becomes the servant of his master. The elasticity of the age of expansion has gone.

The aristocracy which wields this autocratic power is beyond attack, for it is defended by a wage-earning police, by the side of which the legions were a toy; a police so formidable that, for the first time in history, revolt is hopeless and is not attempted. The only question which preoccupies the ruling class is whether it is cheaper to coerce or to bribe. On looking back over long periods of time, the sequence of causes may be followed which have led to this result. First, inventions from the East facilitated trade; then, the perfection of weapons of attack made police possible, and individual bravery unnecessary; on this followed the abasement of the martial and exaltation of the economic type; and finally that intense acceleration of movement by machinery supervened, which, in annihilating space, has destroyed the protection that the costly races long enjoyed against the competition of simpler organisms.

Roman civilization was less complex than modern because of the relative inflexibility of the Latin mind. Unable to quicken his motions by inventions, the ancient Italian failed to discover America or absorb India, and, for the same reason, collapsed without an effort under the insidious attack of Asiatic and African labour. No industrial expansion followed the influx of bullion under Caesar, and therefore, when the value of cereals fell, the evicted farmer either sank into slavery or begged for bread from the magnates of the Senate. In modern times an industrial period has intervened; the evicted long found employment in the factories of the towns, and it has only been as contraction has reduced the demand for merchandise, by diminishing the purchasing power of the agricultural population, that those stagnant pools of the unemployed have collected, which exactly correspond to the proletariat. But, as each special faculty which, for a time, enables its possessor to excel in competition, seems to bear with it the seeds of its own decay, so the inventive, which once enabled the Western races to undersell the Eastern in their homes seems destined to reduce all to a common economic level, as Rome sank to the level of Egypt.

For nearly a century the inventions of Hargreaves, of Crompton, of Cartwright, and of Watt, enabled Lancashire to supply Bombay and Calcutta with fabrics, as, in the seventeenth century, Surat and Calicut had supplied London, and this superiority appeared assured until Orientals should acquire the momentum necessary for machinery. One effect in Europe was the rapid increase of a population congregated in towns, and bearing a marked resemblance to the "humiliores" of Rome in their disinclination for war. True to their instincts, the adventurers ever quickened their movements, ever extended the sphere of their enterprises, and, finally, just as the Second Empire verged upon its fall, they opened the Suez Canal in 1869. The consequences of this great engineering triumph have probably equalled in gravity the establishment of the gold standard, but the two phenomena had this marked difference. The producers saw their danger and resisted to the utmost the contraction of the currency, whereas the Canal was a case of suicide. Thenceforward grain, raised by the most enduring labour of the world, could be thrown without limit on the European market, and, agricultural competition once established, industrial could only be a question of time. The Canal made the importation and the reparation of machinery cheap throughout Asia.

From a period, perhaps, as remote as Clive's victories, the Hindoos had experienced a certain impulsion from contact with the British, but it was not until the building of railroads, under Lord Dalhousie, that the severer phases of competition opened among the inhabitants of India. Lord Dalhousie became Governor General in 1848, and, that the acceleration of the next nine years culminated in a catastrophe seems certain, for nothing can be plainer than that the Mutiny of 1857 was an outbreak of a martial Mohammedan population crushed under an intolerable pressure.

The locality of the disturbance alone is enough to demonstrate the accuracy of this inference. Dalhousie's last act was the annexation of the Kingdom of Oude. Of this province Lucknow is the capital, and while Lucknow was one focus of the insurrection, Delhi, the capital of the ancient Mogul empire, was the other. Once subdued by the British, and reduced to an economic equality with subtler races, the old Moslem gentry rapidly disappeared. Since 1857 these families, which had maintained themselves for six or seven hundred years, have rapidly fallen into ruin, and their estates have been bought by their creditors, the rising usurer class.

Under immemorial native custom the money-lender, generally speaking, had no forcible means of collecting debt; he relied on public opinion and conducted himself accordingly. On the other hand, unrestricted alienation of land was not usually incidental to proprietorship, and thus the tenant for life, as he would be called in English law, could only pledge his crops; he could not sell the succession. With centralization came full ownership, and with it summary process for debt. Following her immutable law, nature, having changed the form of competition, proceeded to select a quality of mind to correspond with the new conditions of life. She demanded improved vents for her energy. Forthwith, under the pressure of accelerated movement and advancing consolidation, the trammels of caste relaxed, the population fused, and a new aristocracy arose, composed of the strongest economic types culled from all the peoples who inhabit the plains south of the Himalayas. This aristocracy is a strange mixture of blood, an amalgam of the most diverse elements, of Parsees, Brahmins, Bunniahs of different races, with gifted individuals from other castes, like the leather-workers or the goldsmiths; but among them all the most ruthless, the corruptest, the most hated, and the most successful, are the Marwaris, who have been thus described by a British commission:—

"The average Marwari money-lender is not a pleasant character to analyze; his most prominent characteristics are love of gain and indifference to the opinions or feelings of his neighbour. He has considerable self-reliance and immense industry, but the nature of his business and the method by which it is pursued would tend to degrade and harden even a humane nature, which his is not. As a landlord he follows the instincts of the usurer, making the hardest terms possible with his tenant, who is also his debtor and often little better than his slave." (1)

The effect of the selection of such a type as a dominant class must be destructive to a martial population, whether it be French or English, Mohammedan or Hindoo. The social revolution which swept over Oude after its annexation has been referred to, but the fate which overtook the famous Mahratta nation is even more tragic and impressive.

When, toward the close of the last century, the British were pushing their conquests inland, the most formidable enemy they met were the Mahrattas; and, perhaps, the most renowned battle, next to Plassey, ever fought by Europeans against natives, was Assaye, where Wellesley defeated Sindhia in 1803. These Mahrattas were tribes of Hindoo farmers, who inhabited the mountainous country about one hundred miles to the east of Bombay; a territory of which Poona has always been considered the capital. Mounted on their hill ponies, these bold and hardy spearmen were always ready to follow their chiefs to battle, and, in the eighteenth century, became the terror not only of the Mohammedans of the Deccan, but of the Mogul himself, at Delhi. Even the English respected and feared them, and only subdued them in 1818 after desperate fighting. Then they were disarmed and subjected to the combined action of peace and English law.

Soon after this conquest an inflow of Marwaris began. As early as 1854, in Dalhousie's administration, Captain Anderson stated that "two-thirds of the ryots [were] in the hands of the Marwaris, and that the average debt of each individual [was] not less than Rs. 100."(2) Competition continued unchecked as time flowed on, and in 1875 disturbances broke out in certain villages near Poona, serious enough to cause the government to appoint a commission of inquiry. After full investigation this commission reported that up to 1872 or 1873 the peasantry had seemed relatively prosperous, but that afterward "prices fell quickly," and that this fall had been accompanied by a rise in taxation of somewhat more than fifty per cent.(3) Under this double pressure the peasantry had rapidly sunk into insolvency, and the whole real estate of the Deccan was passing into the hands of usurers, while the farmers had become serfs toiling on the soil they had once owned, to satisfy an inextinguishable debt. Precisely like the colonus, the delinquent was not evicted, but remained, "recorded as occupier of his holding, and responsible for the payment of revenue assessed on it, but virtually reduced by pressure of debt to a tenant-at-will, . . . sweated by his Marwari creditor. It is in that creditor's power to eject him any day; . . . and if allowed to hold on, it is only on condition of paying over to his creditor all the produce of his land not absolutely necessary for next year's seed grain or for the support of life. He is indebted on an average to the extent of sixteen or seventeen years' payment of the government revenue. He has nothing to hope for, but lives in daily fear of the final catastrophe." (4)

Since Assaye three generations have passed away, and the Mahratta spearmen have vanished. The Western Ghats are now tilled by a sluggish race whom the British officers deem unworthy of their cavalry, and in the place of those renowned and daring chiefs Sivaji and Holkar, stands the Marwari under whom no ryots can prosper save those "who having received some education are able to combat the sowkars with their own weapons, fraud, chicanery, and even forgery." (5) Apparently the same destiny awaits every people which requires more than the minimum of nutriment, or which is not gifted with the economic mind, (6) for the "money-lenders sweep off the crops as soon as harvested, only leaving with the ryots barely sufficient to eke out a subsistence till the following year." (7) That allowance, in the Deccan, is estimated at about a dollar a month in silver—too little to sustain any but the most tenacious organisms, even among Asiatics. Consequently, though the population of India is increasing rapidly, the increase lies chiefly among the aboriginal tribes who form the lowest castes, or in other words among the non-martial or servile races. Men who, though enslaved by the Aryan invaders of prehistoric times, and who have always been subjected to extremest hardship, have been gifted, like the Egyptian fellah, with an endurance which has enabled them to survive.(8)

Herein, likewise, may be plainly perceived the destructive effects of the policy of the Western usurers upon the population subject to them. By enhancing the value of their own money they have nearly doubled the intensity of this Asiatic competition. In India, silver has substantially retained its purchasing power, therefore the ryot now, as in the days of Captain Cunningham, can exist on two rupees a month, but he cannot live on less. Accordingly, the severity of his competition with Europeans must be measured by the value of his wages when reckoned on the European scale. In 1854 the ryot's two rupees were worth one dollar; now, through the appreciation of gold, they are worth about sixty cents, and the effect is the same as though the tenacity of life of the Asiatic had been increased four-sixths. Everything the Indian or Chinese peasant produces with his hands, whether on the farm or in the factory, has been reduced in price, in relation to Western peoples, in the ratio of six to ten.

The cheapest form of labour is thus being bred on a gigantic scale, and this labour is being accelerated by an industrial development which is stimulated by eviction of the farmers, as the "industrial revolution" was stimulated in England one hundred and thirty years ago. For many years the cotton mills of Bombay have undersold Lancashire in the coarser fabrics, and when, by means of a canal to the Pacific, American cotton can be imported cheaply, they will spin the finer also. Moreover, Hindostan is full of iron and coal which has never been utilized because of the immense difference in the rapidity of European and Asiatic labour, but the steadily falling range of Western prices must force the cheapest product on the market, and when the Indian railways have been assumed by the government, a new era will have opened. The same causes are affecting China and Japan, and, under precisely similar conditions, the centre of exchanges passed from the Tiber to the Bosphorus sixteen hundred years ago.

Such uniformity of development in the most distant times, and among the most divergent peoples, points to a progressive law of civilization, each stage of progress being marked by certain intellectual, moral, and physical changes. As the attack in war masters the defence, and the combative instinct becomes unnecessary to the preservation of life, the economic supersedes the martial mind, being superior in breadwinning. As velocity augments and competition intensifies, nature begins to sift the economic minds themselves, culling a favoured aristocracy of the craftiest and the subtlest types; choosing, for example, the Armenian in Byzantium, the Marwari in India, and the Jew in London. Conversely, as the costly nervous system of the soldier becomes an encumbrance, organisms, which can exist on less, successively supplant each other, until the limit of endurance is reached. Thus the Slavs exterminated the Greeks in Thrace and Macedonia, the Mahrattas and the Moslems dwindle before the low caste tribes of India, and the instinct of self-preservation has taught white races to resist an influx of Chinese. When nature has finished this double task, civilization has reached its zenith. Humanity can ascend no higher.

In view of this possible extermination of the martial blood in the higher stages of civilization, the attention necessarily becomes concentrated on what is, perhaps, the main point of divergence between ancient and modern society,—the presence and the absence of a supply of barbaric life. All the evidence points to the conclusion that the infusion of vitality which Rome ever drew from territories beyond her borders, was the cause both of her strength and of her longevity. Without such aid she could never have consolidated the world. On the other hand, the lack of this resource has been the weakness of modern nations. One after another they have dreamed of universal conquest, and one after another they have fallen through exhaustion in war.

Spain levied never a pikeman in America, and her colonies were a source of debility in so far as they drained her of her youth. Had Rome been similarly situated, she could hardly have carried the eagles beyond the Bosphorus and the Alps. Perhaps Caesar's army was the best an ancient general ever put in the field, and yet it was filled with barbarians. All his legions were raised north of the Po, and most of them, including the tenth, north of the Alps. (9) When pitted against this force native Italians broke in rout, and one of the most striking pages of Plutarch is the story of the gradual awakening of Pompey to a sense of the impotence of Romans. Pompey himself was a commander of high ability, and, until he split upon the rock of the pure martial blood, battle had been with him synonymous with victory.

At first he felt such confidence, he laughed at the suggestion of an attack within the Rubicon. With the conviction of the conqueror he said: "Whenever I stamp with my foot in any part of Italy, there will rise up forces enough in an instant, both horse and foot." (10) A very short experience of the men of the north sufficed to sober him; for, though Caesar's command amounted to only twenty-two thousand, and his to twice as many, he not only declined an action, but took what care he could to keep the threats of the Gauls from his men, "who were out of heart and despondent, through terror at the fierceness and hardiness of their enemies, whom they looked upon as a sort of wild beasts." (11) Pharsalia stunned him. When the tenth legion routed his left wing, he went to his tent and sat speechless until the invasion of the camp; then he walked away "softly afoot, taken up altogether with thoughts such as probably might possess a man that for the space of thirty-four years together had been accustomed to conquest and victory, and was then at last, in his old age, learning for the first time what defeat and flight were." (12)

Thus, in reality, barbarians consolidated the ancient world, and the force which created the Empire, afterward upheld it. With each succeeding century the drafts of centralized society upon the blood of the country beyond the Danube and the Rhine increased, but the supply proved limitless; and, when the Western provinces disintegrated, a new imaginative race poured over Italy and France, creating a new religion, a new art, a new literature, and new institutions. Among modern nations the Russians alone have developed this power of absorbing kindred conquered peoples; and yet, obviously, Napoleon would have fought his campaigns under very different circumstances, and, perhaps, brought them to a different end, had he, like Cæsar, had an exhaustless supply of the best soldiers, altogether independent of the population of France.

Religious phenomena become explicable when viewed from the same standpoint. Unquestionably scepticism has been to the full as rife in Paris since 1789 as it ever was in Rome, and yet no new religion has been born. Supposing, however, that a vast and highly emotional emigration flowed annually into France, the aspect of life would be completely changed. Christian saints and martyrs were not begotten by the usurers of Constantinople or of Rome, but by barbarian soldiers and Asiatic serfs, and Christianity could hardly have become a State religion had the composition of society, as it existed under Trajan, remained unaltered. Even in the reign of Justinian the aristocracy carped at faith, and Byzantine architecture did not bloom until the invasions of Alaric and Attila.

If, then, although nature never precisely repeats herself, she operates upon the human mind according to immutable laws, it should be possible by comparing a living civilization with a dead, to estimate in some degree the course which has been run. For such an attempt an infinite variety of standards might be suggested, but few, perhaps, are more suitable than the domestic relations which lie at the basis of the reproduction of life.

In a martial and imaginative age, where energy vents itself through fear, and every man must be a soldier, the family generally forms a unit; the women and children being under the control of the father, as they were under the control of the patriarchs in the Bible, or of the paterfamilias in Rome. In such periods the woman is sought after by the man, and even commands a high money value; "And Shechem said unto her father, . . . Ask me never so much dowry and gift, and I will give according as ye shall say unto me: but give me the damsel to wife."(13) The Homeric heroes bought their wives, and, moreover, were very fond of them—an affection the women returned, for in all classical literature there are few more charming legends than that of Penelope. Divorce was unknown to Hector and Agamemnon, Ulysses and Achilles. Marriage, in these simple ages, is usually a rite half sacred, half warlike. When Abraham's servant found Rebekah at the well, he bowed his head, and blessed the Lord God of his master Abraham, which had led him in the right way. A Roman wedding was a solemn religious function accompanied by prayer and sacrifice, and, at the end, the bride was carried to her husband's house, where she was violently torn from her mother's arms.

Aristotle, with his unerring acumen, made this observation: "That all warlike races are prone to the love of women," and also that they tend to "fall under the dominion of their wives." (14) Undoubtedly this is the instinct of the soldier, and, in martial ages, women are idealized. When a foreigner asked the wife of Leonidas, "Why do you Lacedaemonian wives, unlike all others, govern your husbands?" the Spartan answered, "Because we alone are the mothers of men." When at Rome Tiberius killed the male serpent, thereby devoting himself to death to save Cornelia, Plutarch, telling the story, remarked, "that Tiberius seemed to all men to have done nothing unreasonable, in choosing to die for such a woman; who, when King Ptolemy himself proffered her his crown, and would have married her, refused it, and chose rather to live a widow." (15)

In the Middle Ages, that greatest of martial and imaginative epochs, marriage developed into the most solemn of sacraments, and the worship of women became the popular religion. In France, especially, the centre of thought, enthusiasm, and war, from the mighty fane of Paris downward, the churches were dedicated to Mary, and the vow of chivalry bound the knight to fight for God and for his lady.

"It hath bene through all ages ever scene
That with the praise of armes and chevalrie
The prize of beautie still hath ioyned beene." (16)

It might almost be said that the destinies of France have been moulded by men's love for women, and that this influence still prevailed down to the advent of the usurers after the rout of Waterloo. On the other hand, nature bred a type of woman fit to mate with the imaginative man. The devotion of Saint Clara to Saint Francis is one of the most exquisite lyrics of the Church, and for six hundred years Héloïse remained an ideal of the West. Perhaps, indeed, that strange blending of tenderness and enthusiasm, which was peculiar to the mediaeval mind, never found more refined and exalted expression than in the simple hymn which Héloïse is said to have composed and sung at the grave of Abélard:—

"Tecum fata sum perpessa;
Tecum dormiam defessa,
Et in Sion veniam.
Solve crucem,
Duc ad lucem
Degravatam animam."

In primitive ages children are not only a source of power, but of wealth, and therefore the highest merit of the woman is fecundity. "And they blessed Rebekah, and said unto her, . . . be thou the mother of thousands of millions." Also maternity is then a glory, and childlessness a shame; and Rachel said, "Give me children, or else I die." "And she conceived and bare a son; and said, God hath taken away my reproach." That she might live for her boys, Cornelia refused a crown; and when they grew up, she would upbraid them because "the Romans as yet rather called her the daughter of Scipio than the mother of the Gracchi." But Cornelia's father was the conqueror of Hannibal, and her son was an agrarian agitator, whom the monied oligarchy murdered for reviving the Licinian Laws. Apparently, one of the first signs of advancing civilization is the fall in the value of women in men's eyes. Not very long after the siege of Troy, husbands must have ceased paying for their wives; for, at a comparatively early date, they demanded a price for wedding them. Euripides, born in 480 B.C., made Medea complain that women had to buy their husbands for great sums of money. In other words, the custom of the wedding portion had come to prevail.

As the pressure of economic competition intensifies with social consolidation, the family regularly disintegrates, the children rejecting the parental authority at a steadily decreasing age; until, finally, the population fuses into a compact mass, in which all individuals are equal before the law, and all are forced to compete with each other for the means of subsistence. When at length wealth has accumulated sufficiently to find vent through capitalistic methods of farming and manufacture, children lose all value, for then hiring labour is always cheaper than breeding. Thenceforward, among the more extravagant races, the family dwindles, as in ancient Rome or modern France, and marriage, having become a luxury, decreases. Moreover, the economic instinct impels parents to reduce the number of possible inheritors of their property, that its bulk may not shrink.

Upon women the effect of these changed conditions is prodigious. Their whole relation to society is altered. From a religious sacrament marriage is metamorphosed into a civil contract, dissoluble, like other contracts, by mutual consent; and, as the obligations of maternity diminish, the relation of husband and wife resolves itself into a sort of business partnership, tending always to become more ephemeral. Frequent as divorce now is, it was even more so under the Antonines.

On men the action of natural selection is, at least, as drastic. The change wrought in Roman character in about three hundred years has always been one of the problems of history. In the words of Aristotle, the primitive Roman "was prone to the love of women." Strong in his passions, austere in his life, fierce in his jealousy, he set the undisputed possession of the female as his supreme happiness. Virginius slew his daughter to keep her from Appius Claudius, and his comrades in the legions washed out his wrong in the Decemvir's blood; while among the stirring ballads of the fabled time which were sung at the farmer's fireside, none roused such emotion as the tale of the vengeance wreaked on Tarquin for Lucretia's death. Compare this virile race with the aristocracy of the middle Empire. By the second century female purity weighed light against money. Marcus Aurelius is said to have condensed the whole economic moral code in one short sentence. His wife, Faustina, was accused, by scandal, of being the most abandoned woman of her generation, more notorious even than had been Messalina. When the philosopher was urged to repudiate her, he replied, "Then I should have to surrender her portion" (the Empire); and he not only lived with her, but built a temple to her memory. Even if the story be false, it reflects none the less truly the temper of the age.

The minds of noble Romans of the third and fourth centuries, under the same impulsion, worked differently from those of their primitive ancestors; they lacked the martial and the amatory instincts. As a general rule one salient characteristic of the later reigns was a sexual lassitude yielding only to the most potent stimulants. The same phenomena were noticed among Frenchmen at the collapse of the Empire, since when like symptoms have become notorious in London.

Taking history as a whole, women seem never to have more than moderately appealed to the senses of the economic man. The monied magnate seldom ruins himself for love, and chivalry would have been as foreign to a Roman senator under Diocletian, as it would be now to a Lombard Street banker. On the other hand, in proportion as women's influence has declined when measured by their power over men, it has increased when measured by the economic standard. In many ways the female seems to serve as a vent for the energy of capital almost as well as men; in the higher planes of civilization they hold their property in severalty, and, by means of money, wield a power not unlike Faustina's. If unmarried, the economic woman competes with the man on nearly equal terms, and everywhere, and in all ages, the result is not dissimilar. The stronger and more fortunate members of the sex have grown rich and have bought social and political power. Roman politics under Septimius Severus and Caracalla was much in the hands of women, and Julia Massa, who was enormously wealthy, carried through a most famous intrigue by purchasing the throne for Elagabalus.

In Rome, however, there was always a strong admixture of barbaric blood, and, to the last, the barbarians married for love. Justinian was an example. Born of an obscure race of barbarians in the desolate Bulgarian country, he fell uncontrollably in love with Theodora, who had scandalized even the theatres of Constantinople. His mother died of shame; but Justinian persevered, and, while she lived, his devotion to his wife never wavered.

In Rome and in Byzantium such women were the stronger or the more fortunate; their counterparts are easily to be found in any economic age. The fate of the weaker there was slavery; now they are forced by competition into the ranks of the cheapest labour,—a lot, perhaps, hardly preferable.

And yet art, perhaps, even more clearly than religion, love, or war, indicates the pathway of consolidation; for art reflects with the subtlest delicacy those changes in the forms of competition which enfeeble or inflame the imagination. Of Greek art, in its zenith, little need be said; its great qualities have been too fully recognized. It suffices to point out that it was absolutely honest, and that it formed a vehicle of expression as flexible as the language itself. A temple apparently of marble, was of marble; a colonnade apparently supporting a portico, did support it; and, while the ornament formed an integral part of the structure, the people read it as intelligently as they read the poems of Homer. Nothing similar ever flourished in Rome.

Unlike the Greeks, the Romans were never sensitive or imaginative. Properly speaking, they had nothing which they could express through art; they were utilitarian from the outset, and their architecture finally took shape in the most perfect system of materialistic building which, probably, has ever existed. Obviously such a system could only be matured in a capitalistic society, and, accordingly, Roman architecture only reached perfection somewhat late, perhaps, toward the close of the first century.

The Romans, though vulgar and ostentatious, understood business. They knew how to combine economy and even solidity with display. As Viollet-le-Duc has observed, "They were rich, and they wanted to appear so," (17) but they strove to attain their end without waste. Therefore they first ran up a cheap core of rubble, bricks, and mortar, which could be put together by rude slave labour under the direction of an engineer and a few overseers; and their squalid interior they afterward veneered with marble, adding, by way of ornament, tier above tier of Greek columns ranged against the walls. That gaudy exterior had nothing whatever to do with the building itself, and could be stripped off without vital injury. From the Greek standpoint nothing could be falser, more insulting to the intelligence, or, in a word, more plutocratic; but the work was sound and durable, and, to a certain degree, imposing from its mass. This system lasted, substantially unimpaired, even to Constantine or until the final migration of capital to the Bosphorus, the only difference between the monuments of the fourth century and the first being that the former are somewhat coarser, just as the coins of Diocletian are coarser than those of Nero. Yet, although the monied aristocracy remained supreme down to the final disintegration of the West, emigration began very early to modify the base of society, by the injection of a considerable amount of imaginative blood; and, as early as the reign of Claudius, this new store of energy made its presence felt through the outlet of Christianity. The converts were, of course, the antipodes of the ruling class. They were "humiliores," poor people, below the notice of a rich man like Tacitus; "quos, . . . vulgus Christianos appellabat." (18)

These Christians held a position analogous to that of Nihilists now, whom they resembled save in respect to violence. They were socialists living under a monied despotism, and they openly prayed for the end of the world; therefore they were thought "haters of the human race," (19) and they suffered the penalty. Primitive Christianity was incompatible with the existence of Roman society, against which it was a protest, for it "fully accepted the idea that the rich, if he did not surrender his superfluity, kept what belonged to another." (20) By right the Kingdom of Heaven was closed to the wealthy.

Probably very few of these early Christians were Italians; most of them were from the Levant, and that they were intensely emotional is proved by their lust for martyrdom—they voluntarily sought death as a means of glorifying God. One day Arrius Antoninus, proconsul of Asia, having ordered certain Christians arrested, saw all the faithful of the town present themselves before his tribunal, demanding to share the fate of those chosen for martyrdom. He dismissed them in wrath, telling them that if they were so in love with death they might commit suicide; (21) and Renan's account of the persecutions under Nero shows an incredible exaltation. (22)

Almost at once the effect of this emotional temperament became perceptible. The paintings in the catacombs are, perhaps, the oldest example of Christian art, and of these M. Vitet thus spoke many years ago:—

"These decorations, made with the hand raised, in secret, hurriedly, and more for pious reasons than for love of the beautiful, nevertheless reveal to the most rebellious eyes and in spite of strange negligence and incorrectness, I know not what of animation, of youth, of fecundity, and, so to speak, a real transformation of that very art which, in the service of paganism, seemed then, we are all agreed, dying of exhaustion." (23)

As the world disintegrated, and the imagination everywhere acquired power, and with power wealth and the means of expression, an entirely new architecture sprang up in the East, whose growth closely followed upon the barbarian invasions and the progressive failure of the Roman blood. The system of construction was Asiatic modified by Greek influences,(24) and with this new construction came an equally new decoration, a decoration which once more served as a language.

Mosaics of stone had long been used, but mosaics of glass, which give such an incomparable lustre to the dome, were the invention of Levantine Christians, and seem to have come into general use toward the beginning of the fifth century. But the fifth century was the period of the great invasions of Alaric, Attila, and Theoderic, and during this period the population of Italy, Macedonia, and Thrace must have undergone profound changes. In Italy the whole fabric of consolidated society crumbled; south of the Danube it survived, but survived in a modified form, a form on which the recent migrations left an unmistakable imprint. Galla Placidia, the first great patron of the pure Byzantine school, died in 450, after an eventful life largely passed among the barbarians, one of whom she married. She began to embellish Ravenna, and a comparison of these remains with those of France and Italy of the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries, exposes the difference in the forces which moulded these three civilizations.

With all its grace and refinement the characteristic of Ravenna was not religious ecstasy, but rather an absence of fear of the unknown, and a respect for wealth. There is nothing mysterious or terrible about these charming buildings, which are manifestly rather a glorification of the Empire on the Bosphorus, than of the Kingdom of Heaven.

At San Vitale it is Justinian, with an aureole about his head and surrounded by his courtiers, carrying a gift to the shrine; or Theodora, blazing with jewels, and followed by the magnificent ladies of her household. At San Apollinare the long procession of saints are richly clad and bear crowns, while the Virgin herself, seated on a throne and revered as a sovereign, is as far removed from the vulgar as Theodora herself. "Byzantine etiquette no longer permits her to be approached directly; four angels surround her and separate her from humanity."(25) The terrifying was scrupulously avoided. "By a most significant scruple, the artist, in reproducing various episodes of the Passion, avoided the most painful, the Crucifixion." (26)

Saint Sophia offers every indication of having been expressly contrived to provide the large light spaces needful for such functions as those depicted in San Vitale, and the account given by Procopius of its erection sustains this supposition. According to Procopius, Saint Sophia was a hobby of Justinian, who not only selected the architect Anthemius because he was the most ingenious mechanic of his age, but who also supplied the funds and "assisted it by the labour and powers of his mind."(27) The dome, "from the lightness of the building . . . does not appear to rest upon a solid foundation, but to cover the place beneath as though it were suspended from heaven by the fabled golden chain"; and the interior "is singularly full of light and of sunshine; you would declare that the place is not lighted by the sun from without, but that the rays are produced within itself, such an abundance of light is poured into this church."(28) Of the decorations it is impossible to speak with certainty, since it is probable that the mosaics which now exist were of a later period.

Perhaps, however, the most significant phenomenon about the church is its loneliness; nothing like it was built elsewhere, and the reason seems plain. There was but one imperial court which needed so superb a setting, and but one emperor who could pay for it. Herein lies the radical divergence between the East and West; the great tabernacle of Constantinople stood alone because it represented the wealth, the pomp, and the imagination of the barbarian shepherd who had been raised by fortune to be the chief of police of the city where the world's wealth had centralized. In France every diocese had a temple magnificent according to its means, some of which exceeded in majesty that of Paris; and the cause was that, in France, the artistic and imaginative caste formed a theocracy, who were not hired by king or emperor, but who were themselves the strongest force in all the land. In the East, the imaginative inroad was not strong enough to cause disintegration, and the artists always remained wage-earners. In the West, society fell back a thousand years, and consolidation began afresh. Six centuries intervened between the death of Galla Placidia and the famous dream of the monk Gauzon which contained the revelation of the plan of the Abbey of Cluny, and yet six hundred years by no means represented the gap between the Franks and the Burgundians, and the Eastern Empire, even when it sank lowest under Heraclius. To Justinian the building of Saint Sophia was a matter of time and money; to Saint Hugh the church of Cluny was a miracle.

In France the churches long were miracles; the chronicles are filled with the revelations vouchsafed the monks; and none can cross the threshold of one of these noble monuments and fail to grasp its meaning. They are the most vigorous of all expressions of fear of the unseen. The Gothic architect heeded no living potentate; he held kings in contempt, and oftener represented them thrust down into hell than seated on their thrones. With the enemy who lurked in darkness none but the saints could cope, and them he idealized. No sculpture is more terrible than the demons on the walls of Rheims, none more majestic and pathetic than that over the door of the Virgin at Paris, while no colour ever equalled the windows of Saint Denis and Chartres.

With the thirteenth century came the influx of the Eastern trade and the rise of the communes. Immediately the glory of the Gothic began to fade; by the reign of Saint Louis it had passed its prime, and under Philip the Fair it fell in full decline. The men who put dead cats in shrines were not likely to be inspired in religious sculpture. The decay, and the reasons for it, can be readily traced in colour.

The monks who conceived the twelfth century windows, or painted the pictures of the saints, only sought to render an emotion by a conventional symbol which should rouse a response. Consequently they used marvellous combinations of colours, in which blue was apt to predominate, and they harmonized their colours with gold. Viollct-le-Duc has elaborately explained how this was done. (29) But such a system was not pretentious, and was incompatible with perspective. The mediaeval burgher, like the Roman, was rich, and wanted to appear so. He demanded more for his money than a solemn portrait of a saint. He craved a picture of himself, or of his guild, and above all he insisted on display. The fourteenth century was the period when the reds and yellows superseded the blues, and when the sense of harmony began to fail. Furthermore, the burgher was realistic and required a representation of the world he saw about him. Hence came perspective, the abandonment of gold, and the final degradation of colour, which sank into a lost art. For hundreds of years it has been impossible to imitate the work of the monks of Saint Denis. In Italy, the economic phenomena were yet more striking; for Italy, even in the Middle Ages, was always a commercial community, which looked on art with the economic eye. One example will suffice,—the treatment of the dome.

Placed between the masterpieces of the East and West, and having little imagination of his own, the Florentine banker conceived the idea of combining the two systems and embellishing them in a cheap and showy manner. Accordingly on Gothic arches he placed an Eastern dome, and instead of adorning his dome with mosaics, which are costly, he had his interior painted at about one-quarter of the price. The substitution of the fresco for the mosaic is one of the most typical devices of modern times.

Before the opening of the economic age, when the imagination glowed with all the passion of religious enthusiasm, the monks who built the abbeys of Cluny and Saint Denis took no thought of money, for it regarded them not. Sheltered by their convents, their livelihood was assured; their bread and their robe were safe; they pandered to no market, for they cared for no patron. Their art was not a chattel to be bought, but an inspired language in which they communed with God, or taught the people, and they expressed a poetry in the stones they carved which far transcended words. For these reasons Gothic architecture, in its prime, was spontaneous, elevated, dignified, and pure.

The advent of portraiture has usually been considered to portend decay, and rightly, since the presence of the portrait demonstrates the supremacy of wealth. A portrait can hardly be the ideal of an enthusiast, like the figure of a god, for it is a commercial article, sold for a price, and manufactured to suit a patron's taste; were it made to please the artist, it might not find a buyer. When portraits are fashionable, the economic period must be well advanced. Portraiture, like other economic phenomena, blossomed during the Renaissance, and it was then also that the artist, no longer shielded by his convent or his guild, stood out to earn his living by the sale of his wares, like the Venetian merchants whom he met on the Rialto, whose vanity he flattered, and whose palaces he adorned. From the sixteenth century downward, the man of imagination, unable to please the economic taste, has starved.

This mercenary quality forms the gulf which has divided the art of the Middle Ages from that of modern times—a gulf which cannot be bridged, and which has broadened with the lapse of centuries, until at last the artist, like all else in society, has become the creature of a commercial market, even as the Greek was sold as a slave to the plutocrat of Rome. With each invention, with each acceleration of movement, prose has more completely supplanted poetry, while the economic intellect has grown less tolerant of any departure from those representations of nature which have appealed to the most highly gifted of the monied type among successive generations. Hence the imperiousness of modern realism.

Thus the history of art coincides with the history of all other phenomena of life; for experience has demonstrated that, since the Reformation, a school of architecture, like the Greek or Gothic, has become impossible. No such school could exist in a society where the imagination had decayed, for the Greek and Gothic represented imaginative ideals. In an economic period, like that which has followed the Reformation, wealth is the form in which energy seeks expression; therefore, since the close of the fifteenth century, architecture has reflected money.

Viollet-le-Duc has said of the Romans, that, like all parvenus, the true expression of art lay, for them, rather in lavish ornament than in purity of form, (30) and what was true of the third century is true of the nineteenth. The type of mind being the same, its operation must be similar, and the economic, at once ostentatious and parsimonious, produces a cheap core fantastically adorned. The Romans perched the travesty of a Grecian colonnade upon the summit of a bath or an amphitheatre, while the Englishman, having pillaged weaker nations of their imaginative gems, delights to cover with coarse imitations the exterior of banks and counting-houses.

And yet, though thus alike, a profound difference separates Roman architecture from our own; the Romans were never wholly sordid, nor did they ever niggle. When they built a wall, that wall was solid masonry, not painted iron; and, even down to Constantine, one chord remained which, when struck, would always vibrate. Usurers may have sat in the Senate, but barbarians filled the legions, and, as long as the triumph wound its way through the Forum, men knew how to raise triumphal arches to the victor. Perhaps, in all the ages, no more serious or majestic monument has been conceived to commemorate the soldier than the column of Trajan, a monument which it has been the ambition of our century to copy.

In Paris an imitation of this trophy was erected to the greatest captain of France, and the column of the Place Vendôme serves to mark the grave of the modern martial blood. Raised in 1810, almost at the moment when Nathan Rothschild became despot of the London Stock Exchange, the tide from thence ran swiftly, and, since Sedan, the present generation has drained to the lees the cup of realism.

No poetry can bloom in the arid modern soil, the drama has died, and the patrons of art are no longer even conscious of shame at profaning the most sacred of ideals. The ecstatic dream, which some twelfth-century monk cut into the stones of the sanctuary hallowed by the presence of his God, is reproduced to bedizen a warehouse; or the plan of an abbey, which Saint Hugh may have consecrated, is adapted to a railway station.

Decade by decade, for some four hundred years, these phenomena have grown more sharply marked in Europe, and, as consolidation apparently nears its climax, art seems to presage approaching disintegration. The architecture, the sculpture, and the coinage of London at the close of the nineteenth century, when compared with those of the Paris of Saint Louis, recall the Rome of Caracalla as contrasted with the Athens of Pericles, save that we lack the stream of barbarian blood which made the Middle Age.

Footnotes

(1) Report of the Commission appointed in India to enquire into the Causes of the Riots which took place in the year 1875, in the Poona and Ahmednagar Districts of the Bombay Presidency, 12.

(2) Report of the Commission appointed in India to enquire into the Causes of the Riots which took place in the year 1875, in the Poona and Ahmednagar Districts of the Bombay Presidency, 159.

(3) Report of the Commission, etc., 25, 26.

(4) Ibid., 167.

(5) Report of the Commission, etc., 168.

(6) See Musulmans and Money-lenders in the Punjab, Thorburn.

(7) Report of the Commission, etc., 168.

(8) See Brief History of the Indian Peoples, Hunter, 50.

(9) See History of the Romans, ed. of 1852, Merivale, ii. 81, where the authorities are collected.

(10) Plutarch's Lives, Clough's trans., iv. 123.

(11) Ibid., 298.

(12) Ibid., 142.

(13) Genesis xxxiv. 11, 12.

(14) Aristotle, Pol., ii. 9.

(15) Plutarch's Lives, Clough's trans., iv. 507.

(16) Faery Queene, Spenser, iv. 5, 1.

(17) Entretiens sur l'Architecture, i. 102.

(18) Ann., xv. 44.

(19) Ann., xv. 44.

(20) Marc-Aurèle., Renan, 600.

(21) Tertullian, Ad Scapulam, 5.

(22) L'Antechrist, 163 et seq.

(23) Études sur l'Histoire de l'Art, Vitet, i. 200.

(24) L'Art de Batir chez les Byzantins, Choisy, 5, 6.

(25) Recherches pour servir à l'Histoire de la Peinture et de la Sculpture Chrétiennes en Orient, Bayet, 99.

(26) Ibid., 99.

(27) Buildings of Justinian, Procopius, trans. by Stewart, i. 1.

(28) Ibid.

(29) Dictionnaire de l'Architecture, Art. "Peinture."

(30) Entretiens, i. 102.