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THE FOUNDATIONS OF THE NINETEENTH CENTURY -- VOLUMES 1 & 2

INTRODUCTION

SOME ten years ago there appeared in Germany a work of the highest importance which at once arrested the attention of the literary world, and was speedily declared to be one of the masterpieces of the century. The deep learning, the sympathy with knowledge in its most various forms, a style sometimes playful, sometimes ironical, always persuasive, always logical, pages adorned with brilliant passages of the loftiest eloquence -- these features were a passport to immediate recognition. Three editions were exhausted in as many years, and now when it has gone through eight editions, and, in spite of the expense of the two bulky volumes, no fewer than sixty thousand copies have been sold in Germany, it is surely time that England should see the book clothed in the native language of its author.

Houston Stewart Chamberlain was born at Southsea in 1855, the son of Admiral William Charles Chamberlain. Two of his uncles were generals in the English army, a third was the well-known Field-Marshal Sir Neville Chamberlain. His mother was a daughter of Captain Basil Hall, R.N., whose travels were the joy of the boyhood of my generation, while his scientific observations won for him the honour of Fellowship of the Royal Society. Captain Basil Hall's father, Sir James Hall, was himself eminent in science, being the founder of experimental geology. As a man of science therefore (and natural science was his first love), Houston Chamberlain may be regarded as an instance of atavism, or, to use the hideous word coined by Galton, "eugenics."

His education was almost entirely foreign. It began in a Lycee at Versailles. Being destined for the army he was afterwards sent to Cheltenham College: but the benign cruelty of fate intervened; his health broke down, he was removed from school, and all idea of entering the army was given up: and so it came to pass that the time which would have been spent upon mastering the goose-step and the subtleties of drill was devoted under the direction of an eminent German tutor, Herr Otto Kuntze, to sowing the seed of that marvellous harvest of learning and scholarship the full fruit of which, in the book before us, has ripened for the good of the world. After a while he went to Geneva, where under Vogt, Graebe, Muller Argovensis, Thury, Plantamour and other great professors he studied systematic botany, geology, astronomy, and later the anatomy and physiology of the human body. But the strain of work was too great and laid too heavy a tax upon his strength; so, for a time at any rate, natural science had to be abandoned and he migrated to Dresden, a forced change which was another blessing in disguise; for at Dresden he plunged heart and soul into the mysterious depths of the Wagnerian music and philosophy, the metaphysical works of the master probably exercising as strong an influence upon him as the musical dramas.

Chamberlain's first published work was in French, Notes sur Lohengrin. This was followed by various essays in German on Wagnerian subjects: but they were not a success, and so, disgusted with the petty jealousies and unrealities of art-criticism, he fell back once more upon natural science and left Dresden for Vienna, where he placed himself under the guidance of Professor Wiesner. Again the miseries of health necessitated a change. Out of the wreck of his botanical studies he saved the materials for his Recherches sur la seve ascendante, a recognised authority among continental botanists, and natural science was laid aside, probably for ever.

Happily the spell of the great magician was upon him. In 1892 there appeared Das Drama Richard Wagners, which, frozen almost out of existence at first (five copies were sold in the twelve-month, of which the author was himself the buyer), has since run into four greedily purchased editions. Then came that fine book, the Life of Wagner, which has been translated into English by Mr. Hight, and Chamberlain's reputation was made, to be enhanced by the colossal success of the Grundlagen des Neunzehnten Jahrhunderts which followed in 1899. Naturally enough, criticism was not spared. The book was highly controversial and no doubt lent itself to some misunderstanding; moreover the nationality of the author could hardly fail to be in a sense provocative of some slight jealousy or even hostility. One critic did not hesitate to accuse him of plagiarism -- plagiarism, above all, from Richard Wagner, the very man whose disciple and historian he was proud to be, whose daughter he was, years afterwards, to marry. But this attack is one for which Chamberlain might well be thankful, for it gave him the chance, in the preface to the third edition, of showing all his skill in fence, a skill proof even against the coup de Jarnac. His answer to his critics on his theory of Race, and his criticism of Delitzsch in the preface to the fourth edition are fine pieces of polemical writing.

What is the Book? How should it be defined? Is it history, a philosophical treatise, a metaphysical inquiry? I confess, I know not: probably it is all three. I am neither an historian, alas! nor a philosopher, nor a metaphysician. To me the book has been a simple delight -- the companion of months -- fulfilling the highest function of which a teacher is capable, that of awakening thought and driving it into new channels. That is the charm of the book. The charm of the man is his obviously transparent truthfulness. Anything fringing upon fraud is abhorrent to him, something to be scourged with scorpions. As in one passage he himself says, the enviable gift of lying has been denied to him. Take his answer to Professor Delitzsch's famous pamphlet Babel und Bibel, to which I have alluded above.

No writer is so dangerous as the really learned scholar who uses his learning, as a special pleader might, in support of that which is not true. Now, Professor Delitzsch is an authority in Assyriology and the knowledge of the cuneiform inscriptions. The object of his brilliant and cleverly named pamphlet was to arouse interest in the researches of the German Orientalischer Verein. In this sense any discovery which can be brought into line with the story of the Old Testament is an engine the price of which is above pearls. Accordingly, Professor Delitzsch, eager to furnish proof of Semitic monotheism, brings out the statement that the Semitic tribes of Canaan which, at the time of Khammurabi, two thousand years before Christ, flooded Assyria, were worshippers of one God, and that the name of that God was Jahve (Jehovah), and in support of that statement he translates the inscriptions on two tablets, or fragments of tablets, in the British Museum. Now it must be obvious to the poorest intelligence that an obscure script like that in the cuneiform character can only be read with any approach to certainty where there is the opportunity of comparison, that is to say, where the same groups of wedges or arrowheads, as they used to be called, are found repeated in various connections: even so, the patience and skill which have been spent upon deciphering the inscriptions, from the days of Hincks and Rawlinson until now, are something phenomenal. Where a proper name occurs only once, the difficulty is increased a hundredfold. Yet this did not deter Delitzsch from making his astounding monotheistic assertion on the strength of an arbitrary interpretation of a single example of a group of signs, which signs moreover are capable of being read, as is proved by the evidence of the greatest Assyriologists, in six if not eleven different ways. Truly a fine case for doctors to disagree upon! Chamberlain, with that instinctive shying at a fraud which distinguishes him, at once detected the imposition. He is no Assyriologist, but his work brings him into contact with the masters of many crafts, and so with the pertinacity of a sleuth-hound he runs the lie to earth. In a spirit of delicate banter, through which the fierce indignation of the truth-lover often pierces, he tears the imposture to tatters; his attack is a fighting masterpiece, to which I cannot but allude, if only in the sketchiest way, as giving a good example of Chamberlain's methods. So much for Tablet No. 1.

The interpretation of the second tablet upon which Professor Delitzsch reads the solemn declaration "Jahve is God" fares no better at our author's hands; for he brings forward two unimpeachable witnesses, Hommel and Konig, who declare that Delitzsch has misread the signs which really signify "The moon is God."

It is well known -- a fact scientifically proved by much documentary evidence -- that Khammurabi and his contemporaries were worshippers of the sun, the moon and the stars; the name of his father was Sin-mubalit, "the moon gives life," his son was Shamshuiluna, "the sun is our God." But no evidence is sufficient to check Professor Delitzsch's enthusiasm over his monotheistic Khammurabi! That much in the deciphering of Assyrian inscriptions is to a great extent problematical is evident. One thing, however, is certain in these readings of Professor Delitzsch: in the face of the authority of other men of learning, his whole fabric, "a very Tower of Babel, but built on paper, crumbles to pieces; and instead of the pompously announced, unsuspected aspect of the growth of monotheism, nothing remains to us but a surely very unexpected insight into the workshop of lax philology and fanciful history-mongering."

It seems to me that Khammurabi has been made a victim in this controversy. Even if he was a worshipper of the sun and the stars and the moon, he was, unless we ignorant folk have been cruelly misled, a very great man: for he appears to have been the first king who recognised the fact that if a people has duties to its sovereign, the sovereign on the other hand has duties to his people -- and that, for a monarch who reigned so many centuries before Moses, must be admitted to show a very high sense of kingly responsibility. But Delitzsch, in trying to prove too much, has done him the dis-service of exposing him to what almost amounts to a sneer from the Anti-Semites. I have submitted what I have written above to Dr. Budge of the British Museum, who authorises me to say that he concurs in Chamberlain's views of Professor Delitzsch's translation.

But it is time that we should leave these battles of the learned in order to consider the scheme, the scope and the conduct of the book. To write the story of the Foundations of the Nineteenth Century was a colossal task, for which the strength of a literary Hercules would alone be of any avail. Mr. Chamberlain, however, has brought to the undertaking such a wealth of various knowledge and reading, set out with unrivalled dialectical power, that even those who may disagree with some of his conclusions must perforce incline themselves before the presence of a great master. That his book should be popular with those scholars who are wedded to old traditions was not to be expected. He has shattered too many idols, dispelled too many dearly treasured illusions. And the worst of it is that the foundations of his beliefs -- perhaps I should rather say of his disbeliefs -- are built upon rocks so solid that they will defy the cunningest mines that can be laid against them. This is no mere "chronicle of ruling houses, no record of butcheries." It is the story of the rise of thought, of religion, of poetry, of learning, of civilisation, of art; the story of all those elements of which the complex life of the Indo-European of to-day is composed -- the story of what he calls "Der Germane."

And here let me explain once for all what Chamberlain means by "Der Germane": obviously not the German, for that would have been "Der Deutsche." To some people the name may be misleading; but he has adopted it, and I may have to use it again, so let us take his own explanation of it. In this term he includes the Kelts, the Germans, the Slavs, and all those races of northern Europe from which the peoples of modern Europe have sprung (evidently also the people of the United States of America). The French are not specifically mentioned, but it is clear from more than one passage that they too are included. As indeed how should they be left out? Yet it strikes one almost as a paradox to find Louis XIV claimed as a "genuine Germane" for resisting the encroachments of the Papacy, and bearding the Pope as no other Catholic sovereign ever did; and blamed as a Germane false to his "Germanentum" for his shameless persecution of the Protestants! In the Germane, then, he describes the dominant race of the nineteenth century. Strange indeed is the beginning of the history of that race.

Far away in Asia, behind the great mountain fastnesses of India, in times so remote that even tradition and fable are silent about them, there dwelt a race of white men. They were herdsmen, shepherds, tillers of the soil, poets and thinkers. They were called Aryas -- noblemen or householders -- and from them are descended the dominant caste of India, the Persians, and the great nations of Europe. The history of the Aryan migrations, their dates, their causes, is lost in the clouds of a mysterious past. All that we know is that there were at least three great wanderings: two southward to India and Persia, one, or perhaps several, across the great Asiatic continent to Europe. What drove these highly gifted people from their farms and pastures? Was it the search for change of climate? Was it pressure from the Mongols? There are some reasons for supposing that religious dissent may have had something to do with it. For instance, the evil spirits of the Zendavesta, the scriptures of the Zoroastrians, are the gods of the Rigveda, the sacred poems of the Indian Aryans, and vice versa. Be that as it may, wherever the Aryans went they became masters. The Greek, the Latin, the Kelt, the Teuton, the Slav -- all these were Aryans: of the aborigines of the countries which they overran, scarcely a trace remains. So, too, in India it was "Varna," colour, which distinguished the white conquering Arya from the defeated black man, the Dasyu, and so laid the foundation of caste. It is to the Teuton branch of the Aryan family that the first place in the world belongs, and the story of the Nineteenth Century is the story of the Teuton's triumph.

While by no means ignoring, or failing to throw light upon, the Assyrian or Egyptian civilisations, this all-embracing book ascribes the laying of the Foundations of the Nineteenth Century to the life-work of three peoples: two of these, the Greek and Roman, being of Aryan extraction, the third, the Jew, Semitic.

Of Greek poetry and art Chamberlain writes with all the passionate rapture of a lover. "Every inch of Greek soil is sacred." Homer, the founder of a religion, the maker of gods, stands on a pinnacle by himself. He was, as it were, the Warwick of Olympus. "That any one should have doubted the existence of the poet Homer will not give to future generations a favourable impression of the perspicacity of our times." It is just a hundred years since Wolf started his theory that there was no such poet as Homer -- that the Iliad and Odyssey were a parcel of folk-songs of many dates and many poets pasted together. By whom? asks Chamberlain. Why are there no more such "able editors"? Is it paste that is lacking or brain-paste? Schiller at once denounced the idea as "simply barbarous" and proclaimed Wolf to be a "stupid devil." Goethe at first was caught by the idea, but when he examined the poems more closely, from the point of view of the poet, recanted, and came to the conclusion that there could be only one Homer. And now "Homer enters the twentieth century, the fourth millennium of his fame, greater than ever." No great work of art, as Chamberlain points out, was ever produced by the collaboration of a number of little men. The man who made the faith of a people was, as Aristotle put it,  divine before all other poets." If Greek poetry and Greek art were in those two branches of human culture the chief inheritance of the nineteenth century, then we may safely assert that Homer in that direction dominated all other influence and was the first prophet of our Indo-European culture.

Never, indeed, did the sacred fire of poetry and art burn with a purer flame than it did in ancient Greece. Homer was followed by a radiant galaxy of poets. The tragic dramas of AEschylus and Sophocles, the farces of Aristophanes, the idylls of Theocritus, the odes of Pindar, the dainty lyrics of Anacreon, have made the Greek genius the test by which all subsequent work must be judged. In architecture and sculpture the Greeks have never been equalled; of their painting we know less; but the men who were under the influence of a Phidias and a Praxiteles, we may safely say, would not have borne with a mere dauber. Poetry and art then were the very essence of Greek life; they penetrated the soul and thrilled every fibre of the ancient Hellenes. Their philosophy, the deep thoughts that vibrated in their brain, were poetry. Plato himself was, as Montesquieu said of him, one of the four great poets of mankind. He was the Homer of thought, too great a poet, according to Zeller, to be quite a philosopher. But Plato was Himself, and his spirit is as young and as fresh to-day as it was when he was so penetrated with the sense of beauty that he made his Socrates lecture only in the fairest scenes, and pray to the great god Pan that he might be beautiful in his inner self, and that his outer self should be in tune with it. "Much that has come between has sunk in oblivion; while Plato and Aristotle, Democritus, Euclid and Archimedes live on in our midst stimulating and instructing, and the half-fabulous figure of Pythagoras grows greater with every century."

But -- and it is a big "but" -- when we come to metaphysics Chamberlain cries, Halt! With all his reverence for Plato as statesman, moralist and practical reformer; for Aristotle as the first encyclopaedist; full of admiration for the philosophers of the great epoch so far as they represent a "creative manifestation" of the mind of man closely allied to the poetic art, in the history of human thought he dethrones them from the high place which has hitherto been assigned to them, he denies them the honour of having been the first thinkers. To Aristotle, indeed, with all his gifts, he traces the decadence of the Hellenic spirit.

It has been the fashion among the schoolmen to hold the Greeks up to admiration as being historically the first thinkers. Nothing could be further from the truth. They laid the foundations of our science, of geography, natural history, logic, ethics, mathematics -- of metaphysics they were not the founders, though they taught us to think. Bacon indeed condemned their philosophy as "childish, garrulous, impotent and immature in creative power." Centuries before the birth of the great Greeks, India had produced philosophers who in the realms of thought reached heights which never were attained by Plato or Aristotle. The doctrine of the transmigration of souls was brought by Pythagoras from India. In Greece, until it was published by Plato, it was regarded as the mystery of mysteries, only to be revealed to the elect -- to the high priests of thought: but in India it was the common belief of the vulgar; whereas to the philosophers, a small body of deep thinkers, it was and is an allegorical representation of a truth only to be grasped by deep metaphysical pondering. The common creed of the Indian coolie, invested by Plato with the halo of his sublime poetry, became glorified as the highest expression of Greek thought!

Alas! for the long years wasted in the worship of false gods! Alas! for the idols with feet of clay, ruthlessly hurled from their pedestals! That the ancient Greek was the type of all that was chivalrous and noble was the accepted belief taught by the old-fashioned, narrow- minded pedagogues of two generations ago. They took the Greeks at their own valuation, accepting all their figures and facts without a question. Their battles were always fought against fearful odds; they performed prodigies of valour; their victories decided the fate of the world. To the student brought up in the faith of such books as Creasy's Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World, it comes as a shock to be told that Marathon was a mere skirmish without result, in which, as a matter of fact, the Athenians had if anything rather the worst of it. Even Herodotus inconveniently let out the fact that Miltiades hurried on the battle knowing that his brave Hoplites were half minded to go over to the enemy, and that delay might cause this treacherous thought to be carried into effect. Another half-hour and the "heroes of Marathon" would have been seen marching against Athens side by side with the Persians. As it was, the latter quietly sailed back to Ionia in their Grecian ships, carrying with them several thousand prisoners and a great store of booty. Gobineau has shown that Salamis was no better, and he describes Grecian history as "la plus elaboree des fictions du plus artiste des peuples." ["The more elaborate fictions of the most artistic of people."]

In the view of writers like Gobineau and Chamberlain the ancient Greek was a fraud, a rogue and a coward, a slave-driver, cruel to his enemies, faithless to his friends, without one shred of patriotism or of honour. Alcibiades changing colour like a chameleon, Solon forsaking his life's work and going over to Pisistratus, Themistocles haggling over the price for which he should betray Athens before Salamis, and living at the Court of Artaxerxes as the declared enemy of Greece, despised by the Persians "as a wily Greek snake," these and others are sickening pictures which Chamberlain draws of the Hellene when viewed as a man apart from his poetry and his art.

Probably in these days of critical investigation the fanciful teaching of previous generations will be modified. The Greeks have enough really to their credit, they have a sufficient title to our gratitude for what they were, without being held up to our admiration for that which they distinctly were not. It seems laughable that Grote should have accepted as gospel truth, and held up as an example for future ages, what Juvenal had summed up, eighteen hundred years before, as "all that lying Greece dares in history."

No two people could be in sharper contrast to one another than the Greeks and the Romans. From the creative genius of the Greeks we have inherited Olympus, the Gods, and Homer who made them, poetry, architecture, sculpture, philosophy, all that makes up the joy of life: not our religion -- that comes from a higher source -- and yet, even here perhaps something, some measure of religiosity which fitted us to receive the Divine Message. The gift of the matter-of-fact Roman, on the other hand, has been law, order, statecraft, the idea of citizenship, the sanctity of the family and of property. Borne on the pinions of imagination the Greek soared heavenward. The Roman struck his roots deep into the soil. In all that contributes to the welfare and prosperity of the State and of the man the Roman was past-master. In poetry, in the fine arts, in all that constitutes culture, he was an imitator, a follower -- at a great distance -- of the Greeks. A poet in the true sense of the word, he certainly was not. A poet means one who creates. Consider the translations and imitations wrought with consummate skill by Virgil, at the imperial command, into an epic in honour of a dynasty and a people. Compare these, masterpieces of their kind though they be, with the heaven-inspired creations of Homer, and you will see what Chamberlain means when he says that "to unite Greek poetry with Latin poetry in the one conception of classical literature, is a proof of incredible barbarism in taste, and of a lamentable ignorance of the essence and value of artistic genius." The Roman was no true poet, no creator. Horace, with all his charm -- the most quotable of writers because his dainty wit had the secret of rendering with delicate fancy the ideas which occur at every step, on every occasion of our lives -- was after all only the first and foremost of all society verse-writers. Chamberlain is inclined to make an exception in favour of Lucretius, of whom in a footnote he says that he is worthy of admiration both as thinker and bard. (I hesitate here to translate the word Dichter by "poet.") Yet in the same note he goes on to say that his thoughts are altogether Greek, and his materials preponderatingly so. "Moreover there lies over his whole work the deadly shadow of that scepticism that sooner or later leads to barrenness, and which must be carefully distinguished from the deep intuition of truly religious spirits that preserve the figurative in that which they set forth without thereby casting doubt upon the lofty truth of their inmost forebodings, their inscrutable mysteries." For Lucretius, Epicurus, the man who denied the existence of God, was the greatest of mortals. And yet there came a day when even Epicurus must needs fall down before Zeus. "Never," cried Diokles, who found him in the Temple, "did I see Zeus greater than when Epicurus lay there at his feet." Footnotes are apt to be skipped, and I have felt it right to dwell upon this one because of its importance as bearing upon Chamberlain's views of the "deadly shadow of scepticism."

The poetry of Greece was the dawn of all that is beautiful, the bounteous fountain of all  good gifts, at which, century after century, country after country, have quaffed the joyous cup, seeking inspiration that in their turn they might achieve something lovely.

The influence which Rome has exercised upon our development has been in a totally different direction. From the beginning of time the races of Aryan extraction have been deeply imbued with the conviction of the importance of law. Yet it was reserved for the Romans to develop this instinct, and they succeeded because to them alone among the Aryans was possible the consolidation of the State. The law was the foundation of personal right; the State was based upon the sacrifice of that personal right, and the delegation of personal power for the common weal. If we realise that, we recognise the immense value of the inheritance bequeathed to us by the Romans. Without the great quality of patriotism this would have been impossible.

The spot upon which the Roman had settled had little physically to recommend it. There was no romantic scenery, there were no lofty mountains, no rushing rivers. The seven mean hills, the yellow mud of the Tiber, the fever-stricken marshes, a soil poor and unproductive, were not features to captivate the imagination. But the Roman loved it and cherished it in his heart of hearts. Surrounded by hostile tribes, his early history was one long struggle for life, in which his great qualities always won the day. Once defeated, he would have been wiped off the face of the earth: strength of character, determination, courage above proof, saved him, and in the end made him the conqueror of the world. There was no need in his case to pass laws enforcing valour as in the case of Sparta, making men brave, as it were, by act of Parliament. There was no fear of his turning traitor; he was loyal to the core. His home, his family, his fatherland were sacred, the deeply treasured objects of his worship, a religion in themselves. Self was laid on one side -- the good of the community was everything. It was the idea of the family carried into statecraft. One word represented it, Patria, the fatherland, and the man who worked for the Patria was the ideal statesman.

Is it fair, asks Chamberlain, to call the Roman a conqueror or invader? He thinks not. He was driven to war not by the desire of conquest or of aggrandisement, but by the desperate determination to maintain his home or die. With the defeat and disappearance of the surrounding tribes, he found himself ever compelled to push his outposts farther and farther still; it was self-preservation, not the lust of conquest, which armed the Roman. For him war was a political necessity, and no people ever possessed the political instinct in so high a degree.

The struggle with Carthage was a case in point. Historians from the earliest times, from Polybius to Mommsen, have denounced the barbarity shown by the Romans in the extermination of Carthage. Chamberlain in a few convincing paragraphs teaches us what was the real issue. He shows us that annihilation was an absolute necessity. Rome and Carthage could not exist together. The fight was for the supremacy in the Mediterranean; and therefore for the mastery of the world. On the one side was the civilising influence of Rome, colonising under laws so beneficent that nations even came to petition that they might be placed under her rule: on the other side a system of piratical colonisation undertaken in the sole cause of gain, the abolition of all freedom, the creation of artificial wants in the interest of trade, no attempt at legal organisation beyond the imposition of taxes, slavery, a religion of the very basest in which human sacrifices were a common practice. The Roman felt that it must be war to the knife without quarter. In his own interest, and, though he knew it not, in that of the world, there could be nothing short of extermination. "Delenda est Carthago" was the cry. Had he failed, had the piracy of the Semitic combination of Phoenicians and Babylonians won the day against the law and order of the Aryan, it is not too much to say that culture and civilisation would have come to a standstill, and the development of the nineteenth century would have been an impossibility, or at any rate hopelessly retarded. "It is refreshing," writes Chamberlain, "for once to come across an author who, like Bossuet, simply says, 'Carthage was taken and destroyed by Scipio, who herein proved himself worthy of his great ancestor,' without any outburst of moral indignation, without the conventional phrase, 'all the misery that later burst upon Rome was retribution for this crime.''' Caesar rebuilt Carthage, and it became a congeries of all the worst criminals: Romans, Greeks, Vandals, all rotten to the very marrow of their bones. It must have been something like Port Said in the early days some forty years ago, which seemed to be the trysting-place of the world's rascaldom: those who remember it can form some idea of what that second Carthage of Caesar's must have been.

In the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans one sees the hand of Providence. It was largely the act of the Jew himself, the born rebel against State law, or any law save that which he deemed to be his own sacred inheritance. It was immaterial that he had himself petitioned Rome to save him from his own Semitic kings and to take him under her charge. He was a continual thorn in the side of his chosen rulers, and his final subjugation and dispersal became a necessity. Had the Jew remained in Jerusalem, Christianity would have become a mere sect of the Jews. Long before our era the Diaspora had taken place. Originally the Diaspora meant the Jews who, after the Babylonian captivity, refused to go back to Palestine because of the prosperity which they enjoyed in their place of exile. Later it embraced all those Jews who, for various reasons of trade, or convenience, or missionary enterprise, went forth into the world. In Alexandria alone these numbered over one million. The making of proselytes was universal. But wherever they might be, to Jerusalem they looked as to their home. To Jerusalem they sent tribute, in the interests of Jerusalem they worked as one man. The influence of Jerusalem was all-pervading. Even the first Christians, in spite of St. Paul, held to the rites of Judaism; those who did not were branded by St. John as "them of the Synagogue of Satan." In destroying the stronghold of Judaism the Romans, though here again they knew it not, were working for the triumph of Christianity. As it is, much of Judaism pervades our faith. Had Jerusalem stood, the "religious monopoly of the Jews," says Chamberlain, "would have been worse than the trade monopoly of the Phoenicians. Under the leaden pressure of these born dogmatists and fanatics, all freedom of thought and of belief would have vanished from the world: the flat materialistic conception of God would have been our religion, pettifoggery our philosophy. This is no fancy picture, there are too many facts crying aloud: for what is that stiff, narrow-minded, spiritually cramped dogmatising of the Christian Church, such as no Aryan people ever dreamt of; what is that bloodthirsty fanaticism disgracing the centuries down to the nineteenth, that curse of hatred fastening on to the religion of love from the very beginning, from which Greek and Roman, Indian and Chinese, Persian and Teuton, turn with a shudder? What is it if not the shadow of that Temple in which sacrifice was offered to the God of wrath and of revenge, a black shadow cast over the young generation of heroes striving out of the Darkness into the Light?"

With the help of Rome, Europe escaped from the chaos of Asia. The imaginative Greek was ever looking towards Asia -- to him the East called. The practical Roman transferred the centre of gravity of culture to find an eternal home in the West, so that Europe "became the beating heart and the thinking brain of all mankind." The Aryan had mastered the Semite for all time.

It comes somewhat as a surprise to find Rome, the ideal Republic, pointed to as the fountain-head from which the conception of Constitutional Monarchy is drawn. The principle of Roman Law and the Roman State was, as we have seen, that of the rights of the individual and his power to choose representatives. In the course of time when Rome ceased to be Rome, when she fell under the rule of half-breeds from Africa, aliens from Asia Minor, baseborn men from Illyria, not chosen by the people, but elected by the army; when she had ceased even to be the capital of her own Empire; one would have thought that the decay of the Republic would have been the end of all the constitutional principles which it had established. But it was not so. The jurists in the service of Diocletian, an Illyrian shepherd, of Galerius, an Illyrian cowherd, of Maximinus, an Illyrian swineherd, were the men who based the imperial conception upon the theory of the will of the people, upon the same power which had elected the consuls and the other officers of the ancient State. Never before had the world beheld such a phenomenon. "Despots had ruled as direct descendants of the Gods, as in the case of the Egyptians and the Japanese of to-day, or as in Israel as representatives of the Godhead, or again by the Jus Gladii -- the right of the sword." The soldier-emperors who had made themselves masters of the Roman Empire founded their rights as autocrats upon the constitutional law of the Republic. There was no usurpation, only delegation pure and simple. To this we owe the conception of the Sovereign and the Subject.

In the meantime Christianity had become a power; and with it had taken place the abolition of slavery in Europe. Only a Sovereign could abolish slavery -- that we saw in Russia in 1862. The nobles would never have given up their slaves, who were their property, their goods and chattels; far rather would they have made free men into bondsmen. But the establishment of the monarchical principle has been the main pillar of law and order and of that civic freedom from which, as we see, it originally sprang; it is one proof of the great debt of gratitude which Europe owes to ancient Rome, it is not the only one.

It would be an impertinence were I to attempt to discuss Roman Law. The treatment of the subtleties and intricacies of a highly technical subject must be left to those who have made of them a special study. Yet it is impossible to pass over in silence the effect of the great legacy which the world has inherited from Rome. The effect is an historical fact and must be as patent to the layman as to the professed jurist. What Greece did for the higher aesthetic culture, that Rome did for law, good government and statecraft. The one made  life beautiful, the other made it secure. As a poet, or as a philosopher, the Roman was insignificant; he had not even an equivalent for either word in his language; he must borrow the name, as he borrowed the idea, from the Greek. But in the practical direction of the life of the individual, of the life of the State, he remains, after more than twenty centuries, the unrivalled master. The pages in which Chamberlain brings into relief the noble qualities of the Roman character are, to my thinking, among the best and most eloquent in his book, and they should be read not without profit in an age which is singularly impatient of discipline. For after listening to Chamberlain we must come away convinced that it was discipline which made the Roman what he was. He learnt to obey that he might learn to command, and so he became the ruler of the world. That his conception of the law has become the model upon which all jurisprudence has been moulded, the State as he founded it being based upon the great principles of reciprocity and self-sacrifice on the one side and of protection of the sanctity of private rights on the other, is a fact which bears lasting testimony to the force of Roman character. There have  been great jurists in many nations -- professors learned in the law -- laws have been amplified and changed to meet circumstances; but no single nation has ever raised such a legal monument as that of the Romans, which, according to Professor Leist, is "the everlasting teacher for the civilised world and will so remain."

It is interesting to consider wherein lay the difference between Greek and Roman legislation. How came it, asks Chamberlain, that the Greeks, mentally so incomparably superior to the Romans, were able to achieve nothing lasting, nothing perfect, in the domain of law? The reason he gives is simple enough -- simple and convincing. The Roman started with the principle of the family, and on the basis of the family he raised the structure of State and Law. The Greek, on the contrary, ignored the family, and took the State as his starting-point. Even the law of inheritance was so vague that questions in connection with it were left by Solon to the decision of the Courts. In Rome the position of the Father as King in his own house, the rank assigned to the Wife as house-mistress, the reverential respect for matrimony, these were great principles of which the Greeks knew nothing; but they were the principles upon which the existence of the private man depended, upon which the Res Publica was founded. The Jus Privatum and the Jus Publicum were inseparable, and from them sprang the Jus Gentium, the law of nations. The laws of Solon, of Lycurgus and others have withered and died; but the laws of Rome remain a stately and fruit-bearing tree, under whose wholesome shade the civilisation of Europe has sprung up and flourished.

Few men have approached a great subject in a loftier spirit of reverence than that in which Chamberlain deals with what, to him, as to all of us, is the one great and incomparable event in the whole story of our planet. "No battle, no change of dynasty, no natural phenomenon, no discovery possesses a significance which can be compared with that of the short life upon earth of the Galilean. His birth is, in a sense, the beginning of history. The nations that are not Christian, such as the Chinese, the Turks and others have no history; their story is but a chronicle on the one hand of ruling houses, butcheries and the like, and on the other, represents the dull, humble, almost bestially happy life of millions that sink in the night of time without leaving a trace."

With the dogmas of the Church or Churches, Chamberlain has scant sympathy, and on that account he will doubtless be attacked by swarms as spiteful as wasps and as thoughtless. And yet how thoroughly imbued with the true spirit of Religion, as apart from Churchcraft, is every line that he has written! Christ was no Prophet, as Mahomet dubbed him. He was no Jew. The genealogies of St. Matthew and St. Luke trace to Joseph, but Joseph was not His father. The essence of Christ's significance lies in the fact that in Him God was made man. Christ is God, or rather since, as St. Thomas Aquinas has shown, it is easier to say what God is not than what He is, it is better to invert the words and say God is Christ, and so to avoid explaining what is known by what is not known. Such are but a few ideas of the author culled at random and from memory. But (and here is the stone of offence against which the Churchman will stumble) "it is not the Churches that form the strength of Christianity, but that Fountain from which they themselves draw their power, the vision of the Son of Man upon the Cross."

In two or three masterly pages written with such inspiration that it is difficult to read them without emotion, Chamberlain has drawn a parallel between Christ and Buddha, between the love and life-breathing doctrine of the One and the withering renunciation of the other. Buddha tears from his heart all that is dear to man -- parents, wife, child, love, hope, the religion of his fathers -- all are left behind when he wanders forth alone into the wilderness to live a living suicide and wait for death, an extinction that can only be perfect, in the face of the doctrine of metempsychosis, if it is so spiritually complete that the dread reaper can harvest no seed for a new birth. How different is it with the teaching of Christ, whose death means no selfish, solitary absorption into a Nirvana, a passionless abstraction, but the Birth of the whole world into a new life. Buddha dies that there may be no resurrection. Christ dies that all men may live, that all men may inherit the Kingdom of Heaven. And this Kingdom of Heaven, what is it? Clearly no Nirvana, no sensuous Paradise like that of Mahomet. He gives the answer Himself in a saying which must be authentic, for His hearers could not understand it, much less could they have invented it. The Kingdom of God is within you. "In these sayings of Christ we seem to hear a voice; we know not His exact words but there is an unmistakable, unforgettable tone which strikes our ear and so forces its way to the heart. And then we open our eyes and we see this Form, this Life. Across the centuries we hear the words, Learn from me! and at last we understand what that means: to be as Christ was, to live as Christ lived, to strive as Christ died, that is the Kingdom of Heaven, that is eternal Life."

As I sit writing I can see on a shelf a whole row of books written on Buddhism by eminent scholars and missionaries, comparing its doctrines with those of the Saviour. It is not too much to say that the sum of all the wisdom and learning of that little library of Buddhism is contained in the few paragraphs of which I have given the kernel. Chamberlain in burning words points out how radiant is the doctrine of hope preached by the Saviour -- where is there room for pessimism since the Kingdom of God is within us? -- and he contrasts the teaching of our Lord with the dreary forebodings of the Old Testament, where all is vanity, life is a shadow, we wither like grass. The Jewish writers took as gloomy a view of the world as the Buddhists. But our Lord who went about among the people and loved them, taking part in their joys and in their sorrows -- His was a teaching of love and sympathy, and above all of hope. Christ did not retire into the wilderness to seek death and annihilation. He came out of the wilderness to bring life eternal. Buddha represents the senile decay of a culture that has finished its life; Christ represents the Birth of a new day, of a new civilisation dawning under the sign of the Cross, raised upon the ruins of the old world, a civilisation at which we must work for many a long day before it may be worthy to be called by His name.

Chamberlain is careful to tell us that he does not intend to lift the veil which screens the Holy of Holies of his own belief. But it must be clear from such utterances as those upon which I have drawn above, how noble and how exalted is the conception of Christ and of His teaching which is borne in on the mind of one of the foremost thinkers of our day. He draws his inspiration at the fountainhead. For the dogmas of oecumenical councils, for the superstitions and fables of monks, he has an adequate respect: he preaches Christ and Him crucified: that is to him all-sufficing. Can there be a purer ideal?

It is this same lofty conception which accounts for the contrast which this protestant layman draws between Catholicism and the hierarchy of Rome. For the former he has every sympathy: upon the latter he looks as a hindrance to civilisation and to the essential truths of Religion. How could it be otherwise with an institution which until the year 1822 kept under the ban of the Index every book which should dare to contest the sublime truth that the sun goes round the Earth? The whole Roman system, hierarchical and political, is in direct opposition to the development of Indo-European culture, of which the Germane constitutes the highest expression. The Catholic, on the other hand, when not choked by the mephitic vapours of Roman dogma and Roman imperialism, left free to follow the simple teaching of the cross, and to practise so far as in him lies the example of the Saviour, is worthy of all the respect which is due to the true Christian of whatsoever denomination he may be. He at any rate is no enemy to the Truth.

Very striking are the passages in which Chamberlain points out the ambiguous attitude of our Lord towards Jewish thought and the religion of which His teaching was the antithesis. How he brushed aside the narrow prescriptions of the Law, as for example in the great saying, "the Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath"; -- and yet how, born in the midst of Jewish ideas and bigotry, the bearer of the new Glad Tidings, the Teacher who was to revolutionise the world, never altogether shook off the old traditions. Chamberlain's argument leads us a step farther. It is impossible not to feel how much more completely St. Paul, a Pharisee after the strictest sect of his religion, cut himself adrift from Judaism. There was no beating about the bush, no hesitation, no searching of the soul. A convert, he at once threw into his new faith all the zeal and energy with which up to that very moment he had persecuted it. He ceased to be a Jew: he became the Apostle to the Gentiles, and bade his followers refuse all "old wives' fables" (1 Tim. iv. 7), while to Titus he says, "rebuke them sharply, not giving heed to Jewish fables and commandments of men, that turn from the truth" (Titus i. 14). Christ's life upon earth was spent among the Jews: it was to them that His "good tidings" were addressed. To touch the hearts of men you must speak to them in a language that they understand. St. Paul, on the other hand, who lived and worked among the Gentiles, was unfettered by any preconceived ideas on the part of his hearers. His doctrine was to them absolutely new, standing on its own foundation, the rock of Christianity -- and yet, as Chamberlain points out in a later part of the book, it was St. Paul, the very man who after his conversion avoided the Jews and separated himself from them as much as he could, who did more than any of the first preachers of Christianity to weld into the new faith the traditions of the Old Testament. In the Epistle to the Romans the fall of man is given as an historical event; our Lord born "from the seed of David according to the flesh" is declared to be the son of God; Israel is the people of God, the good olive-tree into which the branches of the wild olive-tree, the Gentiles may be "graffed." The death of the Messiah is an atoning sacrifice in the Jewish sense, &c. &c., all purely Jewish ideas preached by the man who hated the Jews. When we read these contradictions of the man's self we may say of St. Paul's epistles as St. Peter did, in another sense, "in which are some things hard to be understood."

The influence of Judaism on Indo-European civilisation is a subject upon which the author of the Grundlagen dwells with special stress. He cannot withhold his admiration from the sight of that one small tribe standing out amid the chaos of nationalities, which was the legacy of the fallen Roman Empire, "like a sharply cut rock in the midst of a shapeless sea," maintaining its identity and characteristics in the midst of a fiery vortex where all other peoples were fused into a molten conglomerate destroying all definition. The Jew alone remained unchanged. His belief in Jehovah, his faith in the promises of the prophets, his conviction that to him was to be given the mastery of the world -- these were the articles of his creed, a creed which might be summed up as belief in himself. Obviously to Chamberlain the Jew is the type of pure Race, and pure Race is what he looks upon as the most important factor in shaping the destinies of mankind. Here he joins issue with Buckle, who considered that climate and food have been the chief agents in mental and physical development. Rice as a staple food Buckle held to be the explanation of the special aptitudes of the Indian Aryans. The error is grotesque. As Chamberlain points out, rice is equally the food of the Chinese, of the hard-and-fast materialists who are the very antipodes of the idealist, metaphysical Aryans. In the matter of climate Chamberlain might have brought the same witnesses into court. There are more variations of climate in China than in Europe. The climate of Canton differs as much from that of Peking as from that of St. Petersburg. The Chinaman of the north speaks a different language from that of the south, though the ideographic script is the same: his food is different, the air that he breathes is different: but the racial characteristics remain identical.

Race and purity of blood are what constitute a type, and nowhere has this type been more carefully preserved than among the Jews. I remember once calling upon a distinguished Jewish gentleman. Mr. D'Israeli, as he was then, had just left him. "What did you talk about?" I asked at haphazard. "Oh," said my host, "the usual thing -- the Race." No one was more deeply penetrated with the idea of the noble purity of "the Race" than Lord Beaconsfield. No one believed more fully in the influence of the Jew working alongside of the Indo-European. With what conviction does he insist upon this in Coningsby!

That Race, however, does not drop ready-made from the skies is certain; nature and history show us no single example either among men or beasts of a prominently noble and distinctly individual race which is not the result of a mixture. Once the race established, it must be preserved. The English constitute a Race, and a noble one, though their pedigree shows an infusion of Anglo-Saxon, Danish and Norman bloods. In spite of its history which is its religion, there is proof that at a remote stage of its existence the Jewish race was actually formed of several elements. Its stability, unchanged for thousands of years, is one of the wonders of the world. One rigidly observed law is sufficient for their purpose. The Israelite maiden may wed a Gentile: such an alliance tends not to the degeneracy of the race: but the Jewish man must not marry outside his own nation, the seed of the chosen people of Jehovah must not be contaminated by a foreign alliance. That Chamberlain is a strong Anti-Semite adds to the value of the testimony which he bears to the nobility of the Sephardim, the intensely aristocratic Jews of Spain and Portugal, the descendants of the men whom the Romans, dreading their influence, deported westward. "That is nobility in the fullest sense of the word, genuine nobility of race! Beautiful forms, noble heads, dignity in speech and in deportment.... That out of the midst of such men prophets and psalmists should go forth, that I understood at the first glance -- something which I confess the closest observation of the many hundred 'Bochers' in the Friedrichstrasse in Berlin had failed to enable me to do." To the Ashkenazim, the so-called German Jews, Chamberlain is as it seems to me unjust. That they have played a greater part in the history of the nineteenth century than the Sephardim is hardly to be denied. They are born financiers and the acquisition of money has been their characteristic talent. But of the treasure which they have laid up they have given freely. The charities of the great cities of Europe would be in a sad plight were the support of the Jews to be withdrawn; indeed many noble foundations owe their existence to them. Politically too they have rendered great services: one instance which Chamberlain himself quotes is the settlement of the French indemnity after the war of 1870. Bismarck was represented by a Jew, and the French on their side appointed a Jew to meet him, and these two Jews belonged to the Ashkenazim, not to the noble Sephardim.

Who and what then is the Jew, this wonderful man who during the last hundred years has attained such a position in the whole civilised world?

Of all the histories of the ancient world there is none that is more convincing, none more easily to be realised, than that of the wanderings of the patriarch Abraham. It is a story of four thousand years ago, it is a story of yesterday, it is a story of to-day. A tribe of Bedouin Arabs with their womenkind and children and flocks flitting across the desert from one pasture to another is a sight still commonly seen -- some of us have even found hospitality in the black tents of these pastoral nomads, where the calf and the foal and the child are huddled together as they must have been in Abraham's day. Such a tribe it was that wandered northward from the city of Ur on the fringe of the desert, on the right bank of the Euphrates, northward to Padan Aram at the foot of the Armenian Highlands; six hundred kilometres as the crow flies, fifteen hundred if we allow for the bends of the river and for the seeking of pasture. From Padan Aram the tribe travels westward to Canaan, thence south to Egypt and back again to Canaan. It is possible that the names of the patriarchs may have been used to indicate periods, but, however that may be, these journeys, long in themselves, and complicated by the incumbrances of flocks and herds, occupied a great space in time; there were moreover long halts, residences lasting for centuries in the various countries which were traversed, during which intermarriages took place with the highly civilised peoples with whom the wanderers came in contact.

The Bible story, ethnology, the study of skulls and of racial types, all point to the fact that the Jewish people, the descendants of the tribes of Judah and Benjamin, united in themselves the five great qualifications which Chamberlain holds to be necessary for the establishment of a powerful race. First, to start with, a strong stock. This the Jew possessed in his Arab origin. No type, surely, was ever so persistent as that of the Bedouin Arab of the desert, the same to-day as he was thousands of years ago. Secondly, inbreeding. Thirdly, such inbreeding not to be at haphazard but carefully carried out, the best mating only with the best. Fourthly, intermarriage with another race or races. Fifthly, here again careful selection is essential. The Jewish race, built up under all these conditions, was, as we have seen, once formed, kept absolutely pure and uncontaminated. Of what happens where these laws are not observed the mongrels of the South American republics -- notably of Peru -- furnish a striking example.

In the days of the Roman Republic the influence of the Israelite was already felt. It is strange to read of Cicero, who could thunder out his denunciations of a Catiline, dropping his voice in the law courts when of the Jews he spoke with bated breath lest he should incur their displeasure. In the Middle Ages high offices were conferred by Popes upon Jews, and in Catholic Spain they were even made bishops and archbishops. In France the Jews found the money for the Crusades -- Rudolph of Habsburg exempted them from the ordinary laws. In all countries and ages the Jew has been a masterful man. Never was he more powerful than he is to-day. Well may Chamberlain count Judea as the third ancient country which with Greece and Rome has made itself felt in the development of our civilisation. It is not possible within the limits of this brief notice to give an idea of the extraordinary interest of Chamberlain's special chapter upon the Jews and their entry into the history of the West. I have already hinted that with some of his conclusions I do not agree: but I go all lengths with him in his appreciation of the stubborn singleness of purpose and dogged consistency which have made the Jew what he is. The ancient Jew was not a soldier -- foreigners furnished the bodyguard of his king. He was no sailor like his cousins the Phoenicians, indeed he had a horror of the sea. He was no artist -- he had to import craftsmen to build his Temple -- neither was he a farmer, nor a merchant. [1]  What was it then that gave him his wonderful self-confidence, his toughness of character, which could overcome every difficulty, and triumph over the hatred of other races? It was his belief in the sacred books of the law, the Thora: his faith in the promises of Jehovah: his certainty of belonging to the chosen people of God. The influence of the books of the Old Testament has been far-reaching indeed, but nowhere has it exercised more power than in the establishing of the character of the Jew. If it means so much to the Christian, what must it not mean to him? It is his religion, the history of his race, and his individual pedigree all in one. Nay! it is more than all that: it is the attesting document of his covenant with his God.

Within the compass of a few pages Chamberlain has performed what amounts to a literary feat: he has made us understand the condition of Europe and of the chief countries of the Mediterranean littoral at the time of the first symptoms of decay in the power of Rome. It was the period of what he calls the "Wilker-chaos," a hurly-burly of nationalities in which Greeks and Romans, Syrians, African mongrels, Armenians, Gauls and Indo-Europeans of many tribes were all jumbled up together --  a seething, heterogeneous conflicting mass of humanity in which all character, individuality, belief and customs were lost. In this witches' Sabbath only the Jew maintained his individuality, only the Teuton preserved the two great characteristics of his race, freedom and faith -- the Jew the witness of the past; the Teuton the power of the future.

They were a wonderful people, these tall men with the fair hair and blue eyes, warriors from their birth, fighting for fighting's sake, tribe against tribe, clan against clan, so that Tiberius, looking upon them as a danger, could think of no better policy than to leave them alone to destroy one another. But the people who held in their hands the fate of mankind were not to be got rid of like so many Kilkenny cats. Their battlesomeness made them a danger to the State -- to a Roman Emperor, ever under the shadow of murder, their trustworthiness made them the one sure source from which he could recruit his bodyguard. But they were not mere fighting machines, though war was to them a joy and a delight. From their Aryan ancestors, from the men to whom the poems of the Rigveda were a holy writ, they had received, instilled in their blood, a passion for song and for music, an imagination which revelled in all that is beautiful, and which loved to soar into the highest realms of thought. And so it came to pass that when in the fulness of time they absorbed the power of Europe, they knew how to make the most of the three great legacies which they had inherited: poetry and art from the Greeks, law and statecraft from the Romans, and, greatest of all, the teaching of Christ. By them, with these helps, was founded the culture of the nineteenth century.

In the descendants of such men it is not surprising to see the union of the practical with the ideal. A Teuton writes The Criticism of Pure Reason. A Teuton invents the steam-engine. "The century of Bessemer and Edison is equally the century of Beethoven and Richard Wagner.... Newton interrupts his mathematical inquiries to write a commentary on the Revelation of St. John. Crompton troubles himself with the invention of the spinning mule, that he may have more leisure to devote to his one love -- music. Bismarck, the statesman of blood and iron, in the critical moments of his life causes the sonatas of Beethoven to be played to him." Whoso does not realise all this, fails to understand the essence of the Teuton character, and is unable to judge of the part which it has played in the past and is still playing in the present.

The Goths, who of course were Teutons, have been, as Gibbon puts it, "injuriously accused of the ruin of antiquity." Their very name has passed into a byword for all that is barbarous and destructive; yet, as a matter of fact, it was Theodosius and his followers who, with the help of the Christian fanatics, destroyed the Capitol and the monuments of ancient art, whereas it was Theodoric, the Ostrogoth, on the contrary, who issued edicts for the preservation of the ancient glories of Rome. Yet "this man could not write; for his signature he had to use a metal stencil.... But that which was beautiful, that which the nobler spirits of the Chaos of Peoples hated as a work of the devil, that the Goth at once knew how to appreciate: to such a degree did the statues of Rome excite his admiration that he appointed a special official for their protection." Who will deny the gift of imagination in the race which produced a Dante (his name Alighieri a corruption of Aldiger, taken from his grandmother who was of a Goth family from Ferrara), a Shakespeare, a Milton, a Goethe, a Schiller, not to speak of many other great and lesser lights? Who will dispute the powers of thought of a Locke, a Newton, a Kant, a Descartes? We have but to look around us in order to see how completely our civilisation and culture are the work of the Germane.

Freedom, above all things Freedom, was the watchword of the Germane -- Dante taking part with the Bianchi against the Neri and Pope Boniface; Wycliffe rebelling against the rule of the Church of Rome; Martin Luther leading a movement which was as much political as it was religious, or even more so; all these were apostles of Freedom. The right to think and to believe, and to live according to our belief, is that upon which the free man insists: our enjoyment of it is the legacy of those great men to us. Without the insistence of the Germane, religious toleration would not exist to-day.

We have seen that Chamberlain takes the year one -- the birth of our Lord -- as the first great starting-point of our civilisation. The second epoch which he signalises as marking a fresh departure is the year 1200. The thirteenth century was a period of great developments. It was a period full of accomplishment and radiant with hope. In Germany the founding and perfecting of the great civic league known as the Hansa, in England the wresting of Magna Charta from King John by the Barons, laid the foundation of personal freedom and security. The great religious movement in which St. Francis of Assisi was the most powerful agent "denied the despotism of the Church as it did the despotism of the State, and annihilated the despotism of wealth." It was the first assertion of freedom to think. Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, Albertus Magnus and Roger Bacon were leaders, the first two in philosophical thought, the last two in modern natural science. In poetry, and not in poetry alone but in statecraft, Dante towers above all those of his day; and yet there were many poets, singers whose names are still famous, while at the same time lived Adam de la Halle, the first great master in counterpoint. Among painters we find such names as Niccolo Pisani, Cimabue, Giotto, from whom sprang the new school of art. And while these men were all working each at his own craft, great churches and cathedrals and monuments were springing up, masterpieces of the Gothic architect's skill. Well did the thirteenth century deserve the title given to it by Fiske, "the glorious century." [2]

When we reach these times we stand on fairly firm ground. The details of history, when we think how the battle rages round events which have taken place in our own times [for instance, the order for the heroic mistake of the Balaclava charge, where "some one had blundered"] may not always command respect, but the broad outlines are clear enough. We are no longer concerned with the deciphering of an ambiguous cuneiform inscription. The works of the great men testify, and their witness commands respect.

The second volume of the Grundlagen opens with a chapter entitled "Religion" -- a chapter which leaves upon the mind of the reader a vivid impression of the superstitions and myths which gave birth to the dogmas of the Christian Church in its early years, dogmas the acceptance or rejection of which was decided by the votes of Councils of Bishops, many of whom could neither read nor write. It seems incredible that such sublime questions as those of the nature of the Godhead, the relation of the Father to the Son, Eternal Punishment and others, should have been settled by a majority of votes "like the imposition of taxes by our Parliaments." In the dark ages of Christianity, Judaism, Indian mythology, Egyptian mysteries and magic, were woven into a chequered woof, which was an essential contradiction of the touching simplicity of our Lord's teaching. It was a strange moment in the world's history, and one which lent itself to the welding together of utterly dissimilar elements. In the Chaos of Peoples, all mixed up in the weirdest confusion, the dogma-monger found his opportunity. Judaism, which up to that time had been absolutely confined to the Jews, was clutched at with eagerness by men who were tired of the quibbles, the riddles and the uncertainties of the philosophers. Here was something solid, concrete; a creed which preached facts, not theories, a religion which announced itself as history. In the international hodgepodge, a jumble in which all specific character, all feeling of race or country had been lost, the Asiatic and Egyptian elements of this un-Christian Christianity, this travesty of our Lord's teaching, found ready acceptance. The seed  bed was ready and the seed germinated and prospered greatly. In vain did the nobler spirits, the wiser and more holy-minded of the early Fathers raise their voices against gross superstitions borrowed from the mysteries of Isis and of Horus. The Jews and dogma triumphed. The religion of Christ was too pure for the vitiated minds of the Chaos of Peoples, and perhaps dogma was a necessity, a hideous evil, born that good might arise. Men needed a Lord who should speak to them as slaves: they found him in the God of Israel. They needed a discipline, a ruling power; they found it in the Imperial Church of Rome.

Conversion to Christianity was in the days of the Empire far less a question of religious conviction than one of Law arbitrarily enforced for political reasons by autocrats who might or might not be Christians. Aurelian, a heathen, established the authority of the Bishop of Rome at the end of the third century. Theodosius made heresy and heathenism a crime of high treason. Lawyers and civil administrators were made Bishops -- Ambrosius even before he was baptized -- that they might enforce Christianity, as a useful handmaid in government and discipline. As the power of the Empire dwindled, that of the Church grew, until the Caesarism of the Papacy was crystallised in the words of Boniface VIII., "Ego sum Caesar, ego sum Imperator."

In vain did men of genius, as time went on and the temporal claims of the Popes became intolerable, rise in revolt against it. Charlemagne, Dante, St. Francis, all tried to separate Church from State. But the Papacy stood its ground, firm as the Tarpeian Rock, immutable as the Seven Hills themselves. It held to the inheritance which came to it not from St. Peter, the poor fisherman of the Sea of Galilee, but from the Caesars, like whom the Bishops of Rome claimed to be Sovereigns over the world. How much more tolerant the early Popes were in religious matters than in temporal is a point which Chamberlain forcibly brings out: they might bear with compromise in the one; in the other they would not budge an inch. Like the Phoenix in the fable, out of its own ashes the Roman Empire arose in a new form, the Papacy.

It is not possible here to dwell upon our author's contrast between St. Paul and Augustine, that wonderful African product of the Chaos, in whom the sublime and the ridiculous went hand in hand, who believed in the heathen Gods and Goddesses as evil spirits, who took Apuleius and his transformation into an ass seriously, to whom witches and sorcerers, and a dozen other childish fancies of the brain, were realities. We must leave equally untouched his interesting sketches of Charlemagne and Dante and their efforts at Reformation. His main object in this chapter is to show the position of the Church at the beginning of the thirteenth century. The Papacy was in its glory. Its doctrines, its dogmas and its temporal supremacy had been enforced -- politically it stood upon a pinnacle. The proudest title of the Caesars had been that of Pontifex Maximus. The Pontifex Maximus was now Caesar.

And the present position -- what of to-day? The Church of Rome is as solid as ever it was. The Reformation achieved much politically. It achieved freedom. But as the parent of a new and consistent religion, Protestantism has been a failure. Picking and choosing, accepting and rejecting, it has cast aside some of the dogmas of the early days of the  Chaos, but it remains a motley crowd of sects without discipline, all hostile to one another, all more or less saturated with the tenets of the very Church against which they rebelled. Rome alone remains consistent in its dogmas, as in its claims, and, purged by the Reformation of certain incongruous and irreconcilable elements, has in religion rather gained than lost strength. It is easy to see what difficulties the lack of unity creates for Protestant missionaries. Church men, Chapel men, Calvinists, Baptists, Presbyterians, Methodists, Congregationalists and Heaven knows how many more, all pulling against one another! and the Roman Catholic Church against them all! The religion of Christ as He taught it absolutely nowhere! Small wonder that the heathen should grin and be puzzled.

The building up of the ideal State as we know it to-day was the result of two mighty struggles which raged during the first twelve centuries of our era. The first, as we have seen, was the fight for power between the Caesars and the Popes for the Empire of the world in which now one, now the other, had the upper hand. The second was the struggle between "Universalism" and "Nationalism," that is to say, between the idea on the one hand of a boundless Empire, whether under Caesar or Pope, and on the other a spirit of nationality within sure bounds, and a stubborn determination to be free from either potentate, which ended in the organisation of independent States and the triumph of the Teuton. His rise meant the dawn of a new culture, not as we are bidden to remember a Renaissance in the sense of the calling back into life of a dead past, but a new birth into freedom, a new birth in which the cramping shackles, the levelling influences of the Imperium Romanum, of the Civitas Dei, were cast aside -- in which at last, after long centuries of slavery, men might live, thinking and working and striving according to their impulses, believing according to the faith that was in them.

Independent statecraft then, as opposed to the all-absorbing Imperium, was the work of the rebellious Teuton, the poet warrior, the thinker, the free man. It was a mighty victory, yet one in which defeat has never been acknowledged. From his prison in the Vatican the Pope continues to issue Bulls and Briefs hurling defiance at the world and at common sense; new saints are canonised, new dogmas proclaimed by oecumenical councils summoned from all parts of the inhabited world; and there are good men and, in many respects, wise men, who bow their heads and tremble. No one can say that the Papacy, though shorn of its earthly dominions, is not still a Power to be reckoned with: its consistency commands respect; but the Civitas Dei is a thing of the past: it is no more than a dream in the night, from which a weary old man wakens to find its sole remnant in the barren semblance of a mediaeval court, and the man-millinery of an out-of-date ceremonial. Truly a pathetic figure!

A new world has arisen. The thirteenth century was the turning-point. The building is even now not ended. But the Teuton was at work everywhere, and the foundations were well and truly laid. In Italy, north and south, the land was overrun with men of Indo-European race -- Goths, Lombards, Norsemen, Celts. It was to them that was owing the formation of the municipalities and cities which still remain as witnesses of their labour. It was their descendants, certainly not the hybrids of the Chaos, that worked out the so-called "Renaissance," and when owing to the internecine feuds and petty wars, as well as to the too frequent intermixture with the hybrids, the Teuton element became weaker and weaker, the glory of Italy waned likewise. Happily for the world the race was maintained in greater purity elsewhere.

The leitmotiv which runs through the whole book is the assertion of the superiority of the Teuton family to all the other races of the world -- and more especially, as we have seen, is this shown by the way in which the Germane threw off the shackles with which, under the guise of religion, the Papacy strove to fetter him. It is interesting to consider how Immanuel Kant, the greatest thinker that ever lived, treated this subject. He, the man who was so deeply penetrated with religious feeling that he held it to be "the duty of man to himself to have religion," saw in the teaching of Christ a "perfect religion." His demand was for a religion which should be one in spirit and in truth, and for the belief in a God "whose kingdom is not of this world." He by no means rejected the Bible, but he held that its value lay not so much in that which we read in it, as in that which we read into it, nor is he the enemy of Churches, "of which there may be many good forms." But with superstition and dogma he will have no dealings. Nor is this to be wondered at when we consider how, by whom, and for what purpose dogmas, as we have seen above, were manufactured, and what manner of men they were who degraded the early Church with their superstitions. In the mass of ignorant monks and bishops who were the so-called "Fathers of the Church" there are brilliant exceptions. Perhaps the greatest of these was St. Augustine. He was a good and a holy man, but even his great brain, as we have seen, was saturated with Hellenic mythology, Egyptian magic and witchcraft, Neoplatonism, Judaism, Romish dogmatism. If we cite him as an irrefutable authority on a point of dogma, we should, to be consistent, go a step farther, and equally hold him as irrefutable when he inclines to a belief in Apuleius and his ass, and in his views as to Jupiter, Juno and the theocracy of Olympus. Religious dogmas, superstitions, so bred, could not be accepted by a man of Kant's intellect. They were noxious weeds to be rooted up and swept out of existence. Christ's teaching being, as he held it to be, perfect, could only be degraded by being loaded with heathen fables and tawdry inanities. It was the scum of the people who invented superstitions, the belief in witches and demons: it was the priestcraft who welded those false doctrines into the semblance of a religion to which they gave Christ's name. [3]

Kant said of himself that he was born too soon; that a century must elapse before his day should come. "The morning has dawned," as Chamberlain says in another book, [4] and "it is no mere chance that the first complete and exact edition of Kant's collected works and letters should have begun to appear for the first time in the year 1900; the new century needed this strong guardian spirit, who thought himself justified in saying of his system of philosophy that it worked a revolution in the scheme of thought analogous to that of the Copernican system. There are to-day a few who know, and many who suspect, that this scheme of philosophy must form a pillar of the culture of the future. For every cultivated and civilised man Kant's thought possesses a symbolical significance; it wards off the two opposite dangers -- the dogmatism of the Priests and the superstition of science -- and it strengthens us in the devoted fulfilment of the duties of life." Now that thought is less cramped and Kant is beginning to be understood, the true religiosity of his august nature is surely being recognised, and the last charge that will be brought against him will be that of irreligion. If he destroyed, he also built; he was not one of those teachers who rob a man of what he possesses without giving anything in exchange. He completed the work which Martin Luther had begun. Luther was too much of a politician and too little of a theologian for his task; moreover he never was able altogether to throw off the monk's cowl. To the last he believed in the Real Presence in the Sacrament, and hardly knew what dogmas he should accept and what he should reject. Kant was the master who taught Christianity in all its beauty of simplicity. The kingdom of God is in you! There was no cowl to smother Kant.

The foundation-stone of the nineteenth century was laid by Christ himself. For many centuries after His death upon the Cross, ignorant men, barbarians, under the cloak of religion, were at pains to hide that stone in an overwhelming heap of rubbish. Kant laid it bare, and revealed it to the world: his reward was the execration of men who were not worthy to unloose the latchet of his shoes: but the tables are turned now. His morning has indeed dawned, and the twentieth century is recognising the true worth of the man who, more than any other, has influenced the thought of the educated world. Goethe, indeed, said of Kant that he had so penetrated the minds of men that even those who had not read him were under his influence.

The last section of Chamberlain's ninth chapter is devoted to Art. He has kept one of his most fascinating subjects for the end. And who is better qualified to write upon it than he? Here is not the conventional aspect of Art contained in the technical dictionaries and encyclopredias, "in which the last judgment of Michael Angelo, or a portrait of Rembrandt by himself, are to be seen cheek by jowl with the lid of a beer-mug or the back of an arm-chair." Art is here treated as the great creative Power, a Kingdom of which Poetry and Music, twin sisters, inseparable, are the enthroned Queens. To Chamberlain, as it was to Carlyle, the idea of divorcing Poetry from Music is inconceivable. "Music," wrote Carlyle, "is well said to be the speech of angels; in fact nothing among the utterances allowed to man is felt to be so divine. It brings us near to the Infinite." "I give Dante my highest praise when I say of his Divine Comedy that it is in all senses genuinely a song." Again: "All old Poems, Homer's and the rest, are authentically songs. I would say in strictness, that all right Poems are; that whatsoever is not sung is properly no Poem, but a piece of Prose cramped into jingling lines, to the great injury of the grammar, to the great grief of the reader for the most part!" so spoke Carlyle, and so speaks Chamberlain, with the masterly competence of a man who as critic and disciple, for he is both, has sat at the feet of the great Tone-Poet of our times. [5]

The hurry and bustle of this fussy age have largely robbed us of true enthusiasm, for which men substitute catchwords and commonplaces. All the more delight is there in meeting it in such sayings as this, coming straight from the heart of a man who is never in a hurry, whose convictions are the result of measured thought. "A Leonardo gives us the form of Christ, a Johann Sebastian Bach his voice, even now present to us." The influence of Religion upon Art, and in reflex action, that of Art upon Religion has never been better shown than in these words. Religion inspired the artists, furnished them with their subject; the artists, so inspired, have touched the hearts of thousands, infusing them with some perception, some share of their own inspiration.

Who can say how many minds have been turned to piety by the frescoes of Cimabue and Giotto picturing the life of St. Francis at Assisi? Who can doubt the influence of the Saint upon the painters of the early Italian school? Who has not felt the religious influence of the architect, the painter, the sculptor? Two great principles are laid down for us by Chamberlain in regard to Art. First: Art must be regarded as a whole: as a "pulsing blood- system of the higher spiritual life." Secondly: all Art is subordinated to poetry. But not that which has been written is alone poetry: the creative power of poetry is widespread. As Richard Wagner said, "the true inventor has ever been the people. The individual cannot invent, he can only make his own that which has been invented." This I take it is the true spirit of folk-lore. If you think of it, the epic of Homer, the "mystic unfathomable song," as Tieck called it, of Dante, the wonders of Shakespeare, all prove the truth of Wagner's saying. The matter is there: then comes the magician: he touches it with his wand, and it lives! That is true creative art, the art which in its turn inspires, fathering all that is greatest and noblest in the world. It is the art upon which the culture of the nineteenth century has been founded and built.

Rich indeed have been the gifts which have been showered upon mankind between the thirteenth and the nineteenth centuries. New worlds have been discovered, new forces in nature revealed. Paper has been introduced, printing invented. In political economy, in politics, in religion, in natural science and dynamics there have been great upheavals all paving the way for that further progress for which we are apt to take too much credit to ourselves, giving too little to those glorious pioneers who preceded us, to the true founders of the century.

I have endeavoured to give some idea of the scope of Chamberlain's great work. I am very sensible of my inadequacy to the task, but it was his wish that I should undertake it, and I could not refuse. I console myself with the thought that even had I been far better fitted for it, I could not within the limits of these few pages have given a satisfying account of a book which embraces so many and so various subjects, many of which I had of necessity to leave untouched. Indeed, I feel appalled at the range of reading which its production must have involved; but as to that the book is its own best witness. We are led to hope that some day the history of the Foundations of the Nineteenth Century may be followed by an equally fascinating analysis of the century itself from the same pen. It will be the fitting crown of a colossal undertaking. It may be doubted whether there is any other man equipped as Chamberlain is to erect such a monument in honour of a great epoch. To few men has been given in so bountiful a measure the power of seeing, of sifting the true from the false, the essential from the insignificant; comparison is the soul of observation, and the wide horizon of Chamberlain's outlook furnishes him with standards of comparison which are denied to those of shorter sight: his peculiar and cosmopolitan education, his long researches in natural history, his sympathy and intimate relations with all that has been noblest in the world of art -- especially in its most divine expression, poetry and music -- point to him as the one man above all others worthy to tell the further tale of a culture of which he has so well portrayed the non-age, and which is still struggling heavenward. But in addition to these qualifications he possesses, in a style which is wholly his own, the indescribable gift of charm, so that the pupil is unwittingly drawn into a close union with the teacher, in whom he sees an example of the truth of Goethe's words, which Chamberlain himself more than once quotes:

Hochstes Gluck der Erdenkinder
Ist nur die Personlichkeit.
[Only the personality is the highest happiness of the children of earth.]-- REDESDALE
BATSFORD PARK
January 8, 1909

NOTE. This introduction was in print before the writer had seen Dr. Lees' translation. There may, therefore, be some slight discrepancies in the passages quoted.

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Notes:

1. It was a common creed of the days of my youth that all the great musical composers were of Jewish extraction. The bubble has long since been pricked. Joachim, who was a Jew, and as proud of his nationality as Lord Beaconsfield himself, once expressed to Sir Charles Stanford his sorrow at the fact that there should never have been a Jewish composer of the first rank. Mendelssohn was the nearest approach to it, and after him, Meyerbear. But in those days Mendelssohn, in spite of all his charm, is no longer counted in the first rank. Some people have thought that Brahms was a Jew, that his name was a corruption of Abrahams. But this is false. Brahms came of a Silesian family, and in the Silesian dialect Brahms means a reed. (See an Interesting paper in Truth of January 13, 1909). In poetry, on the other hand, the Jew excelled. The Psalms, parts of Isaiah, the sweet idyll of Ruth are above praise. The Book of Job is extolled by Carlyle as the finest of all poems, and according to Chamberlain poetry is the finest of all arts. In the plastic arts, as in music, the Jew has been barren.

2. It is strange to see how great tidal waves of intellectual and creative power from time to time flood the world. Take as another example the sixteenth century, the era of the artistic revival in Italy, of the heroes of the Reformation. What a galaxy of genius is there. To cite only a few names; Ariosto, Tasso, Camoens. Magellan, Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, St. Francis Xavier, St. Ignatius Loyola, Rabelais, Shakespeare, Bacon. The best works of Indian art are produced under the reign of the Moghul Akbar, Damascus turns out its finest blades; the tiles of Persia, and the porcelain of China under the Ming Dynasty, reach their highest perfection; while in far Japan Miyochin, her greatest artist in metal, is working at the same time as Benvenuto Cellini in Florence and Rome. Such epidemics of genius as those of the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries are mysteries indeed. This, however is but an aside, though as I think one worthy of note.

3. The Christian religion, I would point out here, is not the only one which has suffered in this way. Nothing can be simpler, nothing purer in its way than Buddhism as the Buddha taught it. Yet see what the monks have made of it! The parallel is striking.

4. Immanuel Kant, by Chamberlain. Bruckmann, Munich, 1905, The book which Chamberlain tells me that he himself considers the "most important" of his works. It is published in German.

5. It is curious to note that of the three greatest English poets of our day, Tennyson, whose songs are music itself, knew no tune, Swinburne, whose magic verses read with the lilt of a lovely melody, had not the gift of Ear, while Browning, the rugged thinker, the most unvocal of poets, never missed an opportunity of listening to music in its most exalted form.

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