[Footnote 354: Holm on this head makes an admission (iii, 168) which countervails the remark last above cited from him. Noting the prosperity of art in Asiatic Greece, he writes: "Art as a rule flourishes--we do not say, reaches its highest point, _for that is impossible without freedom_--where wealth is to be found combined with good taste. And good taste is a gift which even tyrants may possess, and semi-barbarians acquire."]
[Footnote 355: Professor Spalding, _Italy and the Italian Islands_, i, 117, 118.]
[Footnote 356: K.O. Muller, _History of Greek Literature_, 1847, pp.
208, 210.]
[Footnote 357: Schomann, _Griechische Alterthumer_, ii, 362.]
[Footnote 358: The questions of the previous expansion under Richelieu and Mazarin, and of the decay in the latter part of Louis"s reign, are discussed, _apropos_ of the _laissez-faire_ argument of Buckle, in the author"s _Buckle and his Critics_, pp. 324-39.]
[Footnote 359: An interesting corroboration of the above general view was presented in an article on the state of German art in the _Century Magazine_ for July, 1898. The writer thus described the position of German art under the Kaiser"s patronage: "Moved by the best of intentions, the Emperor is not very successful in his efforts to encourage art. They smack too much of personal tastes and one-man power.
Menzel is perhaps a favourite, not because of his great Meissonnier-like skill in ill.u.s.trations, but because he is the draftsman and painter of the period of Frederick the Great. The Emperor is really honouring his own line rather than the artist when he covers him with rewards.... It is not by making sketches for the Knackfusses to carry out that the Emperor will raise art in Prussia from its present stagnation, but by allowing the dangerous breath of liberty to blow through the art world.
The fine arts are under the drill-sergeant, and produce recruits who have everything except art in them. It is too much to say that this is the Emperor"s fault; but it is true that so long as he insists upon running things artistic, no one else can, or will--and the artists themselves least of all."]
[Footnote 360: Cp. Mill, _Liberty_, ch. iii, People"s ed. p. 38.]
[Footnote 361: Cp. J.S. Mill"s a.n.a.lysis of "benevolent despotism" in ch.
iii of his _Representative Government_.]
[Footnote 362: Prof. Mahaffy (_Greek Life and Thought_, p. 112) attributes the same sense of superiority to the men of the period of the earlier successors of Alexander. This could well be, and such a feeling would serve to inspire the great art works of the period in question.
Cp. Thirlwall (vii, 120) as to the sense of new growth set up by the commercial developments of the Alexandrian world.]
[Footnote 363: Finlay. _History of Greece_, i. 186. Cp. p. 185.]
[Footnote 364: D. Bikelas. _Seven Essays on Christian Greece_, translated by the Marquess of Bute, 1890.]
[Footnote 365: Work cited, p. 103.]
[Footnote 366: Work cited, pp. 97-98; Finlay, _History of Greece_, iv, 351-52. That this was no Christian innovation becomes clear when we compare the status of women in Egypt and imperial Rome. Cp. Mahaffy, _Greek Life and Thought_, pp. 173-74. And see his _Greek World under Roman Sway_, p. 328, as to pre-Christian developments.]
[Footnote 367: Bikelas, p. 104.]
[Footnote 368: Ch. 53, Bohn ed. vi, 233. Cp. Finlay, ii, 4, 217, as to the internal forces of routine.]
[Footnote 369: _De bello Gothico_, i, 3. Cp. Gibbon, ch. 47, note, Bohn ed. v, 243; and Prof. Bury"s App. to his ed. of Gibbon, iv, 516.]
[Footnote 370: Finlay, _History of Greece_, i, 224-25; Gibbon, ch. 43, end.]
[Footnote 371: "The degrading feature of the end of the seventh century ... was the ignorant credulity of the richer cla.s.ses" (Bury, _History of the Later Empire_, ii, 387). Cp. Gibbon, ch. 54, Bohn ed. vi, 235.]
[Footnote 372: Cp. Bury, as cited, ii, 521.]
[Footnote 373: Bury, App. 12 to ed. of Gibbon, v, 531.]
Chapter II
THE SARACENS
While Byzantine civilisation thus stagnated, the Saracen civilisation for a time actually gained by contact with it, inasmuch as Byzantium possessed, if it could not employ, the treasures of old h.e.l.lenic science and philosophy. The fact that such a fructification of an alien civilisation could take place while the transmitting community showed no similar gain, is tolerably decisive as to _(a)_ the constrictive force of religious systems under certain conditions, and _(b)_ the nullity of the theory of race genius. Yet these very circ.u.mstances have been made the ground of a preposterous impeachment of the "Semitic" character in general, and of the Arab in particular.
Concerning no "race" save the Celtic has there been more unprofitable theorising than over the Semitic. One continental specialist after another[374] has explained Semitic "faculty" in terms of Semitic experience, always to the effect that a nation has a genius for becoming what it becomes, but only when it has become so, since what it does not do it has, by implication, no faculty for doing.[375] The learned Spiegel, for instance, in his work on the antiquities of Iran, inexpensively accounts for the Jewish opposition to sculpture as a matter of race taste,[376] without even asking how a practice to which the race was averse had to be forbidden under heavy penalties, or why the same course was held in Aryan Persia. Connecting sculpture with architecture, he p.r.o.nounces the Semites averse to that also; and as regards the undeniable building tendencies of the Babylonians, he argues that we know not "how far entirely alien models were imitated by the Semites."[377] Only for music does he admit them to have any independent inclination; and their lack of epos and drama as such is explained, not by the virtual inclusion of their epopees and early dramatic writings in their Sacred Books, and the later tabu on secular literature, but by primordial lack of faculty for epos and drama. The vast development of imaginative fiction in the _Arabian Nights_ is credited bodily to the "Indo-Germanic" account, because it has Hindu affinities, and took place in Persia; and, of course, the Semites are denied a mythology, as by M.
Renan, no question being raised as to what is redacted myth in the Sacred Books. For the rest, "the Semite" is not fitted to shine in science, being in all his branches "almost totally devoid of intellectual curiosity," so that what philosophy and science he has are not "his own"; and he is equally ill-fitted for politics, wherein, having no political idea save that of the family, he oscillates between "unlimited despotism and complete anarchy."[378] Apart from music, his one special faculty is for religion.
Contemporary anti-Semitism may fairly be surmised to underlie in part such performances in pseudo-sociology, which, taken by themselves, set up a depressing suspicion that numbers of deeply learned specialists contrive to spend a lifetime over studies in departments of the history of civilisation without learning wherein the process of civilisation consists. On Spiegel"s method--which is that of Mommsen in dealing with the early culture-history of Rome--the Germanic nations must be adjudged to be naturally devoid of faculty for art, architecture, drama, philosophy, science, law, and order, since they had none of those things till they got them in the Middle Ages through the reviving civilisation of the Mediterranean and France. And as the Greeks certainly received their first impulse to philosophy and science through contact with the survivals of the old Semitic civilisations in Ionia, they in turn must be p.r.o.nounced to have "neither a philosophy nor a science of their own"; while the Spartans were no less clearly devoid of all faculty for the epic and the drama. It is the method of Moliere"s doctors, with their _virtus dormitivus_ of opium, applied to sociology.
The method, nevertheless, is steadily popular, and is no less freely applied to the phenomena of Arab retrogression than to those of imperfect development in the Semitic life of antiquity, with some edifying results as regards consistency. Says a French medical writer:--
"There is no such thing as an original Arab medical science. Arab medical science was a slavish imitation from the Greek. And the same remark is true of all the sciences. The Arabs have never been inventors. They are enthusiasts, possessed with a pa.s.sion for anything new, which renders their enthusiasm itself evanescent. And in consequence of this incapacity for perseverance, they soon forgot the lessons in medical science which they had once acquired from the Greeks, and have fallen back into a state of the most absolute ignorance."[379]
The method by which Arab defects are here demonstrated from the arrest of Arab civilisation is a simple extension of that by which Spiegel demonstrates the original deficiencies of the ancient Semites, and Mommsen the incapacity of the Latins to do what they did not do. A certain race or nation, having at one time attained a considerable degree of civilisation, and afterwards lost it, is held to have thus shown a collective incapacity for remembering what "it" or "they" had learned. The "they" here is the correlative of M. Taine"s "we"--a pseud-ent.i.ty, entirely self-determining and strictly h.o.m.ogeneous. The racial misfortune is set down to a fault pervading the whole national character or intellect, and peculiar to it in comparison with other national characters. Conditions count for nothing; totality of inherited character, acting _in vacuo_, is at once the summary and the judgment.
Anyone who has followed the present argument with any a.s.sent thus far will at once grant the futility of such doctrine. "The Arabs" had neither more nor less collective faculty of appreciation and oblivion than any other equally h.o.m.ogeneous people at the same culture-stage. It is quite true that they had not an "original medical science." But neither have any other historical "they" ever had such. The Greeks certainly had not. The beginnings of medical knowledge for all mankind lay of necessity in the primeval lore of the savage; and the nations which carried it furthest in antiquity were just those who learned what others had to give, and improved upon it. The Greeks must have learned from Asia, from Egypt,[380] from Phoenicia; and the Romans learned from the Greeks. The Arabs, coming late into the sphere of the higher civilisation, and crossing their stock in the East with those of Persia, in the West with the already much-mixed stocks of Spain, pa.s.sed quite as rapidly as the Greeks had done from the stage of primitive thought in all things to one of comparative rationality as regards medicine and the exact sciences; and this not in virtue of any special "enthusiasm"
for new ideas, but by the normal way of gradual collection of observations and reflection upon them, in communities kept alert by variety of intercourse, and sufficiently free on the side of the intellectual life. Such was the state of the Saracens in Persia and Spain in the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries; and their social evolution before and after is all a matter of natural sequence, not proceeding upon any peculiarity of collective character, but representing the normal reactions of character at a given culture-stage in special political circ.u.mstances.
What is peculiar to the Saracen civilisation is its sudden origin (taking Islam as a history by itself)[381] under conditions reached elsewhere only as climax in a long evolution. The rise of Islam has the twofold aspect of a barbarian campaign of plunder and a crusade of fanaticism; and though the prospect and the getting of plunder were needed to ripen the fanaticism to full bloom,[382] the latter was ultimately a part of the cementing force that turned a horde into a community. The great facilitating conditions for both were the feeble centralised system maintained by the Christianised Empire, and the disintegrating force of Christianity as a sectarian ferment. In Egypt, for instance, the hatred between rival schools of Christian metaphysic secured for the Arabs an unresisted entrance into Alexandria.[383] It needed only a few generations of contact with higher culture in a richer environment to put the Saracens, as regards art and science, very much on a level with the stagnating Byzantines; and where the latter, possessed of their scientific and philosophical cla.s.sics, but imprisoned by their religion, made no intellectual progress whatever, the former, on the same stimulus, progressed to a remarkable degree. There has been much dispute as to the exact measure of their achievements; but three things are clear: (1) that they carried the mathematics of astronomy beyond the point at which it had been left by the Greeks; (2) that they laid the foundations of chemistry; and(3) that they intelligently carried on surgery and medicine when the Byzantines, having early in the Christian period destroyed the Asklepions, which were in some degree the schools of the medicine of antiquity, had sunk to the level of using prayers and incantations and relics as their regular means of cure.
Curiously enough, too, the Saracens had the merit, claimed for the Byzantines, of letting their women share rather freely in their culture of all kinds.[384] What is more, the later Saracens of Spain, whatever the measure of their own scientific progress, were without question a great seminal force in the civilisation of Western Christendom, which drew from them its beginnings in mathematics, philosophy, chemistry, astronomy, and medicine, and to some extent even in literature[385] and architecture,[386] to say nothing of the effect on the useful arts of the contact of the Crusaders with the Saracens of the East.
As to Arab medicine, see Withington, as cited, pp. 139, 170; and Sprengel, _History of Medicine_, French tr. vol. ii (1815), pp.
262-64--a pa.s.sage which contradicts Sprengel"s previous disparagements. Compare p. 343. The _histoire particuliere_ in this chapter (v of Sect. 6) generally countervails the hostile summaries. Sprengel proceeded on the prejudice (i, 215) that there was no "rational science" anywhere before the Greeks; as if there were not many irrational elements in the science not only of the Greeks but of the moderns. A much better qualified historian of Arab medicine, Dr. Lucien Leclerc, writes (_Histoire de la medecine arabe_, 1876, i, 462) that in the eleventh century "the medical productions [of the Arabs] continue to develop an independent aspect, and have already a certain stamp of originality. Already the Arabs feel themselves rich on their own footing. We see appearing certain writings not less remarkable for the novelty of the form than for the value of the substance." Again, Dr. Ernst von Meyer, the historian of chemistry, sums up (_Hist. of Chemistry_, M"Gowan"s tr. 2nd ed. p. 28), that "the germs of chemical knowledge attained to a marvellous growth among the Arabians." It may be noted that there is record of a hospital in Bagdad at the beginning of the ninth century, and that there were many there in the tenth (Leclerc, i, 559).
A rational argument is brought against Semitic "faculty" by Dr.
Cunningham, it should be admitted, in the contention that the Phoenicians figured poorly as copyists of Greek art (_Western Civilisation_, p. 69, following Renan). But this argument entirely ignores the element of time that is needed to develop any art in any civilisation. The Phoenician civilisation was overthrown before it had time to a.s.similate Greek art developments, which themselves were the work of centuries even in a highly favourable set of conditions. Noldeke, though less unscientific than Spiegel, partly follows him in insisting that Phoenician architecture copied Egyptian, and that the later Semites copied the Greek, as if the Greeks in turn had not had predecessors and guides. Starting with the fixed fallacy that the Semites were "one-sided," he reasons in a circle to the effect that their one-sidedness was "highly prejudicial to the development of science," while compelled to admit the importance of the work of the Babylonians in astronomy. (_Sketches from Eastern History_, Eng. tr. pp. 15-18.)
It is now current doctrine that "for nearly eight centuries, under her Mohammedan rulers, Spain set to all Europe a shining example of a civilised and enlightened State. Her fertile provinces, rendered doubly prolific by the industry and engineering skill of her conquerors, bore fruit an hundredfold. Cities innumerable sprang up in the rich valleys of the Guadalquivir and the Guadiana.... Art, literature, and science prospered as they prospered nowhere else in Europe. Students flocked from France and Germany and England to drink from the fountain of learning which flowed only in the cities of the Moors. The surgeons and doctors of Andalusia were in the van of science; women were encouraged to devote themselves to serious study; and the lady doctor was not unknown among the people of Cordova. Mathematics, astronomy and botany, history[?], philosophy and jurisprudence[?] were to be mastered in Spain, and Spain alone. The practical work of the field, the scientific methods of irrigation, the arts of fortification and shipbuilding, the highest and most elaborate products of the loom, the graver and the hammer, the potter"s wheel and the mason"s trowel, were brought to perfection by the Spanish Moors."
See Stanley Lane-Poole, _The Moors in Spain_, pref. It could be wished that Mr. Lane-Poole had given English readers, as he so well could, a study of Saracen civilisation, instead of a "Story of the Nation" on the old lines. For corroboration of the pa.s.sage see Dozy, _Histoire des Musulmans d"Espagne_, 1861, iii, 109, 110; Prescott, _History of Ferdinand and Isabella_, Kirk"s ed. 1889, pp.
186-88, 192, 195-99; Draper, _Intellectual Development of Europe_, ed. 1875, ii, 30-53; Sismondi, _Historical View of the Literature of the South of Europe_, Eng. tr. i, 50-54, 64-68, 76-84, 89. Cp.
Seign.o.bos, _Histoire de la Civilisation au Moyen Age_, 3e ed. pp.
48-62; Gebhart, _Origines de la Renaissance en Italie_, 1879, pp.
185-89; Bosworth Smith, _Mohammed and Mohammedanism_, 2nd ed. pp.
217, 286; Noldeke, as cited, p. 105; Bouterwek, as cited, i, 3; Baden-Powell, _History of Natural Philosophy_, 1834, pp. 94-104; U.R. Burke, _History of Spain_, Hume"s ed. 1900, vol. i, ch. 16.
All this being so, the course of deciding that the Arabs retrogressed because "they" were impatient and discontinuous is on a level with the thesis that nature has a horror of a vacuum. The Arab civilisation was arrested and anchylosed by forces which in other civilisations operated in exactly the same modes. The first great trouble was the element of perpetual domestic strife, which was uncured by the monarchic system, since every succession was liable to dispute. Under such conditions just government could not flourish; and Moslem taxation always tended to be suicidally unscrupulous.[387] Disputes of succession, indeed, wrought hardly more strife among the Saracens than has taken place among Greeks and Romans, and Christians of all nations, down to modern times; even the ecclesiastical and feudal doctrine of legitimacy, developed by the Latin and Greek Churches, having failed to prevent dynastic wars in Christendom. But the Saracens, neighboured everywhere by Christians who bore them a twofold hostility, had peculiar need of union, and ran special risks from dissension; and in Spain their disunion was their ruin. At the same time their civilisation was strangled intellectually by a force which, though actually in operation in Christendom also, was there sufficiently countered by a saving condition which the Saracens finally lacked. The force of constriction was the cult of the Sacred Book; the counteracting force in Christendom was diversity and friction of governments and cultures--a condition which pa.s.sed out of the Saracen equation.
How fatally restrictive the cult of the completed Sacred Book can be is obvious in the history of Byzantium. It was in terms of the claims of the Christian creed that the Eastern Emperors proscribed pagan philosophy and science, reducing the life of the whole Eastern world as far as possible to one rigid and unreasoned code. That the mental life of Italy and France was relatively progressive even in the Middle Ages was substantially due--(1) to Saracen stimulus, and (2) to the friction and ferment set up by the diversity of life in the Italian republics, and the Italian and French and German universities. Byzantium was in comparison a China or an Egypt. The saving elements of political diversity, culture compet.i.tion, and culture contact have in later Europe completed the frustration of the tendency of church, creed, and Bible to destroy alike science and philosophy. In Islam, on the other hand, the arresting force finally triumphed over the progressive because of the social and political conditions. (1) The political field, though stormy, finally lacked diversity in terms of the universality of the monarchic principle, which was imposed by the military basis and bound up with the creed: uniformity of ideal was thus furthered. (2) There was practically no fresh culture contact possible after the a.s.similation of the remains of Greek science and the stimulus of Jewish philosophy; for medieval Christendom had no culture to give; and the more thoroughly the Papacy and the Christian monarchy in Spain were organised, the more hostile they grew to the Moors. (3) The economic stimulus among the latter tended to be restricted more and more to the religious cla.s.s, till that cla.s.s was able to suppress all independent mental activity.
The last is the salient circ.u.mstance. In any society, the special cultivation of serious literature and the arts and sciences depends on one or more of three conditions--(_a_) the existence of a cultured cla.s.s living on unearned incomes, as in ancient Athens, middle Rome, and modern England and France; (_b_) public expenditure on art and culture, as in ancient Athens, Renaissance Italy and modern France, and in the German university system _par excellence_; or (_c_) the personal concern of princes and other patrons to encourage ability. In the nature of the case it was mainly on this last and most precarious stimulus that Saracen culture depended. Taking it at its zenith, under such rulers as Haroun Alraschid and El-Mamoun at Bagdad, and Abderrahman III and Hakam II of Cordova, we find its advance always more or less dependent on the bounty of the caliph; and even if, like Abderrahman and his son Hakam, he founded all manner of public and free schools, it depended on the bias of his successors rather than on public opinion or munic.i.p.al custom whether the movement should continue. Abderrahman"s achievement, seen even through Christian eyes, was so manifold as to const.i.tute him one of the great rulers of all history; but the task of making Moorish civilisation permanent was one which no series of such statesmen could have compa.s.sed. The natural course of progress would have been through stable monarchy to const.i.tutionalism. But Christian barbarism, with its perpetual a.s.sault, kept the Saracens forever at the stage of active militarism, which is the negation of const.i.tutionalism; and their very refinement was a political danger, no less than their dynastic strifes.
On the other hand, the continuous stress of militarism was in ordinary course much more favourable to fanaticism than to free thought; and to fanaticism the Koran, like the Bible, was and is a perpetual stimulant.
It was as a militant faith that Islam maintained itself; and in such a civilisation the Sacred Book, which claimed to be the highest of all lore, and was all the while so easy a one, giving to ignorance and conceit the consciousness of supreme knowledge without any mental discipline whatever, was sure of abundant devotees.[388] In an uninstructed community--and of course the ma.s.s of the Saracen population was uninstructed[389]--the cult of the Sacred Book needs no special endowment; it can always be depended on to secure revenues for itself, even as may the medicine-man in an African tribe. To this day the propagation of the Koran is subscribed for in Turkey as the Bible Society is subscribed to among ourselves, ignorance earning thus the felicity of prescribing for human welfare in the ma.s.s, and at the same time propitiating Omnipotence, at the lowest possible outlay of study and reflection. Enthusiasms which can thus flourish in the twentieth century were of course abundant in the ninth, tenth, and eleventh;[390]
and thus we find that when a caliph was suspected by the pietists of caring too little for their lore, he ran the risk of being rebelled against with a speed and zeal in the ratio of their conviction of divine knowledge. Islam, unlike the State churches of Greece, Rome, and England, has democratic rootage in the practice of setting ordinary laymen to recite the prayers and preach the sermons in the mosques: it, in fact, resembles Methodism more than any of the established Christian churches in respect of its blending of clerisy and laity. Such a system, when thoroughly fanaticised, has enormous powers of turbulence; and in Moorish Spain we find them early exercised. Abderrahman I, whose policy of tolerance towards Jews and Christians transcended all previous Christian practice, and thus won for his realm a great stimulus in the way of variety of culture-elements and of industry, had kept the religious cla.s.s in due control; but his well-meaning son Hisham was priest-ridden to the last degree; and when his successor Hakam showed an indisposition to patronise pietists to the same extent they raised revolt after revolt (806-815), all put down by ma.s.sacre.
Mr. Lane-Poole notes (p. 73) the interesting fact that the theologers were largely of Spanish stock, the natives having in general embraced Islam. Thus the fanaticism of the Berbers was reinforced by that of the older population, which, as Buckle showed, was made abnormally devout, not by inheritance of character, but by the constant effect of terrorising environment, in the form of earthquakes.
The elements of the situation remained fundamentally unchanged; and when the Moorish military power began to feel more and more the pressure of the strengthening Christian foe, it lay in the nature of the case that the fanatical species should predominate. The rationalistic and indifferent types would figure as the enemies of their race, very much as such types would have done in Covenanting Scotland. At length, in the eleventh century, the weakened Moorish princes had to call in the aid of the fanatical Almoravides from Barbary; and these, with the full support of the priesthood and the pious, established themselves at the head of affairs, reducing everything as far as possible to the standards of the eighth century.[391] And when the new barbarism in time grew corrupt, as that of the Goths and Vandals had done in earlier ages, the "Unitarian"