The moral ideal : a historic study

Front matter

BOUGHT WITH THE INCOME PROM THE

SAGE ENDOWMENT FUND

THE GIFT OF

Contents

OHAP. PAGE

I. EGYPT THE EARLIEST NATION .... i

II. INDIA AND THE PRIMAL UNITY .... 40

Chapter I

The student of ideals should beware of despising the Sanctity in study of nomenclature. A name is something more than a ^ Natfon? sign-post ; the terms expressive of the moral life influence as well as reveal the course of moral development. An argument may be condensed into an epithet ; the word un- English, for example, although no one would deliberately maintain that our countrymen are distinguished from others by a practice of all the virtues, is hardly ever used except in an unfavourable sense. Doubtless the habit of stamping every word with praise or blame encourages prejudice; it would be easy to mention many epithets of which the force is blunted for description by their habitual use as eulogy or as condemnation. Still it would bfe a vain endeavour to drain away all moral association from words not primarily moral. Would any one give a merely neutral content to the word Nation? Strictly speaking it denotes no more than a particular group of human beings, good, bad, and indiiferent. It is almost synonymous with the word Country. We hardly remember that the one word belongs to history and the other to geography ; in common parlance the only difference between them is that the word nation is the more grandiloquent and the less poetic of the two. Yet with the slight change we enter or quit the realm of moral association. The frequent quotation of Burke's supposed statement that it is not possible to bring an indictment against a nation i shows that a vague popular reverence, not accorded to all corporate names (nobody would say that it is impossible to bring an indictment against a class or a party), attaches to the idea.

Men are bad or good, but nations, in some sense, are supposed to be good. The life of a nation is felt by all to be more sacred than the life of an individual ; all men are mortal ; all nations, it is assumed, should be immortal. The lives of men are sacrificed without hesitation or remorse on the scaffold, or on the battlefield, for a sufficient national object; but an attempt to destroy a national life is stigmatised as a national crime. But what is Yet it cannot be said that the meaning of the word is uncontrovertibly clear. England means something more than the collective inhabitants of a particular island, something less than the collective subjects of a particular government. It never weighed with Wellington that he was an Irishman, and the significance of his indifference is independent of its righteousness. On the other hand, we do not call either a Hindoo or an Australian an Englishman, though the first may be a subject of the English monarch with no independent government of his own, while the second speaks our language and cordially accepts our dominion. The difficulty of deciding the exact limits of our own nation is not merely literai-y. The course of history would be clearer, even the course of political life easier, if the name of a nation were as definite as the name of a man. We need not go beyond the memories of the young to exhibit the disastrous influence of this ambiguity ; the most embittered controversy of the late nineteenth century turned on the question whether our united kingdom consists of one nation divided by geography or of two nations held together by government. The ques-

' In his speech on conciliation with America. Given here as it is generally quoted. What he actually said was : " I do not know the method of drawing up an indictment against a whole people."

tion, however it be answered, both shows that a common government does not necessarily make a nation, and goes some way towards showing that a double government necessarily unmakes a nation. Two races may form one nation ; but one race, divided in its government, loses its ideal unity. It is to recognise this distinction that the word nationality has attained its present significance as a claimant for international recognition, and the change forcibly illustrates the tendency of words to epitomise argument, for it is the declaration of a particular theory as much as the label of a particular fact. It implies that the desire of a race, apart from its power to assume the national responsibility of self-defence, constitutes a claim to national unity. The wordji first thus used in a time which saw two great nations attain their integrity, commemorates a strengthened sympathy with nascent, and a weakened respect for established political organisation, which is perhaps a natural result of the fact that national feeling is strongest as an aspiration. The interval between the ideal Italy glimmering before the eye of Dante and its tardy realisation in the kingdom of Victor Emmanuel measures the slow growth of a Nation. In the narrower and more exact sense of the word it is hardly present to the attention of the classical historian or the student of the Old Testament, although classical and scriptural aspiration after national life represent a loftier ideal than we find realised in modern Europe. The orators of Greece, the prophets of Israel, have recorded a race's yearnings after unity, but neither the Hellenic nor the Hebrew people formed a nation. Greece was one only in the sense that Europe is one. It embodied contrasts no less distinct than those which separate our country from its continental neighbours. England and France, indeed, are

^ I believe " nationality " was never used in the modern sense of an inchoate nation before the changes brought about by the revolutions of 1848. Before that it was only as one might say that one could tell the nationality of a person who spoke French with a German accent.

hardly as difFerent as Athens and Sparta.^ The wonderful people who called the rest of the world barbarians, and might all have been lodged in London, were never what we mean by a nation. Hellenic union was a vivid dream^ recorded in immortal eloquence, but the waking reality, when all is told, was a merely provincial life. The only ancient race equally dominant in modern ideas had a development strikingly similar. The Hebrew, like the Hellenic race, which in other respects it so little resembles, embodied a similar dualism, yearned after a similar unity, and became a fragment of the same all-embracing empire. The aspiration so vivid in feeling, so eloquent in expression, was in neither case realised in fact.

It is a pro- A nation begins to exist whenever a race comes of age, modern The varying limits of youth and maturity are recognised to a. ^"'"^' t;ertain small extent, even for individuals ; a monarch does not await his twenty-first birthday. Far more does the period of a nation's majority vary ; the race may last for ages undeveloped into a nation ; the nation may arise at an early period in the life of the race. Still on the whole the twentyone years which make the babe a man have their analogue in national development. In dealing with that early period which we should more rightly call the young than the old world, History speaks rarely of nations ; ^ in proportion as she approaches our own day she speaks mainly of nations. The modern historian narrates the conquests of England, the revolutions of France; he rejoices in the deliverance of Italy,

'■ See for instance the speech of the Corinthians at the Congress of Sparta of 432 B.C. (Thucydides, i. 70). The contrast, as they describe it, would be felt extravagant in any comparison of Englishmen and Frenchmen.

2 That is, in what is here regarded as the strict sense of the word ; in a vague general sense, as a synonym for race, it is common enough, and in Latin is often used in a somewhat contemptuous sense as " tribe " with us. The distinction between nation and race seems to me well given in a letter to the Times (July 30, 1901) by Professor Waldstein, of King's- College, Cambridge. " The chief cause of most international errors and complications," he considers, is just this confusion of race with nation. " A nation in all adequate modern conception of the term is ultimately based upon community of political ideas, institutions, and ideals."

he laments over the partition of Poland. When we turn back to ancient history, we are absorbed in the fate of cities; we hear of the fall of Jerusalem, the rivalry of Athens and Sparta, the victory of Syracuse, the expanding dominion of Rome. Almost the only country of which we take cognisance is the enemy of all freedom, the great but weak empire of Persia. To a Greek it must have seemed impossible that freedom should ever belong to a country, we may say indeed that it is impossible for the quality he meant by freedom to attach to the thing we mean by a country. The ideal of corporate life has changed, and the object of common desire cannot remain identical.

Tha group visible to the eye of History is at first a For Antiwandering race, then a selection from a single race finding unit was its centre ordinarily ^ within fortified walls, and united by *® '"•"y* common legislation, last of all (as far as our present experience goes) a race, or mixture of races, dwelling within the limits of a definite territory, under a common authority which claims the allegiance of every inhabitant and accords to all its impartial protection. It is the middle term of this evolution which has most deeply impressed our political and historical dialect. It is not the longest ; already the State has been much longer established in a country than it ever was in a city ; but the coincidence of city life with the sudden effulgence of genius has associated, for ever as far as we can see, the ideas of the political with the terms of city life. The view that the city is the State survives in our whole political dialect and domineers over all nomenclature referring to corporate action. When we speak of the rights and duties of the citizen, we say, though we do not mean, that political life is the life of a town, nay the theory has left its stamp on a dialect even broader than that of politics. In translating Augustine's Civiias Dei as " The City of God " we do homage to a view which arose

^ The qualification is made necessary by the important exception of Sparta, which had no walls till a late period in its history.

when stable union was associated with encircling walls and a central citadel; and the translator who should endeavour to discover some rendering less inapplicable to human yearnings after an eternal home would discover that the political ideas of the classical world were still too tyrannical for him, and that he had no choice between some word quite in a wrong key or by this surprising but natural reminiscence of Jerusalem and Rome.

The Nation We must not minimise the distinction by saying, as if cftyseiecu, i* were the whole truth, that there were few people in the itsconsti- world then and many people in the world now, and that States in consequence were small and are great. No doubt a country is a large place and a city is a comparatively small place, but the question of size does not convey the whole difference between them. Or rather, perhaps, the question of size has bearings often overlooked. A question of degree may amount to a question of kind; quantity, above ai certain point, means quality. All would concede that a homogeneous group might be too small to be spoken of as a nation ; the greatest political thinker who ever lived supposed that it might be too large. Aristotle occupies many lines of his Politics with the dangers of a State over the wide extent of which, as he puts it, the government of God alone could extend.^ And his conception of a City State differs from our conception of a Nation in other respects than that of mere size. The functions of the artizan and the citizen, he implies, are mutually exclusive, an attitude impossible for one who contemplates a Nation. It is not so much that our view is higher, or more humane ; it is not only that sympathy has widened since the fourth century before Christ. It is that Aristotle's view is inapplicable to the inhabitants of a country. A city was in fact in some sense a class. The ideal citizen must not work for his living, but of course many persons living in the city must work for theirs, and for his also. The city chose out from ^ Aristotle, Politics, 1326a.

a particular spot a particular set of men, and regarded these as her subjects in the true sense of the word, others being more or less their slaves. A nation knows no such personal distinctions ; it is defined by the outline of the soil it occupies. No doubt there are such beings as resident aliens in England, but we may almost ignore their distinction from naturalised English subjects when we compare them with aliens in Athens. The law accords its protection impartially to them and to its proper subjects. The modern State is a more geographical conception than the ancient one. It is much less personal than that was; perhaps we might say it is less spiritual. It does not select its subjects, but comprehends all who live on a particular soil ; it can only exist where there is a stable population, and hence in the beginning of history a nation is an idea rarely entertained and almost never embodied in actual territorial existence.

Almost, not quite ; for the curtain of History rises on Egypt, the one people which, whatever test we apply, we must recognise ancient as a Nation, A settled government, a definite territory, a "^"°°- common language and religion, these things existed in the valley of the Nile for ages before the name of Greece or Rome was known to mankind. Egypt contains great cities but depends on none of them ; its centre and soul is the great river whose rising and falling tides mark out its territory more definitely than impregnable walls, presenting an island of unsurpassed fertility in a surrounding expanse of desert. Here we have a realm which enforces union on its inhabitants as in Greece we have a realm which enforces separation on them. The idea of unity is presented by the mighty river which has created Egypt as it is not presented by any other portion of our planet. No other name of a country opens so long a vista; no other, applicable to a resort of twentieth century tourists, is also applicable to a kingdom on which history dawns. The Hebrew Patriarch receives a lesson in righteousness from an Egyptian monarch

S THE MORAL IDEAL

before the existence of the Hebrew tribe ;i the earliest Athenian statesman listens as a pupil to an Egyptian priest who speaks as the representative of an elder world. Abraham and Solon alike find a teacher on Egyptian soil. We cannot thus measure the remoteness of any but Egyptian civilisation; if any other be equally distant the backward road presents no similar landmark. No record of Chinese or Indian activity falls into line with the hope of Israel or the glory of Greece. No revelation of the spade and the mattock can antedate the primacy thus secured to the land that saw the birth of Moses and the pilgrimages of Solon and Herodotus. Egypt was a resort of tourists in the time of the first great Athenian known to the modern world ; the land of far memories was as attractive at the beginning of authentic history as in its maturity.^ " Each day grow older and learn something new " was the motto of Solon's old age,^ and surely not less of his youth ; and we may discover in the precept the aim of the traveller no less than that of the student. Egypt was the hoary teacher naturally sought by the ardent learner. The figure of the legendary sage and statesman wandering amid the marshes and cities of the Delta, conferring with Egyptian priests, and bringing out the antiquities of Greece to find them scorned as things of yesterday — this striking image is to the historian what the planet seen against the constellation is to the astronomer. The star which for the ignorant spectator melts into unity with that bright cluster, measures a vast intervening distance to the enlightened vision of the astronomer. Solon,' long as he lived before Marathon and Salamis, before .iEschylus and Socrates, yet in comparison with all that this background implies, belongs to the modern

1 Gen. xii. 18-19. Compare the doublet in xx. 9, where, however, the king is not Egyptian.

" Strabo (i. 2, 22), in defending Homer from the charge of ignorance, oddly brought against him by Eratosthenes, says that he (Homer) did not give a particular description of the Nile because he thought it too well known.

' Plutarch's Livei. Solon 2.

world. Rome is as yet hardly more than a village, Athens still lacks her immortal halo of art and poetry, but Egypt is already, and we may say for ever, the land of the past.

This distinction is symbolised in what may be called a Egypt,. parable, destined to the immortality of all that is found on gu'S'^'^ the page of Plato.^ The goddess worshipped at Sais, we from tjie are told, was identified with the goddess who had given vian world, her name to Athens, and the two cities appear to have owned some sort of bond. As an Athenian Solon would thus receive a warm welcome from its inhabitants, and the legend which he brings home from his sojourn on the banks of the Nile is one of which Athens is the centre. In his discourse with an Egyptian priest he appears anxious to make the most of the antiquity of his city, but his account of " Phoroneus called the First, and Niobe and Deucalion " is swept aside as a mere story of modern life. " O Solon, Solon," an aged priest interrupts him, " the Greeks are but children.'" " What do you mean .'' " asks Solon, we may suppose rather indignantly, for youth had not in those young days the charm it has in ours. "You have," pursues the Egyptian, " the minds of children. No traditional belief, no hoary learning exists with you." But he goes on to vindicate for the primaeval Athens an antiquity compared with which that of Homer and Hesiod is as yesterday. Nine millenniums, he says, separate the city of Solon from the first city of Athens, the inhabitants of which, though they perished in some cataclysm of the early world, had left an example of heroic resistance to overwhelming power such as no later civilisation could transcend. A great Empire was repelled by the primaeval Athenians — a vast continent lying beyond the Pillars of Hercules sent its forces in vain against the small city. Victors and vanquished survived the conflict but a moment ; the vast Atlantis, the minute Athens, were engulfed in the same flood. Nature, as it were jealous of lo THE MORAL IDEAL

human achievement, dropped her curtain on the stage, permitting no record of a war far greater than that of Troy to survive save in the records of Egypt, here represented as the historiogi'apher of the human race. Some fugitives from Atlantis and from Athens brought the tale to the Delta, and the Egyptian priest who narrated it to Solon did but restore to him the bequest of his unknown compatriots. The narration so impressed him (we follow throughout the account of Critias in the Timceus) that he aimed at becoming the Homer of this primaeval Iliad, and would have Succeeded but for the summons from his troublesome fellowtownsmen to undertake the government of their city. The poem he is said to have begun is mentioned only by Plato, and is probably the creation of his fancy. The informant of Solon may be bracketed with that Raphael Hythloday who gave Sir Thomas More the account of Utopia, or with the mariner sailing from Peru to whom Bacon owed the account of the new Atlantis. The ideal Republic is a theme of unfailing interest, and never do we find its associations more august than when it presents to us the first great legislator of Athens, and the greatest philosopher who ever lived.

At any rate Whatever we may think of Solon's travels in Egypt and History. the existence of a vanished continent in the Atlantic, this story in the Timceus may be accepted as a grandiose declaration of the fact that Egypt is the most ancient nation in the world. Its growth was fostered by a deeply rooted conservatism. Its inhabitants were preserved not only from the disasters of flood or flame, but also from the political cataclysms which interrupt and delay the peaceful development of a nation. To the eyes of the turbulent Greek Egypt was, with the impressiveness of a special contrast, the home of immemorial tradition. Its curtain rises on the vista of a long past. Its history, if we may take Herodotus as our historian, begins with an enormous engineering feat ; its first king, in the tradition he preserves, changes the course of the

EGYPT THE EARLIEST NATION ii

Nile.i An early dynasty constructs the mightiest buildings in the world. Nothing Egyptian is inchoate. In the art of any other country we should have no difficulty in arranging its objects chronologically by mere inspection. It would be enough to see that the execution was rude to enable us to judge that the date was early. In the case of Egypt such an inference might invert the truth. We know nothing in Egyptian sculpture so admirable as some of the productions of the old empire.^ It is impossible that Art could have started with such perfection. The history, as the river, of Egypt, reveals by no shrinkage the approach to its source. Its vista opens into myth and legend, but never into barbarism. The mystery which for ages hung over the source of its river, has never been removed from the origin of the race dwelling beside it. Far away in the dimness of the past that stream takes its rise ; what we confront from the first is a " united kingdom." How modern are all the associations called up by those words ! In truth Egypt is as much the most modern as the most ancient of nations ; the two statements are different ways of expressing the same fact. To say that a country is the most ancient in the world is to say that it reached its maturity at an early epoch ; the longer a State has been in existence the nearer it must come to a modern standard. Egypt had reached the third stage of national development^ long before the other races of the old world had reached the second. She was a nation while the races which were to create Athens and Sparta were wanderers. Perhaps we may best bring home to our minds the stability of her dominion by reminding ourselves that her history is reckoned by dynasties. At a period when

1 Herodotus, ii. ig. "We can," says the latest, and surely the classic historian of Egypt, somewhat to his reader's surprise, " easily credit the narrative " (A JSistory of Egypt from the Earliest Times to the Persian Conquest, by James Henry Breasted, Ph.D., 1906).

^ As for instance the so-called Sheikh el Beled, the sitting scribe in the Louvre, and the diorite statue of Khephren.

^ See above, p. 5. The second stage, that of city life, covering all known to us as classic literature, dates from a late period of Egyptian history.

settled government was elsewhere unknown, Egypt had been ruled for ages by a succession of royal families. In that fact we gather up a record of unbroken national unity such as we cannot as yet parallel from any other country in the world. Egypt the The peculiarities of the scenery which gave scope for

because a" t^is early development had attracted Greek attention unique almost as soon as that development itself; the great and mysterious river roused an interest not claimed by any other natural phenomenon. When Herodotus, quoting from au earlier writer,^ calls Egypt the gift of the Nile, he sums up the influences which dominated its industrial and spiritual life. As we read we see the broad life-giving sti-eam with its margin of verdure, its frame of desert ; we feel the contrast of narrow life and encroaching death ; the aggressive desert, the sand, as a modern Egyptologist ^ expresses it, "trying to trickle down" through the wall of rock into the hardly won, arduously defended strip of tillage. The foreboding of Greek disaster, expressed to Herodotus ' by Egyptians who learnt, apparently for the first time, that Greece depended upon rain for irrigation, shows that the Nile was a faithful fellow-worker on the whole. The country which two millenniums have left almost unchanged exhibits striking changes within a few months. Those emerald fields, that amber sand, the faint amethyst wall of distant or approaching cliffs, that broad expanse of waters — all must have looked much the same to its earliest as to its latest tourist, and man''s achievement in the landscape is hardly more altered than Nature's background. To the eye of Herodotus as to that of the latest tourist did Nile reflect "the endless length of dark red colonnades." * But while travellers who visit Egypt at

1 I.e. Hecatseus of Miletus, a historian known only in fragments. Both he and Herodotus (ii, 5) probably took the expression from Egyptian sources.

2 Adolf Erman, Life in Egypt, translated by H. M. Tirard, 1894 (p. 8). ' Herodotus, ii. 13.

* 'Hi.a.GaxiXa.j , Prophecy of Cwpys.

an interval of three thousand years might leave identical descriptions, those who visit it at the interval of six months might seem to be describing different countries. The Egypt known to winter visitants differs strikingly from the miniature archipelago with the villages as islands which forms the Egypt of the inundation. A modern Egyptologist— M. Lefebure — translates the description which we have unawares taken from Herodotus into imagery more graphic to the tourist of our day, Egypt, he says, is an "intermittent Venice." The title is no less accurate than picturesque. The scorching summer, which elsewhere brings parched fields and withered vegetation, bathes Egypt in sweet waters hiding the fields which they both moisten and fertilise. In no other country did man find Nature so sympathetic a fellow-worker — sympathetic and exacting at once, for those life-giving waters needed the co-operation of man for their beneficent office, and preached with a unique eloquence the duty and the promise attendant on the gospel of work.

That gospel is set forth in the life of Egypt in all its Yet rather strength and in all its weakness. We cannot combine the prosaic virtues of the worker and the dreamer. The life of agri- invention

° than of

culture is indeed a poetic object for the poet and the artist, history. but we must turn to a " land of dark heath and shaggy wood," a land where Nature guards a peculiar domain for herself, to find a " meet nurse for a poetic child." To be alone with Nature is not possible in Egypt. The trace of human labour is everywhere. In spite of the great fertility of its soil, no country has so poor a variety of plants,^ every spot of earth being either deprived of water or forced to bear crops; the wanderer by the Nile can rarely pluck a bunch of wild flowers. The landscape is monotonous; irrigated meadows, limestone rocks, the broad river, the graceful palm-groves — these few impressive elements make up the whole scenery of the land. The only approach to 1 Erman, p. ii seq.

wild country in ancient Egypt was to be found in the marshes of the Delta, a vanishing realm as the progress of cultivation reclaimed the land for agriculture ; and the life of the marshes seems to have taken for the Egyptian the place which the life of the forest occupies in Teutonic folklore. This small and dwindling relic of primaeval wildness stood out against a background of elaborate civilisation which excluded the scenery of romance and forbade leisure for dreams. We may indeed find more than one of our nursery tales in Egypt; the "rosy cheeked maiden" who loses her slipper and gains a prince for her husband ^ must surely be a relation of Cinderella ; but here the romance is strangely impaired, the preliminary meeting of youth and maiden being altogether lost. An eagle carries off the sandal as Rhodopis is bathing, and the prince before whom it is dropped, fascinated by its beauty and the strangeness of its appearance, causes a search to be made for its wearer, after which the story ends as in our nursery tale. But the loss of its opening scene and the whole stress being thereby thrown upon the slipper itself is a touch very characteristic of the prosaic materialism of Egypt. Perhaps even such romance as we find in it may be partly due to its Greek reporter. In purely Egyptian story, romance loses itself in grotesque detail. It is not fanciful to connect this limitation with the landscape meeting the eyes of every Egyptian. A narrow strip of fertile land walled in by limestone cliffs, knowing no coast, no wild moor or forest, everywhere cultivated till it meets the desert, is no theatre for fancy's bright creations, or imagination's mystic suggestions. Egypt is thus in all its literature the land of prose. And yet it is not the land of history. No claim for Egypt is more baseless than that which we have seen recorded by Plato, to be the