The Unity of Civilization

in art. This has been very natural, for they represent one main aspect and justification of the revolt against th

uperior to that of the classicists, but they refused to admit that art was bound to follow the forms of antiquity, and maintained rather that its

lity of the artist is conditioned by his nationality, so far also will his artistic work reflect the characteristics of his nation or country. And yet, while this is true, it really needs very little consideration to see that when we consider a great work of art, we are very little concerned with the question of the nationality of the artist, but with something whic

ed with the unity of the artistic expression even of East and West. I am far from wishing to say that nationality or race has no significance in art, but I think that we have been in danger of greatly exaggerating its importance. I am at

the whole. But on the other hand it is not less important for us to understand that what we desire to do is not to destroy those elements which Germany contributes to European civilization, but only that they should take their natural and appropriate place in that greater unity which is enriched and enlarged by the contribution of every separate national society. European art is one; that is, the common characteristics are far more importa

truth is that the movement of ideas and fashions was probably at least as rapid in the Middle Ages as it is to-day. However this may be, the fact is, I think, clear, that when we come to examine mediaeval literature we find that it is practically homogeneous, that whether we look at it i

ns de Geste, which belong to the end of the twelfth century. This epic literature is not least interesting to us because it has, as far as we can judge, no trace of that great classical influence of which you have already heard, and which plays so great a part in the later developments of European literature. Now what is the epic? Its materials are the stories of northern mythology, the traditions of th

uch even whether the man is wrong or perverse: he loves the obstinacy of Roland, who will not, till too late, sound his horn to call Charlemagne and his armies, but prefers to face the enemy, and if need be to die, by himself, rather than to ask for help; he is filled with the sense of the magnificence of the stark figure of Hagen, who had ind

aid by those who only know the epics in one or other of the various languages, that women and the love of women have no place in the epic, but belong to the romance, but this is a mistake. In the

oems, we can frequently reconstruct the life and manners of the time to which the poems belong from that which they tell us. And it is impossible to say that there is any really national difference between the epics as we find them in different language

. From the story of Tristan and the 'lais' of Mary of France, down to the Vita Nuova of Dante, that with which it is occupied is the human heart, its hopes and fears, its joys and sorrows, its exultation and despair. We have only to read the earliest and greatest forms in which the story of Tristan and Iseult have come down to us to see this for ourselves. It is indeed true that we can see or that we can conjecture that behind the present romance there may have lain an epic story of the hero's actions, but what we see now is nothing but the story of the 'infinite passion', the 'infinite pain' of the human heart. It is the story of their

f feeling, of passion, is presented under the form of a world almost wholly unreal and conventional. The men and women of the epic were great heroic figures, of larger stature, of greater passions than the common run, but they were quite real people, moving and acting in the real world. The figures of romance are for the mos

later and lesser poets, the romantic method finally loses almost all sense of personality, and becomes a picture and analysis of abstract emotion. It is to these abstractions that Guillaume de Lorris gave a new life and a singular grace in the personifications of the Romance of the Rose, and the charm and grace of his

observe that the characteristic of mediaeval literature is that of all mediaeval art and life. To myself, indeed, it is clear that the notion that the people of the Middle Ages desired or worked for a unified political organization is indeed a great mistake. But, on the other hand, it is equally certain that in general civilization, as in relig

surely the modern national literatures are in many ways different, you will say that there is surely some great difference between Dutch and Italian painting, some great contrast between English and French poetry. Many people us

he unity of European art will perhaps be found in examining some of the great movements in its history, s

he passion and pain of Francesca and her lover, and with equal power the masterful figure of Farinata, whose dauntless soul not hell itself could quell; who could pass from the vivid drama of the fierce contemporary life of Italy to the infinite peace of those to whom 'la sua voluntade è nostra pace'. For indeed it is this which places Dante among the supreme poets of the world, that there is no aspect of the reality of human life and experience which is strange to him, and which the greatness of his imagination cannot make living to us. It has often been said that

un as artists of romance, and the romantic sentiment of life never ceased to interest and move them, but they had learned to go beyond the romantic conventions, and to find the material of their art in everything which was part of the reality of life. To them, as to the other tale-writers of these centuries, it was quite immaterial whether they were retelling a story which had come down from immemorial antiquity, or relating something which had happened but yesterday in their own town or village, and they knew nothing of distinctions of class or rank or circumstance; it is the universal human interest wh

at dramatists from bare 'realism' into the highest expression of reality. No doubt the dramatists take into their work other materials and influences, but the substantial quality whether of the tragedy or the comedy is intimately related to that of the tales. How often were the great dramas built up on materials which they drew from Bandello or the other Italians who continued the tradition of Boccaccio, or from similar northern sources. But the great dramatists gave their stori

er degree to some of the other great Elizabethans like Marlowe and Webster, there is nothing common and insignificant in life, nothing which the creative imagination of the artist cannot transform, transmute, from

a and Calderon, a drama of the same character, inspired by the same spirit, living under the power of the same creative imagination, a drama in which the same vivid reality is informed by the same breath of magical romance. In the trag

ld, every day brought a new failure, every year a new disaster; the great Armada had perished miserably on the dunes of Flanders and Holland, on the cliffs of Scotland and Ireland; a handful of valiant Dutchmen had defied its power and broken its wealth; the real enemy of Spain, that is France, had gathered itself together after forty years of ruin and misery, and had driven out the Spanish power. Indeed, so

ere raiding and plundering the New World, which Spain and Portugal had looked on as their own; England was s

h devotion to the forms and conceptions of mediaeval religion had proved unshakeable, while England was the representative

tness, the splendour of human nature, which is most triumphant when most it seems to fail; and on the other side at least something of that exquisite, that almost unimaginable grace of the romantic comedy, of the world of Portia

the Middle Ages which has survived to us, limits and restrains its subjects and its forms. But no one who is at any pains to consider mediaeval sculpture and mosaic painting can fail to see that alongside of much which became conventional, and was fixed in what has been called the 'Byzantine' style, there is an immense amount of work both in sculpture and in mosaic which expresses the determination of the mediaeval artist to represent the world as he experienced and saw it, and that the main obstacle to the free expression of this spirit was not the acquiescence or satisfaction of the mediaeval artist in conventional forms, but the lack of technical dexterity. This will become evident to any one who will turn his attention, in studying the mosaics, from wha

are reality of life by the magic of the imaginative sense of beauty and of passion as in the great drama. It is not, I think, merely fanciful to say that the real counterpart of the English and Spanish drama is to be found in the Italian painters and sculptors of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and in the Flemish artists of the early seventeenth. It is certainly true that each of these great

lassical influence, but the Petrarch whose letters were the first summons of Europe to a new and indefatigable work of the rediscovery of the ancient world. It was an Italian with whom the classical movement began, but it was only in the hands of two northern artists that it achieved a sati

some measure, Pope. It did some good, but far more evil, but happily it is long past and dead and done with, and we can afford to

ver Europe in the eighteenth century, to trace the beginnings of that c

l know, the great Hogarth. We all at least have read Robinson Crusoe, and we have probably all seen Hogarth's engravings

ferocity of human nature. It is not a pretty or a pleasing world which we see in Hogarth or in Defoe's Colonel Jack. But they are great artists. If you see human nature often on its most repulsive side, in its harshest and most repellent form, at least you see in their novels or pictures, the world as they saw it in the streets and taverns, in the police courts and prisons of their day,

but in the 'romantic' south. The first signs of the new movement are to be found not in England or in Flanders, but in Spain in the sixteenth century. It was the Lazarillo de Tormes, the first of the Picaresque novels which struck the new note, which turned from the fantastic and conventional world of the romances in which Don Quixote had nourished his soul, and from the heroic world of beauty and grace of the dramatists, to the bare and hard reality o

er seventeenth century we find ourselves in another world. The little beggar boys of Murillo may perhaps show a somewhat mannered realism, but the Spanish painting, as a whole, while it would be absurd to try to describe it under any one phrase, shows very clearly the determination to present the reality of the world under terms which are ver

nds with the reaction against the continuance of a great tradition which had become merely a convention, when it had lost its vitality and sincerity. The best examples of this may perhaps be found in Dryden's attempt to carry on the heroic tradition in English tragedy, and in Voltaire's strenuous and meritorious efforts to continue the work of Racine and Corneille. They meant well, and their tr

, and though the descent was great, yet it gain

enth century we find the novelists and, though they are less important, the dramatists, turning from the faithful and minute study of the outward

Marivaux, and his Vie de Marianne is a study of a young woman who is the embodiment of sensibility and self-consciousness, an amiable and virtuous girl, who is hardly able to enjoy the good that life brings her, for fear lest she should miss the opportunity of renunciation. The first great novel of sentiment is also French, the

lone, but of all Europe, known and loved and imitated in every country in Europe. The sorrows of Clarissa, the pathetic or maudlin humour of Sterne, the idyllic grace and gentle laughter of Gold

nto the tragedy of the vain and hopeless efforts of an honest but over-sensitive nature to control his emotion and to master his life. Not indeed that it was with Werther the movement ended: it was continued in Byron: it was perhaps the most important element in what the Germans call specifically their Romantische Schule, and in the work of the French Romantic artists from Chateaubriand to Alfred de Musset. If you wish to see it in painting you have only to look at the work of Greuze, and at

it is true, that it was not till the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that there appeared a school of painting which took landscape, and a poetry which took 'nature' specifically for its subject. There is indeed frequent reference to 'nature' in the poetry of the Middle Ages and of the sixteenth century, and this is often significant in the early Engl

egory, but we sometimes wonder whether the most important thing in his poetry is not the chequered light and shade of his forests, the picturesque splendour of his castles, and the gloom of his caverns and dungeons. Spenser's poetry is

in the grace of his earlier poetry, but in the maturity of his genius, in the Lycidas and even in the Paradise, Milton is at least as great an artist of nature and its beauty as he is of life. And near Milton there stands a poet, lesser indeed, but individua

nd the Cadore compelling more and more our attention, as not a mere background, but as an integral part of the picture; but it was not till the seventeenth century and the Fle

fically English, and it is true that in Wordsworth and Shelley the poetry of nature grew into something which is unique and unmatched, but we must not think of the poetry of Wordsworth as though it were the only form under which nature can be presented. That would be to ignore the qualities, in England of Keats and Tennyson, and in Europe of great artists in whom the treatment of nature assumed other forms. The great poetry of nature began in England, but it was carried on in all the European countries, and for more than a century it was dominated mainly by the genius of Ro

r freedom, for the complete experience of life, for life itself, and not mere knowledge or mere words-this is the motive which drives Faust till he is willing to make his bargain with any power which will give him this. The infinite, the insatiable desire of the human soul, which can never be wholly satisfied, which can never reach its term, this is the passion which possesses Faust, this is the rock upon which the hopes of the poor devil are shipwrecked, the poor devil who in the limitation of the merely critical and negative

manity, and in his supreme sense of the unity of all life and nature with the living spirit who is in all things; and the great romantic artists of Fra

e a language which we can all understand, imagine life and nature under terms which we all feel and know to be true. And, though in literature the language creates a real difference, and causes a difficulty in recognizing the un

It is not to Frenchmen only that the intellectual passion of Pascal, or the hatred of shams and the love of the honest man of Molière or of Voltaire, appeal, but to us all. It is not only Germans who understand the splendour of human experience, and the infinite pathos of the mistakes of the human heart, but we all. A

t in the supreme art and poetry we rise above all these distinctions and ar

FOR RE

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