Here is the first and greatest period in European philosophy: Diogenes Laertius tells the story of Socrates the martyr and Plato the reformer, of Democritus the Laughing Philosopher and Aristotle the Encyclopedia, of Zeno the Stoic and Epicurus who was not an Epicurean. Plato speaks, and paints his perfect state; the immaculately reasonable Aristotle preaches the golden mean, and marries the richest girl in Greece.Williams takes up the tale, and tells how science replaced superstition; how Hippocrates became, after many centuries of Physicians, the “Father of Medicine” and how Archimedes solved his theorems while a soldier, symbolizing the eternal opposition of war and art, stabbed him to death. Last of all, Elie Faure lets us stand by while Pheidias, with the patience that is genius, carves figures for the Parthenon, and Praxiteles chisels Aphrodite’s perfect grace. When shall we see such an age again?
To understand these Greeks would in itself be a sufficient education, and indeed, a great American educator is making the experiment of giving two years of the college course, for one hundred fortunate students, to a study of Greek civilization in all its varied wealth. The Romans do not give us so much, for though they admirably laid the foundations of social order and political continuity for the nations of modern Europe, they lost themselves too much in laws and wars, in building roads and sewers and warding off encompassing barbarians, to snatch from their hard lives the quiet thought that flowers in literature, philosophy, and art.Yet even here there are gods: the greatest statesmen that ever lived, perhaps, made companionable by Plutarch’s artistry; the somber Lucretius expounding in masculine verse the inescapable Nature of Things; the delicate felicity of Virgil weaving his country’s legendary past into a cloth of gold; and, last of the Romans, Marcus Aurelius, meditating on the vanity of lust and power from the vantage point of an unequaled throne.
It is a tremendous and tragic story, how this great colossus bestrode all the earth with its majesty, and then through corruption and slavery slowly rotted away, until barbarian armies from without, and Oriental cults from within, brought it down to ruin. Here it is that the greatest historian of all, Edward Gibbon, begins his stately recital of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and plays with his mighty organ-prose a marche funèbre of desolation. Let us read those purple pages leisurely; life is not so important that we may not spare for this philosopher writing history the unhurried calm that we must have in order to drink in the wisdom of his comments and the music of his periods.
Gibbon is so generous that he tells the story not of dying Rome alone, but of that infancy of northern Europe which we know as the Middle Ages. Here is the rise of the Papacy to the realization of the greatest dream of Western statesmanship—the unification of Europe; here is the conversion of Constantine and the coronation of Charlemagne; here is the bloody tale of how Mohammed and his generals, leading armies hungry for booty and infuriated with theology, swept over Africa and Spain, built the civilization of Bagdad and Cordova, and sank back into the desert when the Turks, still more barbarous than themselves, poured down through the Caucasus upon the disordered West. How the Jews and the Persians prospered under Moslem sway let Maimonides and Omar attest. We shall find in Williams the noble record of Moslem achievements in mathematics and medicine, in astronomy and philosophy, and Faure will show us their unique and delicate architecture in the Alhambra at Granada, and in India’s Taj Mahal.
But there were a few Christians, too, in those days. Robinson takes up The Human Adventure, and describes their civilization so well that we cannot spare him from our list. Dante and Chaucer sum up the age: the Canterbury Pilgrims, though on a pious mission, frolic with stories as earthy as Rabelais’s; and Dante, though at war with his Church, lifts its theology to such splendor and dignity that for a moment we forget the barbarism that created Hell. Abelard doubted that theology, but very suddenly lost the manhood to stand his ground; nothing could be more pitiful and human than his weak abandonment of Heloise and doubt. If you would know how perfect, even in our styleless days, English prose can be, read George Moore’s quiet narrative of this immortal love. Henry Adams tells that story too in Mont St. Michel and Chartres, and expounds the encyclopedic orthodoxy of Saint Thomas Aquinas, as incidents in his personally conducted tour of the great French cathedrals; here Gothic is made to talk English, and reveal itself even to Americans. And here also we come upon that unappreciated glory, Taine’s History of English Literature: a book as scholarly in preparation and as brilliant in exposition as can be found this side of Gibbon; it took a Frenchman to explain their literature to the English.
Finally we listen to the masculine-melancholy music of the Middle Ages, and the Gregorian chant surrounds and deepens us with its flowing majesty. Cecil Gray is no perfect guide here, he is only brief, and those who love music as the highest philosophy will deviate from our list at this point and read the fourth, fifth, and sixth volumes of the Oxford History of Music. Life without music, as Nietzsche said, would be a mistake.
Then the Middle Ages melt away, and suddenly we stand before that full flowering of medieval art and thought, the Italian Renaissance. Mr.Wells gives us a few inadequate pages of outline, and then we abandon ourselves, for seven spacious and astounding volumes, to the lead of John Addington Symonds, who took the very breath of his ailing life, and even the latitude of his morals, from this greatest epoch of the Christian age. (If your years are too short for so extended a tour, read Burckhardt’s single volume, The Renaissance in Italy; if you have learned to make haste slowly, read Burckhardt and Symonds, too.) Here again is a very swarm of genius: at Florence we enter the Palace of the Medici, where Pico della Mirandola is burning candles before the bust of the rediscovered Plato, and a boy called Michelangelo is carving the figure of a toothless faun; at Rome we walk the marble floors of the Vatican with Julius II and Leo X, and watch them turning the wealth and poetry of the Church to the stimulation and nourishment of every art.Vasari opens to us the studios of Botticelli, Brunelleschi, Leonardo, Raphael, and Angelo; Faure rhapsodizes on this unprecedented efflorescence of painting, statuary, and ornament; Machiavelli makes Caesar Borgia sit for the portrait of the ideal prince; Cellini abandons murder occasionally to cast his Perseus or make a perfect vase; Bruno and Vanini renew man’s effort to understand the world with reason; Copernicus, Vesalius, and Gilbert lay the cornerstones of modern science; and Palestrina takes us aloft on the wings of song.A supreme era unfolds itself for us in every phase of its winnowed wealth.
But Luther, coming down from the cold, stern North, does not like the licentious art of sunny Italy, and in a voice heard throughout the world he calls for the return of the Church to primitive asceticism and simplicity. The princes of Germany, using the religious revolt as an instrument of policy, separate their growing realms from the Papacy, establish a multitude of independent states, and inaugurate that dynastic nationalism which is the thread of European history from the Reformation to the Revolution. National consciousness replaces religious conscience, patriotism replaces piety, and every European people has for a century its own Renaissance. It is an age of political romance: Catherine de Medici and Henry VIII, Charles V and Philip of the Armada, Elizabeth and Essex, Mary Queen of Scots and her inextricable lovers, and the Terrible Ivan. It is an epoch of giants in literature: in France Rabelais riots with all commandments and adjectives, and Montaigne discusses affairs public and privy in the greatest essays ever written; in Spain Cervantes finds one arm sufficient for writing the most famous of all novels, and Lope de Vega composes eighteen hundred plays; in London a butcher’s son produces the greatest of modern dramas, and all England, as Spengler would say, is “in form.” It is the springtime of the modern soul.