The intellectual commerce between England and France

The intellectual commerce between England and France from (let us say) 1725 to 1790 is one of the most memorable episodes in the history of the human mind. The two generations which followed the visit of Voltaire to England formed an intellectual alliance between the leading spirits of our two nations: an alliance of amity, offensive and defensive, scientific, economic, philosophical, social, and political, such as had not been seen since the days of the Greco-Roman education or the cosmopolitan fellowship of mediaeval universities. Voltaire, Montesquieu, Hume, Adam Smith, Franklin, Turgot, Quesnay, Diderot, Condorcet, d’Argen- son, Gibbon, Washington, Priestley, Bentham—even Rousseau, Mabli, Mirabeau, and Jefferson — belonged to a M

Republic of Ideas, where national character and local idiosyncrasy could indeed be traced in each, but where the essential patriotism of humanity is dominant and supremesofia sightseeing
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In England, Pitt; in Prussia, Frederick; in Austria, Joseph; in Tuscany, Leopold; in Portugal, Pombal; in Spain, d’Aranda; all laboured to an end, essentially similar, in reforming the incoherent, unequal, and obsolete state of the law; in rectifying abuses in finance; in bringing some order into administration, in abolishing some of the burdens and chains on industry; in improving the material condition of their states; in curbing the more monstrous abuses of privilege; and in founding at least the germs of what we call modem civilised government. Some of these things were done ill, some well, most of them tentatively and with a naive ignorance of the tremendous forces they were handling, with a strange childishness of conception, and in all cases without a trace of suspicion that they were changing the sources of power and their political constitution. And in all this the rulers were led and inspired by a crowd of economical and social reformers who eagerly proclaimed Utopia at hand, and who mistook generous ideals for scientific knowledge. For special causes the great social evolution concentrated itself in France towards the latter half of the eighteenth century; but there was nothing about it exclusively French.

Socially and economically viewed, it was almost more English and Anglo-American than French; intellectually and morally viewed, it was hardly more French than it was English. Hume, Adam Smith, Burke, and Priestley are as potent in the realm of thought as Diderot, Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Condorcet. And in the realm of social reform, Europe owes as much to Bentham, Howard, Clarkson,- Franklin, Washington, Pitt, and Frederick, as it does to Turgot, Mirabeau, Girondins, Cordeliers, or Jacobins. The ‘ ideas of ’89/ were the ideas of the best brains and most humane spirits in the advanced nations of mankind. All nations bore their share in the labour, and all have shared in the fruits.

But if the revolution were so general in its preparation, why was the active manifestation of it concentrated in France? and why was France speedily attacked by all the nations of Europe?

Two questions may be answered

These two questions may be answered in two words. In France only were the old and the new elements ranged face to face without intermixture or con-tact, with nothing between them but a decrepit and demoralised autocracy. And no sooner had the inevitable collision begun, than the governments of Europe were seized with panic as they witnessed the fury of the revolutionary forces. In England the Reformation, the Civil War, the Revolution of 1689, and the Hanoverian dynasty had transferred the power of the monarchy to a wealthy, energetic, popular aristocracy, which had largely abandoned its feudal privileges, and had closely allied itself with the interests of wealth.

During two centuries of continual struggle and partial reform, a compromise had been affected in Church and in State, wherein the claims of king, priest, noble, and merchant had been fused into a tolerable modus vivendi. In France the contrary was the case. During two centuries the monarchy had steadily asserted itself as the incarnation of the public, claiming for itself all public rights, and undertaking (in theory) all public duties; crushing out the feudal authorities from all national duties, but guaranteeing to them intact the whole of their personal privileges.

As it had dealt with the aristocracy so it dealt with the Church; making both its tool, filling both with corruption, and giving them in exchange nothing but license to exploit the lay commonalty. The lay commonalty naturally expanded in rooted hostility to the privileged orders, and to the religious and hereditary ideas on which privilege rested. It grew stronger every day, having no admixture with the old orders, no points of contact, having no outlet for its activity, harassed, insulted, pillaged, and rebuffed at every turn, twenty-six millions strong against two hundred thousand; all distinctions, rivalries, and authority, as amongst this tiers uniformly crushed by the superincumbent weight of Monarchy, Church, and Privilege.

The smallest opportunity for experience

The vast mass of the people thus grew consolidated, without a single public outlet for its energies, or the smallest opportunity for experience in affairs; the whole ability of the nation for politics, administration, law, or war, was forced into abstract speculation and social discussion; conscious that it was the real force and possessed the real wealth of the nation; increasing its resources day by day, amidst frightful extortion and incredible barbarism, which it was bound to endure without a murmur; the thinking world, to whom action was closed, kept watching the tremendous problems at stake in their most naked and menacing aspect, without any disguise, compromise, or alleviation. And in France, where the old feudal and ecclesiastical system was concentrated in its most aggravated form, there it was also the weakest, most corrupt, and most servile.

And there, too, in France the tiers Hat was the most numerous, the most consolidated, the most charged with ideas, the most sharply separated off, the most conscious of its power, the most exasperated by oppression. Thus it came about that a European evolution broke out in France into revolution. The social battle of the eighteenth century began in the only nation which was strictly marshalled in two opposing camps; where the oppressors were utterly enfeebled by corruption; where the oppressed were fermenting with ideas and boiling with indignation sofia sightseeing.

The Church was torn by factions

The fourteenth and the fifteenth centuries saw the silent universal but unobserved dissolution of the old mediaeval society. For crusades the soldier took to the puerilities of the tournament. The lordly castles fell one by one before the strong hand of the king. The humble village expanded into the great trading town. The Church was torn by factions and assailed by heresies. The musket- ball destroyed the supremacy of the mailed knight.

The printing-press made science and thought the birthright of all. The sixteenth century saw a temporary resettlement in a strong dominant monarchy and a compromise in religion. Whilst the seventeenth century in England gave power to a transformed and modified aristocracy, in France it concentrated the whole public forces in a monstrous absolutism, whilst nobility and Church grew daily more rife with obsolete oppression. Hence, in France, the ancient monarchy stood alone as the centre of the old system. Beside it stood the new elements unfettered and untransformed. It was the simplicity of the problem, the glaring nature of the contrast, which caused the intensity of the explosion. The old system stood with dry-rot in its heart; the new was bursting with incoherent hopes and undefined ideals. The Bastille fell — and a new era began.

Take a rapid survey of France in the closing years of the Monarchy. She had not recovered the desolation of the long wars of Louis xiv., the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, the banishment of the Protestants, the monstrous extravagance of Versailles and the corrupt system which was there concentrated. The entire authority was practically absorbed by the Crown, whilst the most incredible confusion and disorganisation reigned throughout the administration. A network of incoherent authorities crossed, recrossed, and embarrassed each other throughout the forty provinces. The law, the customs, the organisation of the provinces, differed from each other. Throughout them existed thousands of hereditary offices without responsibility, and sinecures cynically created for the sole purpose of being sold.

The administration of justice was as completely incoherent as the public service. Each province, and often each district, city, or town, had special tribunals with peculiar powers of its own and anomalous methods of jurisdiction. There were nearly four hundred different codes of customary law. There were civil tribunals, military tribunals, commercial tribunals, exchequer tribunals, ecclesiastical tribunals, and manorial tribunals. A vast number of special causes could only be heard in special courts: a vast body of privileged persons could only be sued before special judges. If civil justice was in a state of barbarous complication and confusion, criminal justice was even more barbarous.

Preliminary torture before trial, mutilation, ferocious punishments, a lingering death by torment, a penal code which had death or bodily mutilation in every page, were dealt out freely to the accused without the protection of counsel, the right of appeal, or even a public statement of the sentence. For ecclesiastical offences, and these were a wide and vague field, the punishment was burning alive. Loss of the tongue, of eyes, of limbs, and breaking on the wheel, were common punishments for very moderate crimes. Madame Roland tells us how the summer night was made hideous by the yells of wretches dying by inches after the torture of the wheel. With this state of justice there went systematic corruption in the judges, bribery of officials from the highest to the lowest, and an infinite series of exactions and delays in trial.

Survey of the thirteenth century

As to Dante himself, it is not easy to place him in a survey of the thirteenth century. In actual date and in typical expression he belongs to it, and yet he does not belong to it. The century itself has a transitional, an ambiguous character. And Dante, like it, has a transitional and double office. He is the poet, the prophet, the painter of the Middle Ages. And yet, in so many things, he anticipates the modern mind and modern art. In actual date, the last year of the thirteenth century is the ‘ middle term ’ of the poet’s life, his thirty-fifth year. Some of his most exquisite work was already produced, and his whole mind was grown to maturity. On the other hand, every line of the Divine Comedy was actually written in the fourteenth century, and the poet lived in it for twenty years.

Nor was the entire vision complete until near the poet’s death in 1321. In spirit, in design, in form, this great creation has throughout this double character. By memory, by inner soul, by enthusiasm, Dante seems to dwell with the imperial chiefs of Hohenstaufen, with Francis and Dominic, Bernard and Aquinas. He paints the Catholic and Feudal world; he seems saturated with the Catholic and Feudal sentiment. And yet he deals with popes, bishops, Church, and conclaves with the audacious intellectual freedom of a Paris dialectician or an Oxford doctor.

Between the lines of the great Catholic poem we can read the death-sentence of Catholic Church and Feudal hierarchy. Like all great artists, Dante paints a world which only subsisted in ideal and in memory, just as Spenser and Shakespeare transfigured in their verse a humanistic and romantic society such as had long disappeared from the region of fact. And for this reason, and for others, it were better to regard the sublime Dies Irce, which the Florentine wanderer chanted in his latter years over the grave of the Middle Ages, as belonging in its inner spirit to a later time, and as being in reality the dawn of modern poetry sofia sightseeing.

In Dante, as in Giotto

In Dante, as in Giotto, in Frederick II., in Edward I., in Roger Bacon, we may hear the trumpet which summoned the Middle Ages into the modern world. The true spirits of the thirteenth century, still Catholic and Feudal, are Innocent HI., St. Francis, Stephen Langton, Grossetete, Aquinas, Bonaventura, and Albert of Cologne; Philip Augustus, St. Louis, the Barons of Runnymede, and Simon de Montfort; the authors of the Golden Legend and the Catholic Hymns, the Doctors of Paris, Oxford, and Bologna; the builders of Amiens, Notre Dame, Lincoln, and Westminster.

The movement known as the Revolution of 1789 was a transformation — not a convulsion; it was constructive even more than destructive; and if it was in outward manifestation a chaotic revolution, in its inner spirit it was an organic evolution. It was a movement in no sense local, accidental, temporary, or partial; it was not simply, nor even mainly, a political movement. It was an intellectual and religious, a moral, social, and economic movement, before it was a political movement, and even more than it was a political movement.

If it is French in form, it is European in essence. It belongs to modem history as a whole quite as much as to the eighteenth century in France. Its germs began centuries earlier than the generation of 1789, and its activity will long outlast the generation of 1889. It is not an episode of frenzy in the life of a single nation. In all its deeper elements it is a condensation of the history of mankind, a repertory of all social and political problems, the latest and most complex of all the great crises through which our race has passed.

The year 1789

The year 1789, more definitely than any other date marks any other transition, marks the close of a society which had existed for some thousands of years as a consistent whole, a society more or less based upon military force, intensely imbued with the spirit of hereditary right, bound up with ideas of theological sanction, sustained by a scheme of supramundane authority; a society based upon caste, on class, on local distinctions and personal privilege, rooted in inequality, political, social, material, and moral; a society of which the hope of salvation was the maintenance of the status quo, and of which the Ten Commandments were Privilege.

And the same year, 1789, saw the official installation of a society which was essentially based on peace, the creed of which was industry, equality, progress; a society where change was the evidence of life, the end of which was social welfare, and the means social co-operation and human equity. Union, communion, equality, equity, merit, labour, justice, consolidation, fraternity — such were the devices and symbols of the new era. It is therefore with justice that modern Europe regards the date 1789 as a date that marks a greater evolution in human history more distinctly than, perhaps, any other single date which could be named between the reign of the first Pharaoh and the reign of Victoria sofia sightseeing.

One of the cardinal pivots in human history we call this epoch, and not at all a French local crisis. The proof of this is complete. All the nations of Europe, and indeed the people of America, contributed their share to the movement, and more or less partook in the movement themselves.

It was hailed as a new dispensation by men of various race; and each nation in turn more or less added to the movement and adopted some element of the movement. The intellectual and social upheaval, which for generations had been preparing the movement, was common to the enlightened spirits of Europe and also to the Transatlantic Continent. The effects of the movement have been shared by all Europe, and the distant consequences of its action are visible in Europe to the third and the fourth generations. And lastly, all the cardinal features of the movement of 1789 are in no sense locally French, or of special national value. They are equally applicable to Europe, and indeed to advanced human societies everywhere. They appeal to men primarily, and to Frenchmen secondarily. They relate to the general society of Europe, and not to specific national institutions.

Common Weal

They concern the transformation of a feudal, hereditary, privileged, authoritative society, based on antique right into a republican, industrial, equalised, humanised society, based on a scientific view of the Common Weal. But this is not a national idea, a French conception of local application. It is European, or rather human. And thus, however disastrous to France may have been the travail of the movement officially proclaimed in 1789, from a European and a human point of view it has abiding and pregnant issues. May we profit by its good whilst we are spared its evil.

Obviously, the salient form of the revolution was French, ultra-French; entirely unique and of inimitable peculiarity in some of its worst as well as its best sides. The delirium, the extravagances, the hysterics, and the brutalities which succeeded one another in a series of strange tragicomic tableaux from 1789 till 1795, were most intensely French, though even they, from Caps of Liberty to Festival of Pikes, have had a singular fascination for the revolutionists of every race. But the picturesque and melodramatic accessories of the revolution have been so copiously over-coloured by the scene-painters and stage- carpenters of history, that we are too often apt to forget how essentially European the revolution was in all its deeper meanings.

A dozen kings and statesmen throughout Europe were, in a way, endeavouring to enter on the same path as Louis xvi. with Turgot and Necker. In spite of the contrast between the government of England and the government of France, between the condition of English industry and that of France, Walpole and Pitt offer many striking points of analogy with Turgot and Necker.

Most assuredly the close of the eighteenth century

Let us avoid misunderstanding of what we are now speaking. Most assuredly the close of the eighteenth century in France displayed a convulsion, a frenzy, a chaos such as the world’s history has not often equalled. There was folly, crime, waste, destruction, confusion, and horror of stupendous proportions, and of all imaginable forms. There was the Terror, the Festival of Reason, the Reaction, and all the delirium, the orgy, the extravagance, which give brilliancy to small historians and serve as rhetoric to petty politicians. Assuredly the revolution closed in with most ghastly surprises to the philanthropists and philosophers who entered on it in 1789 with so light a heart.

Assuredly it has bequeathed to the statesmen and the people of our century problems of portentous difficulty and number. But we are speaking now neither of ’93 nor of ’95, nor of ’99, of no local or special incident, of no single event, nor of political forms. We are in this essay dealing exclusively with ‘ the ideas of ’89/ with the movement which at Versailles, on 5th May 1789, took outward and visible shape. And we are about to deal with it in its deeper, social, permanent sofia sightseeing, and human side, not in its transitory and material side. The Seine, the Loire, and the Rhone have washed away the blood which once defiled their streams, the havoc caused by the orgies of anarchy has been effaced, years make fainter the memory of crimes and follies, of revenge and jealousy. But the course of generations still deepens the meaning of ‘the ideas of ’89,’ of the social, intellectual, economic new birth which then received official recognition, opening in a conscious and popular form the reformation that, in a spontaneous form, had long been brooding in so many generous hearts and profound brains.

No reading of merely French history, no study of the reign of Louis xvi. by itself, can explain this great movement—no political history, no narrative of events, no account of any special institution. Neither the degeneration of the monarchy, nor the corruption of the nobility, nor the disorder of the administration, nor the barbarism of the feudal law, nor the decay of the Church, nor the vices of society, nor the teaching of any school, nor all of these together — are adequate to explain the revolution.

They are enough to account for the confusion, waste, conflict, and fury of the contest — i.e. for the explosion. But they do not explain how it is that hardly anything was set up in France between 1789 and 1799 which had not been previously discussed and prepared, that between 1789 and 1799 an immense body of new institutions and reformed methods of social life were firmly planted in such a way that they have borne fruit far and wide in France and through Europe.

Religious fanaticism

Nor do any of these special causes just enumerated suffice to explain the passion, the contagious faith, the almost religious fanaticism which was the inner strength of the revolution and the source of its inexhaustible activity. What we call the French Revolution of 1789, was really a new phase of civilisation announcing its advent in form. It had the character of religious zeal because it was a movement of the human race towards a completer humanity.

Rhetoricians, poets, and preachers have accustomed us too long to dwell on the lurid side of the movement, on its follies, crimes, and failures; they have overrated the relative importance of the catastrophe, and by profuse pictures of the horrors, they have drawn off attention from its solid and enduring fruits. In the midst of the agony it was natural that Burke, in the sunset of his judgment, should denounce it. But it was a misfortune for the last generation that the purple mantle of Burke should have fallen on a prophet, who was not a statesman but a man of letters, who, with all Burke’s passion and prejudice, had but little of his philosophic power, none of his practical sagacity, none of the great Whig’s experience of affairs and of men.

The universal bonfire ’ theory, the ‘ grand suicide ’ view, the ‘ chaos-come-again ’ of a former generation, are seen to be ridiculous in ours. The movement of 1789 was far less the final crash of an effete system than it was the new birth of a greater system, or rather of the irresistible germs of a greater system. The contemporaries of Tacitus, Trajan, and Marcus Aurelius could see nothing but ruin in the superstition of the Galileans, just as the contemporaries of Decius, Julian, and Justinian saw nothing but barbarism in the Goths, the Franks, and the Arabs.

Aristotle and Descartes

Albert, Roger, Thomas, combined, as did Aristotle and Descartes, the science of nature with the philosophy of thought; and, though we look back to the Opus Majus of Roger Bacon with wonder and admiration for his marvellous anticipatory guesses of modern science, we cannot doubt that Aquinas was truly the mightier intellect. Roger Bacon was, indeed, four centuries in advance of his age — on his own age and on succeeding ages he produced no influence at all. But Aquinas was ‘ the master of those who know ’ for all Christian thinkers from his death, in 1274, until the age of Francis Bacon and Descartes. Roger Bacon, like Leonardo da Vinci, or Giordano Bruno, or Spinoza, belongs to the order of intellectual pioneers, who are too much in advance of their age and of its actual resources to promote civilisation as they might do, or even to make the most of their own extraordinary powers.

An age which united aspiring intellect, passionate devotion, and constructive power, naturally created a new type of sacred art. The pointed architecture, that we call Gothic, had its rise, its development, its highest splendour in the thirteenth century, to which we owe all that is most lovely in the churches of Chartres, Amiens, Reims, Paris, Bourges, Strasburg, Cologne, Burgos, Toledo, Westminster, Salisbury, and Lincoln.

It is true that there are some traces of the pointed style in France in the twelfth century, at St. Denis, at Sens, and at Laon; but the true glories of this noble art belong, in France, to the reigns of Philip Augustus and of St. Louis; in England, to those of Henry in. and Edward i. In these two countries we must seek the origin of this wonderful creation of human art, of which Chartres, Amiens, and Westminster are the central examples. These glorious fanes of the thirteenth century were far more than works of art: they were at once temples, national monuments, museums, schools sofia daily tours, musical academies, and parliament halls, where the whole people gathered to be trained in every form of art, in all kinds of knowledge, and in all modes of intellectual cultivation.

They were the outgrowth of the whole civilisation of their age, in a manner so complete and intense, that its like was never before seen, except on the Acropolis of Athens, in the age of Eschylus and Pericles. It is not enough to recall the names of the master masons — Robert de Luzarches, Robert de Coucy, Erwin of Steinbach, and Pierre de Montereau. These vast temples are the creation of generations of men and the embodiment of entire epochs; and he who would know the Middle Ages should study in detail every carved figure, every painted window, each . canopy, each relief, each portal in Amiens, or Chartres, Reims, Bourges, Lincoln, or Salisbury, and he will find revealed to him more than he can read ‘in a thousand books.

Great age of architecture

Obviously the thirteenth century is the great age of architecture — the branch of art which of all the arts of form is at once the most social, the most comprehensive, and the most historic. Great buildings include sculpture, painting, and all the decorative arts together; they require the co-operation of an entire people; and they are, in a peculiar manner, characteristic of their age. The special arts of form are more associated with individual genius. These, as was natural, belong to centuries later than the thirteenth. But, even in the thirteenth, sculpture gave us the peopled portals and the exquisite canopies of our northern cathedrals, the early palaces of Venice, and the carvings of Nicolas and John of Pisa, which almost anticipate Ghiberti and Donatello. And in painting, Cimabue opens in this century the long roll of Italian masters, and Giotto was already a youth of glorious promise, before the century was closed.

The literature of the thirteenth century does not, in the strict sense of the term, stand forth with such special brilliancy as its art, its thought, and its political activity. As in most epochs of profound stirring of new ideas and of great efforts after practical objects, the energy of the age was not devoted to the composition of elaborate works. It was natural that Dante should be a century later than Barbarossa and Innocent, and that Petrarch of Vaucluse should be a century later than Francis of Assisi. But the thirteenth century was amply represented, both in poetry, romance, and prose history. All of these trace their fountain-heads to an earlier age, and all of them were fully developed in a later age.

But French prose may be said to have first taken form in the chronicle of Villehardouin at the opening of the century, and the chronicle of Join- ville at its close. The same century also added to the Catholic Hymnal some of the most powerful pieces in that glorious Anthology— the Dies Irce, the Stabat Mater; the grand hymns of Aquinas, of Bonaventura, and of Thomas of Celano. It produced also that rich repertory of devotional story, the Golden Legend of Voragine. It was, moreover, the thirteenth century which produced the main part of the Roman de la Rose, the favourite reading of the Middle Ages, some of the best forms of the Arthurian cycle, Ruteboeuf and the French lyrists, some of the most brilliant of the Troubadours, Sordello, Brunetto Latini, Guido Cavalcanti, and the precursors and associates of Dante.

Political history of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries

Thus the political history of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries is a record of bloodshed and anarchy, until men like the grim Louis xi., Ferdinand v. and Charles v., and the Tudors in England finally succeeded in mastering Feudalism by the aid of the middle classes and middle- class statesmen. But, as neither middle class nor middle- class statesmen existed in the thirteenth century, the kings were forced to do the best they could with their feudal resources. What they did was often very good, and sometimes truly wonderful. It could not permanently succeed; but its very failure was a grand experiment. And thus, whether in the spiritual and intellectual world, or in the political and social world, the thirteenth century — the last great effort of the Middle Ages—was doomed to inevitable disappointment, because the preceding thousand years of history had deprived it of the only means by which success was possible.

The unmistakable sign that the real force of Catholicism was exhausted may be read in the transfer of the intellectual leadership from the monasteries to the schools, from the churchmen to the doctors. And this transfer was thoroughly effected in the thirteenth century. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries the spiritual and philosophic guidance of mankind was in the hands of true monks. Clugny, Clairvaux, St. Denis, Bee, Canterbury, Merton, Malmesbury, Glastonbury, and Croyland sent out teachers and rulers. St. Bernard managed to silence Abailard. But in the thirteenth century it is not the monasteries but the universities that hold up the torch. Paris, Oxford, Montpellier, and the like were wholly secular schools; for though the leading doctors and professors of this age are still nominally churchmen, and even monks, their whole moral and mental attitude, and the atmosphere of their schools, are strictly secular, and not monastic sofia daily tours.

Dominican and Franciscan houses

Within two generations the Dominican and Franciscan houses, founded at the beginning of the century in such a whirlwind of ecstatic devotion, became celebrated schools of learning and secular education, so that Aquinas has almost as little of the missionary passion of St. Dominic as Roger Bacon has of the mystic tenderness of St. Francis. It is a fact of deep significance that, within a generation of the foundation of the Mendicant Orders, the Descartes and the Bacon of the thirteenth century were both on the roll of the Friars. So rapidly did mystic theology tend to develop into free inquiry. It would be hard to find anything more utterly unlike the saintly ideal of monasticism than were Paris and Oxford at the end of the thirteenth century. Its whole intellectual character may be measured by the light of these two famous seminaries of the new thought.

It was the great age of the schools we call universities, for though those of Italy belong to an earlier age, the thirteenth century gave full stature to the universities of Paris, and of Oxford, of Orleans, Toulouse, and Montpellier, of Cordova, Seville, and Toledo. That of Paris received from Philip Augustus in 1215 (the year of our Great Charter) her formal constitution, and all through the thirteenth century her ‘nations’ of twenty thousand students formed the main intellectual centre of Europe. The University of Oxford was hardly second to that of Paris; and though the history of the Oxford schools is in its origin obscure, and even local, in the thirteenth century we can trace the definite constitution of the university and the momentous foundation of the colleges, when Walter de Merton, in the reign of Edward 1., gave statutes to Merton College. Thus the origin of our great English university is almost exactly coeval with the origin of our English Parliament.

The same age also witnessed the revival of rational philosophy after its long sleep of a thousand years. Intellects quite as powerful as those of the Greek thinkers took up the task of constructing a harmony of general ideas on the ground where it had been left by the Alexandrine successors of Aristotle and Plato. The best teachers of the thirteenth century had conceptions and aims very far broader and more real than those of Abailard, of William of Champeaux, or John of Salisbury in the twelfth century, who were little more than theological logicians.

The thirteenth century had an instrument of its own, at least as important to human progress as the classical revival of the fifteenth century. This was the recovery in substance of the works of Aristotle. By the middle of the thirteenth century the entire works of Aristotle were more or less sufficiently known. For the most part they were translated from the Arabic, where they had lain hid for six centuries, like papyri discovered in an Egyptian mummy case. They were made known by Alexander Hales at Paris, by Albert the Great and Aquinas, his pupil and successor.

Albert of Cologne, the ‘Universal Doctor,’ as they called him, might himself, by virtue of his encyclopaedic method, be styled the Aristotle of the thirteenth century, as St. Bonaventura, the ‘Seraphic Doctor,’ the mystical metaphysician, may be called the Plato of the thirteenth century. Roger Bacon, the Oxford Franciscan, is even yet but imperfectly known to us, though he is often compared, not unfavorably, with his famous namesake, the author of the Novimt Organum. But, in spite of the amazing ingenuity of the founder of natural philosophy in modern Europe, we can hardly hesitate to place above all his contemporaries — the ‘ Angelic Doctor,’ Thomas Aquinas, the Descartes of the thirteenth century, and beyond doubt the greatest philosophic mind between Aristotle and Descartes.

Extraordinary brilliancy and energy

The so-called Renaissance, or Humanistic Revival, was a time of extraordinary brilliancy and energy; but it was avowedly based on insurrection and destruction, and it was an utterly premature attempt to found an intellectual humanism without either real humanity or sound scientific knowledge. And the age of Voltaire, though it had both humanity and science, was even more destructive in its aim; for it erected negation into its own creed, and proposed to regenerate mankind by ‘ stamping out the infamy ’ (of religion).

It follows then that, if we are to select any special period for the birth of a regenerate and developed modern society, we may take the age of Dante, 1265-1321, as that which witnessed the mighty transformation from a world which still trusted in the faith of a Catholic and Feudal constitution of society to a world which was teeming with ideas and wants incompatible with Catholic or Feudal systems altogether. The whole thirteenth century was crowded with creative forces in philosophy, art, poetry, and statesmanship as rich as those of the Humanist Renaissance sofia daily tours.

And if we are accustomed to look on them as so much more limited and rude, it is because we forget how very few and poor were their resources and their instruments. In creative genius, Giotto is the peer, if not the superior, of Raphael. Dante had all the qualities of his three chief successors — and very much more besides. It is a tenable view that, in pure inventive fertility and in imaginative range, those vast composite creations — the cathedrals of the thirteenth century — in all their wealth of architecture, statuary, painted glass, enamels, embroideries, and inexhaustible decorative work, may be set beside’ the entire painting of the sixteenth century. Albert and Aquinas, in philosophic range, had no peer until we come down to Descartes. Nor was Roger Bacon surpassed in versatile audacity of genius and in true encyclopaedic grasp, by any thinker between him and his namesake, the Chancellor. In statesmanship, and all the qualities of the born leader of men, we can only match the great chiefs of the thirteenth century by comparing them with the greatest names three or even four centuries later.

The thirteenth century was indeed an abortive revival. It was a failure: but a splendid failure. Men as great as any the world has known in thought, in art, in action, profoundly believed that society could be permanently organised on Catholic and Feudal lines. It was an illusion; but it was neither an unworthy nor an inexcusable illusion; for there were great resources, both in Catholic and in Feudal powers. And it was not possible for the greatest minds, after the thousand years of interval which had covered Europe since the age of the Antonines, to understand how vast were the defects of their own age in knowledge, in the arts of life, and in social organisation.

No ancient world

They had no ancient world, or what we call to-day, the Revival of Learning; they had no real science; and even the ordinary commonplaces of every Greek and Roman were to them a profound mystery. What was even worse, they did not know how much they needed to know: they had no measure of their own ignorance. And thus even intellects like those of Albert, Aquinas, and Dante could still dream of a final co-ordination of human knowledge on the lines of some subjective recasting of the Catholic verities. And they naturally imagined that, after all, society could be saved by some regeneration of the Church —though we now see that this was far less possible than to expect Pope Boniface eventually to turn out a saint, like Bernard of Clairvaux or Francis of Assisi.

And just as the men of intellect still believed that it was possible to recast the Catholic scheme, so men of action still believed it possible to govern nations on the Feudal scheme, and with the help of the feudal magnates. I’or a time all through the thirteenth century, men of very noble character or of commanding genius did manage to govern in this way, by the help first of the churchmen, then of the growing townships, and by constantly exhausting their own barons in foreign expeditions.

Philip Augustus, Blanche, St. Louis, and Philip the Fair held their own by a combination of high qualities and fortunate conditions. In England the infamous John and his foolish son forced the feudal chiefs to become statesmen themselves. Edward 1., Rudolph of Hapsburg, Albeit of Austria, Henry of Luxembourg, succeeded in marshalling their fierce baronial squadrons. But it could only be done by extraordinary skill and fortune, and even then but for a short time. After them, for nearly two hundred years, Europe was delivered over to an orgie of feudal anarchy. The dreadful Hundred Years’ War between France and England, the wars of succession, the Wars of the Roses, the dismemberment of France, the confusion of Spain, the decadence of the Empire ensued.

Side by side with Parliaments

Side by side with Parliaments there grew up the power of the law courts: along with constitutions, civil jurisprudence. Our Edward 1. is often called, and called truly, the English Justinian. The authority of the decisions of the courts, the development of law by direct legislation — i.e., case-law as we know it, legislative amendment of the law as we know it — first begin with the reign of Edward I. From that date to this hour we have an unbroken sequence of development in our judicial, as much as in our parliamentary, history. An even more momentous transformation of law took place throughout France. There the kings created the powerful order of the jurists, and ruled at home and abroad through them. In the legislation of Philip Augustus, the translation under him of the Corptis Juris into French, the famous Etablisscments of St. Louis, at the middle of the century, the growing importance of the Parle- meats, or judicial councils, under Philip the Fair at the end of the century, we have the first resurrection of the Roman civil law to fight out its long contest with the feudal law, which has led to its ultimate supremacy in the Civil Codeoi our day.

These, however, are but the external facts forming the framework within which the moral and intellectual ferment of the thirteenth century moved and worked; and in grouping in a few paragraphs the well-known outlines of the political events of that age we are merely tracing the skeleton of the living forces of the time. In many ways the thirteenth century created by anticipation much of the Renascence that we associate with the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries sofia daily tours. It was a revival or new era, deeper, purer, more constructive than the latter movement, which we commonly speak of as Renaissance. This superfluous Gallicism is a term which we should do well to drop; for it suggests a national character to a European movement; it implies a new birth, in the spirit of mendacious vanity, so characteristic of the age of Cellinis and Aretinos; and it expresses the negative side of what was largely a mere evolution of the past. As a creative movement, the profound uprising of intellect and soul concentrated in Dante was a far nobler and more potent effort than any form of classical revival.

The movement we associate with the epoch of Leo x., of Francis i., and Charles v. was only one of the series of European efforts to realise a more complete type of moral and social life; and of them all it was the one most deeply tainted with the spirit of vanity, of impurity, and of anarchy. Of all the epochs of effort after a new life, that of the age of Aquinas, Roger Bacon, St. Francis, St. Louis, Giotto, and Dante is the most purely spiritual, the most really constructive, and indeed the most truly philosophic.

Revolutionary reconstruction

Between the epoch of Charlemagne and the revolutionary reconstruction of the present century we may count at least four marked periods of concerted effort in Western Europe to found a broader and higher type of society. European civilisation advances, no doubt, in a way which is most irregular, and yet in the long run continuous. But we may still trace very distinct periods of special activity and common upheaval.

One of these periods is the age of Hildebrand, the great Norman chiefs, Lanfranc, Anselm, and the first Crusade. The second period is that which opens with Innocent in. and closes with Dante. The third is the classical revival from Louis xi. to Charles v. The fourth is the philosophic and scientific movement of the age of Voltaire, Diderot, and Hume, which preceded the great revolutionary wars. The first two movements, in the golden age of Popes and Crusades, were sincere attempts to reform society on a Catholic and Feudal basis. They did not succeed, but they were both inspired with great and beautiful ideals. And the movement of the thirteenth century was more humane, more intellectual, more artistic, more original, and more poetic than that of the eleventh century.

Great confederation of the Rhine

This is the age of the great confederation of the Rhine, and the rise of the Hanseatic League; for in Germany and in Flanders, where the towns could not count on the protection of a friendly and central monarchy, the towns formed mutual leagues for protection and support amongst themselves. It would need a volume to work out this complex development. But we may take it that, for Northern Europe, the thirteenth century is the era of the definite establishment of rich, free, self-governing municipalities. It is the flourishing era of town charters, of city leagues, and of the systematic establishment of a European commerce, north of the Mediterranean, both inter-provincial and inter-national.

And out of these rich and teeming cities arose that social power destined to such a striking career in the next six centuries — the middle class, a new order in the State, whose importance rests on wealth, intelligence, and organisation, not on birth or on arms. And out of that middle class rose popular representation, election by the commons, i.e., by communes, or corporate constituencies, the third estate. The history of popular representation in Europe would occupy a volume, or many volumes: its conception, birth, and youth fall within the thirteenth century sofia daily tours.

The Great Charter

The Great Charter, which the barons, as real representatives of the whole nation, wrested from John in 1215, did not, it is true, contain any scheme of popular representation; but it asserted the principle, and it laid down canons of public law which led directly to popular representation and a parliamentary constitution. The Great Charter has been talked about for many centuries in vague superlatives of praise, by those who had little precise or accurate knowledge of it. But now that our knowledge of it is full and exact, we see that its importance was in no way exaggerated, and perhaps was hardly understood; and we find it hard adequately to express our admiration of its wise, just, and momentous policy. The Great Charter of 1215 led in a direct line to the complete and developed Parliament of 1295.

And Bishop Stubbs has well named the interval between the two, the eighty years of struggle for a political constitution. The Charter of John contains the principle of taxation through the common council of the realm. From the very first year after it representative councils appear; first from counties; then, in 1254, we have a regular Parliament from shires; in 1264, after the battle of Lewes, Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester, summoned two discreet representatives from towns and cities by writ; in 1273, Edward 1. summoned what was in effect a Parliament; and, after several Parliaments summoned in intervening years, we have the first complete and finally constituted Parliament in 1295.

But our own, the greatest and most permanent of Parliaments, was by no means the earliest. Representatives of cities and boroughs had come to the Cortes of Castile and of Arragon in the twelfth century; early in the thirteenth century Frederick 11. summoned them to general courts in Sicily; in the middle of the century the towns sent deputies to the German Diets; in 1277, the commons and towns swear fealty to Rudolph of Hapsburg; in 1291, was founded in the mountains of Schwytz that Swiss confederation which has just celebrated its 600th anniversary; and, in 1302, Philip the Fair summoned the States-General to back him in his desperate duel with Boniface vm. Thus, seven years after Edward 1. had called to Westminster that first true Parliament which has had there so great a history over 600 years, Philip called together to Notre Dame at Paris the three estates — the clergy, the baronage, and the commons. So clear is it that the thirteenth century called into being that momentous element of modern civilisation, the representation of the people in Parliament.