Volume Ii Part 6 (1/2)

Such light lay in open front, but palpable ebony blackness, Sealed every far-off street in deep and awful abysses, Out of which rose like phantoms, rose and sank as a sea-bird Rises and sinks on the waves of a dim, tumultuous ocean, Faces dabbled in blood, phantasmagory direful and scenic.

But where is Belshazzar the Lord? Has he fled? Has he found an asylum?

Or still does he pace in his palace, blind-seeming or moonstruck?

Still does he tread proudly the palace, fancy-deluded, Prophets of falsehood trusting, or false Babylonian idols, Defying the odious truth from the summit of empire!

Lo! at his palace gates the fierce Apollyon's great army, With maces uplifted, stand to make way for great Cyrus of Elam.

Watching for signal from him whose truncheon this way or that bids: 'Strike!' said Cyrus the King. 'Strike!' said the princes of Elam; And the brazen gates at the word, like flax that is broken asunder By fire from earth or from heaven, snapped as a bulrush, Snapped as a reed, as a wand, as the tiny toy of an infant.

Marvellous the sight that followed! Oh, most august revelation!

Mile-long were the halls that appeared, and open s.p.a.ces enormous; Areas fit to hold armies on the day of muster for battle; Hosts upon either side, for amplest castrametation.

Depth behind depth, and dim labyrinthine apartments.

Golden galleries above running high into darkening vistas, Staircases soaring and climbing, till sight grew dizzy with effort Of chasing the corridors up to their whispering gloomy recesses.

Nations were ranged in the halls, nations ranged at a banquet, Even then lightly proceeding with timbrel, dulcimer, hautboy, Gong and loud kettledrum and fierce-blown tempestuous organ.

Banners floated in air, colossal embroidery tissues Of Tyrian looms, scarlet, black, violet and amber, Or the perfectest cunning of trained Babylonian artist, Or ma.s.sy embossed, from the volant shuttle of Phrygian.

Banners suspended in shade, or in the full glare of the lamplight, Mid cressets and chandeliers by jewelly chains swinging pendant.

Draw a veil o'er the rout when advances great Cyrus of Elam, Dusky-browed archers behind him, and spearmen before, When he cries 'Strike!' and the gorgeously inlaid pavements Run ruddy with blood of the festive a.s.syrians there.

VII.--_Greece and Rome._--My female readers, whom only I contemplate in every line of this little work, and who would have a right to consider it disrespectful if I were to leave a single word of Latin or Greek unexplained, must understand that the Greeks, according to that universal habit of viewing remote objects in a relation of ascent or descent with respect to the observer, whence the 'going up to Jerusalem,' and our own 'going up to London,' always figured a journey eastwards, that is, directed towards the Euphrates or Tigris, or to any part of Asia from Greece as tending _upwards_. In this mode of conceiving their relations to the East, they were governed semi-consciously by the sense of a vast presence beyond the Tigris--glorified by grandeur and by distance--the golden city of Susa, and the throne of the great king. Accordingly, the expedition therefore of Cyrus the younger against his brother Artaxerxes was called by Xenophon, when recording it, the Anabasis, or going up of Cyrus; and, from the accident of its celebrity, this t.i.tle has adhered to that expedition; and to that book--as if either could claim it by some exclusive t.i.tle; whereas, on the contrary, the Katabasis, or going down, furnishes by much the larger and the more interesting part of the work.

And, in any case, the t.i.tle is open to all Asiatic expeditions whatsoever; to the Trojan that just crossed the water, to the Macedonian that went beyond the Indus. The word Anabasis must have its accent on the syllable _ab_, not on the penultimate syllable _as_.

In coming to the history of Imperial Rome, one is fortunately made sensible at once of a vast advantage, which is this--that one is not throwing away one's labour. Sad it is, after ploughing a stiff and difficult clay, to find all at once that the whole is a task of so little promise that perhaps, on the whole, one might as well have left it untouched.

X. Yes, I remember that my cousin, Cecilia Dinbury, took the pains to master--or perhaps one ought to say to _mistress_--the history.

L. No, to _miss_ it, is what one ought to say.

X. Fie, my dear second cousin--Fie, fie, if you please. To _miss_ it, indeed! Ah, how we wished that we _had_ missed it. But we had no such luck. There were we broiling through a hot, hot August, broiling away at this intolerable stew of Iskis and Fuskis, and all to no end or use.

Granted that too often it is, or it may be so. But here we are safe. Who can fancy or feel so much as the shadow of a demur, when peregrinating Rome, that we might be losing our toil?

Now, then, in the highest spirits, let us open our studies. And first let us map out a chart of the _personnel_ for pretty nearly a century.

Twelve Caesars--the twelve first--should clearly of themselves make more than a century. For I am sure all of you, except our two new friends, know so much of arithmetic as that multiplication and division are a great menace upon addition and subtraction. It is, therefore, a thing most desirable to set up compound modes--short devices for abridging these. Now 10 is the earliest number written with two digits: and the higher the multiplier, so much harder, apparently, the process. Yet here at least a great simplification offers. To multiply by 10, all you have to do is to put a cipher after the multiplicand. Twenty-seven soldiers are to have 10 guineas each, how much is required to pay all twenty-seven? Why, 27 into 10 is 27 with a cipher at the end--27:0, _i.e._, 270. _Ergo_, twelve Caesars, supposing each to reign ten years, would make, no, _should_ make, with anything like great lives--12:0, _i.e._, 120 years. And when you consider that one of the twelve, viz., Augustus, singly, for _his_ share, contributed fifty and odd years, if the other eleven had given ten each that would be 11:0; this would make a total of about 170.

VIII.--_Beginning of Modern Era._--From the period of Justinian commences a new era--an era of unusual transition. This is the broad principle of change. Old things are decaying, new things are forming and gathering. The lines of decay and of resurrection are moving visibly and palpably to every eye in counteracting agency for one result--life and a new truth for humanity. All the great armies of generous barbarians, showing, by contrast with Rome and Greece, the opulence of teeming nature as against the powers of form in utter superannuation, were now, therefore, no longer moving, roaming, seeking--they had taken up their ground; they were in a general process of castrametation, marking out their alignments and deploying into open order upon ground now permanently taken up for their settlement. The early trumpets, the morning _reveille_ of the great Christian nations--England, France, Spain, Lombardy--were sounding to quarters. Franks had knit into one the rudiments of a great kingdom upon the soil of France; the Saxons and Angles, with some Vandals, had, through a whole century, been defiling by vast trains into the great island which they were called by Providence to occupy and to enn.o.ble; the Vandals had seated themselves, though in this case only with no definite hopes, along the extreme region of the Barbary States. Vandals might and did survive for a considerable period in ineffective fragments, but not as a power. The Visigoths had quartered themselves on Spain, there soon to begin a conflict for the Cross, and to maintain it for eight hundred years, and finally to prevail. And lastly, the Lombards had thrown a network of colonization over Italy, which, as much by the cohesions which it shook loose and broke asunder as by the new one which it bred, exhibited a power like that of the coral insects, and gave promise of a new empire built out of floating dust and fragments.

The movements which formerly had resembled those gigantic pillars of sand that mould themselves continually under the action of sun and wind in the great deserts--suddenly showing themselves upon the remote horizon, rear themselves silently and swiftly, then stalking forward towards the affected caravan like a phantom phantasmagoria, approach, manoeuvre, overshadow, and then as suddenly recede, collapse, fluctuate, again to remould into other combinations and to alarm other travellers--have pa.s.sed. This vast structure of Central Europe had been abandoned by all the greater tribes; they had crossed the vast barriers of Western Europe--the Alps, the Vosges, the Pyrenees, the ocean--these were now the wards within which they had committed their hopes and the graves of their fathers. Social developments tended to the same, and no longer either wis.h.i.+ng or finding it possible to roam, they were all now, through an entire century, taking up their ground and making good their tumultuous irruptions; with the power of moving had been conjoined a propensity to move. Rustic life, which must essentially have been maintained on the great area of German vagrancy, was more and more confirmed.

With this physical impossibility of roaming, and with the reciprocal compression of each exercised on the other, coincided the new instincts of civilization. They were no longer barbarous by a brutal and animal barbarism. The deep soil of their powerful natures had long been budding into n.o.bler capacities, and had expanded into n.o.bler perceptions.

Reverence for female dignity, a sentiment never found before in any nation, gave a vernal promise of some higher humanity, on a wider scale than had yet been exhibited. Strong sympathies, magnetic affinities, prepared this great encampment of nations for Christianity. Their n.o.bility needed such a field for its expansion; Christianity needed such a human nature for its evolution. The strong and deep nature of the Teutonic tribes could not have been evolved, completed, without Christianity. Christianity in a soil so shallow and unracy as the Graeco-Latin, could not have struck those roots which are immovable. The ultimate conditions of the soil and the capacities of the culture must have corresponded. The motions of Barbaria had hitherto indicated only change; change without hope; confusion without tendencies; strife without principle of advance; new births in each successive age without principle of regeneration; momentary gain balanced by momentary loss; the tumult of a tossing ocean which tends to none but momentary rest.

But now the currents are united, enclosed, and run in one direction, and that is definite and combined.

Now truly began that modern era, of which we happily reap the harvest: then were laid the first foundations of social order and the first effective hint of that sense of mutual aid and dependence which has, century by century, been creating such a balance and harmony of adjusted operations--of agencies working night and day, which no man sees, for services which no man creates: the agencies are like Ezekiel's wheels--self-sustained; the services in which they labour have grown up imperceptibly as the growth of a yew, and from a period as far removed from cognizance. One man dies every hour out of myriads, his place is silently supplied, and the mysterious economy thus propagates itself in silence, like the motion of the planets, from age to age. Hands innumerable are every moment writing summonses, returns, reports, figures--records that would stretch out to the crack of doom, as yet every year acc.u.mulated, written by professional men, corrected by correctors, checked by controllers, and afterwards read by corresponding men, re-read by corresponding controllers, pa.s.sed and ratified by corresponding ratifiers; and through this almighty pomp of wheels, whose very whirling would be heard into other planets, did not the very velocity of their motion seem to sleep on their soft axle, is the business of this great nation, judicial, fixed, penal, deliberative, statistical, commercial, all carried on without confusion, never distracting one man by its might, nor molesting one man by its noise.

Now, in the semi-fabulous times of Egypt and a.s.syria, things were not so managed. Ours are the ages of intellectual powers, of working by equivalents and subst.i.tutions; but theirs were done by efforts of brute power, possible only in the lowest condition of animal man, when all wills converged absolutely in one, and when human life, cheap as dog's, had left man in no higher a state of requirement, and had given up human power to be applied at will--without art or skill.