The Law of Civilization and Decay

Aristotle, with his unerring acumen, made this observation: “That all warlike races are prone to the love of women,” and also that they tend to “fall under the dominion of their wives.”385 Undoubtedly this is the instinct of the soldier, and, in martial ages, women are idealized. When a foreigner asked the wife of Leonidas, “Why do you Lacedæmonian wives, unlike all others, govern your husbands?” the Spartan answered, “Because we alone are the mothers of men.” When at Rome Tiberius killed the male serpent, thereby devoting himself to death to save Cornelia, Plutarch, telling the story, remarked, “that Tiberius seemed to all men to have done nothing unreasonable, in choosing to die for such a woman; who, when King Ptolemy himself proffered her his crown, and would have married her, refused it, and chose rather to live a widow.”386

In the Middle Ages, that greatest of martial and imaginative epochs, marriage developed into the most solemn of sacraments, and the worship of women became the popular religion. In France, especially, the centre of thought, enthusiasm, and war, from the mighty fane of Paris downward, the churches were dedicated to Mary, and the vow of chivalry bound the knight to fight for God and for his lady.

“It hath bene through all ages ever seeneThat with the praise of armes and chevalrieThe prize of beautie still hath ioyned beene.”387

It might almost be said that the destinies of France have been moulded by men’s love for women, and that this influence still prevailed down to the advent of the usurers after the rout of Waterloo. On the other hand, nature bred a type of woman fit to mate with the imaginative man. The devotion of Saint Clara to Saint Francis is one of the most exquisite lyrics of the Church, and for six hundred years Héloïse remained an ideal of the West. Perhaps, indeed, that strange blending of tenderness and enthusiasm, which was peculiar to the mediæval mind, never found more refined and exalted expression than in the simple hymn which Héloïse is said to have composed and sung at the grave of Abélard: —

“Tecum fata sum perpessa;Tecum dormiam defessa,Et in Sion veniam.Solve crucem,Due ad lucemDegravatam animam.”

In primitive ages children are not only a source of power, but of wealth, and therefore the highest merit of the woman is fecundity. “And they blessed Rebekah, and said unto her, … be thou the mother of thousands of millions.” Also maternity is then a glory, and childlessness a shame; and Rachel said, “Give me children, or else I die.” “And she conceived and bare a son; and said, God hath taken away my reproach.” That she might live for her boys, Cornelia refused a crown; and when they grew up, she would upbraid them because “the Romans as yet rather called her the daughter of Scipio than the mother of the Gracchi.” But Cornelia’s father was the conqueror of Hannibal, and her son was an agrarian agitator, whom the monied oligarchy murdered for reviving the Licinian Laws. Apparently, one of the first signs of advancing civilization is the fall in the value of women in men’s eyes. Not very long after the siege of Troy, husbands must have ceased paying for their wives; for, at a comparatively early date, they demanded a price for wedding them. Euripides, born in 480 B.C., made Medea complain that women had to buy their husbands for great sums of money. In other words, the custom of the wedding portion had come to prevail.

As the pressure of economic competition intensifies with social consolidation, the family regularly disintegrates, the children rejecting the parental authority at a steadily decreasing age; until, finally, the population fuses into a compact mass, in which all individuals are equal before the law, and all are forced to compete with each other for the means of subsistence. When at length wealth has accumulated sufficiently to find vent through capitalistic methods of farming and manufacture, children lose all value, for then hiring labour is always cheaper than breeding. Thenceforward, among the more extravagant races, the family dwindles, as in ancient Rome or modern France, and marriage, having become a luxury, decreases. Moreover, the economic instinct impels parents to reduce the number of possible inheritors of their property, that its bulk may not shrink.

Upon women the effect of these changed conditions is prodigious. Their whole relation to society is altered. From a religious sacrament marriage is metamorphosed into a civil contract, dissoluble, like other contracts, by mutual consent; and, as the obligations of maternity diminish, the relation of husband and wife resolves itself into a sort of business partnership, tending always to become more ephemeral. Frequent as divorce now is, it was even more so under the Antonines.

On men the action of natural selection is, at least, as drastic. The change wrought in Roman character in about three hundred years has always been one of the problems of history. In the words of Aristotle, the primitive Roman “was prone to the love of women.” Strong in his passions, austere in his life, fierce in his jealousy, he set the undisputed possession of the female as his supreme happiness. Virginius slew his daughter to keep her from Appius Claudius, and his comrades in the legions washed out his wrong in the Decemvir’s blood; while among the stirring ballads of the fabled time which were sung at the farmer’s fireside, none roused such emotion as the tale of the vengeance wreaked on Tarquin for Lucretia’s death. Compare this virile race with the aristocracy of the middle Empire. By the second century female purity weighed light against money. Marcus Aurelius is said to have condensed the whole economic moral code in one short sentence. His wife, Faustina, was accused, by scandal, of being the most abandoned woman of her generation, more notorious even than had been Messalina. When the philosopher was urged to repudiate her, he replied, “Then I should have to surrender her portion” (the Empire); and he not only lived with her, but built a temple to her memory. Even if the story be false, it reflects none the less truly the temper of the age.

The minds of noble Romans of the third and fourth centuries, under the same impulsion, worked differently from those of their primitive ancestors; they lacked the martial and the amatory instincts. As a general rule one salient characteristic of the later reigns was a sexual lassitude yielding only to the most potent stimulants. The same phenomena were noticed among Frenchmen at the collapse of the Empire, since when like symptoms have become notorious in London.

Taking history as a whole, women seem never to have more than moderately appealed to the senses of the economic man. The monied magnate seldom ruins himself for love, and chivalry would have been as foreign to a Roman senator under Diocletian, as it would be now to a Lombard Street banker. On the other hand, in proportion as women’s influence has declined when measured by their power over men, it has increased when measured by the economic standard. In many ways the female seems to serve as a vent for the energy of capital almost as well as men; in the higher planes of civilization they hold their property in severalty, and, by means of money, wield a power not unlike Faustina’s. If unmarried, the economic woman competes with the man on nearly equal terms, and everywhere, and in all ages, the result is not dissimilar. The stronger and more fortunate members of the sex have grown rich and have bought social and political power. Roman politics under Septimius Severus and Caracalla was much in the hands of women, and Julia Mæsa, who was enormously wealthy, carried through a most famous intrigue by purchasing the throne for Elagabalus.

In Rome, however, there was always a strong admixture of barbaric blood, and, to the last, the barbarians married for love. Justinian was an example. Born of an obscure race of barbarians in the desolate Bulgarian country, he fell uncontrollably in love with Theodora, who had scandalized even the theatres of Constantinople. His mother died of shame; but Justinian persevered, and, while she lived, his devotion to his wife never wavered.

In Rome and in Byzantium such women were the stronger or the more fortunate; their counterparts are easily to be found in any economic age. The fate of the weaker there was slavery; now they are forced by competition into the ranks of the cheapest labour, – a lot, perhaps, hardly preferable.

And yet art, perhaps, even more clearly than religion, love, or war, indicates the pathway of consolidation; for art reflects with the subtlest delicacy those changes in the forms of competition which enfeeble or inflame the imagination. Of Greek art, in its zenith, little need be said; its great qualities have been too fully recognized. It suffices to point out that it was absolutely honest, and that it formed a vehicle of expression as flexible as the language itself. A temple apparently of marble, was of marble; a colonnade apparently supporting a portico, did support it; and, while the ornament formed an integral part of the structure, the people read it as intelligently as they read the poems of Homer. Nothing similar ever flourished in Rome.

Unlike the Greeks, the Romans were never sensitive or imaginative. Properly speaking, they had nothing which they could express through art; they were utilitarian from the outset, and their architecture finally took shape in the most perfect system of materialistic building which, probably, has ever existed. Obviously such a system could only be matured in a capitalistic society, and, accordingly, Roman architecture only reached perfection somewhat late, perhaps, toward the close of the first century.

The Romans, though vulgar and ostentatious, understood business. They knew how to combine economy and even solidity with display. As Viollet-le-Duc has observed, “They were rich, and they wanted to appear so,”388 but they strove to attain their end without waste. Therefore they first ran up a cheap core of rubble, bricks, and mortar, which could be put together by rude slave labour under the direction of an engineer and a few overseers; and their squalid interior they afterward veneered with marble, adding, by way of ornament, tier above tier of Greek columns ranged against the walls. That gaudy exterior had nothing whatever to do with the building itself, and could be stripped off without vital injury. From the Greek standpoint nothing could be falser, more insulting to the intelligence, or, in a word, more plutocratic; but the work was sound and durable, and, to a certain degree, imposing from its mass. This system lasted, substantially unimpaired, even to Constantine or until the final migration of capital to the Bosphorus, the only difference between the monuments of the fourth century and the first being that the former are somewhat coarser, just as the coins of Diocletian are coarser than those of Nero.

Yet, although the monied aristocracy remained supreme down to the final disintegration of the West, emigration began very early to modify the base of society, by the injection of a considerable amount of imaginative blood; and, as early as the reign of Claudius, this new store of energy made its presence felt through the outlet of Christianity. The converts were, of course, the antipodes of the ruling class. They were “humiliores,” poor people, below the notice of a rich man like Tacitus; “quos, … vulgus Christianos appellabat.”389

These Christians held a position analogous to that of Nihilists now, whom they resembled save in respect to violence. They were socialists living under a monied despotism, and they openly prayed for the end of the world; therefore they were thought “haters of the human race,”390 and they suffered the penalty. Primitive Christianity was incompatible with the existence of Roman society, against which it was a protest, for it “fully accepted the idea that the rich, if he did not surrender his superfluity, kept what belonged to another.”391 By right the Kingdom of Heaven was closed to the wealthy.

Probably very few of these early Christians were Italians; most of them were from the Levant, and that they were intensely emotional is proved by their lust for martyrdom – they voluntarily sought death as a means of glorifying God. One day Arrius Antoninus, proconsul of Asia, having ordered certain Christians arrested, saw all the faithful of the town present themselves before his tribunal, demanding to share the fate of those chosen for martyrdom. He dismissed them in wrath, telling them that if they were so in love with death they might commit suicide;392 and Renan’s account of the persecutions under Nero shows an incredible exaltation.393

Almost at once the effect of this emotional temperament became perceptible. The paintings in the catacombs are, perhaps, the oldest example of Christian art, and of these M. Vitet thus spoke many years ago: —

“These decorations, made with the hand raised, in secret, hurriedly, and more for pious reasons than for love of the beautiful, nevertheless reveal to the most rebellious eyes and in spite of strange negligence and incorrectness, I know not what of animation, of youth, of fecundity, and, so to speak, a real transformation of that very art which, in the service of paganism, seemed then, we are all agreed, dying of exhaustion.”394

As the world disintegrated, and the imagination everywhere acquired power, and with power wealth and the means of expression, an entirely new architecture sprang up in the East, whose growth closely followed upon the barbarian invasions and the progressive failure of the Roman blood. The system of construction was Asiatic modified by Greek influences,395 and with this new construction came an equally new decoration, a decoration which once more served as a language.

Mosaics of stone had long been used, but mosaics of glass, which give such an incomparable lustre to the dome, were the invention of Levantine Christians, and seem to have come into general use toward the beginning of the fifth century. But the fifth century was the period of the great invasions of Alaric, Attila, and Theoderic, and during this period the population of Italy, Macedonia, and Thrace must have undergone profound changes. In Italy the whole fabric of consolidated society crumbled; south of the Danube it survived, but survived in a modified form, a form on which the recent migrations left an unmistakable imprint. Galla Placidia, the first great patron of the pure Byzantine school, died in 450, after an eventful life largely passed among the barbarians, one of whom she married. She began to embellish Ravenna, and a comparison of these remains with those of France and Italy of the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries, exposes the difference in the forces which moulded these three civilizations.

With all its grace and refinement the characteristic of Ravenna was not religious ecstasy, but rather an absence of fear of the unknown, and a respect for wealth. There is nothing mysterious or terrible about these charming buildings, which are manifestly rather a glorification of the Empire on the Bosphorus, than of the Kingdom of Heaven.

At San Vitale it is Justinian, with an aureole about his head and surrounded by his courtiers, carrying a gift to the shrine; or Theodora, blazing with jewels, and followed by the magnificent ladies of her household. At San Apollinare the long procession of saints are richly clad and bear crowns, while the Virgin herself, seated on a throne and revered as a sovereign, is as far removed from the vulgar as Theodora herself. “Byzantine etiquette no longer permits her to be approached directly; four angels surround her and separate her from humanity.”396 The terrifying was scrupulously avoided. “By a most significant scruple, the artist, in reproducing various episodes of the Passion, avoided the most painful, the Crucifixion.”397

Saint Sophia offers every indication of having been expressly contrived to provide the large light spaces needful for such functions as those depicted in San Vitale, and the account given by Procopius of its erection sustains this supposition. According to Procopius, Saint Sophia was a hobby of Justinian, who not only selected the architect Anthemius because he was the most ingenious mechanic of his age, but who also supplied the funds and “assisted it by the labour and powers of his mind.”398 The dome, “from the lightness of the building … does not appear to rest upon a solid foundation, but to cover the place beneath as though it were suspended from heaven by the fabled golden chain”; and the interior “is singularly full of light and of sunshine; you would declare that the place is not lighted by the sun from without, but that the rays are produced within itself, such an abundance of light is poured into this church.”399 Of the decorations it is impossible to speak with certainty, since it is probable that the mosaics which now exist were of a later period.

Perhaps, however, the most significant phenomenon about the church is its loneliness; nothing like it was built elsewhere, and the reason seems plain. There was but one imperial court which needed so superb a setting, and but one emperor who could pay for it. Herein lies the radical divergence between the East and West; the great tabernacle of Constantinople stood alone because it represented the wealth, the pomp, and the imagination of the barbarian shepherd who had been raised by fortune to be the chief of police of the city where the world’s wealth had centralized. In France every diocese had a temple magnificent according to its means, some of which exceeded in majesty that of Paris; and the cause was that, in France, the artistic and imaginative caste formed a theocracy, who were not hired by king or emperor, but who were themselves the strongest force in all the land. In the East, the imaginative inroad was not strong enough to cause disintegration, and the artists always remained wage-earners. In the West, society fell back a thousand years, and consolidation began afresh. Six centuries intervened between the death of Galla Placidia and the famous dream of the monk Gauzon which contained the revelation of the plan of the Abbey of Cluny, and yet six hundred years by no means represented the gap between the Franks and the Burgundians, and the Eastern Empire, even when it sank lowest under Heraclius. To Justinian the building of Saint Sophia was a matter of time and money; to Saint Hugh the church of Cluny was a miracle.

In France the churches long were miracles; the chronicles are filled with the revelations vouchsafed the monks; and none can cross the threshold of one of these noble monuments and fail to grasp its meaning. They are the most vigorous of all expressions of fear of the unseen. The Gothic architect heeded no living potentate; he held kings in contempt, and oftener represented them thrust down into hell than seated on their thrones. With the enemy who lurked in darkness none but the saints could cope, and them he idealized. No sculpture is more terrible than the demons on the walls of Rheims, none more majestic and pathetic than that over the door of the Virgin at Paris, while no colour ever equalled the windows of Saint Denis and Chartres.

With the thirteenth century came the influx of the Eastern trade and the rise of the communes. Immediately the glory of the Gothic began to fade; by the reign of Saint Louis it had passed its prime, and under Philip the Fair it fell in full decline. The men who put dead cats in shrines were not likely to be inspired in religious sculpture. The decay, and the reasons for it, can be readily traced in colour.

The monks who conceived the twelfth century windows, or painted the pictures of the saints, only sought to render an emotion by a conventional symbol which should rouse a response. Consequently they used marvellous combinations of colours, in which blue was apt to predominate, and they harmonized their colours with gold. Viollet-le-Duc has elaborately explained how this was done.400 But such a system was not pretentious, and was incompatible with perspective. The mediæval burgher, like the Roman, was rich, and wanted to appear so. He demanded more for his money than a solemn portrait of a saint. He craved a picture of himself, or of his guild, and above all he insisted on display. The fourteenth century was the period when the reds and yellows superseded the blues, and when the sense of harmony began to fail. Furthermore, the burgher was realistic and required a representation of the world he saw about him. Hence came perspective, the abandonment of gold, and the final degradation of colour, which sank into a lost art. For hundreds of years it has been impossible to imitate the work of the monks of Saint Denis. In Italy, the economic phenomena were yet more striking; for Italy, even in the Middle Ages, was always a commercial community, which looked on art with the economic eye. One example will suffice, – the treatment of the dome.

Placed between the masterpieces of the East and West, and having little imagination of his own, the Florentine banker conceived the idea of combining the two systems and embellishing them in a cheap and showy manner. Accordingly on Gothic arches he placed an Eastern dome, and instead of adorning his dome with mosaics, which are costly, he had his interior painted at about one-quarter of the price. The substitution of the fresco for the mosaic is one of the most typical devices of modern times.

Before the opening of the economic age, when the imagination glowed with all the passion of religious enthusiasm, the monks who built the abbeys of Cluny and Saint Denis took no thought of money, for it regarded them not. Sheltered by their convents, their livelihood was assured; their bread and their robe were safe; they pandered to no market, for they cared for no patron. Their art was not a chattel to be bought, but an inspired language in which they communed with God, or taught the people, and they expressed a poetry in the stones they carved which far transcended words. For these reasons Gothic architecture, in its prime, was spontaneous, elevated, dignified, and pure.

The advent of portraiture has usually been considered to portend decay, and rightly, since the presence of the portrait demonstrates the supremacy of wealth. A portrait can hardly be the ideal of an enthusiast, like the figure of a god, for it is a commercial article, sold for a price, and manufactured to suit a patron’s taste; were it made to please the artist, it might not find a buyer. When portraits are fashionable, the economic period must be well advanced. Portraiture, like other economic phenomena, blossomed during the Renaissance, and it was then also that the artist, no longer shielded by his convent or his guild, stood out to earn his living by the sale of his wares, like the Venetian merchants whom he met on the Rialto, whose vanity he flattered, and whose palaces he adorned. From the sixteenth century downward, the man of imagination, unable to please the economic taste, has starved.

This mercenary quality forms the gulf which has divided the art of the Middle Ages from that of modern times – a gulf which cannot be bridged, and which has broadened with the lapse of centuries, until at last the artist, like all else in society, has become the creature of a commercial market, even as the Greek was sold as a slave to the plutocrat of Rome. With each invention, with each acceleration of movement, prose has more completely supplanted poetry, while the economic intellect has grown less tolerant of any departure from those representations of nature which have appealed to the most highly gifted of the monied type among successive generations. Hence the imperiousness of modern realism.

Thus the history of art coincides with the history of all other phenomena of life; for experience has demonstrated that, since the Reformation, a school of architecture, like the Greek or Gothic, has become impossible. No such school could exist in a society where the imagination had decayed, for the Greek and Gothic represented imaginative ideals. In an economic period, like that which has followed the Reformation, wealth is the form in which energy seeks expression; therefore, since the close of the fifteenth century, architecture has reflected money.

Viollet-le-Duc has said of the Romans, that, like all parvenus, the true expression of art lay, for them, rather in lavish ornament than in purity of form,401 and what was true of the third century is true of the nineteenth. The type of mind being the same, its operation must be similar, and the economic, at once ostentatious and parsimonious, produces a cheap core fantastically adorned. The Romans perched the travesty of a Grecian colonnade upon the summit of a bath or an amphitheatre, while the Englishman, having pillaged weaker nations of their imaginative gems, delights to cover with coarse imitations the exterior of banks and counting-houses.