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G >> Goldwin Smith >> Lectures and Essays

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Oxford (Ousen-ford, the ford of the Ouse) was already a royal city; and
it may be conjectured that, amidst the general restoration of learning
under Alfred, a school of some sort would be opened there. This is the
only particle of historical foundation for the academic legend which
gave rise to the recent celebration. Oxford was desolated by the Norman
Conquest, and anything that remained of the educational institution of
Alfred was in all probability swept away.

Another measure, indispensable to the civilizer as well as to the church
reformer in those days, was to restore the intercourse with Rome, and
through her with continental Christendom, which had been interrupted by
the troubles. The Pope, upon Alfred's accession, had sent him gifts and
a piece of the Holy Cross. Alfred sent embassies to the Pope, and made a
voluntary annual offering, to obtain favourable treatment for his
subjects at Rome. But, adopted child of Rome, and naturally attached to
her as the centre of ecclesiastical order and its civilizing influences
though he was, and much as he was surrounded by ecclesiastical friends
and ministers, we trace in him no ultramontanism, no servile submission
to priests. The English Church, so far as we can see, remains national,
and the English King remains its head.

Not only with Latin but with Eastern Christendom, Alfred, if we may
trust the contemporary Saxon chronicles, opened communication. As
Charlemagne, in the spirit partly perhaps of piety, partly of ambition,
had sent an embassy with proofs of his grandeur to the Caliph of Bagdad;
as Louis XIV., in the spirit of mere ambition, delighted to receive an
embassy from Siam; so Alfred, in a spirit of piety unmixed, sent
ambassadors to the traditional Church of St. Thomas in India: and the
ambassadors returned, we are told, with perfumes and precious stones as
the memorials of their journey, which were long preserved in the
churches. "This was the first intercourse," remarks Pauli, "that took
place between England and Hindostan."

All nations are inclined to ascribe their primitive institutions to some
national founder, a Lycurgus, a Theseus, a Romulus. It is not necessary
now to prove that Alfred did not found trial by jury, or the frank-
pledge, or that he was not the first who divided the kingdom into
shires, hundreds, or tithings. The part of trial by jury which has been
politically of so much importance, its popular character, as opposed to
arbitrary trial by a royal or imperial officer--that of which the
preservation, amidst the general prevalence of judicial imperialism, has
been the glory of England--was simply Teutonic; so was the frank-pledge,
the rude machinery for preserving law and order by mutual responsibility
in the days before police; so were the hundreds and the tithings,
rudimentary institutions marking the transition from the clan to the
local community or canton. The shires probably marked some stage in the
consolidation of the Saxon settlements; at all events they were ancient
divisions which Alfred can at most only have reconstituted in a revised
form after the anarchy.

He seems, however, to have introduced a real and momentous innovation by
appointing special judges to administer a more regular justice than that
which was administered in the local courts of the earls and bishops, or
even in the national assembly. In this respect he was the imitator,
probably the unconscious imitator, of Charlemagne, and the precursor of
Henry II., the institutor of our Justices in Eyre. The powers and
functions of the legislature, the executive and the judiciary, lie at
first enfolded in the same germ, and are alike exercised by the king,
or, as in the case of the ancient republics, by the national assembly.
It is a great step when the special office of the judiciary is separated
from the rest. It is a great step also when uniformity of justice is
introduced. Probably, however, these judges, like the itinerant justices
of Henry II., were administrative as well as judicial officers; or, in
the terms of our modern polity, they were delegates of the Home Office
as well as of the Central Courts of Law.

In his laws, Alfred, with the sobriety and caution on which the
statesmen of his race have prided themselves, renounces the character of
an innovator, fearing, as he says, that his innovations might not be
accepted by those who would come after him. His code, if so inartificial
a document can be dignified with the name, is mainly a compilation from
the laws of his Saxon predecessors. We trace, however, an advance from
the barbarous system of weregeld, or composition for murder and other
crimes as private wrongs, towards a State system of criminal justice. In
totally forbidding composition for blood, and asserting that
indefeasible sanctity of human life which is the essential basis of
civilization, the code of Moses stands contrasted with other primaeval
codes. Alfred, in fact, incorporated an unusually large amount of the
Mosaic and Christian elements, which blend with Germanic customs and the
relics of Roman law, in different proportions, to make up the various
codes of the early Middle Ages, called the Laws of the Barbarians. His
code opens with the Ten Commandments, followed by extracts from Exodus,
containing the Mosaic law respecting the relations between masters and
servants, murder and other crimes, and the observance of holy days, and
the Apostolic Epistle from Acts xv 23-29. Then is added Matthew vii. 12,
"Whatsoever ye would that men should do to you, do ye even so to them."
"By this one Commandment," says Alfred, "a man shall know whether he
does right, and he will then require no other law-book." This is not the
form of a modern Act of Parliament, but legislation in those days was as
much preaching as enactment; it often resembled in character the Royal
Proclamation against Vice and Immorality.

Alfred's laws unquestionably show a tendency to enforce loyalty to the
king, and to enhance the guilt of treason, which, in the case of an
attempt on the king's life, is punished with death and confiscation,
instead of the old composition by payment of the royal weregeld. Hence
he has been accused of imperializing and anti-Teutonic tendencies; he
had even the misfortune to be fixed upon as a prototype by Oxford
advocates of the absolutism of Charles I. There is no ground for the
charge, so far at least as Alfred's legislation or any known measure of
his government is concerned. The kingly power was the great source of
order and justice amidst that anarchy, the sole rallying point and bond
of union for the imperilled nation; to maintain it, and protect from
violence the life of its holder, was the duty of a patriot law-giver:
and as the authority of a Saxon king depended in great measure on his
personal character and position, no doubt the personal authority of
Alfred was exceptionally great. But he continued to govern by the advice
of the national council; and the fundamental principles of the Teutonic
polity remained unimpaired by him, and were transmitted intact to his
successors. His writings breathe a sense of the responsibilities of
rulers and a hatred of tyranny. He did not even attempt to carry further
the incorporation of the subordinate kingdoms with Wessex; but ruled
Mercia as a separate state by the hand of his brother-in-law, and left
it to its own national council or witan. Considering his circumstances,
and the chaos from which his government had emerged, it is wonderful
that he did not centralize more. He was, we repeat, a true Teuton, and
entirely worthy of his place in the Germanic Walhalla.

The most striking proof of his multifarious activity of mind, and of the
unlimited extent of the task which his circumstances imposed upon him,
as well as of his thoroughly English character, is his undertaking to
give his people a literature in their own tongue. To do this he had
first to educate himself--to educate himself at an advanced age, after
a life of fierce distraction, and with the reorganization of his
shattered kingdom on his hands. In his boyhood he had got by heart Saxon
lays, vigorous and inspiring, but barbarous; he had learned to read, but
it is thought that he had not learned to write. "As we were one day
sitting in the royal chamber," says Asser, "and were conversing as was
our wont, it chanced that I read him a passage out of a certain book.
After he had listened with fixed attention, and expressed great delight,
he showed me the little book which he always carried about with him, and
in which the daily lessons, psalms and prayers, were written, and begged
me to transcribe that passage into his book." Asser assented, but found
that the book was already full, and proposed to the king to begin
another book, which was soon in its turn filled with extracts. A portion
of the process of Alfred's education is recorded by Asser. "I was
honourably received at the royal mansion, and at that time stayed eight
months in the king's court. I translated and read to him whatever books
he wished which were within our reach; for it was his custom, day and
night, amidst all his afflictions of mind and body, to read books
himself or have them read to him by others." To original composition
Alfred did not aspire; he was content with giving his people a body of
translations of what he deemed the best authors; here again showing his
royal good sense. In the selection of his authors, he showed liberality
and freedom from Roman, ecclesiastical, imperialist, or other bias. On
the one hand he chooses for the benefit of the clergy whom he desired to
reform, the "Pastoral Care" of the good Pope, Gregory the Great, the
author of the mission which had converted England to Christianity; but
on the other hand he chooses the "Consolations of Philosophy," the chief
work of Boethius, the last of the Romans, and the victim of the cruel
jealousy of Theodoric. Of Boethius Hallam says "Last of the classic
writers, in style not impure, though displaying too lavishly that poetic
exuberance which had distinguished the two or three preceding centuries;
in elevation of sentiment equal to any of the philosophers; and mingling
a Christian sanctity with their lessons, he speaks from his prison in
the swan-like tones of dying eloquence. The philosophy which consoled
him in bonds was soon required in the sufferings of a cruel death.
Quenched in his blood, the lamp he had trimmed with a skilful hand gave
no more light; the language of Tully and Virgil soon ceased to be
spoken; and many ages were to pass away before learned diligence
restored its purity, and the union of genius with imitation taught a few
modern writers to 'surpass in eloquence' the Latinity of Boethius."
Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English, the highest product of
that memorable burst of Saxon intellect which followed the conversion,
and a work, not untainted by miracle and legend, yet most remarkable for
its historical qualities as well as for its mild and liberal
Christianity, is balanced in the king's series of translations by the
work of Orosius, who wrote of general and secular history, though with a
religious object. In the translation of Orosius, Alfred has inserted a
sketch of the geography of Germany, and the reports of explorations made
by two mariners under his auspices among the natives dwelling on the
coasts of the Baltic and the North Sea--further proof of the variety of
his interests and the reach of his mind.

In his prefaces, and in his amplifications and interpolations of the
philosophy of Boethius, Alfred comes before us an independent author,
and shows us something of his own mind on theology, on philosophy, on
government, and generally as to the estate of man. To estimate these
passages rightly, we must put ourselves back into the anarchical and
illiterate England of the ninth century, and imagine a writer, who, if
we could see him, would appear barbarous and grotesque, as would all his
equipments and surroundings, and one who had spent his days in a
desperate struggle with wolfish Danes, seated at his literary work in
his rude Saxon mansion, with his candle-clock protected by the horn
lantern against the wind. The utterances of Alfred will then appear
altogether worthy of his character and his deeds. He always emphasizes
and expands passages which speak either of the responsibilities of
rulers or of the nothingness of earthly power; and the reflections are
pervaded by a pensiveness which reminds us of Marcus Aurelius. The
political world had not much advanced when, six centuries after Alfred,
it arrived at Machiavelli.

There is an especial sadness in the tone of some words respecting the
estate of kings, their intrinsic weakness, disguised only by their royal
trains, the mutual dread that exists between them and those by whom they
are surrounded, the drawn sword that always hangs over their heads, "as
to me it ever did." We seem to catch a glimpse of some trials, and
perhaps errors, not recorded by Asser or the chroniclers.

In his private life Alfred appears to have been an example of conjugal
fidelity and manly purity, while we see no traces of the asceticism
which was revered by the superstition of the age of Edward the
Confessor. His words on the value and the claims of a wife, if not up to
the standard of modern sentiment, are at least instinct with genuine
affection.

The struggle with the Northmen was not over. Their swarms came again, in
the latter part of Alfred's reign, from Germany, whence they had been
repulsed, and from France, which they had exhausted by their ravages.
But the king's generalship foiled them and compelled them to depart.
Seeing where their strength lay, he built a regular fleet to encounter
them on their own element, and he may be called the founder of the Royal
Navy.

His victory was decisive. The English monarchy rose from the ground in
renewed strength, and entered on a fresh lease of greatness. A line of
able kings followed Alfred. His son and successor, Edward, inherited his
vigour. His favourite grandson, Athelstan, smote the Dane and the Scot
together at Brunanburgh, and awoke by his glorious victory the last
echoes of Saxon song. Under Edgar the greatness of the monarchy reached
its highest pitch, and it embraced the whole island under its imperial
ascendancy. At last its hour came; but when Canute founded a Danish
dynasty he and his Danes were Christians.

"This I can now truly say, that so long as I have lived I have striven
to live worthily, and after my death to leave my memory to my
descendants in good works." If the king who wrote those words did not
found a university or a polity, he restored and perpetuated the
foundations of English institutions, and he left what is almost as
valuable as any institution--a great and inspiring example of public
duty.

THE LAST REPUBLICANS OF ROME

"Has humanity such forces at its command wherewith to combat vice and
baseness, that each school of virtue can afford to repel the aid of the
rest, and to maintain that it alone is entitled to the praise of
courage, of goodness, and of resignation?" Such is the rebuke
administered by M. Renan to the Christians who refuse to recognise the
martyrs of Stoicism under the Roman Empire. My eye fell upon the words
when I had just laid down Professor Mommsen's harsh judgment of the last
defenders of the Republic, and they seemed to me applicable to this case
also.

It is needless to say that there has been a curious change of opinion as
to the merits of these men who, a century ago, were political saints of
the Liberal party, but whom in the present day Liberal writers are
emulously striving, with Dante, to thrust down into the nethermost hell.
Dante puts Brutus and Cassius in hell not because he knows the real
history of their acts, or because he is qualified to judge of the moral
and political conditions under which they acted, but simply because he
is a Ghibelin, and they slew the head of the Holy Roman Empire; and the
present change of opinion arises, in the main, not from the discovery of
any new fact, or from the better sifting of those already known, but
from the prevalence of new sentiments--Imperialism of different shades,
Bonapartist or Positivist, and perhaps also hero-worship, which of
course fixes upon Caesar. Positivism and Hero-worship are somewhat
incongruous allies, for Hero-worship is evidently the least scientific,
while Positivism aims at being the most scientific, of all the theories
of history.

We are judging the opponents of Caesar, it seems to me, under the
dominion of exaggerated notions of the beneficence of the Empire which
Caesar founded, of its value as a political model, of its connection with
the life of modern civilization, and of the respect, not to say
devotion, due to the memory of its founder. Let us try to cast off for
an hour the influence of these modern sentiments, and put the whole
group of ancient figures back into its place in ancient history.

The Empire was a necessity at the time when it came--granted. But a
necessity of what sort? Was it a necessity created by an upward effort,
by an elevation of humanity, or by degradation and decline? In the
former case you may pass the same sentence upon those who opposed its
coming which is passed upon those who crucified Christ, or who, like
Philip II., opposed the Reformation in the spirit of bigoted reaction.
But in the latter case they must be charged, not with moral blindness or
depravity, but only with the lack of that clearness of sight which leads
men and parties at the right moment, or even in anticipation of the
right moment, to despair; and such perspicacity, to say the least, is a
highly scientific quality, requiring perhaps, to make it respectable and
safe, a more exact knowledge of historical sequences than we even now
possess. Even now we determine these historical necessities by our
knowledge of the result. It was a necessity, given all the conditions--
the treachery of Ephialtes included--that the Persians should force the
pass of Thermopylae. But the Three Hundred could not know all the
conditions. Even if they had, would they have done right in giving way?
They fell, but their spirits fought again at Salamis.

To me it appears that the Empire was a necessity of the second kind;
that it was an inevitable concession to incurable evil, not a new
development of good. The Roman morality, the morality which had produced
and sustained the Republic, was now in a state of final and irremediable
decay. That morality was narrow and imperfect, or rather it was
rudimentary, a feeble and transient prototype of the sounder and more
enduring morality which was soon to be born into the world. It was the
morality of devotion to a single community, and in fact consisted mainly
of the performance of duty to that community in war. But it was real and
energetic after its measure and its own time. It produced a type of
character, which, if reproduced now, would be out of date and even
odious, but which stands in history dignified and imposing even to the
last. Nor was it without elements of permanent value. It contributed
largely to the patriotism of the seventeenth century, a patriotism which
has now perhaps become obsolete in its turn, and is superseded in our
aspirations by an ideal with less of right and self-assertion, with more
of duty and of social affection, yet did good service against the
Stuarts. The Roman morality, together with dignity of character,
produced as usual simplicity of life. It produced a reverence for the
majesty of law, the voice of the community. It produced relations
between the sexes, and domestic relations generally, far indeed below
the ideal, yet decidedly above those which commonly existed in the pagan
world. It produced a high degree of self-control and of abstinence from
vices which prevailed elsewhere. It produced fruits of intellect, some
original, especially in the political sphere, others merely borrowed
from Greece, yet evincing on the part of the borrower a power of
appreciating the superior excellence of another, and that a conquered
nation, the value of which, as breaking through the iron boundary of
national self-love, has perhaps not received sufficient notice. What was
of most consequence to the world at large and to history, it produced,
though probably not so much in the way of obedience to recognised
principle as of noble instinct, a signal mitigation of Conquest, which
was then the universal habit, but from being extermination and
destruction, at best slavery or forcible transplantation, became under
the Romans a supremacy, imposed indeed by force, and at the cost of much
suffering, yet, in a certain sense civilizing, and not exercised wholly
without regard for the good of the subject races. Thus that political
unity of the nations round the Mediterranean was brought about, which
was the necessary precursor and protector of a union of a better kind. A
measure of the same praise is due to Alexander, who was a conqueror of
the higher order for a similar reason--namely, that though a Macedonian
prince, he was imbued with the ideas and the morality of the Greek
republics. But Alexander was a single man, and he could not accomplish
what was accomplished in a succession of generations by the corporate
energies and virtues of the Roman Senate.

The conditions under which this morality had maintained itself were now
gone. It depended on the circumstances of a small community, long
engaged in a struggle for existence with powerful and aggressive
neighbours, the Latin, the Etruscan, the Samnite, and the Gaul; entering
in turn, when its own safety had been secured, on a career of conquest,
still in a certain sense defensive, since every neighbour was in those
days an enemy; and continuing to task to the utmost the citizen's
devotion to the State, the virtues of command and obedience necessary to
victory, and the frugality necessary to supply the means of great
national efforts; while luxury was kept at bay, though the means of
indulging it had begun to flow in, by the check of national danger and
the counter-attraction of military glory. But all this was at an end
when Carthage and Macedon were overthrown. National danger and the
necessity for national effort being removed, self-devotion failed,
egotism broke loose, and began to revel in the pillage and oppression of
a conquered world. The Roman character was corrupted, as the Spartan
character was corrupted when Sparta, from being a camp in the midst of
hostile Helots, became a dominant power and sent out governors to
subject states; though the corruption in the case of Sparta was far more
rapid, because Spartan excellence was more exclusively military, more
formal and more obsolete. The mass of the Romans ceased to perform
military duty, and there being no great public duty except military duty
to be performed, there remained no school of public virtue. Such public
virtue as there was lingered, though in a degraded form round the eagles
of the standing armies, to which the duties of the citizen-soldier were
now consigned; and the soldiery thus acquired not only the power but the
right of electing the emperors, the best of whom, in fact, after
Augustus, were generally soldiers. The ruling nation became a city
rabble, the vices of which were but little tempered by the fitful
intervention of the enfranchised communities of Italy. Of this rabble,
political adventurers bought the consulships, which led to the
government of provinces, and wrung out of the unhappy provincials the
purchase money and a fortune for themselves besides. These fortunes
begot colossal luxury and a general reign of vice. Violence mingling
with corruption in the elections was breeding a complete anarchy in
Rome. Roman religion, to which, if we believe Polybius, we must ascribe
a real influence in the maintenance of morality, was at the same time
undermined by the sceptical philosophy of Greece, and by contact with
conflicting religions, the spectacle of which had its effect in
producing the scepticism of Montaigne.

The empire itself was on the point of dissolution. In empires founded by
single conquerors, such as those of the East, when corruption has made
the reigning family its prey, the satraps make themselves independent.
The empire of Alexander was divided among his generals. The empire of
the conquering republic of Rome, the republic itself having succumbed to
vices analagous to the corruption of a reigning family, was about to be
broken up by the great military chiefs. Pompey had already, in fact,
carved out for himself a separate kingdom in Spain, which with its
legions he had got permanently into his own hands. Thus the unity of the
civilized portion of humanity, so indispensable to the future of the
race, would have been lost. Nor was there any remedy but one.
Representation of the provinces was out of the question. Supposing it
possible that a single assembly could have been formed out of all these
different races and tongues, the representation of the conquered would
have been the abdication of the conqueror, and abdication was a step for
which the lazzaroni of the so-called democratic party were as little
prepared as the haughtiest aristocrat in Rome. A world of egotism,
without faith or morality, could be held together only by force, which
presented itself in the person of the ablest, most daring, and most
unscrupulous adventurer of the time. If faith should again fail, and the
world again be reduced to a mass of egotism, the same sort of government
will again, be needed. In fact, we are at this moment rather in danger
of something of the kind, and these revivals of Caesarism are not wholly
out of season. But in any other case to propose to society such a model
would be treason to humanity.

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