Part 14

The two great phenomena, then, of the general appearance of Rome, are the utter abandonment of so large a part of the ancient city and the general lack of buildings of the Middle Ages. Both of these facts are fully accounted for by the peculiar history of Rome. It may be that the sack and fire under Robert Wiscard--a sack and fire done in the cause of a pope in warfare against an emperor--was the immediate cause of the desolation of a large part of Rome; but if so, the destruction which was then wrought only gave a helping hand to causes which were at work both before and after. A city could not do otherwise than dwindle away, in which neither emperor nor pope nor commonwealth could keep up any lasting form of regular government; a city which had no resources of its own, and which lived, as a place of pilgrimage, on the shadow of its own greatness. Another idea which is sure to suggest itself at Rome is rather a delusion. The amazing extent of ancient ruins at Rome unavoidably fills us with the notion that an unusual amount of destruction has gone on there. When we cannot walk without seeing, besides the more perfect monuments, gigantic masses of ancient wall on every side,--when we stumble at every step on fragments of marble columns or on richly adorned tombs,--we are apt to think that they must have perished in some special havoc unknown in other places. The truth is really the other way. The abundance of ruins and fragments--again setting aside the more perfect monuments--proves that destruction has been much less thorough in Rome than in almost any other Roman city. Elsewhere the ancient buildings have been utterly swept away; at Rome they survive, though mainly in a state of ruin. But by surviving in a state of ruin they remind us of their former existence, which in other places we are inclined to forget. Certainly Rome is, even in proportion to its greatness above all other Roman cities, rich in ancient remains above all other Roman cities. Compare those cities of the West which at one time or another supplanted Rome as the dwelling-places of her own Caesars,--Milan, Ravenna, York, Trier itself. York may be looked upon as lucky in having kept a tower and some pieces of wall through the havoc of the English conquest. Trier is rich above all the rest, and she has, in her _Porta Nigra_, one monument of Roman power which Rome herself cannot outdo. But rich as Trier--the second Rome--is, she is certainly not richer in proportion than Rome herself. The Roman remains at Milan hardly extend beyond a single range of columns, and it may be thought that that alone is something, when we remember the overthrow of the city under Frederick Barbarossa. But compare Rome and Ravenna: no city is richer than Ravenna in monuments of its own special class,--Christian Roman, Gothic, Byzantine, but of works of the days of heathen Rome there is no trace--no walls, no gates, no triumphal arch, no temple, no amphitheatre. The city of Placidia and Theodoric is there; but of the city which Augustus made one of the two great maritime stations of Italy there is hardly a trace. Verona, as never being an imperial residence, was not on our list; but rich as Verona is, Rome is--even proportionally--far richer. Provence is probably richer in Roman remains than Italy herself; but even the Provencal cities are hardly so full of Roman remains as Rome herself. The truth is, that there is nothing so destructive to the antiquities of a city as its continued prosperity. A city which has always gone on flourishing according to the standard of each age, which has been always building and rebuilding and spreading itself beyond its ancient bounds, works a gradual destruction of its ancient remains beyond anything that the havoc of any barbarians on earth can work. In such a city a few special monuments may be kept in a perfect or nearly perfect state; but it is impossible that large tracts of ground can be left covered with ruins as they are at Rome. Now, it is the ruins, rather than the perfect buildings, which form the most characteristic feature of Roman scenery and topography, and they have been preserved by the decay of the city; while in other cities they have been swept away by their prosperity. As Rome became Christian, several ancient buildings, temples and others, were turned into churches, and a greater number were destroyed to employ their materials, especially their marble columns, in the building of churches. But though this cause led to the loss of a great many ancient buildings, it had very little to do with the creation of the vast mass of the Roman ruins. The desolation of the Flavian amphitheatre and of the baths of Antoninus Caracalla comes from another cause. As the buildings became disused,--and if we rejoice at the disuse of the amphitheatre, we must both mourn and wonder at the disuse of the baths,--they were sometimes turned into fortresses, sometimes used as quarries for the building of fortresses. Every turbulent noble turned some fragment of the buildings of the ancient city into a stronghold from which he might make war upon his brother nobles, from which he might defy every power which had the slightest shadow of lawful authority, be it emperor, pope, or senator. Fresh havoc followed on every local struggle: destruction came whenever a lawful government was overthrown and whenever a lawful government was restored; for one form of revolution implied the building, the other implied the pulling down, of these nests of robbers. The damage which a lying prejudice attributes to Goths and Vandals was really done by the Romans themselves, and in the Middle Ages mainly by the Roman nobles. As for Goths and Vandals, Genseric undoubtedly did some mischief in the way of carrying off precious objects, but even he is not charged with the actual destruction of any buildings. And it would be hard to show that any Goth, from Alaric to Tovilas, ever did any mischief whatever to any of the monuments of Rome, beyond what might happen through the unavoidable necessities and accidents of warfare. Theodoric of course stands out among all the ages as the great preserver and repairer of the monuments of Ancient Rome. The few marble columns which Charles the Great carried away from Rome, as well as from Ravenna, can have gone but a very little way towards accounting for so vast a havoc. It was almost wholly by Roman hands that buildings which might have defied time and the barbarian were brought to the ruined state in which we now find them.

But the barons of mediaeval Rome, great and sad as was the destruction which was wrought by them, were neither the most destructive nor the basest of the enemies at whose hands the buildings of ancient Rome have had to suffer. The mediaeval barons simply did according to their kind. Their one notion of life was fighting, and they valued buildings or anything else simply as they might be made use of for that one purpose of life. There is something more revolting in the systematic destruction, disfigurement, and robbery of the ancient monuments of Rome, heathen and Christian, at the hands of her modern rulers and their belongings. Bad as contending barons or invading Normans may have been, both were outdone by the fouler brood of papal nephews. Who that looks on the ruined Coliseum, who that looks on the palace raised out of its ruins, can fail to think of the famous line--

"Quod non fecere barbari, fecere Barberini"?

And well-nigh every other obscure or infamous name in the roll-call of the mushroom nobility of modern Rome has tried its hand at the same evil work. Nothing can be so ancient, nothing so beautiful, nothing so sacred, as to be safe against their destroying hands. The boasted age of the _Renaissance_, the time when men turned away from all reverence for their own forefathers and professed to recall the forms and the feelings of ages which are forever gone, was the time of all times when the monuments of those very ages were most brutally destroyed. Barons and Normans and Saracens destroyed what they did not understand or care for; the artistic men of the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries destroyed the very things which they professed to admire and imitate. And when they did not actually destroy, as in the case of statues, sarcophagi, and the like, they did all they could to efface their truest interest, their local and historical association.

A museum or collection of any kind is a dreary place. For some kinds of antiquities, for those which cannot be left in their own places, and which need special scientific classification, such collections are necessary. But surely a statue or a tomb should be left in the spot where it is found, or in the nearest possible place to it. How far nobler would be the associations of Pompey's statue, if the hero had been set up in the nearest open space to his own theatre; even if he had been set up with Marcus and the Great Twin Brethren on the Capitol, instead of being stowed away in an unmeaning corner of a private palace! It is sadder still to wind our way through the recesses of the great Cornelian sepulchre, and to find that sacrilegious hands have rifled the resting-place of the mighty dead; that the real tombs, the real inscriptions, have been stolen away, and that copies only are left in their places. Far more speaking, far more instructive, would it have been to grope out the antique letters of the first of Roman inscriptions, to spell out the name and deeds of "Cornelius Lucius Scipio Barbatus Gnaivod patre prognatus" by the light of a flickering torch in the spot where his kinsfolk and _gentiles_ laid him, than to read it in the full light of the Vatican, numbered as if it stood in a shop to be sold, and bearing a fulsome inscription recording the "munificentia" of the triple-crowned robber who wrought the deed of selfish desecration. Scipio indeed was a heathen; but Christian holy places, places which are the very homes of ecclesiastical history or legend, are no safer than the monuments of heathendom against the desolating fury of ecclesiastical destroyers.

Saddest of all it is to visit the sepulchral church of St. Constantia--be her legend true or false, it makes no difference--to trace out the series of mosaics, where the old emblems of Bacchanalian worship, the vintage and the treading of the wine-press, are turned about to teach a double lesson of Christian mysteries; and then to see the place of the tomb empty, and to find that the tomb itself, the central point of the building, with the series of images which is begun in the pictures and continued in its sculpture, has been torn away from the place where it had meaning and almost life, to stand as number so-and-so among the curiosities of a dreary gallery. Such is the reverence of modern pontiffs for the most sacred antiquities, pagan and Christian, of the city where they have too long worked their destroying will.

In one part however of the city, destruction has been, as in other cities, the consequence of reviving prosperity on the part of the city itself. One of the first lessons to be got by heart on a visit to Rome is the way in which the city has shifted its site. The inhabited parts of ancient and of modern Rome have but a very small space of ground in common. While so large a space within the walls both of Aurelius and of Servius lies desolate, the modern city has spread itself beyond both. The Leonine city beyond the Tiber, the Sixtine city on the Field of Mars--both of them beyond the wall of Servius, the Leonine city largely beyond the wall of Aurelian--together make up the greater part of modern Rome. Here, in a thickly inhabited modern city, there is no space for the ruins which form the main features of the Palatine, Coelian, and Aventine Hills. Such ancient buildings as have been spared remain in a state far less pleasing than that of their ruined fellows. The Pantheon was happily saved by its consecration as a Christian church. But the degraded state in which we see the theatre of Marcellus and the beautiful remains of the portico of Octavia; above all, the still lower fate to which the mighty sepulchre of Augustus has been brought down,--if they enable the moralist to point a lesson, are far more offensive to the student of history than the utter desolation of the Coliseum and the imperial palace. The mole of Hadrian has undergone a somewhat different fate; its successive transformations and disfigurements are a direct part, and a most living and speaking part, of the history of Rome. Such a building, at such a point, could not fail to become a fortress, long before the days of contending Colonnas and Orsini; and if the statues which adorned it were hurled down on the heads of Gothic besiegers, that is a piece of destruction which can hardly be turned to the charge of the Goths. It is in these parts of Rome that the causes which have been at work have been more nearly the same as those which have been at work in other cities. At the same time, it must be remembered that it is only for a much shorter period that they have been fully at work. And wretched as with one great exception is their state, it must be allowed that the actual amount of ancient remains preserved in the Leonine and Sixtine cities is certainly above the average amount of such remains in Roman cities elsewhere.

THE CONTINUITY OF ENGLISH HISTORY

From 'Historical Essays of Edward A. Freeman,' First Series. London, Macmillan & Co., 1871

A comparison between the histories of England, France, and Germany, as regards their political development, would be a subject well worth working out in detail. Each country started with much that was common to all three, while the separate course of each has been wholly different. The distinctive character of English history is its continuity. No broad gap separates the present from the past. If there is any point at which a line between the present and the past is to be drawn, it is at all events not to be drawn at the point where a superficial glance might perhaps induce us to draw it,--at the Norman invasion in 1066. At first sight, that event might seem to separate us from all before it in a way to which there is no analogy in the history either of our own or of kindred lands. Neither France nor Germany ever saw any event to be compared to the Norman Conquest. Neither of them has ever received a permanent dynasty of foreign kings; neither has seen its lands divided among the soldiers of a foreign army, and its native sons shut out from every position of wealth or dignity. England, alone of the three, has undergone a real and permanent foreign conquest. One might have expected that the greatest of all possible historical chasms would have divided the ages before and the ages after such an event. Yet in truth modern England has practically far more to do with the England of the West-Saxon kings than modern France or Germany has to do with the Gaul and Germany of Charles the Great, or even of much more recent times. The England of the age before the Norman Conquest is indeed, in all external respects, widely removed from us. But the England of the age immediately succeeding the Norman Conquest is something more widely removed still. The age when Englishmen dwelt in their own land as a conquered race, when their name and tongue were badges of contempt and slavery, when England was counted for little more than an accession of power to the Duke of Rouen in his struggle with the King of Paris, is an age than which we can conceive none more alien to every feeling and circumstance of our own.

When, then, did the England in which we still live and move have its beginning? Where are we to draw the broad line, if any line is to be drawn, between the present and the past? We answer, In the great creative and destructive age of Europe and of civilized Asia--the thirteenth century. The England of Richard Coeur de Lion is an England which is past forever; but the England of Edward the First is essentially the still living England in which we have our own being. Up to the thirteenth century our history is the domain of antiquaries; from that point it becomes the domain of lawyers. A law of King AElfred's Witenagemot is a valuable link in the chain of our political progress, but it could not have been alleged as any legal authority by the accusers of Strafford or the defenders of the Seven Bishops. A statute of Edward the First is quite another matter. Unless it can be shown to have been repealed by some later statute, it is just as good to this day as a statute of Queen Victoria. In the earlier period we may indeed trace the rudiments of our laws, our language, our political institutions; but from the thirteenth century onwards we see the things themselves, in that very essence which we all agree in wishing to retain, though successive generations have wrought improvement in many points of detail and may have left many others capable of further improvement still.

Let us illustrate our meaning by the greatest of all examples. Since the first Teutonic settlers landed on her shores, England has never known full and complete submission to a single will. Some Assembly, Witenagemot, Great Council, or Parliament, there has always been, capable of checking the caprices of tyrants and of speaking, with more or less of right, in the name of the nation. From Hengest to Victoria, England has always had what we may fairly call a parliamentary constitution. Normans, Tudors, and Stewarts might suspend or weaken it, but they could not wholly sweep it away. Our Old-English Witenagemots, our Norman Great Councils, are matters of antiquarian research, whose exact constitution it puzzles our best antiquaries fully to explain. But from the thirteenth century onwards we have a veritable Parliament, essentially as we see it before our own eyes. In the course of the fourteenth century every fundamental constitutional principle becomes fully recognized. The best worthies of the seventeenth century struggled, not for the establishment of anything new, but for the preservation of what even then was already old. It is on the Great Charter that we still rest the foundation of all our rights. And no later parliamentary reformer has ever wrought or proposed so vast a change as when Simon of Montfort, by a single writ, conferred their parliamentary being upon the cities and boroughs of England.

This continuity of English history from the very beginning is a point which cannot be too strongly insisted on, but it is its special continuity from the thirteenth century onwards which forms the most instructive part of the comparison between English history and the history of Germany and France. At the time of the Norman Conquest the many small Teutonic kingdoms in Britain had grown into the one Teutonic kingdom of England, rich in her barbaric greatness and barbaric freedom, with the germs, but as yet only the germs, of every institution which we most dearly prize. At the close of the thirteenth century we see the England with which we are still familiar, young indeed and tender, but still possessing more than the germs,--the very things themselves. She has already King, Lords, and Commons; she has a King, mighty indeed and honored, but who may neither ordain laws nor impose taxes against the will of his people. She has Lords with high hereditary powers, but Lords who are still only the foremost rank of the people, whose children sink into the general mass of Englishmen, and into whose order any Englishman may be raised. She has a Commons still diffident in the exercise of new-born rights; but a Commons whose constitution and whose powers we have altered only by gradual changes of detail; a Commons which, if it sometimes shrank from hard questions of State, was at least resolved that no man should take their money without their leave. The courts of justice, the great offices of State, the chief features of local administration, have assumed, or are rapidly assuming, the form whose essential character they still retain. The struggle with Papal Rome has already begun; doctrines and ceremonies indeed remain as yet unchallenged, but statute after statute is passed to restrain the abuses and exactions of the ever-hateful Roman court. The great middle class of England is rapidly forming; a middle class not, as elsewhere, confined to a few great cities, but spread, in the form of a minor gentry and a wealthy yeomanry, over the whole face of the land. Villanage still exists, but both law and custom are paving the way for that gradual and silent extinction of it, which without any formal abolition of the legal status left, three centuries later, not a legal villain among us.

With this exception, there was in theory equal law for all classes, and imperfectly as the theory may have been carried out, it was at least far less imperfectly so than in any other kingdom. Our language was fast taking its present shape; English, in the main intelligible at the present day, was the speech of the mass of the people, and it was soon to expel French from the halls of princes and nobles. England at the close of the century is, for the first time since the Conquest, ruled by a prince bearing a purely English name, and following a purely English policy. Edward the First was no doubt as despotic as he could be or dared to be; so was every prince of those days who could not practice the superhuman righteousness of St. Lewis. But he ruled over a people who knew how to keep even his despotism within bounds. The legislator of England, the conqueror of Wales and Scotland, seems truly like an old Bretwalda or West-Saxon Basileus, sitting once more on the throne of Cerdic and of AElfred. The modern English nation is now fully formed; it stands ready for those struggles for French dominion in the two following centuries, which, utterly unjust and fruitless as they were, still proved indirectly the confirmation of our liberties at home, and which forever fixed the national character for good and for evil.