Chapter 50

In Honorius' half, from now on it is a record of ruin hurrying on the footsteps of ruin. Ended the quiet _otium cum dignitate_ of the great country gentlemen; the sterile culture, the somewhat puritan morality, the placid refined life we read of in Ausonius. You shall see now the well-ordered estate laid waste;--the peasants killed or hiding in the woods;--the mansion smashed, and its elegant furniture;--the squire, the kindly-severe religious matron his mother the young wife,--gracious lady of the house,-- and the bonny children:--they are hacked corpses lying at random in the wrecked salons, or in the trampled garden where my lady's flowers now grow wild. The land went out of cultivation; the populace, what remained of it, crowded into the walled cities, there to frowse in mental and physical stuffiness until the Middle Ages were passed,--or else took to the wilds under any vigorous mind, and became bandits. The open country was all trodden down by wave after wave of marauding, murdering, beer-swilling, turbulent giants from the north,--or by the still more dreaded dwarfish horsemen whose forefathers Pan Chow had driven long since out of Asia. They poured down into Greece; they, poured down through Gaul and Spain into Africa; into Italy; host after host of them;--civilization was a pathetic sand-castle washed over and over by ruining seas. Rome, indeed, could still command generals at times: Stilicho, Aetius, and afterwards Belisarius and Narses; but they were all pitiful Partingtons swishing their mops round against a most ugly Atlantic. In 410 Rome itself was sacked by Alaric; in the same year Britain, and then Brittany, rose and threw off the Roman yoke. In the four-fifties came the keen point of the Hunnish terror, putting the fear of death on even the worst of the barbarians that had wrecked the Roman world. In 476, the pretense of a Western Empire was abandoned.--So now to follow the great march of the cycles eastward; with this warning: that next week we shall glance at a little backwash in the other direction, and see the disembodied soul of this now closed phase of human culture 'go west.'

The split with Rome was altogether of value to the Eastern empire of Constantinople. That empire lasted, from the time of Arcadius to that of Constantine IX and Mohammed the Conqueror, "one thousand and fifty-eight years," says Gibbon, "in a state of premature and perpetual decay."--A statement which, taken as an example of Gibbonese, is altogether delightful; but for the true purposes of history it may need a little modification. The position of this Byzantine Empire was a curious one: European in origin, mainly West-Asian in location. Its situation permitted it to last on so long into the West-Asian manvantara; its origin doomed that long survival to be, for the most part, devoid of the best characteristics of life. Yet during most of the European pralaya it was far and away the richest and most civilized power in Christendom; and, except during the reigns of extraordinary kings in the west, like Charlemagne, the strongest too. It specialized in military science; and the well-trained Byzantine soldiers and highly scientific generals had little to fear, as a rule, from the rude energies and huge stature of the northern and western hordes. But culture remained there in the sishta state, and could do nothing until it was transplanted. There were cycles: weaknesses and recoveries; on the whole its long life-period matters very little to history; it only became of great importance when it died.

The reason why it did not succumb when Rome did was that the tides of life in the whole empire had long been flowing eastward, and were now gathered there almost wholly: there was much more activity in the east; there were much bigger cities, and a much greater population. So that part was harder to penetrate and conquer: there was more resistance there. The barbarian deluge flowed down where it might flow down most easily: following, as deluges and everything else gifted with common sense always do, the lines of least resistance. The way through Gaul and Spain was quite open; the way into Italy nearly so;--but the way into Asia was blocked by Constantinople. That city is naturally one of the strongest in the world, in a military sense; and, you would say, inevitably the capital of an empire. If Dardanus had had a little more intuition, and had founded his Troy on the Golden Horn instead of on the Dardanelles, Anax andron Agamemnon and his chalcho-chitoned Achaeans, I dare say, would have gone home to Greece much sadder and wiser men;--or more probably, not at all. But Troy is near enough to that inevitable site to argue the strong probability of its having been, perhaps long before Priam's time, a great seat of empire, trade, and culture. If one dug in Constantinople itself, I dare say one should find the remains of cities that had been mighty. Events of the last seven years have shown how difficult it is to attack, how easy to defend. Since its foundation by Constantine it has been besieged nine times, and only twice taken by foreign enemies. When the Turks took it, they had already overflowed all the surrounding territories; and they were the strongest military power in the world, and the Byzantines were among the weakest.--So it stood there in the fifth century to hold back the hordes of northern Europe from the rich lands of Asia Minor and Syria: a strength much beyond the power of those barbarians to tackle; while all Europe west-ward was being trampled to death.

Further, the peace imposed on Jovian by Shah Sapor in 364 lasted, with one small intermission of war, and that successful for the Romans, for a hundred and thirty-eight years; during which time, also, the powers that were at Constantinople ruled mainly wisely and with economy. They were generally not the reigning emperor, but his wife or mother or aunt, or someone like that.

So then, in the year 400 we find the world in this condition:-- western Europe going

"With hideous ruin and combustion down To bottomless perdition;"

--the Eastern Empire weakish, but fairly quiet and advancing towards prosperity: in pralaya certainly, and so to remain for thirteen decades (395 to 527) from the death of Theodosius to the accession of Justinian;--Persia, under an energetic and intelligent Yazdegird II (399 to 420), a strongish military power: Yazdegird held his barons well in hand, and even made a brave effort to broaden the religious outlook; he tried to stop the persecution of the Christians, and allowed them to organize a national church, the Nestorian;--India, still and until 456, at the height of her glory:--there is a continual rise as you go eastward, with the climax in India. The next step is China; to which now after all these centuries we return.

As we have seen, since the Hans fell there had been a confusion of ephemeral kingdoms jostling and hustling each other across the stage of time: there had been too much history altogether; too many wars, heroes, adventures and wild escapades. Life was too riotous and whirling an affair: China seemed to have sunk into a mere Europe, a kind of Kilkenny Christendom. Not that culture ever became extinct; indeed, through this whole period the super-refinement that had grown up under the Hans persisted side by side with the barbarian excursions and alarms. It was not, as in Rome, a case of major pralaya: men did not resort to savagery; literary production seems never to have run quite so sterile. But things were in the melting-pot, centripetalism had gone; little dynasties flared up quickly and expired; and amidst all those lightning changes there was no time for progress, or deep concerns, or for the Soul of the Black-haired People to be stirring to manifestation.

You will, I dare say, have learned to look for a rise in China at any falling-time in Europe; so would consider something should have happened there in 365, the year of the great earthquake and tidal wave, when the fifty thousand Alexandrians were drowned,-- the second year after Julian's death. Well; in that 365 Tao Yuan-ming was born, who later became known as Tao Chien: in Japanese, Toemmei. There had been poets all along. During the last thirty years of the Hans, 190 to 220, there had been the Seven Scholars of the Chien An Period: among them that jolly K'ung Jung who, because he was a descendant of Confucius, claimed blood-relationship with the descendants of Laotse. Ts'ao Ts'ao himself wrote songs: he was that bold bad adventurer and highly successful general who turned out the last Han and set his own son on the throne as Wei Wenti; who also was a poet, as was his brother Ts'ao Chih. Of Ts'ao Chih a contemporary said: "If all the talent in the world were divided into ten parts, Ts'ao Chih would have eight of them."--"Who, then, would have the other two?" asked somebody.--"I should have one of them myself," was the answer, "and the rest of the world the other." Ts'ao Chih enriched the language with one of its most familiar and delicious quotations:

"The Superior Man takes precautions, And avoids giving rise to suspicion: He does not pull up his shoes in a melon patch, Nor adjust his cap while passing through an orchard of plums."

It is indicative of his own position at court.

Later in the third century came the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove, a "club of rather bibulous singers"; and there are names of many scholars besides to say that the time was not too barren; yet on the whole it was, I suppose, a period of slump in literary production, as it was of confusion in politics. But when Julian had been dead two years in the west of the world, Tao Yuan-ming was born in the east: I do not say the creator of a new time; but certainly a sign of its coming.

A large amount of his poetry survives; and it is filled with a new spirit. Like Wordsworth, he went back to nature. Ambition, of course, had been a great mark of the age: men raced after office, and scrambled for the spoils. Tao Yuan-ming was called to fill an official post, and went up reluctantly to the capital; but very soon escaped back to the things he loved: the mountains, and his chrysanthemum garden, and the country, where he could hear the dogs barking in the far farms, and see the chickens scratching in the lanes. We do not find in him, perhaps, the flood of Natural Magic that came with the poets of the Great Age three or four centuries later; but we do find a heart-felt worship of the great unspoiled world under the sky: he is there to say that China was returning to her real strength, which is Nature-worship. While he pottered about in the front garden, he tells us, his wife pottered about in the back garden; they made an idol of their chrysanthemums, and started or nourished the cult which has flourished so strongly since in Japan. He was I suppose the greatest poet since Ch'u Yuan, who came some seven centuries earlier; it is from him we get the story some of you may know under the title _Red Peach-Blossom Inlet._

For about half a cycle (sixty-five years) barbarian dynasties had been holding the north; with the result that the center of gravity of the real Black-haired People had been shifted from the puritan landscapes of North China to the pagan landscapes of the Yangtse Valley,--a region of mountains and forests and lakes and wild waters: Tsu the land of Laotse and Ch'u Yuan, and I think Chwangtse too. It is here are the Hills of T'ang, the metropolis of Natural Magic perhaps for all the world; and the mind and imagination of China, centered here, were receiving a new polarization; something richer and more luminous was being born. Contemporary with Tao Yuan-ming was Ku Kaichih, the first supreme name in painting. Fenollosa speaks of a "White Lotus Club," organized by Hui Yuan, A Buddhist priest, and consisteing of "mountain-climbers and thinkers,"--Tao Yuan-ming being a member.

One would like to get at the heart of what happened in that last quarter of the fourth century. This is what we see on our side: Canton and Yangtse ports were being visited more and more by Hindu, Arab, and Sassanian traders, bringing in new things and ideas: the Hindus, especially, an impetus towards culture from the splendor of the gupta period, then at its topmost height. Also ther were new inventions, such as that of paper, which was an incentive to literary output. The Chinese mind, in the south especially, was quickened on the one hand by the magical wind from the mountains, and on the other by a wind from the great world over-seas: the necessary nationalistic and international quickenings. But deeper quickenings also were taking place. India was fast becoming, under the Gupta reaction towards Brahmanism, no place for the Buddhists; and the Hindu ships that put in at Canton and the Yangtse were bringing much to China besides merchandise. A great propaganda of Buddhism was in process; by Indian monks, and now too for the first time by native Chinese. We read of a missionary who went about preaching to an indifferent world; then in sorrow took to the mountains, and proclaimed the Good Law to the mountain boulders; and they "nodded as it were their heads in assent." * But there is evidence that China was fast becoming the spiritual metropolis of the world: Buddhism was drifting in, and mingling among the mountains with mountain Taoism, that dear and hoary magic of the Eastern World; and the result was an atmosphere in which astounding events were to happen.

* Giles _Dictionary of Chinese Biography;_ from which work, and from the same author's _Chinese Literature,_ the facts, quotations, and enecdotes given in this lecture are taken. ------

In 401, Kumarajiva, the seventeenth Buddhist Patriarch, came from India and took up his residence at the court at Changan, where a Tibetan family was then reigning over the north; and this, when you think that these Patriarchs were (as I believe) no popes elected by a conclave of churchly dignities, but the Spiritual Successors of the Buddha, each appointed by his predecessor, an event momentous enough in itself. Still, Kumarajiva came (it would appear) but to prepare the way for the great change that was impending; left behind him a successor in India, or one to fill the office at his death; in India the headquarters of Buddhism remained. Two years before his arrival, Fa Hian, a Chinese Buddhist monk, had set out on foot from Central China, walked across the Gobi Desert, and down through Afghanistan into India, a pilgrim to the sacred places: a sane and saintly man, from whom we learn most of what we know about the Gupta regime. He returned by sea in 412, landing at Kiao-chao in Santung,--a place latterly so sadly famous,--bringing with him spiritual and quickening influences. In the south, meanwhile, another Indian teacher, Buddhabhadra, had been at work. Before very long, a Renaissance was in full flow.

The political events that led up to it were these: between 304 and 319 a Tatar family by the name of Liu, from Manchuria, succeeded in driving the House of Tsin out of northern China: these Tsins were that effete, ladylike, chess-playing, fan-waving, high-etiquettish dynasty I have spoken of before. In 319 they took up their abode in Nanking, and there ruled corruptly for a hundred years, leaving the north to the barbarians. In 420, a soldier in their employ, Liu-yu by name, deposed the last Tsin emperor, and set himself on the throne as the first sovereign of the Liu-song Dynasty. He was a capable man, and introduced some vigor and betterment into affairs; he found conditions ripe for a renaissance of civilization; and in his reign we may say that the renaissance took shape. 420 is, so far as a date can be given for what was really a long process, a convenient date to give. We have seen Persia rise in the two-twenties; India in the three-twenties; we shall not go far wrong in giving the four-twenties to China. That decade, too, marks a fresh step downward in the career of Rome: Honorius died in 423. Fenollosa is definite upon 420 for the inception of the great age of the Southern Renaissance of art. That age culminated in the first half of the next century, and ended with the passing of the Liang dynasty in the five-fifties: a matter of thirteen decades again; which, I take it, is further reason for considering our four-twenties epochal.

I fancy we shall grow used to finding the twenties in each century momentous, and marked by great political and spiritual re-shapings of the world. We shall find this in our historical studies; in the next few years we may find it in current events too; and what we shall see may remind us that in these decades the sun generally rises in some new part of the world,--the sun of culture and power. Naturally enough:--in the last quarter of each century you have the influx of spiritual forces; which influx, it is to be supposed, can hardly fail to produce changes inwardly,--a new temperature, new conditions in the world of mind. So there must be readjustments; there is a disharmony between outer and inner things, between the world of causes and the world of effects; and one commonly finds the first two decades of the new century filled with the noise and confusion of readjustment. New wine has been poured into the old skin-bottles of the world; and ferments, explodes, rends them. Then, in the twenties or so, things calm down, and it is seen that readjustments have been made. By 'readjustments,' one does not mean the treaties of statesmen and the like; brain-mind affairs for the most part, that amount to nothing. One means a new direction taken by the tide of incarnating souls. As if the readjusting cataclysms had blocked their old channels of these, and opened new ones...

A new _arpeggio_ chord, but rather a faint and broken one, sounds in the five-twenties, or begins then. At Constantinople the thirteen pralayic and recuperative decades since the death of Theodosius and the split with the West have ended. Now an emperor dies; and it becomes a question which of several likely candidates can lay out his money to best advantage and secure the succession. There is an official of some sort at court there, one Justin, a Balkan peasant by birth; you will do well to bribe him heavily, for he, probably, can manage the affair for you,-- One of the candidates does so: hands him a large sum, on the assurance from Justin that he shall be the man. But the old fellow has peasant shrewdness, shall we say; and the money is _used_ most thriftily; but not as its donor intended. Justin duly ascends the throne.

Nothing very promising in that, to insure manvantaric times coming in. But the old man remembers a nephew of his back there in Bulgaria or Jugoslavia or where it may have been; and sends for him, and very wisely lets him do most of the running of things. In 527, this nephew succeeds to the purple on his uncle's death: as Justinian; and, for Europe and the Byzantine empire, and for the times,--that is to say, 'considering,' --manvantaric doings do begin. A man of hugely sanguine temperament, inquisitive and enterprising and impulsive, he had the fortune to be served by some great men: Tibonian, who drew up the Pandects; Belisarius and Narses, who thrashed the barbarians; the architect who built Saint Sophia. Against these assets to his reign of thirty-eight years you must set the factions of the circus, at Constantinople itself; and bloody battle over the merits of the Greens, the Blues, the Whites, etc. But certainly Justinian contrived to strike into history as no other Byzantine emperor did; with his law code, and with his church. So now enough of him.

Four years after the accession of this greatest of the Byzantines, the greatest of the Sassanids came to the throne in Persia: Chosroes Anushirwan: a wise and victorious reign until 579. There was an 'Endless Peace' sworn with Rome in 533; and not peace merely, but friendship and alliance; it was to last for all time, and did last for seven years. The Chosroes, jealous of the western victories of Justinian, listened to the pleadings of the Ostrogoths, and declared war; peace came again in 563, on the basis of a yearly tribute from Rome to Persia,-- but with compensations, such as toleration for the Christians in Persia.--there were reforms in the army and in taxation; improvements in irrigation; encouragement of learning; revision of the laws; some little outburst in literature and culture generally: the culmination, in all but extent of territory, of the whole Sassanian period.--We may throw in one item from the future,--that is from 620: in that year Sassanian Persia had flowed out to the full limits of the empire of Darius Hystaspes: held Egypt, Syria, all West Asia to within a mile of the walls of Constantinople. Within three years the fall had begun; within twenty it was completed.

As to India, this (520) is among the hidden times: the Ephthalites had overturned the Guptas; they were Huns of the Hunniest; they had over-turned the Guptas and all else (in the north). Tales come down of the fiendishness of their kings: of a man that for his sport would have elephants hurled from the top of precipices; it may be that the Indian manvantara closed with the Gupta fall;--though we get the finical dandiacal 'great' reign of Harsha in 700. The light certainly was dying from India now: the Crest-Wave had been there, in all its splendor; they had made good use of it in all but the spiritual sense, and very bad use of it in that. The year in which you may say (as nearly as history will tell you) the light died there, was precisely this year of 520; and that effected a change in the spiritual center of gravity of the world of the most momentous kind: so much so that we may think of a new order of ages as beginning then; and looking at world-history as a whole, we may say, Here endeth the lesson that began where we took things up in the time of the Six Great Teachers; and here beginneth a new chapter,-- with which these lectures will hardly concern themselves. But we may glance at the event that opens it.