 CHAPTER OF ART When a baby is perfectly healthy, and has had enough to eat, and has slept all it wants, then it hums a little tune to show how happy it is. To grown-ups this humming means nothing. It sounds like goo-zum, goo-zum, gooo. But to the baby it is perfect music. It is his first contribution to art. As soon as he or she gets a little older, and is able to sit up, the period of mud-pie making begins. These mud-pies do not interest the outside world. There are too many million babies making too many million mud-pies at the same time. But to the small infant they represent another expedition into the pleasant realm of art. The baby is now a sculptor. At the age of three or four, when the hands begin to obey the brain, the child becomes a painter. His fond mother gives him a box of colored chalks, and every loose bit of paper is rapidly covered with strange pot-hooks and scrawls, which represent houses and horses, and terrible naval battles. Soon, however, this happiness of just making things comes to an end. School begins, and the greater part of the day is filled up with work. The business of living, or rather the business of making a living, becomes the most important event in the life of every boy and girl. There is little time left for art between learning the tables of multiplication and the past participle of the irregular French verbs, and unless the desire for making certain things for the mere pleasure of creating them without any hope of a practical return be very strong, the child grows into manhood and forgets that the first five years of his life were mainly devoted to art. Nations are not different from children. As soon as the caveman had escaped the threatening dangers of the long and shivering ice period, and had put his house in order, he began to make certain things which he thought beautiful, although they were of no earthly use to him in his fight with the wild animals of the jungle. He covered the walls of his grotto with pictures of the elephants and the deer which he hunted, and out of a piece of stone he hacked the rough figures of those women he thought most attractive. As soon as the Egyptians and the Babylonians and the Persians and all the other people of the East had founded their little countries along the Nile and the Euphrates, they began to build magnificent palaces for their kings, invented bright pieces of jewelry for their women, and planted gardens which sang happy songs of colour with their many bright flowers. Our own ancestors, the wandering nomads from the distant Asiatic prairies, enjoying a free and easy existence as fighters and hunters, composed songs which celebrated the mighty deeds of their great leaders, and invented a form of poetry which has survived until our own day. A thousand years later when they had established themselves on the Greek mainland, and had built their city-states, they expressed their joy and their sorrows in magnificent temples, in statues, in comedies and in tragedies, and in every conceivable form of art. The Romans, like their Carthaginian rivals, were too busy administering other people and making money to have much love for useless and unprofitable adventures of the spirit. They conquered the world and built roads and bridges, but they borrowed their art wholesale from the Greeks. They invented certain practical forms of architecture which answered the demands of their day and age, but their statues and their histories and their mosaics and their poems were mere Latin imitations of Greek originals. Without that vague and hard-to-define something which the world calls personality there can be no art, and the Roman world distrusted that particular sort of personality. The empire needed efficient soldiers and tradesmen. The business of writing poetry or making pictures was left to foreigners. Then came the Dark Ages. The barbarian was the proverbial bull in the China shop of Western Europe. He had no use for what he did not understand. Speaking in terms of the year 1921 he liked the magazine covers of Pretty Ladies, but threw the Rembrandt etchings which he had inherited into the ash can. Soon he came to learn better, then he tried to undo the damage which he had created a few years before, but the ash cans were gone, and so were the pictures. But by this time his own art, which he had brought with him from the east, had developed into something very beautiful and he made up for his past neglect and indifference by the so-called Art of the Middle Ages, which as far as northern Europe is concerned was a product of the Germanic mind, and had borrowed but little from the Greeks and the Latins, and nothing at all from the older forms of art of Egypt and Assyria, not to speak of India and China which simply did not exist as far as the people of that time were concerned. Indeed so little had the northern races been influenced by their southern neighbors that their own architectural products were completely misunderstood by the people of Italy, and were treated by them with downright and unmitigated contempt. You have all heard the word Gothic. You probably associate it with the picture of a lovely old cathedral lifting its slender spires towards high heaven. But what does the word really mean? It means something uncouth and barbaric, something which one might expect from an uncivilized goth, a rough backwoods man who had no respect for the established rules of classical art, and who built his modern horrors to please his own low tastes, without a decent regard for the examples of the Forum and the Acropolis. And yet for several centuries this form of Gothic architecture was the highest expression of the sincere feeling for art which inspired the whole northern continent. From a previous chapter you will remember how the people of the late Middle Ages lived. Unless they were peasants, and dwelt in villages, they were citizens of a city, or civitas, the old Latin name for a tribe. And indeed, behind their high walls and their deep moats, these good-burgers were true tribesmen who shared the common dangers and enjoyed the common safety and prosperity which they derived from their system of mutual protection. In the old Greek and Roman cities the marketplace, where the temple stood, had been the center of civic life. During the Middle Ages the church, the house of God, became such a center. We modern Protestant people who go to our church only once a week, and then for a few hours only, hardly know what a medieval church meant to the community. Then before you were a week old you were taken to the church to be baptized. As a child you visited the church to learn the holy stories of the scriptures. Later on you became a member of the congregation, and if you were rich enough you built yourself a separate little chapel, sacred to the memory of the patron saint of your own family. As for the sacred edifice it was open at all hours of the day and many of the night. In a certain sense it resembled a modern club, dedicated to all the inhabitants of the town. In the church you very likely caught a first glimpse of the girl who was to become your bride at a great ceremony before the High Altar. And finally when the end of the journey had come you were buried beneath the stones of this familiar building that all your children and their grandchildren might pass over your grave until the day of judgment. Because the church was not only the house of God but also the true center of all common life the building had to be different from anything that had ever been constructed by the hands of man. The temples of the Egyptians and the Greeks and the Romans had been merely the shrine of a local divinity. As no sermons were preached before the images of Osiris or Zeus or Jupiter it was not necessary that the interior offer space for a great multitude. All the religious processions of the old Mediterranean peoples took place in the open. But in the north where the weather was usually bad most functions were held under the roof of the church. During many centuries the architects struggled with this problem of constructing a building that was large enough. The Roman tradition taught them how to build heavy stone walls with very small windows lest the walls lose their strength. On the top of this they then placed a heavy stone roof. But in the 12th century after the beginning of the Crusades when the architects had seen the pointed arches of the Mohammedan builders the western builders discovered a new style which gave them their first chance to make the sort of building which those days of an intense religious life demanded. And then they developed this strange style upon which the Italians bestowed the contemptuous name of Gothic or barbaric. They achieved their purpose by inventing a vaulted roof which was supported by ribs. But such a roof, if it became too heavy, was apt to break the walls just as a man of three hundred pounds sitting down upon a child's chair will force it to collapse. To overcome this difficulty certain French architects then began to reinforce the walls with buttresses which were merely heavy masses of stone against which the walls could lean while they supported the roof. And to assure the further safety of the roof they supported the ribs of the roof by so called flying buttresses, a very simple method of construction which you will understand at once when you look at our picture. This new method of construction allowed the introduction of enormous windows. In the twelfth century glass was still an expensive curiosity and very few private buildings possessed glass windows. Even the castles of the nobles were without protection and this accounts for the eternal drafts and explains why people of that day wore furs indoors as well as out. Fortunately the art of making colored glass, with which the ancient people of the Mediterranean had been familiar, had not been entirely lost. There was a revival of stained glass making and soon the windows of the Gothic churches told the stories of the holy book in little bits of brilliantly colored window-pane which were caught in the long framework of lead. Behold, therefore, the new and glorious house of God filled with an eager multitude living its religion as no people have ever done either before or since. Everything is considered too good or too costly or too wondrous for this house of God and home of man. The sculptors who since the destruction of the Roman Empire have been out of employment haltingly return to their noble art. Portals and pillars and buttresses and cornices are all covered with carven images of our Lord and the blessed saints. The embroiderers too are set to work to make tapestries for the walls. The jewelers offer their highest art that the shrine of the altar may be worthy of complete adoration. Even the painter does his best. Poor man, he is greatly handicapped by lack of a suitable medium. And thereby hangs a story. The Romans of the early Christian period had covered the floors and the walls of their temples and houses with mosaics, pictures made of colored bits of glass. But this art had been exceedingly difficult. It gave the painter no chance to express all he wanted to say, as all children know who have ever tried to make figures out of colored blocks of wood. The art of mosaic painting therefore died out during the late Middle Ages except in Russia, where the Byzantine mosaic painters had found a refuge after the fall of Constantinople, and continued to ornament the walls of the Orthodox churches until the day of the Bolsheviky, when there was an end to the building of churches. Of course the medieval painter could mix his colors with the water of the wet plaster which was put upon the walls of the churches. This method of painting upon fresh plaster, which was generally called fresco or fresh painting, was very popular for many centuries. Today it is as rare as the art of painting miniatures in manuscripts, and among the hundreds of artists of our modern cities there is perhaps one who can handle this medium successfully. But during the Middle Ages there was no other way, and the artists were fresco workers for lack of something better. The method, however, had certain great disadvantages. Very often the plaster came off the walls after only a few years, or dampness spoiled the pictures just as dampness will spoil the pattern of our wallpaper. People tried every imaginable expedient to get away from this plaster background. They tried to mix their colors with wine and vinegar and with honey and with the sticky white of egg, but none of these methods were satisfactory. For more than a thousand years these experiments continued. In painting pictures upon the parchment leaves of manuscripts the medieval artists were very successful, but when it came to covering large spaces of wood or stone with paint which would stick they did not succeed very well. At last during the first half of the 15th century the problem was solved in the southern Netherlands by Jan and Hubert van Eyck. The famous Flemish brothers mixed their paint with specially prepared oils, and this allowed them to use wood and canvas or stone or anything else as a background for their pictures. But by this time the religious ardor of the early Middle Ages was a thing of the past. The rich burgers of the cities were succeeding the bishops as patrons of the arts. And as art invariably follows the full dinner pail the artists now began to work for these worldly employers, and painted pictures for kings, for grand dukes, and for rich bankers. Within a very short time the new method of painting with oil spread through Europe, and in every country there developed a school of special painting which showed the characteristic tastes of the people for whom these portraits and landscapes were made. In Spain for example Velázquez painted court dwarfs and the weavers of the royal tapestry factories and all sorts of persons and subjects connected with the king and his court. But in Holland Rembrandt and Franz Hals and Vermeer painted the barnyard of the merchant's house and they painted his rather dowdy wife and his healthy but bumpious children and the ships which had brought him his wealth. In Italy on the other hand, where the Pope remained the largest patron of the arts, Michelangelo and Correggio continued to paint Madonna's and Saint's, while in England where the aristocracy was very rich and powerful, and in France where the kings had become uppermost in the state the artists painted distinguished gentlemen who were members of the government and very lovely ladies who were friends of his majesty. The great change in painting which came about with the neglect of the old church and the rise of a new class in society was reflected in all other forms of art. The invention of printing had made it possible for authors to win fame and reputation by writing books for the multitudes. In this way arose the profession of the novelist and the illustrator. But the people who had money enough to buy the new books were not the sort who liked to sit at home of nights looking at the ceiling or just sitting. They wanted to be amused. The few minstrels of the Middle Ages were not sufficient to cover the demand for entertainment. For the first time since the early Greek city-states of two thousand years before the professional playwright had a chance to ply his trade. The Middle Ages had known the theatre merely as part of certain church celebrations. The tragedies of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries had told the story of the suffering of our Lord. But during the sixteenth century the worldly theatre made its reappearance. It is true that at first the position of the professional playwright and actor was not a very high one. William Shakespeare was regarded as a sort of circus fellow who amused his neighbours with his tragedies and comedies. But when he died in the year sixteen-sixteen he had begun to enjoy the respect of his neighbours and actors were no longer subjects of police supervision. William's contemporary Lope de Vega, the incredible Spaniard who wrote no less than one thousand eight hundred worldly and four hundred religious plays, was a person of rank who received the papal approval upon his work. A century later Molière the Frenchman was deemed worthy of the companionship of none less than King Louis the Fourteenth. Since then the theatre has enjoyed an ever-increasing affection on the part of the people. Today a theatre is part of every well-regulated city and the silent drama of the movies has penetrated to the tiniest of our prairie hamlets. Other art, however, was to become the most popular of all. That was music. Most of the old art forms demanded a great deal of technical skill. It takes years and years of practice before our clumsy hand is able to follow the commands of the brain and reproduce our vision upon canvas or in marble. It takes a lifetime to learn how to act or how to write a good novel. And it takes a great deal of training on the part of the public to appreciate the best in painting and writing and sculpture. But almost anyone, not entirely tone deaf, can follow a tune and almost everybody can get enjoyment out of some sort of music. The Middle Ages had heard a little music but it had been entirely the music of the church. The Holy Chants were subject to very severe laws of rhythm and harmony and soon these became monotonous. Besides, they could not well be sung in the street or in the marketplace. The Renaissance changed this. Music once more came into its own as the best friend of man, both in his happiness and in his sorrows. The Egyptians and the Babylonians and the ancient Jews had all been great lovers of music. They had even combined different instruments into regular orchestras, but the Greeks had frowned upon this barbaric foreign noise. They liked to hear a man recite the stately poetry of Homer and Pindar. They allowed him to accompany himself upon the lyre, the poorest of all stringed instruments. That was as far as anyone could go without incurring the risk of popular disapproval. The Romans, on the other hand, had loved orchestral music at their dinners and parties, and they had invented most of the instruments which, in very modified form, were used today. The early church had despised this music which smacked too much of the wicked pagan world which had just been destroyed. A few songs rendered by the entire congregation were all the bishops of the third and fourth centuries would tolerate. As the congregation was apt to sing dreadfully out of key without the guidance of an instrument, the church had afterwards allowed the use of an organ, an invention of the second century of our era which consisted of a combination of the old pipes of pan and a pair of bellows. Then came the great migrations. The last of the Roman musicians were either killed or became tramp fiddlers going from city to city and playing in the street and begging for pennies like the harpist on a modern ferry boat. But the revival of a more worldly civilization in the cities of the late Middle Ages had created a new demand for musicians. The instruments like the horn, which had been used only as a signal instrument for hunting and fighting, were remodeled until they could reproduce sounds which were agreeable in the dance hall and in the banqueting room. A bow strung with horsehair was used to play the old fashioned guitar, and before the end of the Middle Ages the six-stringed instrument, the most ancient of all string instruments which dates back to Egypt and Assyria, had grown into our modern four-stringed fiddle which Stradivarius and other Italian violin makers of the eighteenth century brought to the height of perfection. And finally the modern piano was invented, the most widespread of all musical instruments which has followed man into the wilderness of the jungle and the ice fields of Greenland. The organ had been the first of all keyed instruments, but the performer always depended upon the cooperation of someone who worked the bellows, a job which nowadays is done by electricity. The musicians therefore looked for a handier and less circumstantial instrument to assist them in training the pupils of the many church choirs. During the great eleventh century Guido, a Benedictine monk of the town of Arezzo, the birthplace of the poet Petrarch, gave us our modern system of musical annotation. During that century, when there was a great deal of popular interest in music, the first instrument with both keys and strings was built. It must have sounded as tinkly as one of those tiny children's pianos which you can buy at every toy shop. In the city of Vienna, the town where the strolling musicians of the Middle Ages, who had been classed with jugglers and card-sharps, had formed the first separate guild of musicians in the year 1288, the little monochord was developed into something which we can recognise as the direct ancestor of our modern Steinway. From Austria the clavichord, as it was usually called in those days because it had claves or keys, went to Italy. There it was perfected into the spinnet, which was so called after the inventor Giovanni Spinetti of Venice. And last, during the 18th century, sometime between 1709 and 1720, Bartolomeo Cristofori made a clavier which allowed the performer to play both loudly and softly, or as it was said in Italian, Piano and Forte. This instrument with certain changes became our Piano Forte, or Piano. Then for the first time the world possessed an easy and convenient instrument which could be mastered in a couple of years, and did not need the eternal tuning of harps and fiddles, and was much pleasanter to the ears than the medieval tubas, clarinets, trombones, and oboes. Just as the phonograph has given millions of modern people their first love of music, so did the early Piano Forte carry the knowledge of music into much wider circles. Music became part of the education of every well-bred man and woman. Musicians and rich merchants maintained private orchestras. The musicians ceased to be a wandering jongleur and became a highly valued member of the community. Music was added to the dramatic performances of the theatre, and out of this practice grew our modern opera. Originally, only a few very rich princes could afford the expenses of an opera troupe, but as the taste for this sort of entertainment grew, many cities built their own theatres, where Italian and afterwards German operas were given to the unlimited joy of the whole community, with the exception of a few sects of very strict Christians who still regarded music with deep suspicion as something which was too lovely to be entirely good for the soul. By the middle of the eighteenth century the musical life of Europe was in full swing. Then there came forward a man who was greater than all others, a simple organist of the Thomas Church of Leipzig by the name of Johann Sebastian Bach. In his compositions for every known instrument, from comic songs and popular dances to the most stately of sacred hymns and oratorios, he laid the foundation for all our modern music. When he died in the year 1750 he was succeeded by Mozart, who created musical fabrics of sheer loveliness which remind us of lace that has been woven out of harmony and rhythm. Then came Ludwig van Beethoven, the most tragic of men who gave us our modern orchestra, yet heard none of his greatest compositions because he was deaf as the result of a cold contracted during his years of poverty. Beethoven lived through the period of the Great French Revolution. Full of hope for a new and glorious day he had dedicated one of his symphonies to Napoleon, but he lived to regret the hour. When he died in the year 1827 Napoleon was gone and the French Revolution was gone, but the steam engine had come and was filling the world with a sound that had nothing in common with the dreams of the Third Symphony. Indeed the new order of steam and iron and coal and large factories had little use for art, for painting and sculpture and poetry and music. The old protectors of the arts, the church and the princes and the merchants of the Middle Ages and the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries no longer existed. The leaders of the new industrial world were too busy and had too little education to bother about etchings and sonatas and bits of carved ivory, not to speak of the men who created those things and who were of no practical use to the community in which they lived. And the workmen in the factories listened to the drone of their engines until they too had lost all taste for the melody of the flute or fiddle of their peasant ancestry. The arts became the step-children of the new industrial era. Art and life became entirely separated. However paintings had been left were dying a slow death in the museums, and music became a monopoly of a few virtuosi who took the music away from the home and carried it to the concert hall. But steadily, although slowly, the arts are coming back into their own. People begin to understand that Rembrandt and Beethoven and Rodin are the true prophets and leaders of their race, and that a world without art and happiness resembles a nursery without laughter. Chapter which ought to give you a great deal of political information about the last fifty years, but which really contains several explanations and a few apologies. If I had known how difficult it was to write a history of the world, I should never have undertaken the task. Of course, anyone possessed of enough industry to lose himself for half a dozen years in the musty stacks of a library can compile a ponderous tome which gives an account of the events in every land during every century. But that was not the purpose of the present book. The publishers wanted to print a history that should have rhythm, a story which galloped rather than walked, and now that I have almost finished, I discover that certain chapters gallop, that others wade slowly through the dreary sands of long-forgotten ages, that a few parts do not make any progress at all, while still others indulge in a veritable jazz of action and romance. I did not like this, and I suggested that we destroy the whole manuscript and begin once more from the beginning. This however, the publishers would not allow. As the next best solution of my difficulties, I took the typewritten pages to a number of charitable friends and asked them to read what I had said and give me the benefit of their advice. The experience was rather disheartening. Each and every man had his own prejudices and his own hobbies and preferences. They all wanted to know why, where, and how I dared to omit their pet nation, their pet statesmen, were even their most beloved criminal. With some of them, Napoleon and Genghis Khan were candidates for high honors. I explained that I had tried very hard to be fair to Napoleon, but that in my estimation he was greatly inferior to such men as George Washington, Gustavus Vassa, Augustus, Hammurabi or Lincoln, and a score of others, all of whom were obliged to content themselves with a few paragraphs from sheer lack of space. As for Genghis Khan, I only recognized his superior ability in the field of wholesale murder and I did not intend to give him any more publicity than I could help. Here you see a picture of a log cabin with a single man walking up to it and it's entitled The Pioneer. This is very well as far as it goes, said the next critic, but how about the Puritans? We are celebrating the tercentenary of their arrival at Plymouth. They ought to have more space. My answer was that if I were writing a history of America, the Puritans would get fully one half of the first twelve chapters, that however this was a history of mankind, and that the event on Plymouth Rock was not a matter of far-reaching international importance until many centuries later, that the United States had been founded by thirteen colonies and not by a single one, that the most prominent leaders of the first twenty years of our history had been from Virginia, from Pennsylvania, and from the island of Nevis, rather than from Massachusetts, and that therefore the Puritans ought to content themselves with a page of print and a special map. Next came the prehistoric specialist. Why in the name of the great Tyrannosaur had I not devoted more space to the wonderful race of Chromagnan men, who had developed such a high stage of civilization ten thousand years ago? Indeed, and why not? The reason is simple. I do not take as much stock in the perfection of these early races as some of our most noted anthropologists seem to do. Rousseau and the philosophers of the eighteenth century created the noble savage, who was supposed to have dwelt in a state of perfect happiness during the beginning of time. Our modern scientists have discarded the noble savage so dearly beloved by our grandfathers, and they have replaced him by the splendid savage of the French valleys, who thirty-five thousand years ago made an end to the universal rule of the low-browed and low-living brutes of the Neanderthal and other Germanic neighborhoods. They have shown us the elephants the Chromagnan painted, and the statues he carved, and they have surrounded him with much glory. I do not mean to say that they are wrong, but I hold that we know by far too little of this entire period to reconstruct that early West European society with any degree, however humble, of accuracy, and I would rather not state certain things that run the risk of stating certain things that were not so. Then there were other critics, who accused me of direct unfairness. Why did I leave out such countries as Ireland and Bulgaria and Siam, while I dragged in such other countries as Holland and Iceland and Switzerland? My answer was that I did not drag in any countries, they pushed themselves in by main force of circumstances, and I simply could not keep them out. And in order that my point may be understood, let me state the basis upon which active membership to this book of history was considered. There was but one rule. Did the country or the person in question produce a new idea or perform an original act without which the history of the entire human race would have been different? It was not a question of personal taste. It was a matter of cool, almost mathematical, judgment. No race ever played a more picturesque role in history than the Mongolians, and no race from the point of view of achievement or intelligent progress was of less value to the rest of mankind. The career of Tiglith Pilizer, the Assyrian, is full of dramatic episodes, but as far as we are concerned, he might just as well never have existed at all. In the same way, the history of the Dutch Republic is not interesting, because once upon a time the sailors of De Reuter went fishing in the River Thames, but rather because of the small fact that this small mud bank along the shores of the North Sea offered a hospitable asylum to all sorts of strange people, who had all sorts of queer ideas upon all sorts of very unpopular subjects. It is quite true that Athens or Florence, during the heyday of their glory, had only one-tenth of the population of Kansas City, but our present civilization would be very different had neither of these two little cities of the Mediterranean Basin existed. And the same, with due apologies to the good people of Wyandotte County, could hardly be said of this busy metropolis on the Missouri River. And since I am being very personal, allow me to state one other fact. When we visit a doctor, we find out beforehand whether he is a surgeon or a diagnostician, or a homeopath or a faith healer, for we want to know from what angle he will look at our complaint. We ought to be as careful in the choice of our historians as we are in the selection of our physicians. We think, oh well, history is history, and let it go at that. But the writer who was educated in a strictly presbyterian household somewhere in the backwoods of Scotland will look differently upon every question of human relationships from his neighbor, who as a child was dragged to listen to the brilliant exhortations of Robert Ingersoll, the enemy of all revealed devils. In due course of time, both men may forget their early training, and never again visit either church or lecture hall. But the influence of these impressionable years stays with them, and they cannot escape showing it in whatever they write or say or do. In the preface to this book, I told you that I should not be an infallible guide, and now that we have almost reached the end, I repeat the warning. I was born and educated in an atmosphere of the old fashioned liberalism which had followed the discoveries of Darwin and the other pioneers of the 19th century. As a child, I happened to spend most of my waking hours with an uncle who was a great collector of the books written by Montaigne, the great French essayist of the 16th century. Because I was born in Rotterdam and educated in the city of Gouda, I ran continually across Erasmus, and for some unknown reason this great exponent of tolerance took hold of my intolerant self. Later I discovered Anatoly France, and my first experience with the English language came about through an accidental encounter with Thackeray's Henry Esmond, a story which made more impression upon me than any other book in the English language. If I had been born in a pleasant middle-western city, I probably should have a certain affection for the hems which I had learned in my childhood, but my earliest recollection of music goes back to the afternoon when my mother took me to hear nothing less than a Bach fugue, and the mathematical perfection of the great Protestant master influenced me to such an extent that I cannot hear the usual hems of our prayer meeting without a feeling of intense agony and direct pain. Again, if I had been born in Italy and had been warmed by the sunshine of the happy valley of the Arno, I might love many colorful and sunny pictures which now leave me indifferent, because I got my first artistic impressions in a country where the rare sun beats down upon the rain-soaked land with almost cruel brutality and throws everything into violent contrasts of dark and light. I state these few facts deliberately that you may know the personal bias of the man who wrote this history and may understand his point of view. The bibliography at the end of this book, which represents all sorts of opinions and views, will allow you to compare my ideas with those of other people, and in this way you will be able to reach your own final conclusions with a greater degree of fairness than would otherwise be possible. Here you see a picture of a very large covered wagon in a desert setting titled Conquest of the West. Under this short but necessary excursion, we return to the history of the last fifty years. Many things happened during this period, but very little occurred which at the time seemed to be of paramount importance. The majority of the greater powers ceased to be mere political agencies and became large business enterprises. They built railroads. They founded and subsidized steamship lines to all parts of the world. They connected their different possessions with telegraph wires, and they steadily increased their holdings in other continents. Every available bit of African or Asiatic territory was claimed by one of the rival powers. France became a colonial nation with interests in Algiers, and Madagascar, and Inam and Tonkin in Eastern Asia. Germany claimed parts of the Southwest and East Africa, built settlements in Cameroon on the west coast of Africa and in New Guinea and many of the islands of the Pacific, and used the murder of a few missionaries as a welcome excuse to take the harbor of Kossakau in the Yellow Sea in China. Italy tried her luck in Abyssinia, was disastrously defeated by the soldiers of the Negas, and consoled herself by occupying the Turkish possessions in Tripoli in Northern Africa. Russia, having occupied all of Siberia, took Port Arthur away from China. Japan, having defeated China in the War of 1895, occupied the island of Formosa, and in the year 1905 began to lay claim to the entire Empire of Korea. In the year 1883, England, the largest colonial empire the world has ever seen, undertook to protect Egypt. She performed this task most efficiently and to the great material benefit of that much neglected country, which ever since the opening of the Suez Canal in 1868 had been threatened with a foreign invasion. During the next thirty years, she fought a number of colonial wars in different parts of the world, and in 1902, after three years of bitter fighting, she conquered the independent war republics of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. Meanwhile, she had encouraged Cecil Rhodes to lay the foundations for a great African state which reached from the Cape almost to the mouth of the Nile, and had faithfully picked up such islands or provinces as had been left without a European owner. The shrewd king of Belgium, by name Leopold, used the discoveries of Henry Staley to found the Congo Free State in the year 1885. Originally, this gigantic tropical empire was an absolute monarchy, but after many years of scandalous mismanagement, it was annexed by the Belgian people who made it a colony in the year 1908, and abolished the terrible abuses which had been tolerated by this very unscrupulous majesty, who cared nothing for the fate of the natives as long as he got his ivory and rubber. As for the United States, they had so much land that they desired no further territory, but the terrible misrule of Cuba, one of the last of the Spanish possessions in the Western Hemisphere, practically forced the Washington government to take action. After a short and rather uneventful war, the Spaniards were driven out of Cuba and Puerto Rico and the Philippines, and the two latter became colonies of the United States. This economic development of the world was perfectly natural. The increasing number of factories in England and France and Germany needed an ever-increasing amount of raw materials, and the equally-increasing number of European workers needed an ever-increasing amount of food. Everywhere the cry was for more and for richer markets, for more easily accessible coal mines, and iron mines, and rubber plantations and oil wells, for greater supplies of wheat and grain. The purely political events of the European continent dwindled to mere insignificance in the eyes of men who were making plans for steamboat lines on Victoria and Nianza, or for railroads through the interior of Shantung. They knew that many European questions still remained to be settled, but they did not bother, and through sheer indifference and carelessness they bestowed upon their descendants a terrible inheritance of hate and misery. For untold centuries the southeastern corner of Europe had been the scene of rebellion and bloodshed. During the seventies of the last century, the people of Serbia and Bulgaria and Montenegro and Romania were once more trying to gain their freedom and the Turks, with the support of many of the Western powers, were trying to prevent this. After a period of particularly atrocious massacres in Bulgaria in the year 1876, the Russian people lost all patience. The government was forced to intervene just as President McKinley was obliged to go to Cuba and stop the shooting squads of General Weiler in Havana. In April of the year 1877, the Russian armies crossed the Danube, stormed the ship Capas, and after the capture of Plevna marched southward until they reached the gates of Constantinople. Turkey appealed for help to England. There were many English people who denounced their government when it took the side of the Sultan, but Disraeli, who had just made Queen Victoria Empress of India and who loved the picturesque Turks while he hated the Russians, who were brutally cruel to the Jewish people within their frontiers, decided to interfere. Russia was forced to conclude the peace of San Stefano, 1878, and the question of the Balkans was left to a Congress, which convened at Berlin in June and July of the same year. This famous conference was entirely dominated by the personality of Disraeli. Even Bismarck feared the clever old man with his well-oiled curly hair and his supreme arrogance, tempered by a cynical sense of humor and a marvelous gift for flattery. At Berlin, the British Prime Minister carefully watched over the fate of his friends the Turks. Montenegro, Serbia, and Romania were recognized as independent kingdoms. The Principality of Bulgaria was given a semi-independent status under Prince Alexander of Battenberg, a nephew of Tsar Alexander II. But none of those countries were given the chance to develop their powers in the resources as they would have been able to do had England been less anxious about the fate of the Sultan, whose domains were necessary to the safety of the British Empire as a bulwark against further Russian aggression. To make matters worse, the Congress allowed Austria to take Bosnia and Herzegovina away from the Turks to be administered as part of the Habsburg domains. It is true that Austria made an excellent job of it. The neglected provinces were as well managed as the best of the British colonies, and that is saying a great deal. But they were inhabited by many Serbians. In older days, they had been a part of the great Serbian Empire of Stefan Dushan, who early in the 14th century had defended Western Europe against the invasions of the Turks, and whose capital of Uskub had been a centre of civilization 150 years before Columbus discovered the new lands of the West. The Serbians remembered their ancient glory as who would not. They resented the presence of the Austrians in two provinces, which so they felt were theirs by every rite of tradition. And it was in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia, that the Archduke Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian throne, was murdered on June 28th of the year 1914. The assassin was a Serbian student who had acted from purely patriotic motives. But the blame for this terrible catastrophe, which was the immediate, though not the only cause of the Great World War, did not lie with the half-crazy Serbian boy or his Austrian victim. It must be traced back to the days of the famous Berlin Conference, when Europe was too busy building a material civilization to care about the aspirations and the dreams of a forgotten race in a dreary corner of the old Balkan Peninsula. End of Chapter 62, recorded by Michelle Crandall, Fremont, California, June 2009. Chapter 63 of The Story of Mankind. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. The Story of Mankind by Hendrik van Loon. Chapter 63. A new world. The Great War, which was really the struggle for a new and better world. The Marquis de Condorcet was one of the noblest characters among the small group of honest enthusiasts who were responsible for the outbreak of the Great French Revolution. He had devoted his life to the cause of the poor and the unfortunate. He had been one of the assistants of D'Alembert and Diderot when they wrote their famous Encyclopedia. During the first years of the Revolution he had been the leader of the moderate wing of the convention. His tolerance, his kindness, his stout common sense had made him an object of suspicion when the treason of the king and the court-click had given the extreme radicals their chance to get hold of the government and kill their opponents. Condorcet was declared or Deloy or Outlawd an outcast who was henceforth at the mercy of every true patriot. His friends offered to hide him at their own peril. Condorcet refused to accept their sacrifice. He escaped and tried to reach his home where he might be safe. After three nights in the open, torn and bleeding, he entered an inn and asked for some food. The suspicious yokels searched him and in his pockets they found a copy of Horace, the Latin poet. This showed that their prisoner was a man of gentle breeding and had no business upon the high roads at a time when every educated person was regarded as an enemy of the revolutionary state. They took Condorcet and they bound him and they gagged him and they threw him into the village lock-up, but in the morning when the soldiers came to drag him back to Paris and cut his head off, behold, he was dead. This man who had given all and had received nothing had good reason to despair of the human race. But he has written a few sentences which ring as true today as they did one hundred and thirty years ago. I repeat them here for your benefit. Nature has set no limits to our hopes, he wrote, and the picture of the human race now freed from its chains and marching with a firm tread on the road of truth and virtue and happiness offers to the philosopher a spectacle which consoles him for the errors, for the crimes and the injustices which still pollute and afflict this earth. The world has just passed through an agony of pain compared to which the French Revolution was a mere incident. The shock has been so great that it has killed the last spark of hope in the breasts of millions of men. They were chanting a hymn of progress and four years of slaughter followed their prayers for peace. Is it worth while, so they ask, to work and slave for the benefit of creatures who have not yet passed beyond the stage of the earliest cavemen? There is but one answer. That answer is yes. The world war was a terrible calamity, but it did not mean the end of things. On the contrary, it brought about the coming of a new day. It is easy to write a history of Greece and Rome or the Middle Ages. The actors who played their parts upon that long forgotten stage are all dead. We can criticize them with a cool head. The audience that applauded their efforts has dispersed. Our remarks cannot possibly hurt their feelings. But it is very difficult to give a true account of contemporary events. The problems that fill the minds of the people with whom we pass through life are our own problems, and they hurt us too much, or they please us too well, to be described with that fairness which is necessary when we are writing history and not blowing the trumpet of propaganda. All the same I shall endeavor to tell you why I agree with poor Condorcet when he expressed his firm faith in a better future. Often before I have warned you against the false impression which is created by the use of our so-called historical epochs which divide the story of man into four parts. The ancient world, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and the Reformation, and modern time. The last of these terms is the most dangerous. The word modern implies that we, the people of the 20th century, are at the top of human achievement. Fifty years ago the Liberals of England who followed the leadership of Gladstone felt that the problem of a truly representative and democratic form of government had been solved for ever by the Second Great Reform Bill, which gave workmen an equal share in the government with their employers. When Disraeli and his conservative friends talked of a dangerous leap in the dark, they answered no. They felt certain of their cause and trusted that henceforth all classes of society would co-operate to make the government of their common country a success. Since then many things have happened, and the few Liberals who are still alive begin to understand that they were mistaken. There is no definite answer to any historical problem. Every generation must fight the good fight anew or perish as those sluggish animals of the prehistoric world have perished. If you once get hold of this great truth, you will get a new and much broader view of life. Then go one step further and try to imagine yourself in the position of your own great, great grandchildren who will take your place in the year ten thousand. They too will learn history, but what will they think of those short four thousand years during which we have kept a written record of our actions and of our thoughts? They will think of Napoleon as a contemporary of Tiglith Pilser, the Assyrian conqueror. Perhaps they will confuse him with Genghis Khan or Alexander the Macedonian. The great war which has just come to an end will appear in the light of that long commercial conflict which settled the supremacy of the Mediterranean when Rome and Carthage fought during one hundred and twenty-eight years for the mastery of the sea. The Balkan troubles of the nineteenth century, the struggle for freedom of Serbia and Greece and Bulgaria and Montenegro, to them will seem a continuation of the disordered conditions caused by the great migrations. They will look at pictures of the Rime Cathedral which only yesterday was destroyed by German guns as we look upon a photograph of the Acropolis ruined two hundred and fifty years ago during a war between the Turks and the Venetians. They will regard the fear of death, which is still common among many people, as a childish superstition which was perhaps natural in a race of men who had burned witches as late as the year sixteen ninety-two. Even our hospitals and our laboratories and our operating rooms of which we are so proud, will look like slightly improved workshops of alchemists and medieval surgeons. And the reason for all this is simple. We modern men and women are not modern at all. On the contrary, we still belong to the last generations of the cave dwellers. The foundation for a new era was laid but yesterday. The human race was given its first chance to become truly civilized when it took courage to question all things and made knowledge and understanding the foundation upon which to create a more reasonable and sensible society of human beings. The Great War was the growing pain of this new world. For a long time to come people will write mighty books to prove that this or that or the other person brought about the war. The socialists will publish volumes in which they will accuse the capitalists of having brought about the war for commercial gain. The capitalists will answer that they lost infinitely more through the war than they made, that their children were among the first to go and fight and be killed and they will show how in every country the bankers tried their very best to avert the outbreak of hostilities. French historians will go through the register of German sins from the days of Charlemagne until the days of William of Hohenzollern and German historians will return the compliment and will go through the list of French horrors from the days of Charlemagne until the days of President Poincaré. And then they will establish to their own satisfaction that the other fellow was guilty of causing the war. Statesmen, dead and not yet dead in all countries, will take to their typewriters and they will explain how they tried to avert hostilities and how their wicked opponents forced them into it. The historian a hundred years hence will not bother about these apologies and vindications. He will understand the real nature of the underlying causes and he will know that personal ambitions and personal wickedness and personal greed had very little to do with the final outburst. The original mistake, which was responsible for all this misery, was committed when our scientists began to create a new world of steel and iron and chemistry and electricity and forgot that the human mind is slower than the proverbial turtle, is lazier than the well-known sloth, and marches from one hundred to three hundred years behind the small group of courageous leaders. A zulu in a frock coat is still a zulu. A dog trained to ride a bicycle and smoke a pipe is still a dog. And a human being with the mind of a sixteenth-century tradesman driving a 1921 Rolls-Royce is still a human being with the mind of a sixteenth-century tradesman. If you do not understand this at first, read it again. It will become clearer to you in a moment, and it will explain many things that have happened these last six years. Perhaps I may give you another more familiar example to show you what I mean. In the movie theaters, jokes and funny remarks are often thrown upon the screen. Watch the audience the next time you have a chance. A few people seem almost to inhale the words. It takes them but a second to read the lines. Others are a bit slower. Still others take from twenty to thirty seconds. Finally, those men and women who do not read any more than they can help get the point when the brighter ones among the audience have already begun to decipher the next cut-in. It is not different in human life, as I shall now show you. In a former chapter I have told you how the idea of the Roman Empire continued to live for a thousand years after the death of the last Roman emperor. It caused the establishment of a large number of imitation empires. It gave the bishops of Rome a chance to make themselves the head of the entire church, because they represented the idea of Roman world supremacy. It drove a number of perfectly harmless barbarian chieftains into a career of crime and endless warfare, because they were forever under the spell of this magic word, Rome. All these people, popes, emperors, and plain fighting men, were not very different from you or me, but they lived in a world where the Roman tradition was a vital issue, something living, something which was remembered clearly both by the father and the son and the grandson. And so they struggled and sacrificed themselves for a cause which today would not find a dozen recruits. In still another chapter I have told you how the great religious wars took place more than a century after the first open act of the Reformation. And if you will compare the chapter on the Thirty Years' War with that on inventions, you will see that this ghastly butchery took place at a time when the first clumsy steam engines were already puffing in the laboratories of a number of French and German and English scientists. But the world at large took no interest in these strange contraptions and went on with a grand theological discussion which today causes yawns but no anger. And so it goes. A thousand years from now the historian will use the same words about Europe of the outgoing 19th century and he will see how men were engaged upon terrific nationalistic struggles while the laboratories all around them were filled with serious folk who cared not one whit for politics as long as they could force nature to surrender a few more of her million secrets. You will gradually begin to understand what I am driving at. The engineer and the scientist and the chemist within a single generation fill Europe and America and Asia with their vast machines, with their telegraphs, their flying machines, their coal-tar products. They created a new world in which time and space were reduced to complete insignificance. They invented new products and they made these so cheap that almost everyone could buy them. I have told you all this before but it certainly will bear repeating. To keep the ever increasing number of factories going the owners who had also become the rulers of the land needed raw materials and coal, especially coal. Meanwhile the mass of the people were still thinking in terms of the 16th and 17th centuries and clinging to the old notions of the state as a dynastic or political organization. This clumsy medieval institution was then suddenly called upon to handle the highly modern problems of a mechanical and industrial world. It did its best, according to the rules of the game which had been laid down centuries before. The different states created enormous armies and gigantic navies which were used for the purpose of acquiring new possessions in distant lands. Wherever there was a tiny bit of land left there arose an English or a French or a German or a Russian colony. If the natives objected they were killed. In most cases they did not object and were allowed to live peacefully provided they did not interfere with the diamond mines or the coal mines or the oil mines or the gold mines or the rubber plantations and they derived many benefits from the foreign occupation. Sometimes it happened that two states in search of raw materials wanted the same piece of land at the same time. Then there was a war. This occurred 15 years ago when Russia and Japan fought for the possession of certain territories which belonged to the Chinese people. Such conflicts however were the exception. No one really desired to fight. Indeed the idea of fighting with armies and battleships and submarines began to seem absurd to the men of the early twentieth century. They associated the idea of violence with the long ago age of unlimited monarchies and intriguing dynasties. Every day they read in their papers of still further inventions of groups of English and American and German scientists who were working together in perfect friendship for the purpose of an advance in medicine or in astronomy. They lived in a busy world of trade and of commerce and factories. But only a few noticed that the development of the state, of the gigantic community of people who recognized certain common ideals, was lagging several hundred years behind. They tried to warn the others, but the others were occupied with their own affairs. I have used so many similes that I must apologize for bringing in one more. The ship of state, that old and trusted expression which is ever new and always picturesque, of the Egyptians and the Greeks and the Romans and the Venetians and the merchant adventurers of the seventeenth century, had been a sturdy craft, constructed of well-seasoned wood, and commanded by officers who knew both their crew and their vessel, and who understood the limitations of the art of navigating which had been handed down to them by their ancestors. Then came the new age of iron and steel and machinery. First one part, then another of the old ship of state was changed. Her dimensions were increased, the sails were discarded for steam. Better living quarters were established, but more people were forced to go down into the stoke-hole, and while the work was safe and fairly remunerative, they did not like it as well as their old and more dangerous job in the rigging. Finally, and almost imperceptibly, the old wooden square rigour had been transformed into a modern ocean liner. But the captain and the mates remained the same. They were appointed or elected in the same way as a hundred years before. They were taught the same system of navigation which had served the mariners of the fifteenth century. In their cabins hung the same charts and signal flags which had done service in the days of Louis XIV and Frederick the Great. In short they were, through no fault of their own, completely incompetent. The sea of international politics is not very broad. When those imperial and colonial liners began to try and outrun each other, accidents were bound to happen. They did happen. You can still see the wreckage if you venture to pass through that part of the ocean. And the moral of the story is a simple one. The world is in dreadful need of men who will assume the new leadership, who will have the courage of their own visions, and who will recognize clearly that we are only at the beginning of the voyage, and have to learn an entirely new system of seamanship. They will have to serve for years as mere apprentices. They will have to fight their way to the top against every possible form of opposition. When they reach the bridge, mutiny of an envious crew may cause their death. But some day a man will arise who will bring the vessel safely to port. And he shall be the hero of the ages. On June 5th, 2009 in San Diego, California. The more I think of the problems of our lives, the more I am persuaded that we ought to choose irony and pity for our assessors and judges as the ancient Egyptians called upon the goddess Isis and the goddess Neftis on behalf of their dead. Irony and pity are both of good counsel. The first with her smiles makes life agreeable. The other sanctifies it with her tears. The irony which I invoke is no cruel deity. She mocks neither love nor beauty. She is gentle and kindly disposed. Her mirth disarms, and it is she who teaches us to laugh at robes and fools, whom but for her we might be so weak as to despise and hate. And with these wise words of a very great Frenchman I bid you farewell.