Caesar: A Sketch | Page 5

object:

Everything that grows Holds in perfection but a little moment, And this
huge state presenteth nought but shows, Whereon the stars in silent
influence comment.
Nevertheless, "as the heavens are high above the earth, so is wisdom
above folly." Goethe compares life to a game at whist, where the cards
are dealt out by destiny, and the rules of the game are fixed: subject to
these conditions, the players are left to win or lose, according to their
skill or want of skill. The life of a nation, like the life of a man, may be
prolonged in honor into the fulness of its time, or it may perish
prematurely, for want of guidance, by violence or internal disorders.
And thus the history of national revolutions is to statesmanship what
the pathology of disease is to the art of medicine. The physician cannot
arrest the coming on of age. Where disease has laid hold upon the
constitution he cannot expel it. But he may check the progress of the
evil if he can recognize the symptoms in time. He can save life at the
cost of an unsound limb. He can tell us how to preserve our health
when we have it; he can warn us of the conditions under which
particular disorders will have us at disadvantage. And so with nations:
amidst the endless variety of circumstances there are constant
phenomena which give notice of approaching danger; there are courses
of action which have uniformly produced the same results; and the wise
politicians are those who have learnt from experience the real
tendencies of things, unmisled by superficial differences, who can shun
the rocks where others have been wrecked, or from foresight of what is
coming can be cool when the peril is upon them.
For these reasons, the fall of the Roman Republic is exceptionally
instructive to us. A constitutional government the most enduring and
the most powerful that ever existed was put on its trial, and found
wanting. We see it in its growth; we see the causes which undermined
its strength. We see attempts to check the growing mischief fail, and we
see why they failed. And we see, finally, when nothing seemed so
likely as complete dissolution, the whole system changed by a violent
operation, and the dying patient's life protracted for further centuries of
power and usefulness.

Again, irrespective of the direct teaching which we may gather from
them, particular epochs in history have the charm for us which dramas
have-- periods when the great actors on the stage of life stand before us
with the distinctness with which they appear in the creations of a poet.
There have not been many such periods; for to see the past, it is not
enough for us to be able to look at it through the eyes of
contemporaries; these contemporaries themselves must have been
parties to the scenes which they describe. They must have had full
opportunities of knowledge. They must have had eyes which could see
things in their true proportions. They must have had, in addition, the
rare literary powers which can convey to others through the medium of
language an exact picture of their own minds; and such happy
combinations occur but occasionally in thousands of years. Generation
after generation passes by, and is crumbled into sand as rocks are
crumbled by the sea. Each brought with it its heroes and its villains, its
triumphs and its sorrows; but the history is formless legend, incredible
and unintelligible; the figures of the actors are indistinct as the rude
ballad or ruder inscription, which may be the only authentic record of
them. We do not see the men and women, we see only the outlines of
them which have been woven into tradition as they appeared to the
loves or hatreds of passionate admirers or enemies. Of such times we
know nothing, save the broad results as they are measured from century
to century, with here and there some indestructible pebble, some law,
some fragment of remarkable poetry which has resisted decomposition.
These periods are the proper subject of the philosophic historian, and to
him we leave them. But there are others, a few, at which intellectual
activity was as great as it is now, with its written records surviving, in
which the passions, the opinions, the ambitions of the age are all before
us, where the actors in the great drama speak their own thoughts in
their own words, where we hear their enemies denounce them and their
friends praise them; where we are ourselves plunged amidst the hopes
and fears of the hour, to feel the conflicting emotions and to
sympathize in the struggles which again seem to live: and here
philosophy is at fault. Philosophy, when we are face to face with