Caesar: A Sketch | Page 6

real
men, is as powerless as over the Iliad or King Lear. The overmastering
human interest transcends explanation. We do not sit in judgment on
the right or the wrong; we do not seek out causes to account for what

takes place, feeling too conscious of the inadequacy of our analysis. We
see human beings possessed by different impulses, and working out a
pre-ordained result, as the subtle forces drive each along the path
marked out for him; and history becomes the more impressive to us
where it least immediately instructs.
With such vividness, with such transparent clearness, the age stands
before us of Cato and Pompey, of Cicero and Julius Caesar; the more
distinctly because it was an age in so many ways the counterpart of our
own, the blossoming period of the old civilization, when the intellect
was trained to the highest point which it could reach, and on the great
subjects of human interest, on morals and politics, on poetry and art,
even on religion itself and the speculative problems of life, men
thought as we think, doubted where we doubt, argued as we argue,
aspired and struggled after the same objects. It was an age of material
progress and material civilization; an age of civil liberty and
intellectual culture; an age of pamphlets and epigrams, of salons and of
dinner-parties, of senatorial majorities and electoral corruption. The
highest offices of state were open in theory to the meanest citizen; they
were confined, in fact, to those who had the longest purses, or the most
ready use of the tongue on popular platforms. Distinctions of birth had
been exchanged for distinctions of wealth. The struggles between
plebeians and patricians for equality of privilege were over, and a new
division had been formed between the party of property and a party
who desired a change in the structure of society. The free cultivators
were disappearing from the soil. Italy was being absorbed into vast
estates, held by a few favored families and cultivated by slaves, while
the old agricultural population was driven off the land, and was
crowded into towns. The rich were extravagant, for life had ceased to
have practical interest, except for its material pleasures; the occupation
of the higher classes was to obtain money without labor, and to spend it
in idle enjoyment. Patriotism survived on the lips, but patriotism meant
the ascendency of the party which would maintain the existing order of
things, or would overthrow it for a more equal distribution of the good
things which alone were valued. Religion, once the foundation of the
laws and rule of personal conduct, had subsided into opinion. The
educated, in their hearts, disbelieved it. Temples were still built with

increasing splendor; the established forms were scrupulously observed.
Public men spoke conventionally of Providence, that they might throw
on their opponents the odium of impiety; but of genuine belief that life
had any serious meaning, there was none remaining beyond the circle
of the silent, patient, ignorant multitude. The whole spiritual
atmosphere was saturated with cant--cant moral, cant political, cant
religious; an affectation of high principle which had ceased to touch the
conduct, and flowed on in an increasing volume of insincere and unreal
speech. The truest thinkers were those who, like Lucretius, spoke
frankly out their real convictions, declared that Providence was a dream,
and that man and the world he lived in were material phenomena,
generated by natural forces out of cosmic atoms, and into atoms to be
again resolved.
Tendencies now in operation may a few generations hence land modern
society in similar conclusions, unless other convictions revive
meanwhile and get the mastery of them; of which possibility no more
need be said than this, that unless there be such a revival in some shape
or other, the forces, whatever they be, which control the forms in which
human things adjust themselves, will make an end again, as they made
an end before, of what are called free institutions. Popular forms of
government are possible only when individual men can govern their
own lives on moral principles, and when duty is of more importance
than pleasure, and justice than material expediency. Rome at any rate
had grown ripe for judgment. The shape which the judgment assumed
was due perhaps, in a measure, to a condition which has no longer a
parallel among us. The men and women by whom the hard work of the
world was done were chiefly slaves, and those who constitute the
driving force of revolutions in modern Europe lay then outside society,
unable and perhaps uncaring to affect its fate. No change then possible
would much influence the prospects of the unhappy bondsmen. The
triumph of the party of the constitution would bring no liberty to them.
That their masters should