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Sunday, July 31, 2022

ARCHITECTURE

Bulgaria has architectural monuments from the Thracian period (settlement, tombs, fortress walls), from the Ancient Greece (a settlement along the Black Sea coast — Messemvria — present day Nessebur), from the Odessa (Varna), from Ap- polonia (Sozopol); from the Roman Empire — Escus (now the village of Tigel), Nikopolis ad Istrum (village ofNukyup), Ab- ritus (Razgrad), Trimontium (Plovdiv). The greatest medieval structures are in Pliska, Veliki Preslav, Tumovgrad, and Boya- na. National Revival buildings of some note are in Rila, Bach- kovo, Troyan, Plovdiv, Kotel, Tryavna, Koprivshtitsa, Zheravna. Of special interest are the buildings by the master builder Kolyu Ficheto (bridge near the village of By ala, Trinity Church in Svishtov, Nikoli Inn at Veliko Turnovo). More recent architecture can be seen in the buildings of the National Assembly, Ivan Vazov National Theatre, the mineral baths building, market hall and the National Museum in Sofia, theatres in Rousse and Varna, etc. Many public buildings, theatres and stadiums have been built in recent years, all pointing to a very high standard of imagination and inspired functionalism.


MUSIC


From earliest times songs recounting actual events have been handed down from generation to generation. Yoan fcoukouzel, the Angel-voiced, was an important composer in the 14th century. From modem Bulgarian composers as Manolov, Dobri Hristov, Petko Stainov, Pancho Vladigerov should be mentioned. Bulgarian choral works, operas and instrumental music have gained popularity on a world scale daily tours istanbul. Many Bulgarian opera singers perform in the greatest opera houses of the world.


THEATRE


The first theatres in Bulgaria were founded during the Ottoman domination (mid 19th century) and starred as amateur ensembles. Professional theatre dates from 1892 when the Suiza i Smyah Drama Company was established, it became the National Theatre in 1904.


AMATEUR ART


A wealth of folk songs and dances is kept alive in every town and village in Bulgaria. Folk art is an essential ingredient of life in Bulgaria.


CINEMA


Although films were produced in Bulgaria prior to 1944, Bulgarian film has developed greatly only post 1945.


They are the original Bulgarian teaching institutions which played a prominent part in preserving national traditions and the identity of the Bulgarian people during the Ottoman domination. The first theatrical performances, the first public libraries, the first choirs and orchestras originated in these dubs. Many of them have valuable collections, art galleries, radio and film clubs, photography, literature and drama circles and schools for foreign languages, music and ballet.


Physical Education and Sport. In recent years, sport has gained popularity in all walks of life and among the young in particular. The National Spartakiades are very popular and enlist the participation of thousands. Bulgarian sportsmen and women have been particularly successful In rhythmic gymnastics, wrestling, weightlifting, track and field events (women), basketball and volleyball.

Saturday, July 30, 2022

Previously established plan

The city was built after a previously established plan. Two gates, well defended — one by bastions, led to the centre of the city from the north and the west. Two principal streets led to it, intersecting at right angles at the city square (agora). The remaining streets ran parallel to the main thoroughfares, and were consequently perpendicular to each other. The houses are most interesting as regards plan. They usually have many rooms arranged around a central court. Some of the houses were two-storeyed and had balconies supported by wooden columns.


Among other features, the pastas type of house, the predecessor of the Greek peristyle house, is also found here. Water was supplied by wells. Nor was a drainage system lacking, as both domestic and city drains are found. The ruler’s residence was the most important building, with a 40 m. front; it was a two-storey building, richly decorated and possessing among others, a vast chamber, decorated with incrustations in many colours. Many coins were found in the city — Thracian, Macedonian and so on. Trade and the crafts were well developed here. The population outside the town was mainly occupied with farming, cattle raising and fishing. Many objects were found in Seutho- polis, especially vessels, mainly pottery both locally made and imported. Oil and wine were imported from the Island of Thasos, as evidenced by the numerous Thasian amphora-stamps.


Seuthopolis, founded by Seuthes III , the Thracian ruler, contemporary of Alexander the Great and Lysimachus, only existed up to the end of the 3rd century travel bulgaria

, when it was burnt down and destroyed.


History of Thrace


The 3rd century was a most stormy period in the history of Thrace. The wars of the Diadochi and the Epigoni more than once affected the Thracian lands to the South along the coast. Here, the Seleucids, the Ptolomids and the Macedonians all contended for supremacy with the Attalids. To these wars were added the invasions of the Celts, who maintained themselves in Thrace for about 60 years, where they founded a state of their own.


Its last ruler (Cavarus) minted bronze and silver coins, established relations with the Greek colonies and interfered with their relations, as was the case with Byzantium, for instance. Other objects of Celtish origin besides the coins of Cavarus are found in the Bulgarian lands. The capital of their kingdom, Tyls, has not yet been discovered. Certain tumuli are attributed to the Celts, but they are absolutely poor. One of the most beautiful finds discovered so far and certainly of Celtic origin, is a gold torque of considerable size found at the village of Archar, Vidin district.


At the end of the 3rd century B. C. the Roman state appeared in the Western part of the Mediterranean as a new world power, and after defeating Carthage, its most dangerous rival, it intervened in the relations of the Hellenic states in the east. The Balkan Peninsula, with its fertile plains and natural wealth, with its freedom-loving and militant peoples and tribes, stood in their way.


The struggle between Rome and the Balkan peoples lasted for over two centuries until the peninsula was conquered. The Thracians were the last to lay down their arms. The highly developed military technique and organization of the Romans got the better of the bravery and self-denial of the Thracians. Out of their lands were formed the two Balkan provinces of Moesia, about 15 A. D., and Thrace about 46 A. D. An extremely numerous army was placed in the Roman camps and fortresses, mainly along the Danube. It was ready to appear at any threatened spot, moving rapidly along the newly made roads, and to crush any attempt at an uprising on the part of the subjected peoples.

Church of St. Sophia

Another building in Sofia, preserved from the end of the antique period, is the Church of St. Sophia of which further mention will be made. The excavations undertaken many years ago around, and pariicularly in the church itself, established that the present building, which is a vaulted basilica with a cupola, was built only in the 6th or 7th century A. D. on the site of two smaller 4th or 5th century churches, which had been consecutively destroyed by the invading Huns and Goths. This was a cemetery church situated outside the city walls. The floors of both the older churches were covered with beautiful mosaics. Numerous graves were found around the churches at the time, as well as masonry tombs, some of which were richly decorated with mural paintings. The necropolis is Early Christian and dates back to the 3th or 6th century. There are also graves of the 10th to 14th century.


Although very rarely, certain ancient buildings were preserved for a long time, and even up to the present day in certain other towns. Thus, for instance, even to this day the ruins of a big building, called the Roman tower, are to be seen in Varna; its walls bear traces of having been built and re-built many times at later dates. Passages of tremendous length now form deep basements beneath this building. It was probably a big public building or fortified palace of the 3rd century A. D. which was later partly destroyed, only parts of it being used in the Middle Ages and preserved to the present day travel bulgaria. In Plovdiv the remains of Trimontium’s (the Town of Three Hills) walls have been preserved on Djambaz Tepe; they show traces of extensive repairs at a later date. However, the walls of the former Roman city of Augustae — today known as Hissarya Spa near Levskigrad, are in the best state of preservation.


The southern city gate, known as the «Camels» impresses the approaching traveller with its colossal body, rising on the road leading to the town, although it has lost the two square towers that formerly flanked it, and its upper part. Its plan, and particularly its superstructure, with a tower in the centre, brings to mind the images of city gates found on the coins that were minted in the cities of Thrace and Moesia in the 2nd and 3rd centuries B. C Far more important ruins of the old Roman fortifications were preserved up to the 19th century at many places in the Bulgarian lands, particularly along the Danube. The ruins of Trajan’s Gate in the Ihtiman Pass were particularly imposing; however, as absolutely nothing was done to preserve these ruins before the Liberation from Ottoman bondage and in the years immediately following it, a large part of them was completely destroyed.


The town of Pomorie


One of the most interesting and massive monuments of funeral architecture in the period of Roman rule has been preserved under a mound near the town of Pomorie (ancient Anchialo). The tomb is distinguished both by its plan and its size, as well as by its construction and the original disposition of its space. It consists of a covered vaulted passage, 22 m., long, flanked on both sides by square chambers; the passage leads to the funeral chamber, which is round and has a diameter of 11.60 m., with a brick column in the centre, 3.5 m. in diameter, hollow on the inside with an opening on the south side opposite the passage, and at its top.


The space between the column and the walls of the tomb forms a ring-shaped corridor, 4.05m. wide, 5.50m. high, and semi-cylindrically vaulted, with the column supporting the inner side of the vault, and thus forming a funnel-shaped extension. The tomb is a real mausoleum. Despite the new manner of construction and the new architectural conception, certain elements of the architecture of the old Thracian cupola tombs have, nevertheless,, been preserved in it. The mausoleum may be dated back to the 4th century A. D.

Thursday, July 28, 2022

TROYAN MONASTERY

It is situated in the folds of the Balkan Range, some 12 km from the town of Troyan. It was built in the year 1840. The frescoes in its church were painted by the best icon-painters of the Samokov School, including Zahari Zograph. Tourist accommodation is available in the monastery.


ALADJA MONASTERY


It stands 14 km northeast of Varna and 3 km west of the Zlatni Pyassatsi resort complex, in one of the most picturesque areas of the Bulgarian Black Sea coast. It is an old monastery carved out of the rocks, consisting of an upper and a lower part. The cells are two and a half metres wide and two metres deep. The length of the church is 11.70 m and its width – 5 m. It is barely 2 m high. On the eastern wall is the altar, in which there are two niches with the comparatively best-preserved mural paintings. Although poorly preserved in general, the murals of the monastery reveal a remarkable development of mediaeval pictorial art. The monastery was most probably founded in the 13th-14th century private tour guide ephesus. 300 m from the monastery are the catacombs – rooms carved out of the rock which were probably used by the monks as dwellings.


The monastery can be reached from Zlatni Pyassatsi on foot along a forest path, or by bus along a panoramic road. From there the road goes on to Varna via Vinitsa village. There are souvenir shops and pavilions for snacks and drinks as well as a fountain.


ZEMEN MONASTERY


It is situated 25 km from Kyustendil on the railway line to Sofia, and is well known for its fine mural paintings dating from the middle of the 14th century. They are very well preserved and among the frescoes which are portraits of contemporaries are those of Deyan, a feudal lord of Kyustendil, and of his wife Doya, patrons of the monastery.


One can travel to the monastery by train as well as by car from Kyustendil or Sofia.


BOYANA CHURCH


At the foot of Mount Vitosha and 10 km from Sofia, stands a unique monument of Bulgarian art — the small Boyana Church, built in the 11th and 13th centuries. Exceptional mural paintings have been preserved in it in an excellent condition. The, unknown Boyana master has succeeded in expressing character traits on the faces of more than 300 large and small human figures, harmoniously distributed in two small compartments. He went beyond the conventionality of the period and became a precursor of the European Renaissance.

Sunday, July 17, 2022

Unbroken evolution of human civilisation

There is something alien to the true historic spirit in any race jealousy and ethnological partisanship. History is the unbroken evolution of human civilisation; and the true historians are they who can show us the unity and the sequence of the vast and complex drama. Theories of race are of all speculations the most cloudy and the most misleading.


And to few nations are they less applicable than to England. Our ethnology, our language, our history are as mixed and complex as any of which records exist. Our nationality is as vigorous and as definite as any in the world; but it is a geographical and a political nationality; and not a tribal or linguistic nationality. To unwind again the intricate strands which have been wrought into our English unity, and to range them in classes is a futile task. If we exaggerate the power of one particular element of the English race, one source of the English people, one side of English institutions, one contributory to the English language, we shall find it a poor equipment for historical judgment.


Professor Clifford


Race prejudices are at all times anti-historic. Professor Clifford used to talk about morality as an evolution of the ‘ tribal ’ conscience. Assuredly confusion is the only possible evolution for a ‘tribal ’ history. The Carlylese school, and the Orientalists turkey sightseeing, and the Dentsch and Jutish enthusiasts, bid fair to turn our language and its literature into an ungainly polyglott. Their pages bristle with Bretwaldas and Heretogas, Bnrhs and Mitnds, Folkfriths and Tungere- fas; or with Reicks, Kurffirsts, Pfalzes, and Kaisers.


All this is very well in glossaries, but not in literature. How absurd it is to write — ‘ The Kurfiirst of Koln or ‘ The Ealdorman of the Hwiccas ! ’ It is as if one wrote — ‘The Due of Broglie was once Ministre of the Affaires Etranghes ’; or that ‘ Wellington defeated the Empireur Napolion and all his Mardchauxjust as they do in a lady’s-maid’s high-polite novel. Why are Deutsch and Jutish titles to be introduced any more than French or Spanish? In glossaries they are useful; but histories of England should be written in English. And it is pleasant to turn to a great book of history, like that of Bishop Stubbs; where, in spite of the temptations and often of the necessities of a specialist dealing with a technical subject, the text is not needlessly deformed with obsolete, grotesque, and foreign words.


A wide range of ethnology and philology shows us that these origins and primitive tongues were themselves the issue of others before them, and are only a phase in the long evolution of history and language. These Engles, and Saxons, and Jutes, these Norse and Welsh, had far distant seats, and far earlier modes of speech. They were no more ‘Autochthones’ in the forests of Upper Germany than they were in Wessex and Caint.


Their speech has been traced back to Aryan roots current in Asia. And there, by the latest glimmerings of ethnographic science, we lose all these Cymric, and British, and Teutonic tribes in some (not definable) affinity, in some (not ascertainable) district of Central Asia, with some (not recoverable) common tongue of their own. So that these war cries about the White Horse, and Engles, and Jutes, turn out to mean simply that a very industrious school of historians choose to direct their attention to one particular phase of a movement which is in perpetual flux; and which, in time, in place, and in speech, can be traced back to very distant embryos in the infinite night of conjecture.


It is treason to our country and to scientific history to write, as Mr. Greene ventured to do in his fine and elaborate Making of England, that ‘ with the landing of Hen- gest English history begins.’ The history of England is something more than the tribal records of the Engles. The history of England began with the first authentic story of organised communities of men living in this island: and that most certainly existed since Caesar narrated his own campaigns in Britain.


The history of England, or the history of France, is the consecutive record of the political communities of men dwelling in the lands now called England and France. The really great problem for history is the assimilation of race and the . co-operation of alien forces. And so, too, the note of true literature lies in a loyal submission to the traditions of our composite tongue, and respect for an instrument which is hallowed by the custom of so many masterpieces. Loyal respect for that glorious speech would teach us to be slow how we desecrate its familiar names with brand- new archaisms; how we ruffle its easy flow with alien cacophonies and solecisms, and deform its familiar topog-raphy with hieroglyphic phonograms.

Tuesday, July 12, 2022

London defies adaptation and adjustment

Size and numbers are not necessarily bad things per se. But unhappily the size and numbers of London have alarming consequences of their own. Great cities have to grow organically, with some kind of self-adaptation to their development. But the increase of London defies adaptation and adjustment. The 70,000 new souls a year arrive before London has time to consider what she can do with them. The bricks pour down in irregular heaps, almost as if, in some cataclysm or tornado, it were raining bricks out of heaven on the earth below. The huge pall of smoke gets denser and more sulphurous, stretching out, they say, some thirty miles into the country, till Berkshire, Bycks, Herts, and Kent are beginning to be polluted by its cloud. From Charing Cross or the Royal Exchange a man has to walk some five or six miles before he can see the blessed meadows or breathe the country air. Few of us ever saw more than half of the city we live in, and some of us never saw nine-tenths of it. We all live more or less in soot and fog, in smoky, dusty, contaminated air, in which trees will no longer grow to full size, and the sulphurous vapour of which eats away the surface of stone.


Our once silver Thames


The beautiful river — our once silver Thames — is a turbid, muddy receptacle of refuse; at times indescribably nasty and unwholesome. The water we drink at times comes perilously near to be injurious to health. Our burying-places, old and new, are a perpetual anxiety and danger. Our sewers pour forth 5,500,0 tons of sewage per week, almost all of it waste- fully and dangerously discharged. An immense proportion of our working population are insufficiently housed, in cheerless, comfortless, and even unhealthy lodgings. Not a few of these are miserable dens or squalid cabins unfit for human dwelling-place sightseeing turkey. Every few years some epidemic breaks out which carries off its thousands. In some four- fifths of London the conditions of life are sadly depressing and sordid, with none of the advantages which city life affords. The amusements, such as they are, are often unworthy of us; the resources of health and recreation are too few; whilst the dangers to life, to morality, to the intelligence, are very real and ever present.


Is this monster city again to double and treble itself? its water supply to get still more precarious and defective, are its dead still more to endanger the living, its dreariness to grow vaster, and its smoke even thicker? It is a strange paradox that, whilst those who have the means are always seeking to get away from London, those who are destitute are perpetually pouring into London; whilst it is the ambition of every well-to-do Londoner to retire to freedom in the country or in the suburbs, it is the instinct of every countryman in distress to find his way up to London.

Constantine discovered on the Bosphorus

1. Nothing further need be said as to the unique source of strength, both for offence and for defence, which the genius of Constantine discovered on the Bosphorus. The removal of the seat of empire from the Tiber to the Bosphorus was the only mode in which the Empire could have been preserved, whilst, at the same time, this made possible its political, religious, and moral transformation. The exact steps, details, and ultimate type of this transformation are precisely the points on which we need light. We see the stupendous machine which this bureaucracy and State Church became, but we know very little about its actual working and its inner life.


We judge its power by results only, and by the startling paradox that the machinery of a most disparate organism goes on working undisturbed by fatuity, strife, and anarchy in the supreme centre. Whatever the vices and follies which raged in the imperial palaces for generations together, disciplined and well-armed troops, powerful navies, military engines and stores, skilful generals, able governors, and expert diplomatists, rise up time after time in infinite succession to save the empire, hold it together, restore its losses, and increase its wealth, and this over the whole period of eight centuries from Theodosius to Isaac Angelus.


2.The material source of this strength in the empire was primarily its sea-power and its command for five centuries of the commerce of the whole Mediterranean. When we study the campaigns of Heraclius and of Nicephorus, when we follow in Leo the Deacon the great expedition to recover Crete, we are struck with the vast maritime resources, the engines and ships of scientific war which the empire possessed in the seventh and tenth centuries. Nothing in Europe at that date could produce any such sea-power. As Nicephorus Phocas very fairly told the angry envoy of Otto ephesus daily tour, he could lay in ashes any sea-board town of the Mediterranean. When the cities of Italy succeeded to the commerce of Constantinople, they held it in shares and fought for it amongst themselves. But until the rise of Venice, Pisa, and Palermo, Constantinople ruled the seas from Sicily to Rhodes, and relatively to her contemporaries with a far more complete supremacy.


Central position in the Bosphorus


3.It was this maritime ascendency, this central position in the Bosphorus, and this vast Mediterranean commerce which was the foundation of the wealth of the empire — a wealth which, relatively to its age, exceeded even the wealth and maritime ascendency of England in our day, which for eight centuries hardly ever suffered a collapse, and was continually being renewed. We must discount the petulant sneers of the irritable Bishop Luitprand, when baffled by the fierce Nicephorus. The silk industry, the embroidery, the mosaic, the enamel, the metal work, the ivory carving, the architecture, the military engineering, the artillery, the marine ‘appliances, the shipbuilding art; the trade in corn, spices, oil, and wine; the manuscripts, the illuminations of Byzantium, far surpassed anything else in Europe to be found in the epoch between the reign of Justinian and the rise of the Italian cities. Much of what we call mediaeval art decoration and art fabrics had their real origin, both industrial and aesthetic, on the Bosphorus, or were carried on there as their metropolitan centre.


Nowhere else in Europe under the successors of Clovis and Charlemagne could such churches have been raised as those of the Holy Wisdom and Irene, such palaces as that beside the Hippodrome or the Boucoleon, such mighty fortifications as those which stretched from Blachernae to the Propontis. Nowhere could Europe in the ninth and tenth centuries produce such enormous wealth as that possessed by Theophilus, Basil i., or Constantine Porphyrogennetus, or equip such fleets and armies as those of Nicephorus, John Zimisces, and Basil.


We are accustomed to compare the art and the civilisation of the Byzantine Empire with those of much later ages than its own, mainly because we have nothing else wherewith to compare it of its own epoch. If we honestly set it against the contemporary state of Europe, from the era of Justinian to that of the Crusades, it will be seen to be not only supreme in the traditions of civilisation, but almost to stand alone. In the eleventh century, without doubt, Western Europe was organised, and began its triumphant career, with the Catholic Church and the feudal organism in full development; and from that date the Byzantine Empire ceased to be pre-eminent. But its vast resources and the splendour and civilised arts of Constantinople still continued to amaze the Crusaders, even down to the thirteenth century.

Monday, July 11, 2022

The indigo the current grape

The climate, the continuous blaze of the sun, the long months of complete drought, the dusty plains and dry water-courses, the aloes, the date palms, the cotton, the indigo, the current-grape, the jackal, the cha- maeleon, and the small crocodile — even the camel which has been seen in use — are Eastern and Southern rather than European. When we land in Greece, we find ourselves in the middle of the week before last, that is to say, they still use the Calendar of the Eastern Church, and are twelve days behind us in Europe. And in A.D. 1900 this will have become thirteen days, for in the West we shall omit that leap-year and gain another day. In Greece they talk of the post coming in from Europe, which it only does when a ship arrives, and they speak of European things, in the sense of foreign. In spite of the conventional statements of the geographers, Greece is not in Europe; but a half-. way house between Europe and Asia.


Another important fact, which the geographers ignore, is this — that Greece is an island for any practical purpose — or rather an interminable string of islands scattered along the Eastern Mediterranean over a space of sea that may measure some 500 miles, both north and south, east and west. The maps may show Greece as a prolongation of the Balkan Peninsula; but it would not be practicable for an ordinary traveller to reach Greece except by sea. Athens, though it is a capital city of Europe, cannot be reached by the continental railways.


The train will carry us direct from Calais to the furthest extremities of the Spanish, Italian, Austrian, Russian, and even Turkish dominions in Europe. But railways do not reach in the Balkan Peninsula south of Salonica, in Turkey. The Romans and the Turks had roads into Greece proper; but it is now unsafe, very fatiguing, and costly, to travel by land from Salonica to Athens, and nobody does so. Hence, practically, socially, politically, and economically speaking, Greece is an island, a vast cluster of islands placed in the Egean Sea, very far East and very far South. Athens lies east of Poland and of Hungary. The whole of Greece lies south of Naples and Taranto; and Crete lies south of the Algerian coast and of any point of Europe bulgaria trips.


Greece by sea


We must go to Greece by sea: and the sea voyage is most instructive. There is a long, lonely, restless stretch of sea, some 400 miles broad between the coast of Sicily and sight of the mountains of Attica. When the vast pinnacle of Aetna, with its trailing pennon of smoke, a pinnacle which hour after hour seems to rise in the sky, at last fades out of sight in the west, a long reach of unbroken sea has to be ploughed. Long before we sight the mountains of Taygetus or the headlands of Taenarum or Malea, between which lies the vale of ‘Hollow Lacedaemon,’ one has come to realise that we have left Europe far behind and are entering on the land of the rising sun. The old saw ran — ‘ When you have passed Cape Malea, make your will and say farewell to your kindred.’ That is no longer necessary or even prudent. But by the time that we have rounded Cape Malea and are steering north-east instead of south-east, it breaks upon us that we have left Europe some distance behind us.


Whatever geographers may pretend, there is not any such country as Greece—and there never was. There is no definitely marked portion of Europe inhabited by a people politically and socially one, with national traditions and habits. There is not now, and there never has been in ancient or in modern times. If we take a list of the illustrious Greeks of antiquity, we shall find that far the larger part of them belonged not to continental Greece proper, but to Greek communities spread out over the world from the coast of Spain to the banks of the Euphrates, from the Euxine to the coast of Africa.

Tuesday, July 5, 2022

Ancient City was dark enough

The obverse to the bright picture of the Ancient City was dark enough. If the citizens engaged in war, and war was always, until the consolidation of empire by Rome, a possible event, defeat meant the risk of having the city razed to the ground, or turned into an open village; sometimes a general massacre, or slavery for man and woman. Or, if in domestic politics, a crisis occurred, which with us means a change of government, in Greece or Italy it might imply to the losers at the ballot confiscation and exile; and the defeated party, be they democrat or aristocrat, lost home and country, and became outcasts and outlaws until they could get a reversal of the sentence.


Furthermore, it must be remembered that the full privileges of citizen belonged only to a portion of the inhabitants of the city — a portion which might not exceed one-tenth, whilst ninety per cent, of the actual dwellers within the walls might be slaves, freedmen, aliens, strangers, clients; and camp-followers. And the slaves in the public service, in the mines and factories, or in the farms, docks, ships, or warehouses led a life too often of appalling misery and toil. Even the household slaves who shared the intimacy of their master or mistress, who were often their superiors in culture and refinement, were liable to horrible punishments, to bodily and moral degradation, and to any cruelty or insult which brutality and caprice might inflict city tours istanbul.


During the brilliant age at Greece


During the brilliant age at Greece, and at last under the empire at Rome, domestic life in our modern sense was stunted or corrupt. At Greece, the wife was too often the drudge or the appendage of the household; at Rome, she too often became the tyrant. Female society in its higher meaning was unknown, unless in a depraved sense. Vice, indolence, indecency, were not only things not involving shame, but things which in an elegant form were a matter of public pride.


Thus this apotheosis of the City had both black and brilliant sides. But there is no essential connexion between its bright and its dark aspect. This religious veneration of the City, this worship of the City as the practical type of religion, was extravagant, anti-social, and inhuman in the wider sense of patriotism and human duty. But it had elements of fixity, of dignity, of reality, and of moral and religious fervour, that are wholly unknown to our city life, inconceivable even by us, elements to which our tepid Patriotism makes but a feeble approach.


The citizens were not indeed the members of a great nation, but a very close, jealous, and selfish civic aristocracy. Within their own order they gave the world fine examples of equality, simplicity, sociability, and public devotion, such as are hardly intelligible to modern men, such as no republican enthusiasm has ever in modern days attempted to revive. In the horror of dirt and the religion of personal health and perfection, they gave the world inimitable examples at which we look back in wonder and awe. For the love of beauty we have taken to us the love of comfort; for the profusion of art we have substituted material production; for the religio loci we prefer the vague immensities of the Universe; in place of public magnificence and social communion, we make idols of our domestic privacy and private luxuriousness.

ANCIENT MEDIAEVAL MODERN IDEAL

Since this essay appeared in 1890, Miss Betham-Edwards has published her own most valuable and interesting survey, her France of To-day, 2 vols., 1892-94. This book is the result of her exhaustive study of French agriculture, over twenty-five years. It forms the pendant to Arthur Young, and as being a study exactly one hundred years later, over the same ground and embodying an even more extensive knowledge of France than that of the old traveller, it becomes a work of rare value to the student of history and of politics. Miss Betham-Edwards is also the well-known author of several other books of travel in France; and her readers rejoice to learn that her life-long labours have received most honourable recognition from the Government of France as well as that of England.


Fluctnat nec mergitur should be the motto not of Paris but of France. The indomitable endurance of her race has enabled her to surmount crushing disasters, .losses, and disappointments under which another race would have sunk. She bears with ease a national debt the annual charge of which is more than double that of wealthy England, and a taxation nearly double that of England, with almost the same population — a permanent taxation (exceeding 100 francs per head) greater than has ever before been borne by any people. She loses over one war, a sum not much short of the whole national debt of England, and she writes off, without a murmur, a loss of 1,200,000,000 francs, thrown into the Panama Canal. If France is thus strong, the backbone of her strength is found in the marvellous industry and thrift of her peasantry. And if her peasantry are industrious and thrifty, it is because the Revolution of ’89 has secured to them a position more free and independent than that presented by any monarchical country on the continent of Europe city tour istanbul.


THE CITY: ANCIENT — MEDIAEVAL — MODERN — IDEAL


The life that men live in the City gives the type and measure of their civilisation. The word civilisation means the manner of life of the civilised part of the community of the city-men, not of the country-men, who are called rustics, and once were called pagans, or the heathens of the villages. Hence, inasmuch as a city is a highly organised and concentrated type of the general life of an epoch or people, if we compare the various types of the city, we are able to measure the strength and weakness of different kinds of civilisation.


How enormous is the range over which city-life extends, from the first cave-men and dug-out wigwams in prehistoric ages to the complex arrangements and appliances of modern Paris (which we may take as the type of the highly organised modern city of Europe). How vast is the interval between one kind of town-life and another kind ! — say comparing Bagdad with Chicago, or Naples with Staleybridge.


The differences in the humblest forms of rural life are far less apparent, whether we deal with different epochs or different races. The ploughman and the shepherd to-day on the Cotswolds, or the Cheviots, certainly the tenants of mud-cabins in Connemara or Skye, do not, in external modes of material life, differ so greatly from their predecessors in the days of the Crusades or even of the Heptarchy; and a herdsman of Anatolia, of La Mancha, or of Kerry, eats, sleeps, and works in very similar ways. But how vast is the interval between the habits and conditions of the Londoners who built the Lake-village of Llyndyn, or the Parisii who staked out the island of Loukhteith, and the modern Londoner and the modern Parisian !

Monday, July 4, 2022

Most assuredly the close of the eighteenth century

Let us avoid misunderstanding of what we are now speaking. Most assuredly the close of the eighteenth century in France displayed a convulsion, a frenzy, a chaos such as the world’s history has not often equalled. There was folly, crime, waste, destruction, confusion, and horror of stupendous proportions, and of all imaginable forms. There was the Terror, the Festival of Reason, the Reaction, and all the delirium, the orgy, the extravagance, which give brilliancy to small historians and serve as rhetoric to petty politicians. Assuredly the revolution closed in with most ghastly surprises to the philanthropists and philosophers who entered on it in 1789 with so light a heart.


Assuredly it has bequeathed to the statesmen and the people of our century problems of portentous difficulty and number. But we are speaking now neither of ’93 nor of ’95, nor of ’99, of no local or special incident, of no single event, nor of political forms. We are in this essay dealing exclusively with ‘ the ideas of ’89/ with the movement which at Versailles, on 5th May 1789, took outward and visible shape. And we are about to deal with it in its deeper, social, permanent sofia sightseeing, and human side, not in its transitory and material side. The Seine, the Loire, and the Rhone have washed away the blood which once defiled their streams, the havoc caused by the orgies of anarchy has been effaced, years make fainter the memory of crimes and follies, of revenge and jealousy. But the course of generations still deepens the meaning of ‘the ideas of ’89,’ of the social, intellectual, economic new birth which then received official recognition, opening in a conscious and popular form the reformation that, in a spontaneous form, had long been brooding in so many generous hearts and profound brains.


No reading of merely French history, no study of the reign of Louis xvi. by itself, can explain this great movement—no political history, no narrative of events, no account of any special institution. Neither the degeneration of the monarchy, nor the corruption of the nobility, nor the disorder of the administration, nor the barbarism of the feudal law, nor the decay of the Church, nor the vices of society, nor the teaching of any school, nor all of these together — are adequate to explain the revolution.


They are enough to account for the confusion, waste, conflict, and fury of the contest — i.e. for the explosion. But they do not explain how it is that hardly anything was set up in France between 1789 and 1799 which had not been previously discussed and prepared, that between 1789 and 1799 an immense body of new institutions and reformed methods of social life were firmly planted in such a way that they have borne fruit far and wide in France and through Europe.


Religious fanaticism


Nor do any of these special causes just enumerated suffice to explain the passion, the contagious faith, the almost religious fanaticism which was the inner strength of the revolution and the source of its inexhaustible activity. What we call the French Revolution of 1789, was really a new phase of civilisation announcing its advent in form. It had the character of religious zeal because it was a movement of the human race towards a completer humanity.


Rhetoricians, poets, and preachers have accustomed us too long to dwell on the lurid side of the movement, on its follies, crimes, and failures; they have overrated the relative importance of the catastrophe, and by profuse pictures of the horrors, they have drawn off attention from its solid and enduring fruits. In the midst of the agony it was natural that Burke, in the sunset of his judgment, should denounce it. But it was a misfortune for the last generation that the purple mantle of Burke should have fallen on a prophet, who was not a statesman but a man of letters, who, with all Burke’s passion and prejudice, had but little of his philosophic power, none of his practical sagacity, none of the great Whig’s experience of affairs and of men.


The universal bonfire ’ theory, the ‘ grand suicide ’ view, the ‘ chaos-come-again ’ of a former generation, are seen to be ridiculous in ours. The movement of 1789 was far less the final crash of an effete system than it was the new birth of a greater system, or rather of the irresistible germs of a greater system. The contemporaries of Tacitus, Trajan, and Marcus Aurelius could see nothing but ruin in the superstition of the Galileans, just as the contemporaries of Decius, Julian, and Justinian saw nothing but barbarism in the Goths, the Franks, and the Arabs.

Saturday, July 2, 2022

six volumes of Latin Christianity

The whole of the closely-packed six volumes of Latin Christianity are possibly beyond the limits of many general readers. But we can point to those parts which may be best selected from the rest. The Introduction in the first book, and the General Survey which forms the fourteenth book at the end of the work, are the parts of the whole of the widest general grasp. To these we may add the chapters which treat of the greater Popes: Leo the Great in Book ii., Gregory the Great in Book iii., Hildebrand in Book vii., Innocent the Third in Book ix., Boniface VIII. in Book xi. — the chapters on Theodoric, Charlemagne, the Othos, the Crusades, St. Bernard, St. Louis — those on the four Latin Fathers, Ambrose, Jerome, Augustine, and Gregory, the monastic orders of St. Benedict, St. Dominic, and St. Francis—the Conversion of the Barbarians, and the Reformers and Councils of the fifteenth century. As is natural and fortunate, the Dean is strongest and most valuable just where Gibbon is weakest or even misleading.


Auguste Comte recommended as the complement of Gibbon


In his Library, Auguste Comte recommended as the complement of Gibbon, the Ecclesiastical History of the Abb6 Fleury. But it seems in vain to press upon the general reader of English a work in French so bulky, so unfamiliar, and so far removed from us in England to-day both in date, in form, and in tone. It was published in 1690, more than two hundred years ago, and is in twenty volumes quarto, and only in part translated into English. It contains an excellent narrative, which was warmly praised by Voltaire. But it is entirely uncritical; it is of course not on the level of modern scholarship; and as the work of a prelate under the later reign of Louis xiv., it is naturally composed from the theological and miraculous point of view. The Abbe gives us the view of the Catholic world as seen by a sensible and liberal Catholic divine in the seventeenth century. The Dean has painted it as imagined by a somewhat skeptical and Protestant man of the world in the nineteenth private turkey tours.


When we pass from Mediaeval to Modern History, we are confronted with the difficulty that modern history is infinitely the more intricate and varied, and that, as we advance, the histories become continually more and more devoted to special epochs and countries, and are minute researches into local incidents and chosen persons. The immediate matter in hand in this essay is to direct attention to great books of history, meaning thereby those works which take us to the inner life of one of the great typical movements, or which in manageable form survey some of the great epochs of general history. Such surveys for the last four centuries are exceedingly rare. There are many valuable standard works, which are supposed to be in every gentleman’s library, and which are familiar enough to every historical student. But they form a list that can hardly be compressed into one hundred volumes, and to master them is beyond the power of the average general reader to whom these pages are addressed. We can mention some of them: though they are hardly ‘great books,’ and neither in range of subject, in charm, or in insight, have they the stamp of Herodotus or Gibbon.

Friday, July 1, 2022

Victory followed upon victory

Victory followed upon victory, and the whole Greek race expanded with this amazing triumph. The old world had been brought face to face with the intellect which was to transform it. The Greek mind, with the whole East open to it, exhibited inexhaustible activity. A century sufficed to develop a thoroughly new phase of civilisation. They carried the arts to a height whereon they stand as the types for all time. In poetry they exhausted and perfected every form of composition. In politics they built up a multitude of communities, rich with a prolific store of political and social institutions. Throughout their stormy history stand forth great names. Now and then there rose amongst them leaders of real genius. For a time they showed some splendid instances of public virtue, of social life, patriotism, elevation, sagacity, and energy. For a moment Athens at least may have believed that she had reached the highest type of political existence ephesus sightseeing.


Barren struggles and wanton restlessness


But with all this activity and greatness there was no true unity. Wonderful as was their ingenuity, their versatility and energy, it was too often wasted in barren struggles and wanton restlessness. For a century and a half after the Persian invasion, the petty Greek states contended in one weary round of contemptible civil wars and aimless revolutions. One after another they cast their great men aside, to think out by themselves the thoughts that were to live for all time, and gave themselves up to be the victims of degraded adventurers. For one moment only in their history, if indeed for that, they did become a nation. At last, wearied out by endless wars and constant revolutions, the Greek states by force and fraud were fused in one people by the Macedonian kings ; and by Macedon, instead of by true Hellas, the great work so long postponed, but through their history never forgotten, was at length attempted — the work of avenging the Persian invasion, and subduing Asia.


Short and wonderful was that career of conquest, due wholly to one marvellous mind. Alexander, indeed, in military and practical genius seems to stand above all Greeks, as Caesar above all Romans; they two the greatest chiefs of the ancient world. No story in history is so romantic as the tale of that ten years of victory when Alexander, at the head of some thirty thousand veteran Greeks, poured over Asia, crushing army after army, taking city after city, and receiving the homage of prince after prince, himself fighting like a knight-errant: until, subduing the Persian empire, and piercing Asia from side to side, and having reached even the great rivers of India, he turned back to Babylon to organise his vast empire, to found new cities, pour life into the decrepit frame of the East, and give to these entranced nations the arts and wisdom of Greece. For this he came to Babylon, but came thither only to die. Endless confusion ensued ; province after province broke up into a separate kingdom, and the vast empire of Alexander became the prey of military adventurers.