of the East was a cause of calamity to the West, since Visigoth, Hun, and Ostrogoth turned successively from the Balkan lands to seek conquest in Italy, Gaul, or Spain; but this is no reproach to the rulers of Byzantium, who could reply that if the realm of Arcadius and Theodosius had been weaker, such weakness would assuredly not have saved the realm of Honorius and Valentinian. In the West all the causes of decline operated without check, and the ascendency of Germans at court was a source of division and discontent which led to rebellions. With the help of all these considerations we may be able to understand how the Latin half of the Empire was dismembered, while the Greek half held together and perpetuated the Empire of Rome.

Our enquiry, finished here, might naturally lead us on to meditate on the causes which brought about the subsequent dismemberment of the Eastern Empire by Persians, Saracens, and Bulgarians in the seventh century. Professor Seeley

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bracketed this later series of events with the events known as the fall of the Western Empire, and sought to embrace both under the same solution. We regard this view as completely erroneous. The causes which led to the success of the Saracens were wholly distinct from the causes which led to the success of the Germans. In one, but only in one, respect was there a continuity in the process. The ravages of Goths, Huns, and other barbarian hordes in the fifth century in the Illyrian provinces caused anew a decline in the population which facilitated the gradual infiltration of a new set of strangers, the Slavs. This influx began actively in the sixth century, and smoothed the way for the Slavonic and Bulgarian conquests in the seventh century-a repetition of the same process which we witnessed in the case of the German conquests. Slavonic settlements were one cause of disintegration. second, and perhaps the most vital and far-reaching, was the religious disunion of the Empire. The political importance of the theological controversies which raged in the fifth century as to the nature or natures of Christ can hardly be too highly estimated. In Egypt and Syria men's intellects did not move on the same lines as in the Greek provinces; and this fundamental divergence in spirit and modes of thought expressed itself in rival doctrines touching Christ's nature and personality. Never was the decree of an ecclesiastical council more fatal to the State than the wire-drawn formula issued by the Churchmen who met at Chalcedon. Egypt and Syria were alienated, and the tendency towards a quasi-national unity, which had been perceptible, was checked by this religious division. The

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mistake of Chalcedon must be largely imputed to the unfortunate influence of the Bishop of Rome; and when it had been committed, no more urgent problem faced the Government of Constantinople than to discover some means of rectifying it. Zeno and the able Patriarch Acacius, a Churchman exceptionally free from bigotry, grappled with the difficulty, and an Act of Union (Henotikon) was proclaimed, which recognised the doctrines of Nicæa and Ephesus and ignored the decision of Chalcedon. On this basis the Churches of Alexandria and Antioch were reunited in communion with Constantinople, and the religious peace of the East was restored. Statesmanship and tact could have maintained this union, but the disastrous policy of Justinian undid the work of Zeno and revived the political error of Chalcedon.

If any man can be regarded as distinctly, if partially, responsible for such a vast event as the dismemberment of the Eastern Empire, first by the Persians and then by the Saracens, we say deliberately that it is the Emperor Justinian. We fear that this statement will appear startling and paradoxical; for we are accustomed to look upon Justinian's reign as an epoch of singular glory and brilliance. Two glorious achievements, beyond all blame or cavil, were accomplished under his auspices. Lawyers of unrivalled learning enriched the world with the 'Digest,' the Institutes,' and the Code'; architects of matchless skill and soaring imagination built the Church of St. Sophia. But the famous conquests of the ambitious ruler were purchased at an exorbitant price. In the first place, seeing that in order to carry out his scheme of recovering Italy and the Western provinces from their German lords it would be of the highest importance to reconcile the Roman Church, which had been alienated by the policy of Zeno, he revived the doctrine of Chalcedon. Thus Rome was conciliated at the expense of the unity of the East, and the attempts which Justinian subsequently made to alleviate the consequences of his act only served to make the evil worse. The East was irrevocably disunited; Egypt and Syria were alienated from Constantinople. In the second place, Justinian's conquests were an enormous strain on the treasury. The grave struggle in which the Empire was then involved with the great Persian king Chosroes imposed such a heavy burden on the revenue that a ruler in Justinian's position was not justified in gratuitously undertaking other wars. If Justinian had merely spent the fund which had been accumulated by the economies of his predecessors, it might have been well; but in order to meet the expenses of his policy he overtaxed his subjects and revived financial oppression in

its worst form.* Alleviation of fiscal burdens had been one of the best features of the reigns of the Emperors who preceded him; and Anastasius had even reformed the curial system by doing away with the principle of joint responsibility. But the progress which their discreet policy inaugurated was undone by Justinian; the merciless system of impositions, associated with the abominable name of John the Cappadocian, impoverished and ruined the people, and precipitated the Empire down that path of decline which ended in the disasters of the next century.

It would exceed the space and scope of this article to go on to show how within its diminished borders the Eastern Empire recovered its strength, so that during the eighth, ninth, and tenth centuries, as Mr. Frederic Harrison observes in his eloquent Rede lecture, the Emperors of New Rome ruled over a settled State which, if not as powerful in arms, was far more rich in various resources, more cultured, more truly modern, than any in Western Europe.' In the second decline, if we may so speak, which began in the eleventh century and culminated in the Latin capture of Constantinople (A.D. 1204), we see repeated some of those economic causes which induced the decay of the early Empire. We can mark especially the fatal growth of vast estates and the ruin of the small proprietors—a process against which the Emperors had legislated and struggled in vain. The day of doom came for the Younger as it had come for the Elder Rome. It is perhaps seldom realised how much longer the sway of Constantinople as an Imperial city endured than the rule of Rome herself. Even if we date the Empire of Rome from the conquest of Sicily, her first province, in the third century before our era, and extend the duration of her power to the subjugation of Italy by Odovacar (A.D. 476), her period amounts to little more than seven centuries. On the other hand, even if we omit to count the two hundred years of the restored Empire of the Palæologi, Constantinople, from her foundation to her capture by the Crusaders, reigned for little less than nine centuries. We are satisfied that this advantage which the daughter city enjoyed was due, above all, to the incomparable strength of her situation and her walls.

* The evidence for this is treated in Panchenko's full and important study on the Historia Arcana' of Procopius, named at the head of this article.

ART. VIII.—THE CONDITIONS OF GREAT POETRY.

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O two domains of thought could, at first sight, seem farther apart than those of poetical criticism and of sociological science. They are, however, in reality very closely connected, though the nature and importance of the connexion has only become apparent through the gradual comprehension of certain facts and principles which has taken place during comparatively recent years. Few conceptions have done more to transform the aspect which existence generally presents to the human mind than the principle now known to us under the familiar name Evolution. It has not only exhibited to us in a wholly new light the sequence of all phenomena, physical, mental, and social; but in the case of each class of phenomena it has cast a light equally new on the fact of their co-existence, revealing it to us as an inter-dependence. It has shown us that, as nothing can be understood apart from the things preceding it, so nothing can be understood apart from the things surrounding it. It has shown us this relativity in the sphere of commerce and industry, in the sphere of political government, in the sphere of class relationships. It has shown us the same thing with regard to thought and literature. There is no order of phenomena which is not conditioned by its environment, which does not depend on circumstances outside itself; and of this great rule poetry is a signal example. The greatness or the littleness of the poetry of any given period depends to some extent on the faculties of the poets themselves; but to some extent also, and far more than was once thought, it depends on the social conditions into which the poets have been born: and poetry being thus connected with social history, the criticism of it, within certain limits, is a portion of the science of sociology.

In pre-scientific days this truth was perceived but dimly. The greatness of the greatest poetry was once attributed without qualification to the peculiar congenital faculties comprised in the personality of the poets; and if the poetry of certain epochs and peoples has been on the whole greater than the poetry of others, the fact was explained solely by reference to the further fact, itself unexplained and inexplicable, that among certain races there appeared at certain epochs an unusual number of unusually gifted individuals. Modern scientific thinkers, among them Mr. Herbert Spencer, have been led, in their protests against the insufficiency of this theory, into an error which is even greater than that which they are anxious to displace. In emphasising the fact that the

greatness of great poetry is not due entirely to the greatness of the poet himself, they have tended to lose sight of the greatness of the poet altogether, and have treated his personal gifts as though they were practically a negligible quantity. The nature of the temptation which has led them to do this is intelligible. Their desire has been to reduce history to a series of calculable phenomena, to redeem it from the dominion of chance or from the arbitrary interpositions of a Deity; and they have no doubt been able to exhibit these phenomena under their wider aspects as arising and succeeding one another in obedience to certain general laws. But the phenomena of exceptional genius have entirely eluded their. explanations. They can tell us why one race is intellectually more feeble than another; they can tell us why one age is intellectually less active than another; but they cannot tell us why, among men of the same race, individuals or groups of individuals appear from time to time, incalculably more gifted than the great mass of those whose racial antecedents and whose social circumstances are the same. The appearance of great genius, and of poetic genius especially, remains still an inscrutable mystery; nor is there any reason for supposing that the causes, which make one member of a family a genius and leave the rest dunces, belong to the same order of causes as those which make the average intelligence of the European greater than that of the Hottentot, or which made the intellectual atmosphere of the time of Queen Elizabeth more stimulating than that of the time of William the Conqueror. In so far therefore as exceptionally great genius is a factor in the production of exceptionally great poetry, the causes of great poetry are inaccessible to the science of the sociologist; and in the interest of his science he is consequently tempted to minimise them. He is tempted to argue that the greatness of such works as the Divine Comedy or 'Hamlet' was due in reality not to the author but to the age. The truth of the matter is that both these causes were essential to the result, and that to dwell on the character of the age and practically ignore that of the author-as is done by Mr. Herbert Spencer-is as nonsensical as to dwell on the author and practically ignore the age. The man with the greatest congenital gift for poetry may be unable to produce any poetry that is really great if he lives in an age that is unsuited to its production; but the age most suited to its production will be no less barren unless, by a happy coincidence, it chance to possess the man whose exceptional poetic powers will respond to the stimulus which it applies to them.

Having, however, recognised that the personal, the incal