enters our life, to begin to crumble and fall away from us, and leave
us strangers in a new world, so it is with the greater types of life,
with peoples and civilisations; some secret inherent flaw was in their
structure; they meet a trial for which they were not prepared, and
fail; once more they must be passed into the crucible and melted down
to their primitive matter. Yet Nature does not repeat herself; in some
way the experience of all past generations enters into those which
succeed them, and of a million of her works that have perished not one
has perished wholly without account. That Greece and Rome, though they
passed away, still influence us daily is indeed obvious; but it is as
certain that the great races before them, of which Babylonia,
Phoenicia, Egypt are only a few out of many, still live in the gradual
evolution of the purpose of history. They live in us indeed as blind
inherited forces, apart from our knowledge of them; yet if we can at
all realise any of them to ourselves, at all enter into their spirit,
our gain is great; for through time and distance they have become
simple and almost abstract; only what was most living in them
survives; and the loss of the vivid multiplicity and colour of a
fuller knowledge makes it easier to discriminate what was important in
them. Lapse of time has done for us with some portions of the past
what is so difficult or even impossible for us to do for ourselves
with the life actually round us, projected them upon an ideal plane:
how ideal, in the case of Greek history, is obvious if we consider for
a moment how nearly Homer and Herodotus are read alike by us. For
Homer's world was from the first imagined, not actual; yet the actual
world of the fifth century B.C. has become for us now no less an
ideal, perhaps one which is even more stimulating and more
fascinating. How far this may be due to any inherent excellence of its
own, how far to the subtle enchantment of association, does not affect
this argument. Of histories no less than of poems is it true that the