During these
so-called Middle Ages, the Western mind reacted in many forms, on
many sides, expressing its motives in modes, such as Romanesque
and Gothic architecture, glass windows and mosaic walls,
sculpture and poetry, war and love, which still affect some
people as the noblest work of man, so that, even to-day, great
masses of idle and ignorant tourists travel from far countries to
look at Ravenna and San Marco, Palermo and Pisa, Assisi, Cordova,
Chartres, with vague notions about the force that created them,
but with a certain surprise that a social mind of such singular
energy and unity should still lurk in their shadows.
The tourist more rarely visits Constantinople or studies the
architecture of Sancta Sofia, but when he does, he is distinctly
conscious of forces not quite the same. Justinian has not the
simplicity of Charlemagne. The Eastern Empire showed an activity
and variety of forces that classical Europe had never possessed.
The navy of Nicephoras Phocas in the tenth century would have
annihilated in half an hour any navy that Carthage or Athens or
Rome ever set afloat. The dynamic scheme began by asserting
rather recklessly that between the Pyramids (B.C. 3000), and the
Cross (A.D. 300), no new force affected Western progress, and
antiquarians may easily dispute the fact; but in any case the
motive influence, old or new, which raised both Pyramids and
Cross was the same attraction of power in a future life that
raised the dome of Sancta Sofia and the Cathedral at Amiens,
however much it was altered, enlarged, or removed to distance in
space.
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