Seldom has a book, so massive and so erudite, caused such a widespread commotion as did Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West. It appealed to a variety of tastes. The preacher of imminent and sensational doomsdays has not lost his attraction with the decline of the religious sanctions attributed to bygone apocalyptics. But a scientific age demands a scientific eschatology, and this Spengler supplied. Popular science had promised only a long protracted cooling of the earth’s crust, or, in moments of soaring imagination, the possibility of a collision with a comet or an invasion from Mars. It was too remote to be really scaring. The morbid eschatological appetite wants the world to go out, not with a fizzle, but with a bang, and the sooner the bang the better. Spengler promised something at once scientific, catastrophic, and fairly soon; though perhaps it was not generally realised that ‘soon’ on the lips of this juggler with milleniums might mean quite a number of centuries.

But the appearance of these volumes—they were first published in 1918—was also well timed to meet a more passing mood. In those days of disillusionment it was gratifying to read this comparative study of the rise and fall of civilisations, this deterministic conception of repeating historical cycles, with its assurances that the signs of the times pointed to a speedy downfall of our own discredited culture. It was particularly gratifying to defeated Germany.

Albert the Great is chiefly entitled to fame as having been for seven years the teacher of St. Thomas Aquinas, and to the end of his life the devoted admirer of his pupil and staunch defender of his doctrine.

To say this is not to belittle Albert personally; it is to place him very high indeed in the hierarchy of great men.

The excellences by which St. Thomas was most distinguished were not mere reproductions of the greatness that was his master’s; they were either peculiar to St. Thomas himself, or possibly, in some points at least, derived from other masters who influenced St. Thomas before he first came under Albert’s notice. Albert’s principal title to greatness is the detachment with which he enabled Thomas to develop seeds of greatness independent of anything he had to give, and to advance to heights that he himself could never reach.

The history of the world has its great people and its great periods which one can isolate for the purpose of more detailed study as representing turning-points in the march of civilization, epochs which seem to sum up all the movements and cultural forces of the preceding centuries, bringing them to a flowering bloom in a few brief years, and seemingly bequeathing a glorious inheritance to the fortunate age to follow. Such a period was the early European Renaissance. Such, especially, was the early Renaissance in Spain.

Calderón, in one of his autos, says that the study of history only serves to make men learn their lesson and take warning. He only saw in history the ruin of great enterprises, powerful and prosperous nations brought low by the folly of their rulers, and the human race given over to pleasures and lusts, heedless of the future. Writing as he did in the Spain of the seventeenth century, he voiced the disillusion and despair of the more enlightened and high-minded of his countrymen who saw no hope for humanity in a world eaten through and through with rottenness. Had he lived two hundred years earlier, in 1460, his feelings would have been identical. Passing from the court of Philip IV to that of Henry IV, he would have noticed little difference. He would have seen vice and corruption reigning in the court of Castile, anarchy in the country, the peasants bled white by grasping nobles who only served their country when they engaged in mutual extermination. The Middle Ages in Spain, as indeed in most countries, had sunk as low as this, to an agonizing death in anarchy and civil war.

He was in Westminster Cathedral and it was also a railway station of intolerable vastness and silence. A church has chairs, vaulting; these provided abominations on the floor and overhead. A station has taxicabs, advertisements, kiosks, angles. What a wilderness of these features. There was a covered lorry with a stupid bill pasted on its hood : ‘G. S. R. Man is omnivorous.’ The lorry became multiplied to infinity in dreary perspective, the alignment perfect like an army-train or a boy’s drawing. Park went down the line in his vestments looking for the sacristy and a third-class smoking compartment. He had lost his server and his railway porter. I shall recognize him, for he is black. An unending train went through, pouring out passengers without stopping; all were negroes. Park halted and addressed himself prophetically :

Go through the swinging glass doors; no one will notice you, as you are black. With a wrench and a struggle he came to himself.