To discern likeness amidst diversity, it is well known, does not require
so fine a mental edge as the discerning of diversity amidst general
sameness. The primary rough classification depends on the prominent
resemblances of things: the progress is towards finer and finer
discrimination according to minute differences. Yet even at this stage
of European culture one's attention is continually drawn to the
prevalence of that grosser mental sloth which makes people dull to the
most ordinary prompting of comparison—the bringing things together
because of their likeness. The same motives, the same ideas, the same
practices, are alternately admired and abhorred, lauded and denounced, according to their association with superficial differences, historical or actually social: even learned writers treating of great subjects often show an attitude of mind not greatly superior in its logic to that of the frivolous fine lady who is indignant at the frivolity of her maid.
To take only the subject of the Jews: it would be difficult to find a
form of bad reasoning about them which has not been heard in
conversation or been admitted to the dignity of print; but the neglect
of resemblances is a common property of dulness which unites all the
various points of view—the prejudiced, the puerile, the spiteful, and
the abysmally ignorant.
That the preservation of national memories is an element and a means of
national greatness, that their revival is a sign of reviving
nationality, that every heroic defender, every patriotic restorer, has
been inspired by such memories and has made them his watchword, that
even such a corporate existence as that of a Roman legion or an English
regiment has been made valorous by memorial standards,—these are the
glorious commonplaces of historic teaching at our public schools and
universities, being happily ingrained in Greek and Latin classics. They
have also been impressed on the world by conspicuous modern instances. That there is a free modern Greece is due—through all infiltration of other than Greek blood—to the presence of ancient Greece in the consciousness of European men; and every speaker would feel his point safe if he were to praise Byron's devotion to a cause made glorious by ideal identification with the past; hardly so, if he were to insist that the Greeks were not to be helped further because their history shows that they were anciently unsurpassed in treachery and lying, and that many modern Greeks are highly disreputable characters, while others are disposed to grasp too large a share of our commerce. The same with Italy: the pathos of his country's lot pierced the youthful soul of Mazzini, because, like Dante's, his blood was fraught with the kinship of Italian greatness, his imagination filled with a majestic past that wrought itself into a majestic future. Half a century ago, what was Italy? An idling-place of dilettanteism or of itinerant motiveless wealth, a territory parcelled out for papal sustenance, dynastic convenience, and the profit of an alien Government. What were the Italians? No people, no voice in European counsels, no massive power in European affairs: a race thought of in English and French society as chiefly adapted to the operatic stage, or to serve as models for painters; disposed to smile gratefully at the reception of halfpence; and by the more historical remembered to be rather polite than truthful, in all probability a combination of Machiavelli, Rubini, and Masaniello. Thanks chiefly to the divine gift of a memory which inspires the moments with a past, a present, and a future, and gives the sense of corporate existence that raises man above the otherwise more respectable and innocent brute, all that, or most of it, is changed.