ntury after Christ, fermentation begins among the
former of these two groups. No longer are the Germanic tribes content
with fighting for their land, retreating step by step before the Latin
invader; alarming symptoms of retaliation manifest themselves, like the
rumblings that herald the great cataclysms of nature.

The Roman, in the meanwhile, wrapped in his glory, continued to rule the
world and mould it to his image; he skilfully enervated the conquered
nations, instructed them in the arts, inoculated them with his vices,
and weakened in them the spring of their formerly strong will. They
called civilisation, _humanitas_, Tacitus said of the Britons, what was
actually "servitude."[27] The frontiers of the empire were now so far
distant that the roar of the advancing tide scarcely reached Rome. What
was overheard of it acted as a stimulus to pleasure, added point to the
rhetorician's speeches, excitement to the circus games, and a halo to
the beauty of red-haired courtesans. The Romans had reached that point
in tottering empires, at which the threat of calamities no longer
arouses dormant energy, but only whets and renews the appetite for
enjoyment.

Meanwhile, far away towards the north, the Germanic tribes, continually
at strife with their neighbours, and warring against each other, without
riches or culture, ignorant and savage, preserved their strength and
kept their ferocity. They hated peace, despised the arts, and had no
literature but drinking and war-songs. They take an interest only in
hunting and war, said Caesar; from their earliest infancy they endeavour
to harden themselves physically.[28] They were not inventive; they
learned with more difficulty than the Celts; they were violent and
irrepressible. The little that is known of their customs and character
points to fiery souls that may rise to great rapturous joys but have an
underlayer of gloom, a gloom sombre as the impenetrable forest, sad as
the grey sea. For them the woods are haunted, the shades of night are
peopled with evil spirits, in their morasses half-divine monsters lie
coiled. "They worship demons," wrote the Christian chroniclers of them
with a sort of terror.[29] These men will enjoy lyric songs, but not
charming tales; they are capable of mirth but not of gaiety; powerful
but incomplete natures that will need to develop fully without having to
wait for the slow procedure of centuries, an admixture of new blood and
new ideas. They were to