English, Department of
Title
Ethnic Ideals of the British Isles
Document Type
Article
Date of this Version
January 1920
The history of a people can be read truly only in
the light of its ideals. To study only the recorded acts of
men is to see only a series of phenomena that are often incomprehensible
and apparently erratic. What a mad affair
the Crusades must seem to one who knows nothing of mediaeval
religious ideals! How inexplicable would appear the
courageous resistance of Belgium to a student in a later age
who should have no knowledge of contemporary thought, and
should be unable to see the principles for which she stood!
Any judgment of a human action which leaves out of account
the ideas which prompted it must be vain: it is only by
means of a sympathetic comprehension of men's ideals that
we may justly estimate their achievements and their failures. We cannot know the reality of history so long as we are content with an outward view.
Racial ideals may be bodied forth in many ways. Indeed,
if they are truly ideals, they must be reflected in every
phase of racial life. Greek ideals are expressed as much in
the Parthenon as in the works of Aristotle or the battle
of Marathon, and are equally contrasted with mediaeval
ideals as expressed in a Gothic cathedral, the theology of
Thomas Aquinas, or the First Crusade. But more concretely
than anywhere else they are embodied in the heroes
of racial myth and legend, those creatures of the popular
fancy, molded in the image, not of men as they are, but
of men as they would be.
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UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA STUDIES IN LANGUAGE, LITERATURE, AND CRITICISM NUMBER 3, Lincoln, Nebraska, 1920