On Archaeology

There is a curious fable that the study of ancient stones has a petrifying effect on people. One of the figures in conventional fiction is the archaeological professor, who is always as dry as a parchment or as rigid as a hieroglyphic. He is one of the most fictitious figures even in fiction. I do not know why it should be supposed that a man who studies mum-mies must himself be a mummy. We do not insist that the hair of a botanist must be bright green, or that the complexion of every geologist must resemble old red sandstone. We do not expect an ornithologist to hop about flapping his two arms like wings. We do not expect a conchologist to curl up like a creature in a shell. Nor is there any reason why one studying old things should himself be old, or even why one who studies dead things should himself be dying. As a matter of fact, most of the men I have known who had a sort of passion for the past were particularly cheerful and vigorous. Being a practical excavator must mean being a practical, adventurer, not ignorant of the toils or even the perils of travel. Scott, in the best of his novels. The Antiquary ^ showed his own shrewdness in making the investigator not only sturdy, but shrewd. Indeed, Mr. Old-buck is a man of liberal and almost revolutionary sympathies 3 while his friend Sir Arthur Wardour is distinguished from him by being merely traditional or reactionary. The one old gentleman is an antiquary, and the other only an antiquity. I do not say that any antiquaries are infallible, any more than Mr. Oldbuck was infallible about Aiken Drum'sLang Ladle. But he was certainly lively and humorous, and all the more lively and humorous for having passed so many of his days among the dead.

For there is here involved a larger matter, which is too little noted. We can see it best if we compare the old romances which the Antiquary studied — or, indeed, the old romance of the Antiquary himself — with a kind of new romance which has been rather typical of our time. I mean the romance about the future — often about the very remote future j and generally at least as strange and spectral as the most remote past. Sometimes it is the description of a Utopia, or perfect state of society into which our social tendencies will evolve. It is not unfair to say that very few Utopian stories have anything that can be called fun in them. The approximate exceptions are More's Utofiay and the work of William Morris, with its fine irresponsible title of News from Nowhere, They are exceptions precisely because neither More nor Morris was really modern, and because Morris was rather more mediaeval than More. But most futurist works have not even this amount of levity j and the reason is not unconnected with the real case for a study of the past.

We talk of the past as deadj but there is a very special and definite sense in which the past is always a living thing while the future is a dead thing. We know that the past has moved on living lines 5 but we can only conceive the future as moving on dead lines — that is, on mechanical lines. If we think the future calculable at all, we can only calculate it in a mathematical fashion, by averages and tendencies and consistent curves of change. We can guess the population will increase in such and such a proportion, or mortality in such and such a degree j but we cannot think about the marriages or murders of the future as we do about the marriages and murders of the past. We can guess that this or that invention will be further improved, or this or that route of travel further developed j that a tax will increase or a trade expand. Probably we guess wrong 5 but certainly we guess in round numbers. We cannot see the fascinating fractions into which the real working out of the sum reduces the real number. It is always those vivid fractions — we might say those vulgar fractions — that we see in the past. It is the things left over, the things that do not fit, the things sprawling and struggling, that make the past so living a thing. That is why every prediction of the future, even by a genius like Mr. Wells, always looks like a long row of noughts. Our fathers were content to say that the future was Xy or the unknown quantity. Our futurists are really content to prove that x = o. The mathematical figure for nought is round and harmonious and symmetrical, and has a fine inevitable curve 3 but it is also hollow and blank — a face without features. In all these points it resembles the usual Utopian or pessimistic prediction about the human race. But history has not been merely a row of noughts. Religious history, at worst, has been a game of noughts and crosses.

The future is dead, because all futurism must be a sort of fatalism. It cannot foresee the free part of human action 5 it can only foresee the servile part. It is not a question of whether the prediction is optimistic or pessimistic j it is a question of the nature of prediction itself. The line may go up or down, with the optimist or the pessimist 5 the line may merely go round and round, with those who believe in recurrence and a wheel of fate. It may be progressive in the pattern of an ascending spiral or self-repeating in the pattern of the swing of a pendulum. But the point about all these patterns is that they must all be mathematical patterns. None of them can be like artistic pictures. The point of all these lines is that they must all be mathematical lines j none of them can be free lines, like the lines of a draughtsman. It is only in the past that we find the finished picture 5 for it is only in the past that we find the free line. In other words, when we look at what men did, we are looking at what they freely chose to do. But when we consider what men will do, we cannot consider what they will choose to do. We can only consider what they must do. Unless it be something they cannot avoid, it is something we cannot predict. And so our prediction, whether it is true or not, will only be dealing with human society on its servile side. In so far as the next generation is free, it is free to frustrate our prophecy.

Now, the historic past is full of those free actions and frustrated prophecies. The future can only consist of things expected j it is only the past that consists of things that were entirely unexpected. Therefore history, and even archaeology, is intrinsically surprising J because it is the study of a story of surprises. For instance, a man looking at the round wheels of modern machinery, and delighted to see the wheels go round, may make a more or less mechanical calculation of what more wheels, or bigger wheels, or swifter wheels, might be used for doing in the future. But a man looking at the round arches of the old Roman and Norman architecture could not possibly have calculated from them that, a hundred years afterwards, the delicate energy of the Gothic would be piercing the sky with spires and pointed arches as if with spears and arrows. That was an act of free imagination and, properly understood, an act of free will. And even if nothing were left of the Gothic but a few grey ruins covered with moss and ivy, even if all the spires were fallen and all the pointed arches broken, the study of them would still be an exciting study: because it would be the study of the intense excitement of an entirely new thing.

We cannot in that sense ^predict an entirely new thing. It would be to expect an unexpected thing. We cannot predict new things, because by hypothesis we can only calculate them logically from old things. We can stand in the present and project its lines further into the future 3 but we cannot stand in the future and project the new thing really native to the future. We may guess some of the fulfilments of a later generation j but we cannot share in any of its surprises. We may know a little about the heritage of our grandchildren, but nothing about their windfalls or their wilder adventures. If we want windfalls and wild adventures, we must consider the ways of our grandfathers and not our grandchildren. If we want the wildest emotions of novelty and astonishment, we can only find them in mouldering stones and fading tapestries, in the museum of antiquities or the place of tombs.