Part 14

The causes which have led to the substitution of nations for cities in the modern world are many, many more than I can attempt to deal with in this lecture; but not a few of them are nearly connected with the main subject of this course, the condition of Europe in its three great stages, before Rome, under Rome, and after Rome. I long ago defined modern history, if the formula has any meaning at all, to mean the history of the times in which the Teutonic and Slavonic nations have held the foremost place. Now among both these races the tendency to look to the city as the natural centre of social and political life has always been far less developed than it was among the southern nations. We may say southern nations in general; for if the highest developement of the city belongs to Greece, yet it is also very strong in Italy--let Rome and Capua bear witness; and if the growth of the city life was much less perfect among Gauls and Iberians than it was among Greeks and Italians, yet Gauls and Iberians had certainly made a nearer approach to it than Slaves or Teutons. The causes of this difference, the detailed shapes in which this difference shows itself, if I ever speak of them at all, I must speak of some other time, and after all they perhaps rather belong to the province of the Reader in Anthropology than to mine. For the present purpose we may simply accept the fact. Take the highest type of each class. Greek political society starts from the city; separate cities may be grouped into confederations. Teutonic political society starts from the tribe; separate tribes may be fused into nations. I use the word _group_ in one case, the word _fuse_ in the other, because in the Teutonic case the union has both happened far more universally and has been far more perfect than in the Greek case. We must take one more glance at the old free Hellas, before the growth of Rome, before the growth of Macedonia. Its ideal is the perfectly independent city; it is only the experience of a later age which leads cities to join into confederations. The process is in some sort an unwilling one; we may be sure that Sikyôn and Corinth would never have given up one jot of their perfect separate independence through any smaller motive than the need of union among cities that had to escape or to throw off Macedonian domination. The Teutonic political unit, the tribe, or whatever we call the body of settlers who occupy a _shire_ or _gá_, holds another position. Neighbouring and kindred tribes join into a nation--at first most likely they join into some group greater than the tribe and less than the nation--with far greater ease than Greek cities join into confederations. Some of the reasons are obvious. A city has in the nature of things a more distinct and abiding political being than a mere district, a mere space on the map. Two shires may be physically rolled into one, and the rolling into one does not carry with it any necessary political subjection of one part of the new whole to the other. Two cities can seldom be physically rolled into one; the political union of two cities is necessarily more imperfect than that of two districts, and it is hard to unite them at all without giving some degree of superiority to one over the other. Again, the tendency of a tribe, whether wandering or settled in its district, is to the headship of a personal chief, whether hereditary or elective; if the assembly is the body of the tribe, the duke, judge, ealdorman, is the head. The tendency of a city, whether aristocratic or democratic, is to mere temporary magistrates, who are not in the same sense heads either of the city or of its assembly. Two or more dukes or ealdormen can give way to a single king, or they can go on exercising their office under a common king, with very little shock to the constitution and habits of the land and its folk. The assembly of the enlarged district is simply an enlargement of the separate assemblies of the two districts. It is by no means so easy to fuse the assemblies and the magistracies of two separate cities into one. The attempt is recorded to have been once made in historic Greece; Corinth for a while, no very long while, merged her separate being in that of Argos; but before long Argos and Corinth were again separate and independent cities. In our own country the process by which the great kingdoms of the Angles and Saxons were joined into the one kingdom of England is perfectly well known; we know nothing of the details of the process by which those seven or eight great kingdoms, those three specially great kingdoms, were gradually formed by the union of earlier and smaller settlements. In most cases we can see that such an union did take place; we can even see that the process of union took different shapes in one kingdom and in another; but the details are hidden from us. One reason of our ignorance among many may well be that the process was gradual and easy, carrying with it no great immediate change. We need not suppose that the union of Wessex or of Mercia was wrought by a series of treacherous murders like those which united the whole Frankish nation under Chlodowig. But the ease with which Chlodowig could root out all the other Frankish kings, the seeming good will with which he was received as king by each division of the nation, shows that the process was an easy one. Even when it was done by force, it would carry with it no special wrong beyond the force by which it was done. The Ripuarians really lost nothing by accepting the Salian king.

At a later time the opposite process has taken place in many lands. Gaul and Germany after a very near approach to union, Italy after an approach far more distant, split up again into a crowd of states, practically if not formally independent. The still abiding theory of the Empire forbade either the free city or the duchy or county to put on that avowed independence which had belonged to every free Greek city, to every barbarian kingdom, in the days before the Empire was. But practically cities and principalities took to themselves all the powers of independent states, even to that of making war on their overlord. In Gaul indeed, besides the splitting up of the land among the dukes and counts, there was the splitting off of the land itself from the body of the Empire. As the German poet sings;

“Et simul a nostro secessit Gallia regno, Nos priscum regni morem servamus, at illa Jure suo gaudet, nostræ jam nescia legis.”

In that part of Gaul which became France in the later sense, we might even say that a nation was forming and splitting in pieces at the same moment. It is hard to distinguish the process by which the house of Robert the Strong became Dukes of the French from that by which they became Kings of the French. In either case we see that the word _Franci_ now means, at least west of the Maes and the Saone, something very unlike what it had meant in the days of Chlodowig. The new nation, the nation formed out of three elements, the _Mischvolk der Franzosen_, the nation which still kept in Latin the name of the old Teutonic Franks, is fast forming. Its language is forming; there is a _lingua Romana_ of Northern Gaul, which is felt to have become distinct from the _lingua Latina_ of books, which is felt before long to be distinct from the other forms of the _lingua Romana_ in Italy, Spain, and Southern Gaul. There is a French people, speaking a French tongue. But the nation, while forming, is splitting asunder. At the very moment when the duchy of France is changing into the kingdom of France, a crowd of smaller duchies and counties are falling off from it. By the strangest chance of all, the duchy is dismembered on behalf of Scandinavian settlers. Their coming might have been almost expected to call into fresh life the waning Teutonic element in Gaul. In truth the new comers from the North, while keeping all their native energy, became disciples of French speech and French culture; and it was in truth their help which enabled the French kingdom to come into being. The typical Romance nation was thus formed, itself a nation in the strictest sense, though it has since done much to absorb and assimilate parts of the other nations on its borders. Yet we may perhaps see in the growth of the French nation, at least as compared with England and Scandinavia, some influences from the city-life of more southern lands. The nation grows round a city in a way in which no Teutonic nation has done; Paris is the centre, nay the cradle, of France in a way in which no chief city of any Teutonic land can be said to be. The other cities, the ancient heads of tribes, kept a headship over the districts which shared their names such as never belonged to the towns of England. When we pass out of France into Southern Gaul, we find another state of things, a state of things approaching to that which is to be seen in Italy, a state of things far more nearly recalling the elder state of Southern Europe. In both lands the cities, though not forming, as in old Greece, the whole political life of the country, are a conspicuous element; in Italy they are the predominant element. As the power of the Emperors gradually died out in their kingdoms of Italy and Burgundy, the land split up into a crowd of practically independent states, among which free commonwealths again played their part alongside of principalities. On the greatness of the Italian cities I need not now dwell; but it is important to remember, first, that, though the history of the cities is the most brilliant and the most attractive part of mediæval Italian history, yet the cities never spread over the whole land, as they did in old Greece; secondly, that the political phænomena of Italy appear, though with less brilliancy and for a shorter time, in the neighbouring lands of Gaul. Provence, the land once so deeply touched by Greek influences, had for a moment her commonwealths no less than Lombardy. Massalia, which had braved the might of Cæsar, again braved the might of Charles of Anjou, and found the Frenchman a far harsher conqueror than the Roman. Aquitaine too, the other land of the tongue of _oc_, if not so distinctly republican as Provence, yet stands distinguished from France as emphatically a land of civic growth and civic privilege. The importance and independence of the cities grow as we go on a south-eastward journey through England, France, Aquitaine, Provence, and Italy.

We have been opposing cities to nations; but it is easier to define a city than to define a nation. I think we may say, at least for our purpose, that the ideal nation is found when all the speakers of the same tongue on a continuous territory are united into a single political whole, which includes no speakers of other tongues. The nation in short should have unity of speech and unity of government. It would be hard to find a nation which exactly answers this definition, but the nearer a political body answers to it, the nearer surely does it come to the highest type of a nation. I think that, when we find anything else, when we find men of several tongues under the same government or men of the same tongue under several governments, we instinctively ask the reason. The reason may be a good one or it may not; but we cannot help asking the reason; the thing is, at the first look of it, an anomaly. Now free cities, with all their merits, are the greatest of all legitimate hindrances to national unity. I say of legitimate hindrances, of hindrances which come of themselves and which have something to be said for them, as distinguished from hindrances caused by external and unrighteous force. Italian unity was impossible as long as Milan and Venice were kept apart from the Italian body by the brute force of the House of Austria; but Italian unity was no less impossible in the days when Milan and Venice--Milan for a moment, Venice for ages--played a part in the affairs of the world as independent commonwealths. Italy, the land of free cities, has, largely because it had been the land of free cities, been of all the lands of Europe that which most thoroughly split asunder, that which most thoroughly became, in the well-known words of her enemy, a mere geographical expression. Germany, in her most divided days, was still far from being so utterly divided as Italy. Save during the few years of French ascendency, her princes and cities always kept up some kind of mutual relations towards one another. Germany always had a national Diet; Italy had none.

The Italian nation has been at last united in our own days, and we all rejoiced in its union. Yet we may be allowed to doubt whether the union was not a little too speedy and a little too thorough. It is surely carrying unity too far to wipe out all traces of the independent being, for most purposes to wipe out the very name, of such a land as Sicily. It jars on our feelings to find that, while Ireland at least forms part of the royal style of its sovereign, Sicily is no longer even a geographical expression. The island realm of Roger has sunk to be seven provinces of the kingdom on the mainland. And there is another result of Italian unity, a result in which we may rejoice without drawbacks, but which still has somewhat of sadness about it as finally ending that great phase of the history of Europe with which we have throughout been dealing. Never were ties with the past so fully snapped as when the army of Italy entered liberated Rome. Of all novelties in European history the greatest was when Rome became the centre of a dominion with acknowledged metes and bounds, the head in short of a local Italian kingdom. “Rome the capital of Italy” was a formula which might well gladden our hearts; but it was a formula which formally swept away the œcumenical position, the œcumenical traditions, of Rome. Till that day some shadow of her œcumenical position had lived on. Under the temporal dominion of her Bishops, she was indeed the temporal capital, not of all Italy but of a part. But the temporal headship of the part did not wipe out the œcumenical position as is done by the temporal headship of the whole. Rome was not the mere head of the Papal States; the Papal States was something which her Bishops held as a temporal appendage to their position as Bishops of the œcumenical city. But the kingdom of Italy is not an appendage to Rome; Rome is the head of the kingdom. The whole is greater than its part; Rome, by her own free will and by the free will of Italy, has become less than Italy. By becoming the willing head of an Italian kingdom she has formally cast aside her Imperial traditions as they were not cast aside when brute force made her the head of a French department. The deliverance of 1870 was the formal record of the fact that, in the sense in which I used the words in the opening of this lecture, the world is Romeless.

While Italy then, the special land of free cities, was slow in rising to national unity, the neighbouring land in which free cities showed themselves only for a moment has never reached national unity at all. Bondage to the modern map, the familiar use of geographical names only in their most modern sense, hinders men from seeing that the lands of Southern Gaul, the lands of the tongue of _oc_, that is Aquitaine and the Imperial Burgundy, had in them all the elements of national life just as truly as Italy or Spain, or as that very France in which their national being has been merged. We are apt to talk as if, because those lands are French now, therefore they have been French from all eternity, or at least as if it had been in the eternal fitness of things that they should become French some day. Aquitaine indeed owed a formal and nominal homage to the French crown; but Provence and the other Burgundian lands were as fully independent of the Kings of Paris as any land of Spain or Italy. The Karolingian dominion, that Frankish kingdom which had grown into a Western Empire of Rome, broke up, as our own Chronicler has told us better than any other record, into the four kingdoms of Germany, Burgundy, Italy, and the Western realm that was to become France. In the course of ages the Western kingdom has annexed the Middle kingdom; it might have been the order of things that the Middle kingdom should annex the Western. The course of the world’s history might have been that, instead of Arles, Vienne, or Lyons bowing to Paris, Paris should bow to Arles, Vienne, or Lyons. In a land whose geography was so largely ruled by ecclesiastical divisions, it might not have seemed wonderful if the seat of the Primate of Primates or of the Primate of all the Gauls had won even temporal precedence over the simple bishopric of Saint Denys and Saint German. The reason why no South-Gaulish nationality was able to maintain itself is most likely to be found in the specially divided political relations of those lands. Aquitaine and the Imperial Burgundy have so much in common, so much that is utterly unlike anything in France, that, had they had the faintest chance of political union, they might have formed a true nation. But there was no moment, under Romans, under Goths, under Franks, when the two lands formed a political whole apart from any other land. Aquitaine and Burgundy were ever parted, each by itself was split in pieces, while Neustria and Austria ever kept some measure of union, enough to enable them to grow into the great realms of France and Germany. And so the Kings of Paris could bit by bit swallow up the divided land. They could not only annex the lands west of Rhone which owed them a formal homage, but they could spread their power, slowly and surely, over the fairer lands, the more royal cities, which knew no king but Cæsar.

But a fragment has escaped. Cities there still are of the old Burgundian realm, cities both of Romance and of Teutonic speech, from which the kingship of Cæsar has passed away, and which have not bowed the neck to any meaner lord. The Middle kingdom still has its representative in Europe; but that representative is no longer a kingdom but a free confederation. Massalia the twice free--Aquæ Sextiæ with her memories of Roman victory and Provençal countship--Arelate where kings took their crown in life and Vienna that sheltered them in death--Lugdunum whose name once spread to the Ocean and the British sea--all these have passed away; but Lausanne and Geneva still sit unchained beside their lake--modern freedom has not wiped out the memory of ancient kingship at Neufchâtel and Payerne--Basel, Basilia, in her very name brings up the thoughts of Empire, fit thoughts in a city where men so long defied the claims of Rome in her newer garb--and high above them all, younger and mightier, still stands the city by the Aar, the home of old patricians, the city looking forth upon her subject mountains, the Bern of Berchthold, yet nobler than the Bern of Theodoric, the city which, in days when the Middle kingdom might seem to have been forgotten, a poet of her own could greet in a twofold garb,

“Als Krone im Burgundenreich, Als freier Städte Krone.”

There is thus still a free and abiding fragment of the old realm of that King Boso who, when men questioned his kingship, could tell them that he was “Dei gratia id quod sum.” But of a Burgundian nationality Europe now knows no trace. The fragment of free Burgundy that is left has joined with two other brands snatched from the burning, a fragment of Germany, a fragment of Italy, to form a political nation, none the less truly a political nation because it does not coincide with any nation defined by blood or speech. A fragment of the English folk, a fragment of the British, a fragment of the Irish, joined together to make for us that people of the Northern England which, among its other merits, has kept alive, under another name, the purest form of the English tongue. If we could not spare Scotland in our island world, our _alter orbis_, still less could we spare Switzerland in the wider world of the European mainland. A fragment of the German, the Burgundian, and the Italian folk, have come together to show us, in this age from which the power of Rome has vanished, one lively image of the age when the œcumenical power of Rome had not yet risen. Athens, like Rome, has sunk to be a seat of local kingship; Achaia still lives, if not on her own Mediterranean shore, yet in the lands which reproduce her political life. She lives in a figure in the mountain land, the home of all that is oldest and newest in Western tradition and Western thought. And she lives too in a figure in the vaster federal and vaster English land beyond the Ocean. We indeed feel the Unity of History to be a living thing when we see the work of Markos of Keryneia and Aratos of Sikyôn reproduced on two such widely different scales in the younger hemisphere and in the elder.