Part 3

The contrasts between the boundary of the fully French Gothic and the intertwined boundary of French speech, over against German, are like the contrasts above noted between south and north in France, and one might further study the growth of the historic kingdom of France, the lines of Customs Dues, Gabelles, and so on, as well as facts about the occurrence and relative importance of Protestantism in various parts. All would show that between the Paris basin and the Rhine is a zone of people with mixed allegiances, and that, however convenient language may be as a distinctive mark, it by no means gives a full idea of the complexity of the case.

Flanders is Low German in speech, but profoundly affected by France in many ways, as its architecture suggests; its zealous Catholicism is a marked feature. Wallony is Celto-Romano-Gallic in foundation, marvellously altered by modern industrialism. Luxembourg is indefinitely debatable, Lorraine mainly French, {30} Alsace Alemannic (Old High German) in speech, but in other respects deeply affected by France.

The study of the zone behind the old Roman frontier of the Danube could be worked out on somewhat similar lines, but with less profit, owing to complications connected with the spread of Asiatic peoples and armies in subsequent times.

The rise of the various peoples of Romance speech behind the ancient frontier is again best studied without too much concentration on the modern states, though language and state do correlate fairly closely.

In the Iberian peninsula, Basque spoken on either side of the western end of the Pyrenees, but over a larger area on their southern side, gives its name to a people physically not very different from their Spanish neighbours, save that probably there are among them more survivors of ancient (Aurignacian) types, especially, it is said, of the Cro-Magnon, than among the majority of the Spaniards. Economically they have a certain amount of distinctness as mountain dwellers on the one hand, and as sailors on the other. Historically, too, they have a certain distinctness; their connexion with the Carthaginians and the Romans, with the kingdom of the Wisigoths and later with the Arab Emirates, was much less close and continuous than that of regions immediately to the south. The people of the little Pyrenean republic of Andorra speak not Basque but Catalan, and are one of a number of instances (San Marino, the four original cantons of Switzerland, Lichtenstein, Montenegro) of the apartness of little mountain groups; there was a number of such groups a few centuries ago.

The main part of the peninsula uses languages that have arisen from Latin, one on the west coast which is known in the two forms of Portuguese and Galician, one along the northern portion of the east coast which is called Catalan, and is more nearly related to the _langue d'oc_ than to Spanish, which is the language {31} of the great plateau of the peninsula, and has become also the language of Andalusia and of the non-Catalan east coast.

In the early part of the eighth century, Islam, at first represented by Berbers and later by Saracens, occupied roughly what had once been Carthaginian Spain, only temporarily holding the north-western quadrant which became a centre of Christian resistance; it had previously remained, for a time at least, apart from the Wisigothic kingdom. The hold of Islam on the east coast north of Tarragona was also only temporary, but as a result of this the Barcelona region during the formative period of language was more in touch with South France than with the north-western and Christian part of Spain, whence its language came to have the kinship with the _langue d'oc_ already noted. In the centuries of Iberian weakness in face of Islam the west coastal plain diverged in speech from the upper Douro basin. As Islam weakened in Spain the west coast language spread southward, while the plateau language (Spanish) spread south especially via Toledo, the Guadiana region being largely waste land for the time. As Spanish, the language of the defenders of Christianity, became the replacer of Islamic languages, it, rather than Catalan, spread over the parts of the east coast south of the Ebro as they were recovered for Christianity. When the north-west was the basis of resistance to Islam, the age-long sanctity of Compostella came into prominence, and the great shrine of St. James (Santiago da Compostella) became world famous, and later on, a centre of pilgrimages. Thus in spite of the kinship of Galician with Portuguese, Galicia became part of the kingdom of Spain, though its seafarers had much in common with the coast-dwellers of northern Portugal. One should note also that, whereas in Portugal the coastal plain has the severe barrier of the plateau edge to divide it from Spain, in Galicia the lines of hill spurs grade down to the sunken coast-line without any marked change.

Though Berber and Saracen elements have been suppressed, {32} a good deal remains to attest their influence not only in cities and their buildings but in the cultivation of the south, and especially in the irrigated gardens (_buertas_) of the east coast and in many features of the people's life, even in some details of dialect. Arabic is now studied a good deal as a 'classical' language in these regions.

There are sharp contrasts in physical geography between the indented coast of Galicia, the narrow coastal strip of North Spain, the plateau-basin of the historic Léon and Castile, the lower lying dry eastern basin of Aragon, the Catalonian coastal plain with hills between it and Aragon, the barren plateau of New Castile, the southern trough of Andalusia, the east coastal regions of Murcia and Valencia. These contrasts have hindered the growth of intercommunication and of unity, and it is said that recently there were one thousand villages in Spain still lacking effective connexions with the road system. The distinctness of the people of the different regions is therefore a marked feature so far as custom and social inheritance is concerned, and the commercial Catalans have often thought of separating themselves from the old-fashioned agriculturists of Spain. The long duration of the struggle with Islam kept the Spaniards a people of leaders and common soldiers with, for a time, a Jewish middle class (Sephardim). But religious zeal led to expulsion of the Sephardim, though not a little of their blood remains, and they have taken a good deal of Spanish blood with them to their later homes in Salonika and elsewhere. Spain's development of a middle class thus lagged far behind that development among the other west European peoples in the Middle Ages, and the weakness of that class has been a factor of Spain's difficulties ever since, of her troubles in America, of her political weakness at home, of the subjection of her mining wealth to English exploiters, and of her long-continued financial troubles. The railway has improved matters to some extent by promoting communication, but such {33} was the fear of France that the Spanish gauge is different from that of the rest of western Europe. The stoppage of the blood-drain of soldiers and governors formerly sent to maintain her old empire seems to have helped Spain greatly, and the importance of her products in the recent war made her prosper, and her peseta went up far above its old par value, which was 25-22½ pesetas = £1 expressed in English terms. Since the war, difficulties in Morocco, internal strains, resumption of imports, and payments for transport services have sent the peseta down again. It is now 28.50 = £1, but that is still nearly twice the value of its former French, three and a half times the value of its former Greek, and more than three times the value of its former Italian equivalent. The general spread of irritability and of the war spirit, however, seems to have increased the political difficulties between Spaniards and Catalans, as it has those between English and Irish, in both cases partly because the Continent has, elsewhere, so largely been settled on the principle of nationality based upon language, or tradition, or both.

The Portuguese of the north are rather distinct from those of the south, in part because among the latter there is a good deal of African blood derived from intermixture with slaves from the seventeenth century, an intermixture which does not appear to have had good effects. The steep edge of the Spanish plateau behind the Portuguese coastal plain, so sharp that its river-breaches are mostly deep and narrow, helps to keep Portuguese and Spanish distinct.

The old-fashioned agricultural life of the people, based upon corn and sheep in Castile and Aragon, and vines, oranges, and olives in Andalusia and in suitable parts of both east and west coasts; the paucity of harbours, save in Galicia; the ecclesiastical zeal derived from the long fight with Islam and the struggle with the schismatic Low Countries, have all helped the lack of communications to keep Spain old fashioned. The {34} Counter-Reformation, arising out of the struggle with the Protestants of the Low Countries, has been anti-national everywhere, and has contributed its part in hindering the growth of modern nationalism in Spain. Further, owing to her weak middle-class life and her lack of coal, Spain has not utilized even the opportunities she had of industrial development, so she stands apart, in this way as well, from the life of modern Europe. Perhaps the modern development of hydro-electric power may alter this to some extent, and in any case the non-industrialization of the country in the coal age may prove an advantage to the country in the end. Memories of old unhappy far-off things are too apt to make Englishmen emphasize the religious persecutions by Catholics in Spain, forgetting too easily the religious and political persecutions barely extinct in the British Isles. We should remember, on the other side, the traditions of Salamanca University with its blending of Christian and Arab thought at the northern outlet of a mountain pass from Arab Spain, the glories of Santiago, and the part its pilgrimages played in the development of European literature, the galaxy of great names, among which Lull, Cervantes, Vives, and Velasquez are but the best known of many, and last, but not least, the influence of the early phases of Saracen civilization in the south on the then semi-barbaric peoples of Western Europe. We should also remember that Spanish remains one of the great world languages, current not only in the mother country, but also in the greater part of Latin America, with a fine tradition in literature and oratory, as well as in other forms of art. It is interesting that under the newly revised scheme (1921) Spain is added to the four nations (Britain, France, Italy, and Japan) which provide permanent members of the Council of the League of Nations.

South of the great curve of the western Alps the varying dialects have ultimately fused into the beautiful Italian language, the most direct descendant of Latin. Since Roman times there {35} have been notable intrusions from without, such as that of the Longobards or Lombards into the Po basin in the sixth century, and those of Islam and of the Normans into the south, but the Latin element has assimilated all these, though in the Alps themselves the tendency is towards French on the west and German on the north, with the curious survival of Romansch and Ladin, already noted in the north-east. A small area of Italian speech near the coast (Mentone) has been included in France. In Calabria there are a few small Greek patches, and there are Albanian ones in various parts, while Slavonic (Slovene) is spoken in various parts of eastern Venetia and Istria.

The home tradition of Rome was that of the city-state, and it resurged during the period of mediaeval trade and operated against the growth of national consciousness. The influence of the other city-states, notably Venice, operated in the same way in the Middle Ages. This was further held back by the struggles of Germanic peoples to gain Rome and revive the Imperial tradition, and still more by the influence of the Church, particularly since the advent of the Counter-Reformation and the Jesuit power. But the railway made the old localism impossible, and the widespread nationalist movement of the nineteenth century had its effect in Italy as well as elsewhere. The struggle for the unification of Italy and the redemption of Italian lands from foreign dominion by Mazzini, Cavour, and Garibaldi is one of the romances of humanity, and from it has arisen the modern Italian kingdom (1870 onwards) with its promise of magnificent development.

The difficulties in the way include three large ones. Industrial power was lacking until hydro-electric schemes became practicable; they are remedying the position to some extent in the north, and the cleanliness of these schemes encourages high-grade industries. The deep social and even racial contrasts between the Po basin and the south of the peninsula are another difficulty. {36} A third is that of the large and often neglected estates (_latifundia_) of the south. There neglected drainage has allowed accumulation of stagnant water, and the swamps are infested with malaria, which not only kills many children, but also weakens those who survive its pernicious attentions.

The Italians are among the best engineers of the world, and are minded to remove this difficulty by drainage works, as well as by social reorganization now proceeding actively and contributing an element of unrest that makes Italy's recovery from war sacrifices a complex problem. It is, however, a problem that cannot but be solved, and with the redevelopment of Mediterranean trade following the opening of the Suez Canal and the retreat of the Turk from non-Turkish lands, the future of the centrally placed kingdom of Italy should be a bright one.

Hydro-electric schemes during the past twenty years have drawn North Italy (Milan) and Switzerland, and to some extent South Germany, together, and Milan has grown in wealth and importance as one of the first-rank cities of Europe with her high-grade industries in the city, thanks to the transmissibility of power by cable. The city's long and powerful artistic tradition is an important factor of her industrial future. Of late these tendencies have been encouraged by the policy of the Western Powers, for it now pays Italy to import from Germany rather than from England, and this redevelopment of mid-European economic relations will help to rehabilitate the value of Italian money if internal social politics permit.

The fame of Italian workmen for road and bridge building as well as for cultivation is world wide, and they have spread in considerable numbers both to other European countries and to America. In every case, however, they have found the lands of immigration developed already beyond possibilities of language change, and so the Italian emigrant tends, in the long run, to change his heritage; but in the meantime he sends surplus earnings {37} back home, and these remittances and the money brought in by emigrants returning are an important resource for Italy. It is interesting to contrast French and Italians in this respect; the Frenchman emigrates with the greatest reluctance, but has planted his language very firmly in such places as the St. Lawrence estuary and Mauritius, though political organization there has passed out of his hands. Those emigrations were made when the lands in question were not yet occupied at all by Europeans, and therein lies the difference. The French, Spanish, and Italian peoples of late years have been working to revive the idea of the Mediterranean as a Roman, or rather now a Romance, lake, and have spread their influence along the North African coast, Spain on the Moroccan coast. France into Morocco and Algeria, both France and Italy into Tunisia, and Italy into Tripoli and the Cyrenaica. These are fields of linguistic and cultural as well as administrative expansion, as the French and Italians, at least, appear likely to organize closer settlement and an economic life very different from that which they found.

The French-speaking and Italian-speaking parts of Switzerland can best be treated with Switzerland as a whole, and of the other outlying Romance groups only a few words need be said. In the Channel Isles, the pre-Norman basis was Celtic-speaking, and there are abundant indications of links with Brittany. Norsemen came in and Norse place-names are well in evidence, but the islands under this influence became merely an outlying fragment of Normandy, and Norman French became the language. The islands, in spite of very close settlement, have doggedly retained distinctive dialectical peculiarities. There are many other examples of this non-fusion in islands such as Ireland, Crete, Ceylon, and Java.

Guernsey has at least three varieties, for example. The importance of the roadstead of St. Peter Port in Guernsey for British commerce with Bordeaux in the Middle Ages was a powerful {38} factor in the dissociation of the Channel Isles from Normandy and their retention by the kings of England, and their strong anti-French prejudices were long a feature. The growth of commerce with England and the fact that the local dialects have no literature make the islands one of the comparatively rare cases of modern language change long after the organization of close settlement. Of the islands of the western Mediterranean it may be said that in the Balearics a variant of Catalan is spoken, while the other islands, including Corsica, use Italian dialects, save that the Alghero district in Sardinia uses the same dialect as the Balearic Islands.

4

_The Peoples of German Speech_

Without attempting to estimate what was the speech of the early long-headed types of man on the European plain (the almost level belt from Calais via Vilna to the Urals), and without trying to dig back deeply into prehistoric time, it may be stated that in the early days of history the home of the Teutonic family of languages seems to have been on the western portion of the European plain and in the related parts of Scandinavia, no doubt with various Baltic extensions. Of its attempts to spread towards the Paris basin then, as in later times, there is little doubt, but its ultimate extension in this direction has already been discussed. It is most probable that the people who used these languages were mainly Nordic coast-dwellers and occupiers of the wet marsh and moorland country on the west side of the Elbe. In many parts their physique must have been Alpine-Nordic to a large extent.

The area of Teutonic speech historically falls into three: the Scandinavian area including Jutland north of Flensburg, the Low German plains from the Elbe to the mouths of Rhine and {39} Maas, and the Highlands east of the Rhine, into which Teutonic speech spread, and in which it became enriched by mixture with Celtic, and, later on, with Latin and Romance elements, and so became Alemannic, and, ultimately, High German.

In Roman times Teutonic speech was thus most characteristic of the belt outside the Rhine frontier of the Roman Empire, and from this basis we may trace the Teutonic peoples onwards. The forests of Germany were dense and extensive, and apparently in post-Roman times they were being attacked in two ways: the hill people were moving down and making the population more Alpine in physical type and more Alemannic in language, and the Church was founding abbeys and spreading its influence across the Rhine from the erstwhile Roman frontier-cities then becoming cities of the Roman Church in most cases. The wave of Roman civilization interrupted by the barbarian movements was thus resumed under Church leadership, and with it went the growth of towns and of intercourse, after some time making the contrast between south and north in Germany not only a contrast between hills and plains and between High German and Low German, but also a contrast between a much more Romanized and civic south and a much less Romanized and more rural north, though the Church did establish itself in the north in due course.

Alemannic became characteristic of the hill belt next beyond the region of French speech, and there replaced a Brythonic Celtic language. But farther east the languages of the hill people had by this time taken Slavonic form, so that the Alemannic belt was of but moderate width, including the Alps and their northern flanks down to the Prussian plain, but not Bohemia and the Carpathian arc which were of Slavonic speech (p. 61). The downhill movement above mentioned characterized the Slavonic hill lands as well as the Alemannic, so that on the Prussian plain east of the Elbe old languages (probably of Lettic kinship, see p. 18) gave way to Slavonic, and in course of time the Elbe became the {40} frontier between German and Slavonic, with the Altmark (old frontier territory) to the west of it.

The progress of Germanization eastwards to the Mittelmark, between Elbe and Oder, and the Neu-Mark farther east, towards but not up to the Vistula, must not be interpreted as meaning that these regions were still purely Slavonic in the days of the Elbe frontier. Probably German was already in use here and there, but Germanization and the spread of the Church involved agricultural development and closer settlement, and so changed the character of the country. It was done under German leadership, and brought in German settlers. In the early Middle Ages there was a recession of Slavonic on the Prussian plain, and now only one fully Slavonic region in the German area remains. This is the Wendish area, and the Wends are supposed to have spread down from the hill slopes on the northern frontier of Bohemia. The present area of the Wends is astride the upper Spree, and especially around Kottbus, and the district is called Lusatia, but in the Middle Ages they spread farther north. It is largely Germanized in speech at the present time, but preserves old features and Slav names. Slav place-names are as characteristic on the German plain east of the Elbe as are Celtic names in the non-Celtic speaking part of Scotland, and illustrate a change of language of a people already having some settled organization. This contrasts with the rarity of survival of Celtic town names on the English plain. The changes of language areas since the Middle Ages have probably been quite small. The zone west of the Vistula has remained a zone of admixture of German and Polish-speaking people, whence the 'Polish corridor to Danzig' of the recent treaties, linguistically and traditionally justifiable and yet admitted to be dangerous politically.

The relation of the Teutonic languages of Jutland to one another in origin is beyond our scope, but the dialect of the western side of the base of Jutland has remained fairly distinct {41} as 'Frisian', and has attempted a literary development in the last century. The new treaty boundary between Germany and Denmark gives what was North Slesvig to Denmark, and is intended to run along a line in the linguistic frontier-zone. The Low German speech of the Rhine mouths, with the long isolation of the people of that region and their concentration on the work of fighting the sea, developed into Dutch.

We thus have Dutch, Frisian, Low German, High German or Alemannic, and naturally a Middle German developing between the two latter along the zone where the southern hills grade into the northern plain.