I said in the opening lecture of this series that one of the most
wonderful features of the age in which we live, an age which will
assuredly take its place in the Universal History of times to come
as one of the most memorable of ages, is that the world is Romeless.
I said too that this feature of the most modern times is, by one of
the great cycles of history, a feature which takes us back to the
earliest days of European life. The world from which Rome has passed
away has something in common with the world in which Rome had never
shown herself. It has something in common with it which it has not
in common with those later ages during which Rome, in one shape or
another, under one form of influence or another, was the acknowledged
centre of all European and Christian lands. But this is one of those
many truths which can be grasped only by those who look at European
history as a whole, and who are not led away by the delusive voices
which would teach them that this or that fragment of the unbroken
tale can be mastered by itself apart from the other acts of the one
drama. He who shuts up his books and he who opens his books at any
arbitrary point in Rome’s long story are alike shut out from any
true conception of the place of Rome in the world’s history; they are
shut out from understanding the difference between an age in which
Rome is and an age in which Rome is not. To their eyes the fact that
the world is Romeless will not seem anything wonderful, anything
distinctive, because they have never looked with any searching gaze
at the ages in which the world was otherwise. Such an one will never
see that the great feature of the most modern times, a feature which
has reached its height in the times in which we ourselves live, is
the absence of any such centre as the world so long gathered itself
around. And if he will not see that the world is Romeless, still
less will he see that even the Romeless world is not as though Rome
had never been. Rome is still eternal in her influence; the world in
truth has been for ages so steeped in Roman influences that those
influences have ceased to be Roman. But Rome, as a visible and
acknowledged centre, has passed away. No longer does an undivided
world look to a single Rome as its one undoubted head. No longer does
a divided world look to an Eastern and a Western Rome as each the
undoubted head of half the world of civilized man. Rome œcumenical in
either of her seats has become a thing that is no longer. The younger
Rome has passed from us to be the spoil of the barbarian. The elder,
by a fate at once more and less hopeful, has sunk to be the local
capital of a single European kingdom. The younger, in her present
distress, has the loftier hopes for the future. Her very oppressors
have in some sort kept on her traditions; they have kept her in her
old place as the head of something more than a mere local realm. We
are far more likely to see Christian Constantinople again step into
her old heritage as the head of Eastern Christendom than to see the
lands of the West again accept the headship of the elder Rome by the
Tiber. The line of her Cæsars is broken, broken, we may be sure, for
ever. Her Pontiffs have not wisdom enough to see how their œcumenical
position has been raised by deliverance from the shackles of local
sovereignty. But to him who begins at the middle or at the end, to
him who leaves off at the middle--to him who, under the influence of
either error, has not given his mind to grasp the whole tale from the
kingship on the Palatine to the kingship on the Quirinal--the things
which make our own age so wonderful are things which lack a meaning.
He who vainly dreams that he will better understand his own times
by beginning his historic work with the times immediately before
them--he who listens to false charmers who bid him seek, perhaps
historic honours but assuredly not historic knowledge, by preferring
the flashy glitter of some sixth or seventh period to the solid
work of his Gregory or his Einhard--he will find out--no, he will
never learn enough to find out--that there is no royal road to the
knowledge even of his own times. His penalty will be to walk in an
age as strange and memorable as any that went before it, and not to
know in how strange and memorable an age it is in which he is walking.
We live then in a Romeless age, and to those who have eyes to see
it is one of the chief wonders of our age that it is Romeless. But
our age is Romeless because we live in a world from which Rome has
passed away; those far-gone ages were Romeless because Rome had
not yet made her way to the place which the world’s destiny had
marked for her. The position of those ages in the general tale of
European history was the subject of the first lecture of this course
six weeks back. In that lecture and in the one which followed it
I strove to point out how Rome, having by slow steps risen to the
first place in the West, burst suddenly into the midst of another
political system, a system of kingdoms and commonwealths which was
in many points a forestalling of the political system of the world
in which we now live. And we may go yet further back, to days when
Rome was so far from being the head of the world that her name could
hardly have been known in the world. By one of the strange cycles of
history, we who dwell in the wide world of modern times, the world of
continents and oceans--nothing better shows its vastness than that
we are driven to form a plural for this last primæval name--have
in some points come back to the state of those who dwelled in the
narrow world of the earliest times, the little world of islands,
peninsulas, and inland seas. We have come back to the state of things
that was, not only before Rome stood forth to rule the nations, but
before Macedonian kingdoms and Greek confederations had cut short
the right of every single town on its hill or in its island to act
as a sovereign state in the affairs of the world. Each nation now,
like each city then, does what is right in its own eyes. A nation
now, like a city then, may be kept back from the exercise of its
inherent powers by dread of the physical strength of some mightier
neighbour. But the nations now, like the cities then, acknowledge no
common centre of lawful rule, no power which can speak to all with
an authority higher than that of physical strength. From our age the
great vision of Dante’s Monarchy has passed away, and we have so
far gone back to the condition of the ages before whose eyes that
wondrous vision had never shown itself. The best witness to this
fact is to be found in the acknowledged importance and the confessed
difficulty of the doctrine of International Law. At no time has it
ever been more needful than it is now to have a system of rules by
which a number of independent powers shall acknowledge themselves to
be bound. At no time has it been found harder to enforce that system
of rules by any practical sanction. The simplest way perhaps is that
the weak state shall be held bound to the strictest observance of
every international rule in its dealings with the stronger, but that
the stronger shall be held to be absolved from the like pedantic
minuteness in its dealings with the weaker. A fancied insult, for
instance, at the hands of Greece is held to demand a humiliating
atonement which would certainly not be asked for in the like case
at the hands of Germany. But the most subtle International lawyer
has failed to devise any means, save the last argument of all,
for bringing a great power to reason which, to put it delicately,
puts its own construction on international rules, and is so fully
convinced of the truth of that construction that it declines to
submit their interpretation to the decision of any arbiter. So it was
in the days when the civilized world was bounded by the independent
commonwealths of Greece. In theory certain rules or customs were
held to bind every Greek state in its dealings with every other
Greek state. Certain acts which were deemed lawful if done towards
barbarians were deemed unlawful if done towards fellow-Greeks. Such
rules differed in no essential respect from the International Law
of modern times. There is simply a verbal difficulty in applying
the name to the old Greek world, a difficulty arising out of the
fact that, in our present state of things, nations have taken the
place of cities. But among Greek cities there was just the same
difficulty in finding a sanction for the wholesome rules laid down
by Greek tradition or religion which there is in finding the like
sanction now. There was no common temporal authority; we can hardly
say that there was a common spiritual authority. The Amphiktyonic
Council had but feeble claims even to the last position; its decrees
went practically for nothing, unless some powerful state undertook
to carry them out for its own purposes, and claimed in return to
determine what they should be. In the days of the great Peloponnesian
war we do not hear of the Amphiktyons at all. Then and later,
Athens, Sparta, Thebes, could trifle at pleasure with the rights
of a weaker city, subject only to the chance that some other among
the stronger cities might find it suit its interests to assert the
rights of the weaker. Every Greek city had in theory an equal right
to independence; but Messênê, Skiônê, and Plataia felt how hard it
sometimes was to assert that right. A treaty graven on a stone went
for little, an Amphiktyonic decree went for less, when a powerful
and ambitious city had other purposes to carry out. Such a treaty,
such a decree, went for about as much as the agreement of a modern
European congress when it binds itself to secure the freedom of
Epeiros and the good government of Armenia. The voice of some one
overbearing city, say Sparta backed by the will of the Great King,
counted for far more. The rise of the Macedonian power under two
renowned princes gave the Greek world for a short space a centre and
a head. International law or its substitutes went for little when
Alexander, flushed with Asiatic conquest, wrote to all the cities
of Greece to restore their exiles. But when the Macedonian kingdom
again became only one power among many, the old state of things
came back again with the needful changes. The world of Greece was
no longer a world of cities only; it was a world in which cities,
kingdoms, and confederations all played their part, a world in
which diplomacy had its full run, in which the eastern seas of
Europe were ever covered by embassies crossing one another in their
endless voyages to the court of this or that prince, to the assembly
of this or that confederation. It was into this busy world of
complicated International dealings that the power of Rome burst like
a thunderbolt. All was at once changed. Under the Roman Peace, indeed
in days long before the Roman Peace was formally established, as soon
as Rome became by common consent the arbiter of the Mediterranean
world, International Law had small opportunities left of showing
its strength or its weakness. For a while the independent powers of
the civilized world received as law whatever decrees the mightiest
among them, the Roman Senate, thought good to put forth in each
particular case. As kingdoms sank into provinces, as independent
cities sank into municipalities, the law of the one commonwealth into
whose substance they were in a manner merged became the immediate
law of the whole civilized world, with the might of Cæsar Augustus
as its sanction. There might still be a _jus gentium_ between Rome
and Parthia; to settle such questions as might arise at Antioch, at
Gades, or at Eboracum, there was only the law of the Roman city of
which all other cities had become suburbs.
As long as any shadow of Roman power lasted, the theory that there
lived on at Rome a central judgement-seat for the world was never
wholly forgotten. As East and West became, not only separate but
hostile, as the Western Pontiff stepped for many purposes into the
place of the Western Emperor, it was the ecclesiastical rather than
the Imperial Rome to which the nations sought as their common judge.
Still in either case it was Rome that spoke; the world at least of
Western Europe still acknowledged a centre by the Tiber, though
that centre might have shifted from the Regia and the Septizonium
to the Lateran and the Vatican. The world of which the Lateran and
the Vatican were centres was presently cut short by a spiritual
revolt. And that spiritual revolt was largely measured by national
distinctions. As Eastern Europe, Greek and Slavonic Europe, had
never admitted the spiritual dominion of the Western Rome, so now
Teutonic Europe cast that dominion aside. Nations which had, in the
teeth of Emperors, asserted their independence in the affairs of
the world, now asserted their independence no less in the range of
man’s spiritual being. The Church of Rome remained, like the Empire
of Rome, a power mighty and venerable, but a power confined, if not
within the bounds of a single nation, at least within the bounds of
a group of nations closely connected in history and speech. As there
was a Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, so there was now a
Holy Roman Church of the Latin-speaking folk. In one important point
indeed we may say that the range of the new Roman power was narrowed
yet further. There was a time when the bishopric of Rome, with all
that the bishopric of Rome carried with it, was, in practice as
well as in theory, open to men of all nations that admitted the
spiritual power of Rome. Now, though no law forbids the election of
a Pope of any nation, in practice the choice of the electors has
long been confined to men of Italian birth. This privilege indeed
might be looked on as in some sort a survival or revival of local
Roman supremacy; more truly it is a falling back on days before the
spiritual supremacy of Rome began. It is a falling back on times when
the Roman church, still a local church though the first of local
churches, naturally sought for its chiefs among its own members.
But so far as it is a falling back in either sense, it is a falling
back in a shape better fitted for later times; here again the nation
takes the place of the city; Italy takes the place of Rome. In short
the Roman Church, still in theory coextensive with the world, once
really coextensive with Western Europe, has shrunk up into a body
mainly Latin with a head exclusively Italian. It is indeed only in a
broad and general sense that we can take such propositions as that
the Latin nations clave to Rome while the Teutonic nations fell
away. That there are many exceptions needs no proof. It is plain
that the Roman Church can still boast herself of not a few Teutonic
and Slavonic subjects. It is no less plain that there are here and
there, though in smaller numbers, men of Latin speech, both in East
and West, who are not her subjects. Still the general proposition
is none the less true in its general sense. It marks, to say the
least, general tendencies which run a certain course wherever there
is no special cause to hinder them. If we look narrowly into each
case of exception, we shall often see some special cause, commonly
some political cause, which accounts for the anomaly. We may note
further that, as the Empire became more purely German and the Papacy
became more purely Latin, the old feuds between Empire and Papacy
died out. The Austrian Emperors, Catholic chiefs of an Empire mainly
Protestant, had no such warfare to wage with the Roman see as had
been waged by the Franconians and the Swabians. But as Empire and
Papacy alike came to be thus shut up within narrowed and definite
limits, neither could any longer act as a common centre, even for
the Western lands. For better or for worse, the world has fallen
back on an older state of things. Instead of a single Rome as the
acknowledged head of all, instead of two rival Romes, each claiming
the headship of its own half of the civilized world, it is now open
to every nation, as in the earlier day it was open to every city,
to do, as far as it finds to do it, that which is right in its own
eyes. Every nation now, as every city then, may play the part of Rome
for the years or for the moments through which it may keep enough of
physical strength to play that part.
The latest times then are in truth a return to the earliest times,
with this difference, that nations have taken the place of cities.
Two of the masters of history in later times have pointed out the
close analogy between the mutual relations of the cities of old
Greece and those of the nations of modern Europe. The lesson has
been taught us in its fulness alike by Arnold and by Grote. It hardly
fell within the scope of either master to point out how truly the
likeness is a cycle, how the later state of things is a return to
the earlier, after the existence for many ages of a state of things
wholly unlike either. They were hardly called on to dwell upon the
causes which have brought about this return to an earlier state of
things, or on the causes which made that return, as every return
to an earlier state of things must be, a return only partial, a
return largely modified by the events which have taken place in the
meanwhile. It was enough for them to point the analogy. And the
analogy is answer enough to those shallowest of the shallow who go
about winning cheers from half-taught audiences by declaiming on
the uselessness of studying the institutions of “petty states” and
by asking what can be gained by knowing about battles fought two
thousand years ago. The substitution of the nation for the city is,
from one side, part of the process which we may, for our purposes,
call the physical growth of the world. The world in which we live
is in physical extent vastly bigger than the first civilized world
of old Greece, vastly bigger than the far wider Mediterranean
world of Rome. What the Ægæan and its borderlands once were, what
the Mediterranean and its borderlands once were, Ocean and his
borderlands, his borderlands spread over so many continents and
islands, are now. No one ought to be more ready than students of
political history to welcome every modern scientific invention. The
discoveries which have gone so far to annihilate distance ought to
call up our deepest thankfulness. But we are perhaps thankful for
them on other grounds than those for which they are prized by their
own inventors; we are certainly thankful for them on other grounds
from those for which they are prized by those who go about bragging
about the worthlessness even of the knowledge of times when those
inventions were unknown. The steamer, the railway, the telegraph,
are wholesome and necessary institutions; they are wholesome and
necessary in order to hinder man’s intellectual and political life
from being crushed by mere physical extension. They allow the England
of our day to come nearer to the Athens of Periklês than the England
of a hundred years back, of fifty years back. They allow the United
States of America, spread over a world wider than any age of Roman
empire, to abide as a Confederation free and united, the true fellow
of the old Achaia shut up within the bounds of Peloponnêsos. They are
needful in an age when nations have taken the place of cities, that
they may make the nations really the political equals of the cities.
You may again, some of you, chance to hear some smatterer sneering at
petty states ignorant of the great discoveries of natural science.
Tell him that the highest use of the discoveries of natural science
has been to raise large states to the political level of small ones.
* * * * *
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.
Thus in the Latin-speaking lands and on the central march of
the Teutonic and Latin-speaking lands nations have grown up of
themselves, they have failed to grow up, or they have been formed
by an artificial union. But the city, as an independent political
unit, has vanished. Even in Switzerland the city is subordinate
to the artificial nation; and we can hardly say that any Swiss
canton is now a city commonwealth in the older sense. The people of
the surrounding district, once commonly a subject district, have
everywhere won for themselves equal rights with the people of the
town. If _Baselstadt_ is a purely town-community, it is because
_Baselland_ has won for itself, not only equality but separation.
In other lands the cities are simply members of the kingdom or
commonwealth, though we have seen that, where cities once were great,
nations have found it harder to grow into nations than elsewhere.
In other parts of Europe, Celtic, Teutonic, Slavonic, nations have
grown up without reference to cities at all. The Teutonic and the
Slavonic political units are both something very unlike a city; the
Celtic political unit is something yet more unlike. In none of
these parts of Europe did the native political developement take
the course which it took in Greece or Italy or even in Gaul, and
the Roman influence was naturally immeasureably less than it was in
Southern Europe. In all these lands the city is everywhere a direct
importation from the South. It may be a real Roman colony; it maybe
a Teutonic or Slavonic community shaping itself after the pattern
of a Roman colony. Nowhere was the city a thing of purely native
growth, nowhere was the independent city the ruling political idea
around which all political life gathered. In one land indeed, in the
central land, the land which took specially to itself the Teutonic
name, cities did indeed become great and famous; but they became
great and famous only under the conditions which I have just laid
down. It was fitting that the German nation which sheltered its own
Holy Roman Empire should conform to Roman traditions more nearly than
England, Scandinavia, or the Slavonic lands. Cities therefore became
an important element in the German kingdom. The oldest Germans looked
on a walled town as a prison; yet in after days cities and city-life
found the German land no unkindly soil. The Roman cities by the
Rhine lived on, and became models for cities of more purely Teutonic
birth. The Colony of Agrippina had its capitol no less than the
Tolosa of Quintus Cæpio, and it seemed only in the nature of things
that patricians should gather round it. Saxon kings, Saxon dukes,
made younger cities arise after their model in the heart of the
German land or on the shore of the Northern Mediterranean. Nor must
we forget that other cities at which we have glanced already--will
any one grasp my meaning and all that it suggests if I speak of one
of them as “Verona in montibus?”--were simply cities of the German
realm, to which circumstances gave in the end a fuller freedom than
their neighbours. Zürich herself, “nobile Torregium,” “die uralte,
löbliche, eidgenössische Stadt,” reckons among her titles of honour
that the judgement-seat of Cæsar was so often held within her walls.
In course of time that special home of Imperial power passed away,
together with her fellows, from all dealings with Cæsar and his
Empire. Others clave to their old allegiance till a new _Francia_
reaching to the Baltic and the Hadriatic supplanted the ancient realm
which was at once _Francia_ and _Romania_. Those free cities of the
Empire which lingered on till our own century came, like the cities
of the Alpine land, of divers forms of growth. Augsburg--Augusta
Vindelicorum--proclaimed herself to all time as of Roman and Imperial
birth; round Nürnberg none but Teutonic memories can gather. And by
the Northern and the Eastern sea, by the banks of Weser, Elbe, and
Trave, cities arose which were called to a still higher and a more
abiding destiny. Merchants, missionaries, self-styled crusaders,
joined their efforts to plant German cities on the conquered shores
of the Wend and of the older folk beyond him, folk beside whom
modern Europe and her nations feel as intruders on foreign soil.
The League of the Saxon Hansa, a power for which, as a League, we
can hardly find a geographical place on land, became mighty indeed
and memorable upon the seas. London and Novgorod formed parts of
one union of trade and enterprise; the merchant cities could give
law to the kingdoms of the North and could place whom they would
on thrones which in Cnut’s day had looked to Winchester and which
were now taught to look to Lübeck. But here too, as in more southern
lands, the greatness of cities was not abiding. The League drooped;
its members fell away; three only lived through the last storm to
claim a revived freedom in the first new birth of Germany seventy
years back. Three-and-twenty years ago I saw those cities still
sovereign and independent; in theory more sovereign and independent
than they were in the days of their might. On the coins of Lübeck
was still graven, if not the image, yet the superscription of Cæsar;
the Hanseatic city seemed to have put forth no marks or shillings
since the days of the first Francis from Lorraine. But Cæsar lived
only in his superscription; Lübeck knew no lord on earth; she was
bound by no ties save those which bound her to her two Hanseatic
sisters and to the lax Confederation which still numbered a single
inland city among its members. The next year after my visit the
tale of free cities was shortened, the freedom of those that still
lived on was shortened also. Frankfurt has sunk from the rank of a
commonwealth to become a city of a local kingdom; Lübeck, Bremen,
Hamburg, are still commonwealths, but commonwealths which are again
members of an Empire. They are survivals, but survivals which
modern Europe, Romeless Europe, the Europe of huge kingdoms and of
countless armies--happy when kingdoms mean nations and when armies
do not simply keep down unwilling subjects--cannot spare from the
midst of her. The age of free cities is past; in some lands the mere
high-handed robbery of the stranger has wiped them out, as where
the fetters of the meanest of oppressors still clank over enslaved
Ragusa. In other lands the loss of local freedom has perhaps been
outweighed by admission into a wider national unity. In two lands
again the commonwealths still abide, tempered only by the obligations
of a federal tie. But a federal tie is one thing when it binds
together a group of lands and cities none of which could now stand
alone; it is another thing when the federation has an Imperial head,
when three surviving cities are grouped with duchies and kingdoms
which could at any moment overwhelm them, and when duchies and
kingdoms are again grouped in fellowship with another kingdom greater
than cities, duchies, and kingdoms joined in one. Yet to this day the
free city, even if shorn of its old greatness, its old independence,
is still an element in our modern Europe. Those three surviving
cities of the great Hansa are precious fragments indeed, fragments in
one sense of a world when the Roman power had put on its German garb,
reminders in another sense of a world on which the Roman power had
not yet risen. As we trust never to see the day when the bull of Uri
and the bear of Bern shall cease to be badges of a freedom more than
municipal, so we trust never to see the day when Imperial Germany
shall cease, among the ensigns of its free confederate members, to
reckon ensigns more worthy of honour than the banners of dukes and
kings, the towers of Hamburg, the key of Bremen, and the eagle-shield
of Lübeck.
* * * * *
I have done my desultory picture of our Romeless world, desultory
and imperfect as must be every picture attempted in lectures such
as these, the object of which is not the communication of minute
knowledge on any point. I am still at the threshold of my work. Some
solid work I think I have done in inner chambers with the small
and faithful band who follow me, who sometimes guide me, through
book after book of the historian of the Franks. But what I have as
yet preached, so to speak, on the house-tops has been in its own
nature general and desultory. I have not, strictly speaking, been
teaching; I have been purposely talking in a way which might call
up memories in some and might stir up to inquiry in others. But
through the general we make our way to the particular. Next term I
trust to make even these more public lectures of a more solid kind.
I have run with a swift pace through a general view of the Methods
of Historical Study, through a general view of the chief periods of
European history. This last series fills up for this year the tale of
forty-two lectures which the iron rule of our masters demands from
me. With such necessity laid upon me, I should think it savoured
of arrogancy and impiety if I ventured on such a voluntary work of
supererogation as a forty-third lecture. What the Commissioners deem
enough you doubtless deem enough; so to-day I bring my desultory
story to an end. In October I hope to begin a more regular course,
and to make a path, through a true understanding of the early history
of Gaul, to a true understanding of the early history of Britain. And
I have one word more to say. Since I came here I have learned several
things, I have learned one in particular. I have hitherto always
shrunk from crying my own wares, from advertising my own writings.
Whenever I have quoted myself or referred to myself, it has been with
a feeling of doing something that one should be ashamed of. But I
have learned in this place where I now stand, from a colleague who is
now no longer a colleague, how very silly such modesty is, and how
much better it is to quote oneself and talk of oneself as freely as
one quotes and talks about anybody else. I will tell you then that a
few years back I gave two courses of lectures on the other side of
the Ocean which, I venture to think, contain matter worth reading. I
think they contain matter specially worth reading by those who think
of following my roundabout course in company, first with the Vandal
who crosses the Rhine and afterwards with the Saxon who crosses the
sea. They were printed in America; some copies have, I know, found
their way into Britain. I must put a bold face on the matter, and
say that those who have followed me thus far and who purpose to
follow me again in October might spend their Long Vacation worse than
in giving some part of it to reading my two courses of Lectures to
American audiences, bound up in one not very big volume. You will
find in them some things that I have said elsewhere, and, though
some seem to think that impossible, some things that I have not
said elsewhere. And so I bid you farewell for a few months, finding
fault with you in nothing, except that, like most other Professors,
I wish there were more of you. But one therefore feels all the more
kindly to the elect, the faithful, the little band that watched with
Ælfred, the stout hearts that lapped with Gideon, even though they be
far from reaching the full tale of three hundred. And so I will end
the work of my first academic year, with a wish to see you all and
more also on the same benches in October; I part from you with the
blessing of the modern Greek, εἰς καλὴν ἀντάμωσιν.