CITIES AND PEOPLES

(A)

THE SOUL OF THE CITY

About the middle of the second millennium before Christ, two worlds lay over against one another on the Ægean Sea. The one, darkly groping, big with hopes, drowsy with the intoxication of deeds and sufferings, ripening quietly towards its future, was the Mycenæan. The other, gay and satisfied, snugly ensconced in the treasures of an ancient Culture, elegant, light, with all its great problems far behind it, was the Minoan of Crete.

We shall never really comprehend this phenomenon, which in these days is becoming the centre of research-interest, unless we appreciate the abyss of opposition that separates the two souls. The man of those days must have felt it deeply, but hardly “cognised” it. I see it before me: the humility of the inhabitant of Tiryns and Mycenæ before the unattainable _esprit_ of life in Cnossus, the contempt of the well-bred of Cnossus for the petty chiefs and their followers, and withal a secret feeling of superiority in the healthy barbarians, like that of the German soldier in the presence of the elderly Roman dignitary.

How are we in a position to know this? There are several such moments in which the men of two Cultures have looked into one another’s eyes. We know more than one “Inter-Culture” in which some of the most significant tendencies of the human soul have disclosed themselves.

As it was (we may confidently say) between Cnossus and Mycenæ, so it was between the Byzantine court and the German chieftains who, like Otto II, married into it--undisguised wonder on the part of the knights and counts, answered by the contemptuous astonishment of a refined, somewhat pale and tired Civilization at that bearish morning vigour of the German lands which Scheffel has described in _Ekkehard_.[130]

In Charlemagne the mixture of a primitive human spirituality, on the threshold of its awakening, with a superposed Late intellectuality, becomes manifest. Certain characteristics of his rulership would lead us to name him the Caliph of Frankistan, but on his other side he is but the chief of a Germanic tribe; and it is the mingling of the two that makes him symbolic, in the same way as the form of the Aachen palace-chapel--no longer mosque, not yet cathedral. The Germanic-Western pre-Culture meanwhile is moving on, but slowly and underground, for that sudden illumination which we most ineptly call the Carolingian Renaissance is a ray from Baghdad. It must not be overlooked that the period of Charles the Great is an episode of the surface, ending, as accidentals do end, without issue. After 900, after a new deep depression, there begins something really new, something having the telling force of a Destiny and the depth that promises duration. But in 800 it was the sun of the Arabian Civilization passing on from the world-cities of the East to the countryside of the West. Even so the sunshine of Hellenism had spread to the distant Indus.[131]

That which stands on the hills of Tiryns and Mycenæ is _Pfalz_ and _Burg_ of root-Germanic type. The palaces of Crete--which are not kings’ castles, but huge cult-buildings for a crowd of priests and priestesses--are equipped with megalopolitan--nay, Late-Roman--luxury. At the foot of those hills were crowded the huts of yeoman and vassals, but in Crete (Gournia, Hagia Triada) the excavation of towns and villas has shown that the requirements were those of high civilization, and the building-technique that of a long experience, accustomed to catering for the most pampered taste in furniture and wall-decoration, and familiar with lighting, water-circulation, staircases, and suchlike problems.[132] In the one, the plan of the house is a strict life-symbol; in the other, the expression of a refined utilitarianism. Compare the Kamares vases and the frescoes of smooth stucco with everything that is genuinely Mycenæan--they are, through and through, the product of an industrial art, clever and empty, and not of any grand and deep art of heavy, clumsy, but forceful symbolism like that which in Mycenæ was ripening towards the geometric style. It is, in a word, not a style but a taste.[133] In Mycenæ was housed a primitive race which chose its sites according to soil-value and facilities for defence, whereas the Minoan population settled in business foci, as may be observed very clearly in the case of Philakopi on Melos which was established for the export trade in obsidian. A Mycenæan palace is a promise, a Minoan something that is ending. But it was just the same in the West about 800--the Frankish and Visigothic farms and manor-houses stretched from the Loire to the Ebro, while south of them lay the Moorish castles, villas, and mosques of Cordova and Granada.

It is surely no accident that the peak of this Minoan luxury coincides with the period of the great Egyptian revolution, and particularly the Hyksos time (1780-1580 B.C.).[134] The Egyptian craftsmen may well have fled in those days to the peaceful islands and even as far as the strongholds of the mainland, as in a later instance the Byzantine scholars fled to Italy. For it is axiomatic that the Minoan Culture is a part of the Egyptian, and we should be able to realize this more fully were it not that the part of Egypt’s art-store which would have been decisive in this connexion--viz.: what was produced in the Western Delta--has perished from damp. We only know the Egyptian Culture in so far as it flourished on the dry soil of the south, but it has long been admitted as certain that the centre of gravity of its evolution lay elsewhere.

It is not possible to draw a strict frontier between the late Minoan and the young Mycenæan art. Throughout the Egyptian-Cretan world we can observe a highly modern fad for these alien and primitive things, and vice versa the war-band kings of the mainland strongholds stole or bought Cretan _objets d’art_ wherever and however they could come by them, admiring and imitating--even as the style of the Migrations, once supposed to be, and prized as, proto-German, borrows the whole of its form-language from the East.[135] They had their palaces and tombs built and decorated by captive or invited craftsmen. The “Treasure-house” (Tomb) of Atreus in Mycenæ, therefore, is exactly analogous to the tomb of Theoderich at Ravenna.

In this regard Byzantium itself is a marvel. Here layer after layer has to be carefully separated. In 326 Constantine, rebuilding on the ruins of the great city destroyed by Septimus Severus, created a _Late Classical cosmopolis_ of the first rank, into which presently streamed hoary Apollinism from the West and youthful Magism from the East. And long afterwards again, in 1096, it is a _Late Magian_ cosmopolis, confronted in its last autumn days with spring in the shape of Godfrey of Bouillon’s crusaders, whom that clever royal lady Anna Comnena[136] portrays with contempt. As the easternmost of the Classical West, this city bewitched the Goths; then, a millennium later, as the northernmost of the Arabian world, it enchanted the Russians. And the amazing Vasili Blazheny in Moscow (1554), the herald of the Russian pre-Culture, stands “between styles,” just as, two thousand years before, Solomon’s Temple had stood between Babylon the Cosmopolis and early Christianity.