Part 3 (1/2)

Southward, enveloping the Alpine ridges, except where the snow peaks perforate its carpet covering, the Woodland changes its character, rather than gives place to anything fresh along the sh.o.r.es of the Lake Region of the Old World. Here and there, in detached plateaux enfolded among the ranges (like the Salt Lake basin and the Shoshonean plateaux in America), there are isolated gra.s.sy plains, repeating on a smaller scale the great gra.s.sland which skirts the Black Sea and the Caspian.

Examples are the heart of Spain and of Asia Minor, and the miniature gra.s.slands of the Balkan Peninsula, such as Thessaly and Eastern Thrace.

It is in the southern third, or thereabouts, of the continuous Woodland, where the deciduous forest trees begin to give place to evergreens, as they themselves replaced the conifers further north, that the minutely subdivided horticulture and arboriculture begins, which characterize the Mediterranean region. To call it agriculture would be to exaggerate its scale. It is more like a northerly extension of tropical _Hackbau_, as the Germans call those forms of plant-raising which dispense with plough and spade, and employ only mattocks or hoes, which are little more than earth-chopping celts. You have only to watch the unhandy way in which the Greek peasant and what Homer called his 'foot-trailing' oxen work their Virgilian plough through the recesses of a field no bigger than a cabbage-patch, and well stocked with olive-trees besides, to realize how truly in this kind of farming the ox is in place of a house-slave to a poor man. For the house-slave could handle a _zappa_, the spadelike Levantine hoe, where an ox would fail to turn round, yet where food-plants could be coaxed to grow, and an olive-tree would luxuriate.

This kind of garden-cultivation indeed repeats very closely the foodquest of the Muskogean cultivators in the South-eastern States, who make up the so-called 'civilized tribes' and, almost alone among the Redskins, 'are all self-supporting and prosperous'.[8] In the Old World, as in the New, its distribution is closely defined by certain limits of rainfall and temperature, and most of all by the extent to which the rainfall is concentrated into a few winter months, so that a dry warm summer is a.s.sured, which Man can mitigate and even exploit if he has access to perennial water. It extended, therefore, in quite early times, and still predominates, all round the mountainous sh.o.r.es of the Mediterranean, from Syria by Southern Europe to Algeria and Tunis, and penetrates inland and upland into the forests till summer clouds and rainfall check it. In this region of its distribution Greek and Roman legends betray the belief that grain-cultivation came late, and superseded a staple diet of tree produce, chestnut, walnut, filbert, and acorn.[9] And when the 'n.o.bler gra.s.ses' came, it was barley and red wheat that predominated, as indeed they predominate still.

But this is only one part of the distribution of the garden-culture. Far north along the Atlantic seaboard, and as far inland as the mild Atlantic climate is perceptible, the same type prevails. Its ancient limit is traced meteorologically in Tacitus' complaints (for example) of the austerity of the lands beyond the Rhine. In this northern region grain crops pa.s.s from red to white wheat, from barley to oats, and from both to rye. The ease with which the Muskogean potato and tomato have been acclimatized, and their respective prevalence now in the Atlantic and Mediterranean sections, ill.u.s.trate exactly the place which primitive hoe-culture held in the economy of the Old-World region. Early monuments of this culture, in which hoe and ox-plough are equally conspicuous, are the 'meraviglie' rock-carvings above Ventimiglia.[10] The fine flower of it is the Minoan civilization of the Crete and the South Aegean.

Egyptian agriculture is also in great part hoe-work.

South-eastward, outside the Carpathians, and within them also, in the great plain of Hungary, we meet a totally different regime; vast featureless and treeless gra.s.slands, extending past the Black Sea and Caspian to the foot of the mountains of North Persia and the spurs of the Central Asian highlands. Here, if Man is to maintain himself at all, he must be master of tame animals which can eat the gra.s.s, and in turn sustain him. South of the eastward continuation of the woodland Mountain Zone, through Asia Minor into Persia, and also south of the Mediterranean lake-region and the ridges of Syria and the 'Africa Minor'

of Tunis, Algeria, and Morocco, which partly enclose it, lies another group of gra.s.slands, Arabia and Sahara, desert-hearted, but capable of sustaining a considerable population of nomad pastoral folk round their margins and in oases, and of emitting them in volcanic emigrations now and then.

From the human point of view, the profound difference between the northern and the southern group of these gra.s.slands, which collectively lie athwart the great east-and-west mountain zone of the Old World, is this. The southern gra.s.sland sustains sheep and goats almost exclusively; it acquired its domesticated horses recently (at earliest about 2000 B.C.) and from the north-east; and it relies, for transport, on camels and a.s.ses, not on wheeled vehicles. The northern, on the other hand, has sufficient perennial pasture to permit of oxen; it uses horses habitually; and it has utilized the timber of its parkland margin, where it pa.s.ses over into the northern forest, to construct wheeled carts and ox-ploughs. Equipped with these fundamental implements of civilization, wheel-borne nomads have penetrated the Mountain Zone from the north again and again, introducing the cart into Egypt rather late, and perhaps even into Babylonia; though with these exceptions no secondary centre of cart-folk was ever established in the south. Obvious reasons for this failure lie in the scarcity of parkland and of perennial pasture for large cattle. At best, a.s.syria and Syria adopted the horsed chariot for war; but these regions, like the Hitt.i.te chariot-users of Asia Minor, the Achaean conquerors of the Greek peninsula, and the Gauls in West-Central Europe, are rather within the parkland fringes of the Mountain Zone, and among those intermont plateaux which we have noted already, than borderers of the Gra.s.sland itself. In particular, they are all sedentary, and stand in this respect contrasted with the migratory Scythian cart-folk in the northern Gra.s.sland. The only nomad cart-folk within the Mountain Zone are the Gipsies,[11] and they seem mainly to have formed their habit of life in the largest intermont plateau of all, the vast table-land of Persia.

The plough is less easy to trace. All that can be safely said at present is that it is a device for applying the strength of large cattle to break up the soil for a grain crop, deeply and uniformly, and above all more rapidly than a man can dig it with a hoe. By his own effort a man can barely break up enough ground to supply his home with grain, except in irrigated land. With the simplest of ploughs he can do this and more, and yet have leisure for other pursuits within the ploughing season. But it is not yet clear in what region ploughing first began. Probably it was in the comparatively well-watered and well-wooded margin of one of the large gra.s.slands; but whether north or south of the Mountain Zone, or round the discontinuous plateaux within it, is not clear. The presumption of large cattle favours the north, yet Babylonia, and even Egypt, had large cattle from very early times. North Syria seems to dispute with Babylonia priority in the production of wheat. Somewhere in this region we may provisionally place the cradle of what I may perhaps describe as the Bread-and-Cheese culture, in which the staple foods are provided by grain-plants and cattle, the latter being valued for their strength and their milk products, but not primarily for their flesh.

Disseminated westward, the Bread-and-Cheese culture is found to suffer regional modification. Southward, among the Mediterranean evergreen flora and old hoe-cultivation, the dearth of summer gra.s.s makes the large cattle useless for milking, as well as for beef; they are bred exclusively for draught, as their gait and structure show, and while cheese is supplied by the sheep and goats, b.u.t.ter and animal-fats are replaced by the vegetable oils, of which the olive is the chief, a characteristic Mediterranean product, evergreen, deep-rooted against summer drought, and fleshy-fruited. A Bread-and-Olive culture results, familiar to all visitors to Mediterranean lands. In the deciduous forests of South-Central Europe there is gra.s.s in the clearings, and milk enough; but goats and sheep are restricted, as the undergrowth becomes deeper and denser, and the prime giver of fats is the forest-bred pig: in a land rolling with ham and sausages we reach the Bread-and-Bacon culture. Further afield still, and later, in proportion as the forest is opened out by semi-pastoral folk, the moister summer permits open meadow-land, with perennial gra.s.s, and the possibility of hay. Here too the grain crops may be so large that there is something over to fatten stock; and to Bread and Cheese the farmer of the north-western plains adds Beef. When there is coa.r.s.e grain in plenty, of course, the large-boned horse of the north gradually replaces the ox at the plough, and permits him to be bred, as with ourselves, not for draught at all, but for milking and killing exclusively. It is in this final phase that the Bread-and-Beef culture pa.s.ses over eventually into the New World, and into the South Temperate Zone. It has been rather a long story to tell, and full of plat.i.tudes, but the gist of it is by this time clear. Whatever be the superstructure of social inst.i.tutions, of arts and sciences, of religion and philosophy, that European men have built upon it, the regime which has made the Western World what it is, from before the dawn of metallurgy until now, has been generically a Bread culture; based on that combination of pastoral and agricultural life in which large cattle co-operate with man in the laborious preparation of the soil which cereal crops require. But the Bread culture itself is always supplemented by some form of milk product, of which cheese is typical. It is almost always supplemented further by some special provision of fats; in Mediterranean conditions by olives and oil, involving extensive tree culture; in the forest region by pig's meat; and on the Atlantic seaboard by b.u.t.ter and beef.

The exhilarants show the same geographic control; with the olive culture go the wines and brandies of the south; with the forest culture, the ciders and the cherry brandies of Central Europe; with the copious cereals and meadow-gra.s.s, the beers and whiskies of the North. In details, of course, the distribution of types is intricately confused; but the main outline is clear; and we reach a first glimpse of a coherent European culture, on the almost animal plane of regional foodquests.

RACE, LANGUAGE, AND CULTURE AS FACTORS OF UNITY

Precedence has been given in our inquiry to the mere animal struggle of man with nature for bare subsistence, for two distinct reasons. The first is economic, namely, that just because this struggle is without qualification that of a highly intelligent animal species to maintain itself under these or those conditions, it is one which befalls equally every breed or race of that species which is ever exposed to those conditions; and further, is no more mitigated by considerations of language than by considerations of race. The second reason is historical or archaeological. The spread of the Bread culture is dated so far back in the history of man in this region, as to make it certain that it preceded not merely the spread of the prevalent Indo-European group of languages, but even the present distribution of racial types. It certainly reached Italy, and the Atlantic seaboard as the British Isles, before the brachycephalic 'Alpine' men arrived there; and still more before the Boreal invasions of Britain and the opposite coasts. Indeed, it would be truer to say that in general each breed of man which has changed its distribution has had to adopt sooner or later the types of culture appropriate to the regions into which it has penetrated, than to a.s.sociate the spread of any element of culture so fundamental as the food-quest with the migrations of any racial type.

Race, indeed, in Europe, as well as further afield, has been anything but a factor of unity. When we speak (on platforms) of Europeans as 'white men', we are in danger of forgetting, what every practical man in our audience knows, that we are dealing with at least three distinct breeds of mankind, which agree, indeed, rather imperfectly in the whiteness of their skin, but differ greatly in other points of structure and physique, including resistance to certain types of climate and regional diseases, and not least in temperament and the quality of their response to Nature's challenges of hards.h.i.+p or indulgence. Of these three breeds of man, only one, the blond Boreal giants (the only 'white men' in the strict sense of defect of pigment in skin, hair, and eyes) is exclusively European now, and has his habitat within the area of the 'Boreal' groups of animals and plants. His champions in ethnological propaganda seem to be of two minds about his earlier distribution; either his 'home' was round the Baltic, in which case it is difficult to see why he should be represented as a civilizing agency, in view of the cultural backwardness of that region; or else it was out on the Eurasian gra.s.sland, in which case he is as much an intruder into peninsular Europe as his brachycephalic 'Alpine' rival, and his claim to represent indigenous European man must go. The large part which he has played in European history seems to result partly from his great physical strength, surpa.s.sed (I believe) only by that of the Negro, partly from his reluctance, not so much to interbreed with more pigmented strains, but to admit the crossbred offspring to full partners.h.i.+p with himself.

Even among his like, he has his own criteria by which one 'white man'

knows another, and coheres with him politically.

Most strongly contrasted externally with the 'Boreal' type is the slight-built Mediterranean brunet. That his home is in the south, that he is closely related with the men of the African and Arabian gra.s.slands, and that he was among the first post-glacial explorers of the Atlantic seaboard, is admitted. More doubt arises as to the extent to which he penetrated from these southern and western bases into the heart of peninsular Europe. Certainly as we trace him to the south-east he seems more and more restricted to the Mediterranean coastline, and at last has no early monopoly even of the islands. The contrast between Crete and Cyprus is instructive as to this. The 'Mediterranean' type, in fact, reaffirms to the anthropologist the close zoological affinity between South-west Europe and North-west Africa.

But if Europe 'ends at the Pyrenees', it ends also anthropologically at the Balkans, or even at the Carpathians; for the whole Balkan Peninsula, and most of the highland core of peninsular Europe, is essentially continuous with Asia Minor and the next eastward sections of the Mountain Zone, so far as its human population is concerned, no less than in its animals and plants. Biological continuity is as complete at the Bosphorus as it is at Gibraltar. Here, what remains in dispute is not so much whether 'Alpine' types are ultimately of Anatolian origin, as whether their spread in Europe has been early or late, and whether their predecessors here were predominantly 'Boreal' or 'Mediterranean'. It is difficult, and perhaps needless, to decide whether lack of evidence or political enthusiasm is more to blame for this; for the Roundheads of prehistoric and of modern Europe are as contentious matter as their English namesakes in the seventeenth century.

To this broadly threefold a.n.a.lysis of European man, add only this, that ever since the old 'Sarmatian' sea shrank to its present dimensions and left the gra.s.slands open between Tienshan and the Carpathians, there has been a steady westward movement of Mongoloid folk until a strong enough Muscovy was interposed; and that along the Northern Woodland also there has been westward movement, slower but no less persistent; and it will be clear that it is not to race that we have to look for any uniform basis of our European culture.

Nor is such a basis to be found in Language. People often speak of Indo-European speech as though they really confused linguistic affinity with mutual intelligibility. But if you want to test the unifying influence of kindred languages, get a Welshman, a German, a Russian, and a Greek into a room together, and see what the 'concert of Europe'

amounts to. The odds are that if they confer at all, they will do so in French, which is in the strict sense of the word a 'modern' language; while if you allowed them to write and gave them time, there is just a chance that the Greek would impose his language on the other three.

There is no need to labour this point further than to recall the fateful bisection of the culture of the European peninsula which resulted from the linguistic alienation of Constantinople from Rome; of the Mediterranean base which understood Latin, from that which thought in Greek. In this tragic respect, which the Turkish conquest, with its linguistic and religious sequel, has done little more than aggravate, Europe ends still at the Save; whereas Rome's greatest daughters have reconquered more than all that Carthage ever held in Africa. And the re-incorporation of Britain, too, into the comity of nations is concurrent with the Latinization of its speech, on which the seal was set in 1611. Late as it was, then, in any case, in the prehistory of the region, the spread of a single type of linguistic structure over Europe has brought not peace, but a sword.

What then of Religion? How far were the older ethnologists on the right lines, when (in spite of language, rather than aided by it) they co-ordinated their own Olympus with the confederate polytheisms of the North? Here, too, we have to keep the dates in mind, and clear ourselves of enthusiasms. It is not from Tacitus or Caesar, nor even so near to the Olympians' dwelling-place as the Thrace of Herodotus' time, that we get our modern impression of the nearness of Olympus to Asgard. If northern genealogies are any guide,--and they are not likely to have reduced the real interval wittingly--Rome's empire reached its full extent while Asgard was in building, or before. And Olympus was in building, by Greek accounts, not many generations before the Trojan War.

In both cases we are dealing with political and almost historical transactions; it was not in finished societies like these that Great G.o.ds (or their votaries either) set out from 'home' over the face of Europe to unite it.

And when we pa.s.s behind Olympian structures, and look into the cults which they served to federate, such uniformities as they present prove far too much. The open-air G.o.ds of Tacitus (_Germania_, chap. 9) are common to Semitic folk, and to many peoples further afield, who are either not sedentary or are themselves not easily 'confined within walls', but haunt 'forests and groves'.

Leaving, then, these high works of the mind, Language and Religion, which have proved but blind guides, and 'of a short stay' in this labyrinth, let us turn to the material evidence of industrial and aesthetic activity. Here we begin at least to get something like first-hand evidence, for we have the manufactured object itself, not Caesar's impression of a Celtic G.o.d, or Herodotus' transcript of a Scythian word. We can judge for ourselves of fabrics and styles, and though, of course, we have only objects of the least perishable sorts, stone, metal, pottery, we have, at all events, in the pottery the most imitative of arts, and therefore the widest basis for conclusions as to the principles of a style. Moreover, outside the sea-borne culture of the Mediterranean, pottery does not travel far: its uses are domestic, not commercial. John Gilpin's fate is typical of those who would carry things on horseback in bottles. Like words, however, potsherds enlighten us more about frontiers and contrasts than about uniformities. They are terribly provincial and tell their tale with a tw.a.n.g. We can trace our _Bandkeramik_ and _Schnurkeramik_ and _Urfirnissmalerei_ and all that sort of technological idiom, across the map, as we can trace the _centum_ and _satem_ languages. But even if we could collate the 'Bandkeramiker' with the 'Satemvolker' as recent enthusiasts propose, we should be no nearer to a common technology for Europe than we were to a common language.

Metal, and even stone, implements do not help us much further, though they were traded more widely than pottery, and form larger provinces. In modern Europe, in the same way, pocket-knives are rather more uniform than milk-jugs; and where they differ, are referable to fewer types. But there is no unity, nor for the present any prospect of it. For anything more, we are reduced to the great crises of material culture, such as the introduction of bronze, of iron, of gla.s.s and glazed earthenware; and these we perceive increasingly not as turning points of the whole, but as processes within it, affecting now one region, now another, in a sequence which is clearly geographical and at very variable speed.