Man, Past and Present

by A. H. Keane

In other respects the social, one might almost say the national, groups are both more numerous and perhaps even more sharply discriminated in the Peninsula than in France. Besides the Basques and Portuguese, the latter with a considerable strain of negro blood[1273], we have such very distinct populations as the haughty and punctilious Castilians, who under an outward show of pride and honour, are capable of much meanness; the sprightly and vainglorious Andalusians, who have been called the Gascons of Spain, yet of graceful address and seductive manners; the morose and impassive Murcians, indolent because fatalists; the gay Valencians given to much dancing and revelry, but also to sudden fits of murderous rage, holding life so cheap that they will hire themselves out as assassins, and cut their bread with the blood-stained knife of their last victim; the dull and superstitious Aragonese, also given to bloodshed, and so obdurate that they are said to "drive nails in with their heads"; lastly the Catalans, noisy and quarrelsome, but brave, industrious, and enterprising, on the whole the best element in this motley aggregate of unbalanced temperaments. The various aspects of Spanish temperament are regarded by Havelock Ellis[1274] as manifestations of an aboriginally primitive race, which, under the stress of a peculiarly stimulating and yet hardening environment, has retained through every stage of development an unusual degree of the endowment of fresh youth, of elemental savagery, with which it started. This explains the fine qualities of Spain and her defects, the splendid initiative, and lack of sustained ability to carry it out, the importance of the point of honour and the glorification of the primitive virtue of valour.

Ethnic Relations in Italy.

In Italy the past and present relations, as elucidated especially by Livi and Sergi, may be thus briefly stated. After the first Stone Age, of which there are fewer indications than might be expected[1275], the whole land was thickly settled by dark long-headed Mediterranean peoples in neolithic times. These were later joined by Pelasgians of like type from Greece, and by Illyrians of doubtful affinity from the Balkan Peninsula. Indeed C. Penka[1276], who has so many paradoxical theories, makes the Illyrians the first inhabitants of Italy, as shown by the striking resemblance of the terramara culture of Aemilia with that of the Venetian and Laibach pile-dwellings. The recent finds in Bosnia also[1277], besides the historically proved (?) migration of the Siculi from Upper Italy to Sicily, and their Illyrian origin, all point in the same direction. But the facts are differently interpreted by Sergi[1278], who holds that the whole land was occupied by the Mediterraneans, because we find even in Switzerland pile-dwellers of the same type[1279].

Then came the peoples of Aryan speech, Celtic-speaking Alpines from the north-west and Slavs from the north-east, who raised the cephalic index in the north, where the brachy element, as already seen, still greatly predominates but diminishes steadily southwards[1280]. They occupied the whole of Umbria, which at first stretched across the peninsula from the Adriatic to the Mediterranean, but was later encroached upon by the intruding Etruscans on the west side. Then also some of these Umbrians, migrating southwards to Latium beyond the Tiber, intermingled, says Sergi, with the Italic (Ligurian) aborigines, and became the founders of the Roman state[1281]. With the spread of the Roman arms the Latin language, which Sergi claims to be a kind of Aryanised Ligurian, but must be regarded as a true member of the Aryan family, was diffused throughout the whole of the peninsula and islands, sweeping away all traces not only of the original Ligurian and other Mediterranean tongues, but also of Etruscan and its own sister languages, such as Umbrian, Oscan, and Sabellian.

At the fall of the empire the land was overrun by Ostrogoths, Heruli, and other Teutons, none of whom formed permanent settlements except the Longobards, who gave their name to the present Lombardy, but were themselves rapidly assimilated in speech and general culture to the surrounding populations, whom we may now call Italians in the modern sense of the term.

Arts and Ethics.

When it is remembered that the Aegean culture had spread to Italy at an early date, that it was continued under Hellenic influences by Etruscans and Umbrians, that Greek arts and letters were planted on Italian soil (Magna Graecia) before the foundation of Rome, that all these civilisations converged in Rome itself and were thence diffused throughout the West, that the traditions of previous cultural epochs never died out, acquired new life with the Renascence and were thus perpetuated to the present day, it may be claimed for the gifted Italian people that they have been for a longer period than any others under the unbroken sway of general humanising influences.

The Rumanians.

These "Latin Peoples," as they are called because they all speak languages of the Latin stock, are not confined to the West. To the Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, with the less known and ruder Walloon of Belgium and Romansch of Switzerland, Tyrol, and Friuli, must be associated the Rumanian current amongst some nine millions of so-called "Daco-Rumanians" in Moldavia and Wallachia, i.e. the modern kingdom of Rumania. The same Neo-Latin tongue is also spoken by the Tsintsars or Kutzo-Vlacks[1282] of the Mount Pindus districts in the Balkan Peninsula, and by numerous Rumanians who have in later times migrated into Hungary. They form a compact and vigorous nationality, who claim direct descent from the Roman military colonists settled north of the Lower Danube by Trajan after his conquest of the Dacians (107 A.D.). But great difficulties attach to this theory, which is rejected by many ethnologists, especially on the ground that, after Trajan's time, Dacia was repeatedly swept clean by the Huns, the Finns, the Avars, Magyars and other rude Mongolo-Turki hordes, besides many almost ruder Slavic peoples during the many centuries when the eastern populations were in a state of continual flux after the withdrawal of the Roman legionaries from the Lower Danube. Besides, it is shown by Roesler[1283] and others that under Aurelian (257 A.D.) Trajan's colonists withdrew bodily southwards to and beyond the Hemus to the territory of the old Bessi (Thracians), i.e. the district still occupied by the Macedo-Rumanians. But in the 13th century, during the break-up of the Byzantine empire, most of these fugitives were again driven north to their former seats beyond the Danube, where they have ever since held their ground, and constituted themselves a distinct and far from feeble branch of the Neo-Latin community. The Pindus, therefore, rather than the Carpathians, is to be taken as the last area of dispersion of these valiant and intelligent descendants of the Daco-Romans. This seems the most rational solution of what A. D. Xenopol calls "an historic enigma," although he himself rejects Roesler's conclusions in favour of the old view so dear to the national pride of the present Rumanian people[1284]. The composite character of the Rumanian language—fundamentally Neo-Latin or rather early Italian, with strong Illyrian (Albanian) and Slav affinities—would almost imply that Dacia had never been Romanised under the empire, and that in fact this region was for the first time occupied by its present Romance speaking inhabitants in the 13th century[1285]. The nomadic life of the Rumanians is in itself, as Peisker points out[1286], a refutation of their descent from settled Roman colonists, and indicates a Central Asiatic origin. The mounted nomads grazed during the summer "on most of the mountains of the Balkan peninsula, and took up their winter quarters on the sea-coasts among a peasant population speaking a different language. Thence they gradually spread, unnoticed by the chroniclers, along all the mountain ranges, over all the Carpathians of Transylvania, North Hungary, and South Galicia, to Moravia; towards the north-west from Montenegro onwards over Herzegovina, Bosnia, Istria, as far as South Styria; towards the south over Albania far into Greece.... And like the peasantry among which they wintered (and winter) long enough, they became (and become) after a transitory bilingualism, Greeks, Albanians, Servians, Bulgarians, Ruthenians, Poles, Slovaks, Chekhs, Slovenes, Croatians ... a mobile nomad stratum among a strange-tongued and more numerous peasant element, and not till later did they gradually take to agriculture and themselves become settled."

Ethnic Relations in Greece.