Nationalism and Culture (75 page)

Misery had lowered pride and slain freedom. Superstition brought about the most frightful of all scourges, that wealth fell, for the greater part, into the "dead hand." The mania for establishing primogenitures atid endowing the church with property was carried so far that at the beginning of the revolution of this century [the nineteenth] more than three-fourths of all the land in the country was subject to servitudes.

One might here mention that it was just at the time of absolutism that Spanish literature and painting reached its highest point. But let us not deceive ourselves. What was here produced was merely the intellectual precipitate of a past timej it inspired "only a few of the foremost minds, whose works were appreciated by a small and dwindling minority and awakened no response among the people themselves. Therefore Diercks remarks very justly:

If along with the governmental ruin came distinguished achievements in several fields of culture, if poetry and painting flourished vigorously, the fact must not deceive us as to the real causes of the general ruin, and it could not check it. Similar contradictions are offered as well by the cultural life of other countries. The surviving vital force of the people made itself effective in the only fields where, under the weight of spiritual and temporal despotism, it could be active.*^

' Geschichte Sf>aniens. Band II, p. 394.

The high development of Russian literature under tsarism is an excellent illustration of the correctness of this view. Anyway, this glorious upsurge of Spanish literature did not last long, and its sudden collapse served to make it all the more noticeable later.

Italian culture never stood at a higher level than during the time, from the twelfth to the fifteenth century, when the whole peninsula was split into hundreds of tiny communities and there could be no talk at all of political unity. During that period the free cities were veritable oases of a higher intellectual and social culture of an astounding diversity and a creative vigor never since reached. If we leave out of consideration the city-republics of ancient Hellas there never was another period in the history of European peoples which produced in so short a time so great a wealth of works of culture. The English scholar, Francis Galton, stated in his works that Florence alone produced in that strange epoch more minds of distinction in every field of culture than all the monarchic states of contemporary Europe together.

In fact the Italian cities at that time were like fruitful seed-beds of intellectual and cultural activity, and they revealed to European humanity wholly new perspectives of a social development which later, by the appearance of the national state, the influence of business capital and the growth of political ambitions, was diverted into quite other lines. In the Italian cities was born that spirit which revolted against the enslaving influence of the church. Here, too, the two philosophical currents of nominalism and realism reached their highest pitch, after having been vitalized by Arabian intellect, and because of the stimulus they had received, even before the appearance of Humanism, were looking for new roads to knowledge. For the real meaning of these two movements— particularly of nominalism in the later phases of its development—consists in this, that they were trying to set philosophic thought, which for a thousand years had been under the intellectual guardianship of ecclesiastical theology, once more on its own feet. Only when one becomes clearly conscious of the distorted thought processes of Christian scholasticism can one correctly value this unmistakable change in the ways of judging spiritual matters. For four hundred years the thought of the scholastic was occupied with the most trivial questions and lost itself in the rubbish of a dead formalism which could open no new outlooks to the human mind. For several decades Christian theologians quarreled over how many spirits could stand on the point of a needle; what sort of excrement the angels emitted; whether, and how, Christ had completed his task of salvation; whether he came to earth as a pumpkin, a beast or a woman; whether a mouse which nibbled at the Host devoured the body of Christ; and what the consequences would be if he did. These and similar questions engaged

the minds of the literate for centuries, and their hair-splitting explanations passed as signs of profoundest learning.

In the cities developed the first preliminaries of the rebirth of science, which with the ascendancy of the ecclesiastical mind had fallen into utter decay. In 1209 a church council at Paris forbade to ecclesiastics the study of those writings about natural history which the Christian world had received from the ancients. As far back as the tenth century there existed in Salerno a high school of the sciences, especially of medicine, where mostly Arabian and Jewish physicians served as teachers. These schools contributed greatly to the spread of Arabic learning and Arabic education in Italy, and so throughout the rest of Europe, by which the first stimulus to the reawakening of science was given. A long line of distinguished discoveries fall in that glorious epoch, many of which supplied the indispensable preliminaries for the great outburst of discovery at the end of the sixteenth century. The magical personality of Leonardo da Vinci, who was not only one of the greatest masters of all time in the most diverse fields of art, but also proved himself a thinker of the first rank in every branch of scientific research, and achieved, especially in mechanics, quite outstanding results, is in its astounding many-sidedness and the greatness of its genius justly the symbol of that wonderful time in which the creative urge of man achieved such powerful expression.

In the cities the handicrafts rose to a greatness never known before. Human labor came again to be honored and was no longer counted a disgrace. In the city municipalities of Northern Italy there were produced the finest embroideries, the most splendid silken stuffs. Every city competed in the production of inlaid steelware, splendid goldsmith's work, and objects of everyday use. Blacksmith's work, metal-casting, mechanical devices, and all the other branches of handicraft, reached a perfection which by its inexhaustible diversity and its fineness and sincerity of execution even today calls forth our admiration.

What was produced in every field of art during that blossom-time of culture excels everything that had made its appearance since the downfall of the Hellenic world. Countless monumental buildings in every city of the peninsula still reveal to us the spirit of that mighty epoch, in which the pulse beat of the community was so strong, and artists, craftsmen and scholars worked together to bring forth the best of which they were capable. In the cathedrals and council houses of the cities, their bell-towers and city gates, in the erection of which the entire population collaborated, is revealed the "creative genius of the masses," as Kropotkin called it, in its full greatness and endless diversity. It filled every undertaking with its spirit, breathed life into dead stones, embodied all the passionate longing that slumbers in men and yearns for fulfillment, and knit the tie that bound them into a community. What then brought men together for a

common effort was the vivid consciousness of an inner unity, which had its roots in the community—that invisible unity which is not imposed on the individual from without, but is the natural result of his social experience. Because man at that time felt always the living tie that bound him to all others there was no need to impose social connections upon him forcibly from without. Only out of this spirit could a free production arise which released all the creative forces in man and so brought the social life of the community to full expansion. In this way were the social prerequisites for the mighty architectural achievements of that great epoch first brought into being.

Like architecture, sculpture and painting ripened to a greatness whose like is to be found only in the Hellenic communities. From the creation of the South-Italian school of sculpture in the first half of the thirteenth century, and the work of Niccola Pisano in Tuscany, to the masterpieces of Donatello, Verrocchio, Sansovino and Michelangelo, almost every city brought forth its own line of distinguished sculptors, to whose abilities the spirit of the community gave wings. Never in so short a time were so large a number of important painters produced, such a wealth of great and greatest works brought to life. From Cimabue to Giotto, from the fresco painters of the later thirteenth century to Fra Angelico, Masaccio, and Masolino, from Pisanello and Castagno to Filippo Lippi, from Piero della Francesca and his circle to Mantegna and his numerous imitators, from Lorenzo di Credi to Verrocchio, Ghirlandajo and Botticelli, from Perugino to Bellini and Leonardo da Vinci, from Correggio, Giorgione, del Sarto, to Titian, Michelangelo and Raffaello, distinguished masters arose in almost every city and gave to painting an exalted status it had never known before. Many of the great masters displayed an astounding versatility and worked at the same time as painters, sculptors, bronze-founders, architects and craftsmen. Thus Pindemonte called Michelangelo the "man with four souls," because he painted the Last Judgment, carved the statue of Moses, vaulted the cupola of Saint Peter's, and wrote sonnets of terrific expressive power. In this way there was shaped in the Italian cities a culture which in a few centuries completely changed the aspect of the country and gave to its social life a trend which it had never possessed before.

At the same time the Italian language also was developing, and with it the literature of the country. At first the style of the Sicilian troubadours was dominant, but the Tuscan dialect came more and more into the foreground and, because of the rich culture of the Tuscan cities, steadily gained in influence. Poets like Guinicelli, Cavalcanti and Davanzati wrote in itj but the powerful poetry of Dante first gave to the language the irresistible vigor of expression, the plastic form and delicate coloring, which enabled the poet to depict everything that stirs the soul of man. Along with Dante

worked Petrarch and Boccaccio to shape that instrument of the soul^-a language.

That splendid culture which spread from Italy over most of the cities of Europe and in them also gave the impulse to a reshaping of social life unfolded at a time when the country was completely split up politically and the idea of national unity had as yet no power over the minds of men. The whole country was covered with a network of self-contained communities which defended their local independence with the same zeal as did the city-republics of ancient Hellas. In the municipality artists and craftsmen in their brotherhoods and guilds cooperated in a common task. The guilds were not merely the directors and administrators of economic life, they constituted also the sole basis for the political structure of the community. There were no political parties nor professional politicians in the modern sense. Each guild elected its representatives to the municipal council, where they carried out the instructions of their organizations and tried by conference with the delegates from other organizations to reach a settlement of all important questions on the basis of free agreement. And since every guild felt itself closely identified with the general interests of the city, things were decided by the vote of the corporations represented. The same procedure held in the federations of cities, the tiniest market town had the same rights as the richest municipality, since it had joined the alliance of its own free choice and had the same interest in its efficiency as all the other communities. At the same time every guild within the city and every city within the federation remained an independent organism which had control of its own finances, its own courts, its own administration, and could make and dissolve treaties with other associations on its own motion. Only the common requirements of the same tasks and the same interests brought the several guilds and municipalities together into corporate bodies of similar type so that they might carry out plans of wider scope.

The great advantage of this system lay in the fact that each member of a guild as well as the representatives of the guild in the corporation could easily keep track of all its functioning. Everyone was dealing with matters which he understood exactly and making decisions about them— matters about which he could speak as expert and connoisseur. If one compares this institution with the legislative and administrative bodies of the modern state, its moral superiority becomes instantly apparent. Neither the voter, today, nor the man who is said to represent him, is in a position that enables him to supervise in any degree (not to say completely) the monstrous mechanism of the central political apparatus. Every delegate is compelled almost every day to decide upon questions of which he has no personal knowledge and about which he must rely on the judgment of others. That such a system must inevitably lead to the worst sort of

maladjustment and injustice is indisputable. And since the individual voter is, for the same reason, in no better position to keep track of and to control the acts of his so-called "representatives," the caste of professional politicians, many of whom have in view only their own advantage, is able more easily to profit by the confusion and the gate is opened wide for every kind of moral corruption.

Next to these notorious evils which are today so unambiguously and so glaringly evident in every parliamentary state, the so-called "centralized representation" is the greatest hindrance to any social progress, standing in direct contradiction to all principles of natural development. Experience teaches us that every social innovation first permeates one little circle and only gradually achieves general recognition. For just this reason federalism offers the best security for unrestricted development, since it leaves to every community the possibility of trying out within its own circle any measures which it may think fitted to advance the welfare of its citizens. The community is, therefore, in a position to apply practical tests and so to subject immediately to the proof of positive experience any proposed innovations. It thus exerts an enlivening and stimulating influence upon neighboring communities, which are thus themselves put in a position to judge of the fitness or unfitness of the innovations. With the central representative bodies of our time such an education in social views is completely excluded. In such a structure, in the very nature of things, the most backward sections of the country have the strongest representation. Instead of the most advanced and intellectually active communities leading the others by their example, we have just the opposite5 the most downright mediocrity is always in the saddle and every impulse toward innovation is nipped in the bud; the most backward and intellectually sluggish sections of the country put fetters on the culturally most developed groups and cripple their initiative by their opposition. The best electoral system cannot alter this fact; it often serves only to make the situation harsher and more hopeless; for the reactionary germ lies in the system of central representation and is not at all affected by the varying forms of the suffrage.