THE ROUMANIAN SYNTHESIS
There is no subject under the sun entirely devoid of interest to human society. All that concerns mankind forms a unity, and the duty of the scholar is to discern and to present it in some form or other. The difference between great and small nations, between large and small territories is of no value to the seeker after novelty, nor for the creator of new syntheses. All that is characteristic, all that can supply impulse and determine a movement, is in itself of interest. In the great problems of the more important human groups the relation is often to be found in an isolated corner, where a small nation, or such a one as has lost most of its components conserves the predominant features of its particular being. Without knowing to a certain extent the life of all men, there is no possibility of comprehending one single individual.
This is true not only of all human problems, but also of all branches of science as well.
The celebrated Roumanian bacteriologist, Babeș, in his maiden spech as a newly-elected Fellow of the Roumanian Academy, said, with true insight and a deep sense of human nature: «There are no small subjects; by digging yet deeper under them one reaches, willy-nilly, the great fundamental truths of science ». Because, may I add, we see different sciences, but all are the expression of the same mind seeking the secrets of a Nature which is strongly unitary, notwithstanding the deceptions of our great mistress of error and delight, the Goddess Illusion.
I say all this as an apology for bringing before an American public the problems — already solved — of the Roumanian synthesis, at a time when the question of future synthesis preoccupies the minds of all thinkers in this immense country, which has become a new fatherland for human beings drawn from nearly all the races of the globe. This question was recently defined by a clever French sociologist, Monsieur Siegfried, as the new and arduous struggle between the old Puritanism of the first settlers combined with that of their later associates who were rapidly fused into the same religious and linguistic community, and the over-numerous newcomer, holding other points of view, other variations of feeling and other habits of our great mistress of error and delight, the Goddess Illusion.
I say all this as an apology for bringing before an American public the problems — already solved — of the Roumanian sythesis, at a time when the question of future sythesis preoccupies the minds of all thinkers in this immense country, which has become a new fatherland for human beings drawn from nearly all the races of the globe. This question was recently defined by a clever French sociologist, Monsieur Siegfried, as the new and arduous struggle between the old Puritanism of the first settlers combined with that of their later associates who were rapidly fused into the same religious and linguistic community, and the over-numerous newcomer, holding other points of view, othe variations of feeling and other habits of thought. Attack and defence, new and old America. To a virile and discriminating French mind this seems to be the truth, but, if other methods than that of reducing the infinite varieties of facts to a few broad lines be employed, it is not certainly the ultimate verity. Here, a new form of mankind is in course of development, a slow development because the components live under the domination of natural ties, of religious organisations and of theories to be found in books. I will try to show how a synthesis of nationality, language, popular customs and art developed in the course of a millenium on the banks of the Lower Danube and the slopes of the Carpathians without recourse to fighting against such obstacles, in what manner the Roumanian Nation, composed of nearly twenty million people, was slowly but surely moulded. The sense of the ancient Latin proverb «Ab uno disce omnes» can thus be changed as far as the broad lines of the achievement are concerned.
However, to come to my subject.
Nineteen centuries ago, a large but dispersed society inhabited not only the territory of the present-day Roumania, but also the whole Balkan Peninsula, the islands of the Archipelago and Asia Minor: the Thracians, neighbours of the Illyrians who dwelt on the shores of the Adriatic Sea. After a century or two, however, they had disappeared; with the single exception of the Greeks on the shores of all seas in this south-east corner of Europe, Latin-speaking subjects of the Roman Empire alone led a life in which all the traditions of the apparently completed past were to be recognised. Three centuries after this process of blending two very different civilisations, the Slavs, continuing the great movement of nations towards Constantinople and the great cities of new Rome, occupied the vast valleys of this territory not only as invaders, but as peaceful inhabitants: Roman and Slavonic tongues were spoken on the same spot. In a certain number of years, before 1000 AD certainly, a single mode of speech served for the manifestations of an apparently homogeneous people.
As these people began to organise, in forms corresponding to the oldest imperial traditions, under domini, who were called « domni», in their residences the Catholic priest sang the Mass in his way, while the poor Orthodox celebrant in his wooden church continued his accustomed oriental rites. The Gothic church of the princess, a foreigner, stood side by side with the Orthodox edifices in which all forms of the great Byzantine tradition were represented: Greek, Serbian; the art of the city and of the village and monastery, all were manifest.
There were two principalities: Moldavia in the north, the older, Wallachia in the south; a military and a popular state: two dynasties of opposite character, ever-ready to fight no matter who the opponent. At the beginning of the 15th century, however, only Orthodoxy remained, a single style for the churches of both principalities.
In the 18th century, under the influence of western philosophy similar forms of administration occur. In the 19th, prompted by the general awakening of consciousness to nationality, we find the same national soul. At the beginning of yet another century the race was strengthened by the addition of such parts of the national territory as, during long centuries, had been occupied by the Hungarian kings in Transylvania or more recently filched by the Austrians in the Bukovina and the Russians in Bessarabia.
In this moment, too, a great part of the Roumanian race is not subject to the free realm, but lives under four regimes of foreign domination, Greek, Serbian, Bulgarian and Albanian. In the realm of United Roumania we have today one million and a half Hungarians and Szekler, many thousand Germans, Transylvanian Saxons, Swabians in the Banat, German colonists in the Bukovina and in Bessarabia, more than a million German and Magyarspeaking Jews, and a goodly number of Great and Little Russians. But in a century or two a greater synthesis will certainly be achieved with nearly all these elements under the rule of the same state and under the influence of a strong national vitality.
All these changes can, and shall, be explained. It is my purpose to find reasons for these tendencies towards the necessary unity, and for every new difficulty encountered.
To sum up: the reason for this historical phenomen is the association to work and the moral sense of brotherhood in such a work, which is enlightened by higher ideals.
There is a generally accepted fable that the Romance grouping on the banks of the Danube is the outcome of the conquest of Trajan, that in the new provinces, wrested from the renitent Dacians, he introduced colonists from all regions of his great Empire. None can deny the imperial measures to increase the numbers of the inhabitants, to add urban elements of a higher culture and calibre, capable of discovering new sources of wealth and working the mines. But long before this official decision and its results, a popular expansion introduced not first here, but particularly in the districts south of the Danube, such components of the population as had the same standard of life as the old indigenous population. As in the South of Gaul, the Romanization of which was possible only by an influx of foreign immigrants, numerous farmers and shepherds (these last finding in the Pindus the same possibilities of transhumance as those of Gaul in the Appenines) abandoned Italy, which had become a country of great cities, of villas and of slavery, nourished with imported food, to seek and find a larger field of activity in this third peninsula of Southern Europe. Diving side by side, tending herds, ploughing diligently the same fertile soil, the two races mingled in a single mass of peasants, scattered in villages leading moral lives in which the traditions of two different, but not too different civilisations were united.
Not the great idea of the Empire, not the decisions of the imperial legates, not the prestige of a higher nature, nor the influence of the Latin-speaking merchants accomplished this so much as the human fellowship engendered by sharing the same daily toil. This active community was also necessary for the meeting of later imported elements : otherwise the searchers for gold, the licensed legionaries, the adventurers, the men of the Caledonian Mountains, the mystical Syrian, the worshipper of the ox Apis could never have been thrown into the same melting-pot to form the resulting exclusively homogeneous community.
When the Touranians, masters of the Steppes, the Huns, Avars, Petchenegs, Cumans, Tartars came with different manners of life, they were wholly incapable of influencing this ever-developing synthesis. There was no partaking in the work, no means of striking a new note in this historical social symphony.
It was otherwise with the Slavs.
The character of their invasion is imperfectly recorded.
They came, not as mild dreamers, devoted to the gods of stream and river, nor were they the teachers in the agricultural sense of much older imitators of Rome as the ancestors of the Roumanians in the 6th and 7th centuries. But neither were they, on the other hand, the wild warriors capable of destroying all trace of their predecessors in the domination of the Balkans. I have sought to show the means they employed in crossing the Danube, ways which correspond to the great routes of ancient civilisations. Some were left behing in extended groups of villages, and these were easily assimilated by the great Roumanian masses. Where the Slavonic agricultural terms are numerous in the Roumanian language, this is not to be explained by the Roumanians having been taught by the newcomers; the old inhabitants were accustomed to ploughing the fields, but the Slavized-Greek merchants on the right bank of the Danube later exercised a strong influence upon the Roumanians.
No other foreign influence was to change the substance of a new and entirely consolidated nation. Though the Magyars were sent into Transylvania, they only formed isolated oases, in the boroughs of Carolingian imitation and in the neighbouring villages. The religious separation between these Catholics and the Orthodox Roumanian population was an insuperable obstacle. The Saxons were brought from their ancient lands on the Moselle for the better cultivation of the fields, but against these colonists, too, who were to form cities by themselves in the sense of the west, the same religious barrier was reared. Each of these nations remained as in an entrenched camp. Transylvania evolved a separate character which it has conserved to this day. As the Teutonic knights were called about the year 1200. from their distant strongholds in the Holy Land to be the guardians of these Transylvanian marches against the Pagans of the orient, they assembled Magyar colonies the better to delimit these borders. As a certain number of the Roumanian free-men too had had this same mission before, they intermingled, the Magyar language predominating, even among non-Magyar types, which is to be found in a minority of this highly intereesting population. The Transylvanian ethnographical aspect gained a new note by the creation of these so-called Szekler (or men of the « seats » or «tribunals » of justice).
About the year 1000 the first political foundations of the Roumanians are to be traced on the right bank of the Danube, under the influence of the Byzantine Empire, which had restored its northern frontier. Princes were mentioned in the Annals of Eastern Rome in the epoch of the Comnenes, in the neighbourhood of Silistra and in the present-day Dobrudja. This is a Byzantine form of state-creation. At that time a great part of the Roumanians on the left shore of the Danube lived in free associations of peasants which I call «Romaniae». Here we have another, rural, form of organisation. Some of these groups united in districts in the valleys, and possessed as military chiefs, and ranking superior to the civil judges, the dukes or, to use a Slavonic term, the voevodes. The second form evolved. The similar organisations of Transylvania were doomed to decay after the consolidation of the Magyar conquest.
In the middle of the 12th century, the groups of the right bank of the river Olt, under the shelter of the Hungarian stronghold of Severing lived separately, on this river and the neighbouring river Jiiu. The left bank was occupied by a mightier state, the capital of which was Argeș. Here the Prince borrowed the externals of his-kingly neighbours in Transylvania as symbols of his rank and this voevode wore garments of purple and coronet of pearls and gold belts, as found in the grave of Ba-sarab, Prince of Argeș. This is the third organisation for a nation which, here and in the Balkans, from the Black Sea to the Adriatic, began to prepare itself for a historical mission, to be curtailed only by the Turkish invasion. A fourth form, the Hungarian province ruled by a voevode appointed by the king, was set up in the new Roumanian province of Moldavia, which was later colonized and ruled by a small group of Roumanian warriors imported from the Hungarian shire of Maramureș.
In a certain number of years a single form remained for all free Roumanian groupings, notwithstanding that two dynasties maintained the two-fold existence of the principalities of Roumania: Wallachia, which stood as a unity for the « Roumanian territory » and that on the: banks of the river Moldova, known as «the Roumanian country of Moldavia ». The popular authority of the judges and dukes, the new settlement of knights, the necessary imitation of the Byzantine Empire melted before a new conception of the State. The Prince was the master of the territory and of his- subjects; this was Byzantine; but he submitted to the guidance of and accepted the guarantees of the nobles (boyards) who were all knights in the feudal sense and ever-ready for battle; this was Angevin and: came from Hungary. Before his «majesty» the least of the peasants could present himself: with complaints and requests: this was popular and of very old tradition.
Moldavia and Wallachia had in the beginning marked differences of organisation: the first under the stronger influence of Hungary, the second also subject to the interference of Poland, which had extended its frontiers to embrace the former Russo-Lithuanian state. In the 15th century very little remained of this differentiation. The political synthesis existed and, as the Phanariots of the 18th century began their reforms, these were extended over the two principalities without discrimination.
The people had long been united. The same mode of thought and feeling, the same traditions and the same enduring superstitions were common to each. The Roumanians living in the mountains of Maramureș? (the original conquerors of Moldavia came from here) were and still are able to understand and sympathise with the riverdwellers of the Danube: only between the Roumanians of ancient Dacia and their co-nationals in the deep valleys of the Pindus is this practically an impossibility: the language differs in certain essentials, when not in the morphology and the basic details of the vocabulary. Now the great families have begun to disappear, because of the accustomed changes of the princes from one principality to another, the old sense of a particular right for the now extinct dynasties having faded away. Each prince who was allied to the indigenous nobility brought his relatives with him. A single class of leaders was formed in this way during the course of the 18th century.
In the religious field this same transformation was rapidly accomplished. The catholic propaganda of the Franciscans and the black-gowned fraternity of St. Dominic owed their earlier successes to the need for the rulers of Wallachia and Moldavia of military aid from the neighbouring realms of Hungary and Poland. Latin bishops officiated in both capitals in the 14th, and, to a lesser extent, in the 15th century. But the people remained faithful to their ancient oriental creed. Not by discrimination of dogma, but because Orthodoxy, a religion of poor village priests, of improvised bishops was not the gift of a foreign hierarchy, but the arduous and protracted creation of their own evolution, a Christianity of folk-lore. The two churches, each with its own metropolitan (that of Moldavia having, at the end of the 16th century, almost patriarchal rights), remained, but intercourse between them was that of perfect fraternity. When, in the 17th century, the Greek Creed was endangered by Calvinist propaganda led by the Hungarian princes in Transylvania, both the Roumanian religious chiefs acted in concert to oppose it successfully. Where this did not avail, the inmates of the numerous and well-populated monasteries of ancient tradition, a unitary organisation of calligraphers, miniaturists and artists of all branches, a truer product of the religious sense of the single nation, were there to uphold the Rite.
The highest expression of a people is through its art and literature. In this branch too, the accomplishment of the Roumanian unity took place with amazing rapidity.
The first churches and their ornaments were imported. Two Latin buildings in the former capitals of the principalities were the first to be erected, followed by good copies of Byzantine and Serbian models in Wallachia. Skilful silversmiths from Transylvania or from Dalmatia provided the metal work. But in the middle of the 15th century the younger principality of Moldavia was courageous enough to set in motion the elaboration of an artistic synthesis. The form of the Byzantine church, with the pronaos before the « ship » with the three apses of the choir and of the altar was necessarily conserved, but, as the artists were Saxons from Transylvania, they brought the manner of ornamentation used in the cities of their small and mountainous fatherland with them: so did the Gothic enter into the new and indigenous form of Roumanian art. This is not all: the eye of the Moldavian was accustomed to the rich colours of the clear azure skies, with the diverse aspects of the flower-studded meadows and the vast yellow undulating cornfields. All this was introduced into the ornamentation of the church in the making. Thus, besides the interior pictures, which were at first the work of Greek artist-immigrants, other means were employed to ensure a triumphant polychromy; the buildings were erected on a green stone foundation: red and blue enamelled bricks formed the longitudinal ribs of its frame, the blind, or Lombardic arcades, which are also to be found in many Byzantine examples, were emphasised, at the point at which the arches met, by plaques of faïence of all colours of the rainbow, while rows of them were used under the roof which, as in the lowly huts of the peasants, were built of a mosaic of shingles. A special artifice gave the smaller tower a double foundation, while the great belfry, in the centre of the lofty walls, dominated the whole, presenting an ensemble of perfect harmony and good proportions.
This was the form embraced by the very soul of the nation, and, to make it more gay still, an open peristyle was added: at first in Moldavia. With a stone surround separating these two ranks or aisles of blind arcades, and a gorgeous embroidery of clear and bright external mural decoration, also first employed in Moldavia and later in the neighbouring principality, the definitive form of Roumanian ecclesiastical art was reached, to be conserved until the middle of the 19th century. It was the adaptation of occidental and oriental traditions to suit the needs of the local folk-lore.
The same thing occurred in literature. At a time when the monks, the secretaries of the princes and the writers of the meagre annals now surviving in the Slavonic tongue, borrowed from the Slavs in the Balkans and from the Ruthenians under the sceptre of Poland, the poetry of the people sweetly sang the sufferings of loving hearts and the valiant deeds of warrior-princes, of which the Serbs, masters of the ballad, and themselves imitators of the French, were the teachers. No difference existed in these products of the general Roumanian soul between the higher and the lower classes of the Eastern and Western districts; the wandering shepherds took with them the plaintive doinas and the singers at the feasts of the princes did not attempt to differentiate between Wallachian or Moldavian epics.
When, in the 17th century, cultivated literature appeared in the Roumanian language, Moldavia took the lead, her chroniclers recalling the glorious Latin origins of the race and her priests inculcating in the people a mild Christianity, as that of the Archbishop Dositheus, who translated the psalms in verse. All that was achieved in the northern principality was imitated, adopted and developed by the southern. About 1690 the Gospel, after many attempts, was presented in a definitive form. A single Roumanian style abolished the particularities of the different provinces. As in the popular ballad, the same note of generality, the same possibility of its being understood by all members of the nations is the characteristic feature of this literature.
Of later days the cultured poets and writers of prose in the 18th and 19th centuries naturally employed this rare element of moral community for the race. The highest modern representative of Roumanian poesy, Mihail Eminescu, gives to his finest lines, full as they are of philosophical thought, a form which is understood by the meanest peasant in Roumania, so innate is the understanding of the sentiments pervading the work of the poet.
This is the most solid foundation of national life and, because of this, it imbued a peasant-army, at a time of arduous struggle for national identity, with invincible, if instinctive, solidarity.
The Roumanian synthesis which today plays its allotted part in forging into homogeneity the masses of diverse race and tongue in the present-day Roumania, which, despite these obstacles to progress, neverless possess a certain identity of aims and aspirations, has been the achievement of one class and one class only: the peasantry. They have infused their fundamental folklore with all that was brought by the alien or discovered by the cultured. All syntheses proceed from the truest representatives, from the most virile factors of a society. Thus has it been with Roumania and thus, may I say, will it be, notwithstanding all theories and traditions, all counsels or obstruction, in this great America.