Nicolae Iorga

“ Perhaps the best way to become acquainted with a country, instead of reading books, often grounded on other books, without the truthful accent to be found only in the uncorrupted and ancient sources, is to search personally the historic places to obtain a knowledge of the past and to link together the present aspects of nature with the memories of forgotten ages. Therefore would it not assuredly be preferable as a method of initiation into the true soul of the Roumanian and into the real meaning of his country? ”

“ 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 ». ”

“ Is is admitted that Byzantine society created none of the elements which form this rich and brilliant synthesis of art. Nothing is owed to new inspirations; no particular note of a new race is struck; there is no influence of a special milieu, no discovery due to the existence of an artist of genius, all we can trace in the development of Byzantine civilization being the presence of able writers and perfect technicians, all seeking to give greater proportions to borrowed models. Roman, Greek and Oriental art united to give that interesting blend: the Byzantine. ”

“ 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. ”

“ In their murky depths, as in the shops of old Portugal, in Evora for example, the old-fashioned merchant, always a Roumanian (not, as in Moldavia, a Jew) , leisurely attended to the peasant who came only on holidays to replenish the provisions of his tiny white dwelling, or to sit for a few hours under the shelter of dried branches to sip a glass of the delicious local wine, to the strains of the old and young gypsy fiddlers, all born musicians. ”

“ In the fifteenth century the Latin life of South-Eastern Europe was no longer represented by French dukes or Catalan and Navarrese adventurers; Venice, the practical and the calculating, was the sole heiress of the former barons in Greece, and the last of these was a nobleman of indifferent attainments like Pierre de St. Exupery, or a fortune-hunter in the style of the Italian tyrants of his time, like Antonio Acciaiuoli, Lord of Athens. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Louis XIV was the first modern king of France, but modern France, unitary and centralised (the created France not the historical) , was the work of the political struggles of the Revolution.
The Revolution was not the beginning of a new era. Its ideas and methods were to be found at the beginning of the 15th century in the riotous Paris of Caboche. Without the intervention of the «absolute» monarchy the outburst would have forestalled Mirabeau by four hundred years. But the former free life of the cities, the greatest thing in that greatest epoch of mankind, the middle ages, was crushed. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The old libraries of the Roumanian boyards were full of books chosen from the best current literature of France. Many reforms, such as the liberation of the peasants, held up to that time in the chains of mediaeval bondage, were due, when not to these counsellors, to the spirit of French thought, which had penetrated deep into the Roumanian soul. The high school, where the Greek tradition of grammar and dry literary exercises had held dominion, was wholly transformed. ”

“ Here lies a more glorious and important path to peace and liberty than that provided by the relegation of all these States to be mere tools in a Franco-Italian rivalry to which France brings a supremacy of culture while Italy presents all the glories of her commercial traditions of the Middle Ages. ”

“ Bolshevism dawned for these inchoate masses, at first in whatever manner it particularly appealed to them. All that is foreign will disappear: pedantic Marxism, the new bureaucracy, the ridiculously belligerent irreligion which imagines that religion can be set up and as easily put down by mere decrees, the hero-worship of the chiefs of the movement, the mummified idol of Lenin. But the local form, the soviets themselves, will remain because centuries of Russian history, which sought them unavailing, have gone to their making. ”

“ They live like sisters, friendly and ready to help each other. I lecture there on World History, Roumanian History, the History of Literature and Art, and university professors aid us. One lecture a day in the summer and once a week in the winter, for two hours and more, and with what warm interest they all listen! No desks, no distinctions, no rewards and no punishments. A sound curiosity, true love for the subject in hand are the sole binding links. The students compare notes taken at their assembly and seek to reconstruct the text as to ideas and form. ”

“ French literature is the leading element, after the ancient Greek, and often in contradiction to the Greek of modern times, considered to be an obsolete form of expression, no longer corresponding to the mental needs of a new society. Writers in their own languages still searched the classical, and above all the philosophical, literature of France, for models. Often the genuine manifestations of the nations called to a new life were endangered by the powerful influence of this splendid foreign model. ”

“ But, above all, the inflexible dogma of the old language, an unintelligible Latin, the sonorous syllables of which resound like the ancient words of command of the armies of once glorious Rome. Here no particularism can be allowed, whereas individuality is always permissible in the East. ”

“ Understanding the Gospel, the Apostles, the hymns of the Liturgy, the peasants loved more than ever before the church which did not disdain to bring to their level the truths of the faith and the consolations of the Holy Gospel. In effect, the Roumanian orthodoxy, free from internal dissensions and unfettered by a foreign language or, as with the Slavs, by an archaic form of a forgotten dialect, was a popular protestantism bound to the conservatism of the eastern creed and bearing some resemblances to the Greek and Slav orthodoxies. ”

“ The prejudice of successive national monarchies of the past can no better withstand the judgment of the historian. He rather gains the impression that the state of the gods, the state for the « four corners of the earth » is successively helped and sustained, to the end of their power, by all oriental nations. None of them, when occupied by a dynasty foreign in our sense of the word, has the humilitating sentiments of a vanquished nation. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The strong sense for the necessity of rule by the Caesars, considered the only legitimate sovereigns of the world, made, in later times, of the many-tongued inhabitants of the Carpathians, the Pindus and the Balkans, the obedient subjects of the new Byzantine princes, the Sultans of the Ottoman Turk. In the 18th and 19th centuries, the richer classes were enamoured of the same western currents, coming first of all from France, which was the creator of a new civilisation. ”

“ But in all these countries the peasant is the backbone of the nation, the most active and the most efficient element of the State, the least prone to sudden changes and revolutionary madness. And in none of these countries, except perhaps for a short period in very recent Bulgarian politics, has a party of peasants for the peasantry been formed as have other parties to represent the various classes of society. The peasant organisation of the deceased Stamboliiski was only a weapon in the hands of a talented but monstrously ambitious pedagogue. ”

“ For overworked women students of the universities, the benevolence of the Princess-Mother has provided a small property as a shelter for the summer months. During this session (July 15th to August 15th) hundreds of students of both sexes and of all ages, conditions and culture come to the summer courses where the problems of the day are freely and fearlessly discussed. A whole month of fraternal life which, for most of them, is the dawn of a new moral sense in their lives. Then the pupils of the permanent yearly school are chosen, but not for their knowledge — for the quality of their souls. ”

“ In Prince Demetrius Cantemir, who was forced to take refuge in Russia after the catastrophe of his great ally the Czar Peter, unexpectedly defeated by the Turks in 1711, the Roumanian race had an universal genius, able to treat in different languages— Roumanian, Latin, Greek, Turkish, Slavonic — all topics, from the Oriental songs to a geography on the lines of the anthropogeographical essays of our own days, and to a history whose lines of original development preceded and inspired the parallel ideas of Montesquieu. ”

“ Prophets of Israel, the tree of Jesse and the genealogy of the Virgin, the Sybils and Sapients of ancient Greece, the joys of Paradise and the torments of Hell, figures representing the hereditary enemies of the peasant, sinners of all grades down to the man who comes too late to church, not omitting the usurer and the grasping merchant, all these form the interesting gallery of folklore in South-Eastern Europe, and were duly made to play their part in the church-decoration. ”

“ First, under Constantine, and then under his succesors, we come across no attempt, in the course of two whole centuries, to delineate the uniform Byzantine church or palace: the Roman tradition is still too strong. All means were employed to maintain this tradition in art as well as in legislation, upon coins, in the law-academy of Beyrouth, in the armies, in certain works of literature (as in the memoirs of Ammianus Marcellinus, at a period when the emperor Julian was the imitator of the ancient Hellene Lukianos) . ”

“ The oldest democracy of Europe was alone able to create a State of its own which preserved the name of «Roman Country» — «Țara Românească».
Another characteristic of Roumanian history is the way in which, thanks to geographical conditions, it was able to combine all currents of Art, and, to a lesser degree, all tendencies of thought, Eastern and Western alike, in an ethnographical synthesis. Before the Slavs of the 7th century altogether disappeared as an ethnical component, such tendencies as could form a corresponding synthesis in the moral field of artistic creation were retained. ”

“ The great battles were fought in the Balkans, on the main road to the City of the Caesars, where new frontiers were traced and new lines of demarcation were established. Withdrawn from the noise of conflict and the making of history, treasure of energy were transmitted from generation to generation. ”