Hallstatt culture

“ III. The Hallstatt (or Celtic?) civilization of bronze and iron roughly overlies the present area occupied by the broad-headed Alpine race; yet this type is not always identified with the Oriental culture. It seems to have appeared in Europe in a far lower stage of civilization, and to have subsequently made progress culturally upon the spot. ”

“ II. Throughout the eastern Alpine highlands, a culture far more highly evolved than the neolithic one in the West, and betraying certain Oriental affinities, appears at a very early time, a thousand years or more before the Christian era. This prehistoric civilization represents a transitional stage between bronze and iron.
In a secluded valley in upper Austria, close to the border line of Salzburg, by the little Alpine hamlet of Hallstatt, a remarkable necropolis was discovered more than a half century ago, which marked an epoch in archæological research. ”

“ This culture differs in some respects radically from that of the dolicho-blond communities, and it bears more of a resemblance to the culture of such a brunet group of peoples as the early historic communities of upper and middle Italy. If the view is to be accepted which is coming into currency latterly, that the Keltic is to be affiliated with the culture of Hallstatt and La Tène, such affiliation will greatly increase the probability that it is to be counted as a culture strongly influenced if not dominated by the Alpine stock. ”

“ A ledge under the shadow of a precipice makes a trying winter residence. The people of Hallstatt are not a blooming race: one sees many dwarfs and cripples among them. But to the summer traveller the place seems wonderfully picturesque. Most of the streets are flights of steps. The high-road has barely room to edge itself through among the old houses, between the window-gardens of bright flowers. On the hottest July day the afternoon is cool and shady. The gay, little skiffs and long, open gondolas are flitting continually along the lake, which is the main street of Hallstatt. ”

“ Germany, as we have seen, is not in the same position. When we are stripped we find no new stratum of culture growing up below the surface; society is simply dissolved, and in its place we find the masses, of which the most hopeful thing we can say is that they are an ordered body. Tradition has been torn in two. No—we have to build from the foundations up. But whether we shall build according to the changing needs of the seasons, [78] according to the casual balance of forces, or according to an idea and a symbol—that is the question! ”

“ In order to adapt ourselves to a new form of society we must know what it may look like, what it ought to look like, and what it will look like. We shall find that Germany is not going to be landed in an earthly Paradise, but in a world of toil, and one which for a long period will be a world of poverty, of a penurious civilization and of a deeply-endangered culture. ”

“ When access to the cultivation of the German spirit has become a common right of the whole people, Culture will become, if not the sign at least the presupposition of creative activity. The proof of capacity will then cease to be settled either between agitators and the masses, or in the dimness of privileged chanceries, but in the productive competition of men of high intellectual endowment. ”

“ Latinized and slaves to French fashion, were so estranged from the masses, that for the last two centuries the latter could have no part in the culture, taste, or æsthetic satisfactions of the upper strata of society, separated from them by an impassable gulf. As, therefore, the large majority of the German people had no interest in art, and troubled themselves little about it, German hysteria could not assume an artistic, æsthetic form. ”

“ Needless to say, the custom soon made its way from the district of Chromatistes to surrounding regions; and within two generations no one in all Flatland was colourless except the Women and the Priests.
Here Nature herself appeared to erect a barrier, and to plead against extending the innovation to these two classes. Many-sidedness was almost essential as a pretext for the Innovators. “Distinction of sides is intended by Nature to imply distinction of colours”—such was the sophism which in those days flew from mouth to mouth, converting whole towns at a time to the new culture. ”

“ We have yet to learn how far the efflorescence of the human mind is aided and modified by heredity, environment, atmosphere, as well as by education, encouragement and other stimuli equally potent.
But we do know that Germany, in spite of its famed universities and its feverish intellectual activity in many departments of knowledge, had to wait many long dreary centuries before it could point to a Goethe, a Schiller, a Humboldt, a Bach, or a Beethoven. We know that France—so long the reputed center of culture—has so far produced no great epic poet, no Cervantes, no Murillo. ”

“ The more conscientious observer, more particularly if he be a foreigner, cannot help noticing withal that no great disparity exists between that which the German scholar regards as his culture and that other triumphant culture of the new German classics, save in respect of the quantum of knowledge. Everywhere, where knowledge and not ability, where information and not art, hold the first rank,—everywhere, therefore, where life bears testimony to the kind of culture extant, there is now only one specific German culture—and this is the culture that is supposed to have conquered France? ”

“ Neither Teutonic nor Gallic, art and handicrafts reveal indigenous growth, and the same feature may be studied in town and village, in palace, cathedral and cottage.
We must remember that we are here dealing with a region of very ancient civilization. Taste has been slowly developed, artistic culture is of no mushroom growth. Alsace formed the highroad between Italy and Flanders. In M. Hallays' words, already during the Renaissance, aesthetic Alsace blended the lessons of north and south, her genius was a product of good sense, experience and a feeling of proportion. ”

“ Imagine how much success would be likely to attend the attempt to persuade such men, that the education which leads to perfection in such elegancies is alone to be called culture; while the facts of history, the process of thought, the conditions of moral and social existence, and the laws of physical nature, are left to be dealt with as they may, by outside barbarians!
It is not thus that the German universities, from being beneath notice a century ago, have become what they are now—the most intensely cultivated and the most productive intellectual corporations the world has ever seen. ”

“ A French anthropologist has remarked that English and German observers do not interest themselves to the same degree, or in the same way, in the social life of peoples in the lower culture; for whereas the German explorers by preference describe, and that with praiseworthy minuteness, the nature of the country and the material civilization of the people, the English, on the other hand, interest themselves more in the intellectual products, the traditions and beliefs. ”

“ Owing to this lack of self-knowledge, he is convinced that his "culture" is the consummate manifestation of real German culture; and, since he everywhere meets with scholars of his own type, since all public institutions, whether schools, universities, or academies, are so organised as to be in complete harmony with his education and needs, wherever he goes he bears with him the triumphant feeling that he is the worthy champion of prevailing German culture, and he frames his pretensions and claims accordingly. ”

“ He who follows his plough will seldom be a member of a company which extend their speculations to the distant corners of the earth; he will not read Homer in the original, he will hardly read the work of a German philosopher upon logic, and the easy intercourse of a modern salon will scarcely be enlivened by his wit. But the results of the collective culture, of that which the learned find, which the artist forms, which manufacturers create, must, at a period when the nation is vigorous and sound, when accessible to the simple countryman of sound judgment, be comprehended and valued by him. ”

“ Hence, too, they had a certain culture, good manners, and a predominant interest in æsthetic questions, as there had been no occasion for them to know the primitive cares of life. But they were tired of the narrowness and tastelessness of their milieu; they wanted to do things differently—to live and love differently; to put art into their surroundings, their dwellings, their dress; good taste—this had been a tradition of the old Vienna, lost in the transition-state when the middle-class element obtained its precedence over the old aristocracy—was now to take its place again. ”

“ Let us look a little more closely at the German idea of national culture rather than national character as the chief element in civilisation. We shall see that it is directly contrary to the ideals which inspire and sustain the British Commonwealth, and practically prohibits that association of races and peoples at varying levels of social progress which is its peculiar task.
"Culture," in the German idea, is the justification of a nation's existence. ”

“ The creations of culture are aristocratic and deliberate creations. The creations of nature are the work of all, they are produced artlessly, by a collective, unconscious and spontaneous generation. With an extraordinary lack of taste German criticism persisted in finding these common characteristics in poetical compositions matured in stages of civilisation so unequal, and belonging to such different antiquities as the Nibelungen, the Bible, and the poems of Homer. ”

“ Hallstatt is about ten miles below Aussee. The Traun here expands into a lake, very dark and deep, shut in by steep and lofty mountains. The railway runs along the eastern shore. On the other side, a mile away, you see the old town, its white houses clinging to the cliff like lichens to the face of a rock. The guide-book calls it "a highly original situation." But this is one of the cases where a little less originality and a little more reasonableness might be desired, at least by the permanent inhabitants. A ledge under the shadow of a precipice makes a trying winter residence. ”

“ When the beginnings of the New Learning made their appearance in Germany, they did not bring with them any widespread revival of culture. There was no outburst, as in Italy, of the artistic spirit, stamping itself upon such arts as painting, sculpture, and architecture, which could appeal to the whole public intelligence. The men who first felt the stirrings of the new intellectual life were, for the most part, students who had been trained in the more famous schools of the Brethren of the Common Life, all of whom had a serious aim in life. ”

“ On the other hand, that which now grandiloquently assumes the title of 'German culture' is a sort of cosmopolitan aggregate, which bears the same relation to the German spirit as Journalism does to Schiller or Meyerbeer to Beethoven: here the strongest influence at work is the fundamentally and thoroughly un-German civilisation of France, which is aped neither with talent nor with taste, and the imitation of which gives the society, the press, the art, and the literary style of Germany their pharisaical character. ”

“ The worship of foreign culture which characterized Germany in the seventeenth and half of the eighteenth centuries only meant that our soil was grown too poor to yield a crop of its own. The culture of the Middle Ages remained international only so long as the population of Europe was too sparse and the opportunities of work too scanty to occupy local energies; even in the thinly populated, Homeric middle-ages of Greece, the builder and the poet were not settled in one place, they were wandering artists. ”

“ In place of German culture and German intellectuality we have a state of things of which a foretaste [68] already exists in parts of America and of Eastern Europe. The fully socialized order, repelling all tutelage through those strata which possess a special tradition, outlook and mentality, has created its own form of civilization. ”

“ But it is just there that we find the reality of a true unhistorical culture—and in spite of that, or perhaps because of it, an unspeakably rich and vital culture. Were we Germans nothing but followers, we could not be anything greater or prouder than the lineal inheritors and followers of such a culture. ”

“ But what has no sense as an expression of the real may have some as the expression of certain tendencies. And it is easy to recognise in the ideology of the primitive the expression of the ethical and national tendencies, aspirations and pretensions of modern Germany. Up to the end of the eighteenth century Germany had felt herself and recognised herself to be a backwater of the traditional European culture of which the Latin nations received the direct heritage from Greece and Rome. ”

“ The culture of the new time soon got a footing in these families. The ladies especially opened their hearts to the new feeling for literature, and many of them became proud of being patronesses of the beautiful art of poetry, whilst the gentlemen still looked distrustfully on the new state of things. As in Germany, poetry had the wonderful effect of bringing the nobility into unprecedented union with the citizen class, so at the same time in Austria, music had for a time a similar effect. ”