On New Capitals

Iwonder that no historian has written a great historical monograph bearing some such title as The New City or perhaps The Second City or more specifically The City of the King. Perhaps none of the titles fully explains what should be explained in the book. It would describe a certain action 5 which differed with differing conditions 3 but occurred again and again all over the world, or at any rate all over Europe. Briefly, it may be called moving from the old capital to the new capital. The old capital was naturally the seat of tradition, and generally of religion. The new capital was naturally the seat of fashion, because it was generally the seat of royalty. A sort of ancient archetypal form of it exists at the very back or beginning of the whole history of Christendom 3 in that great exodus of the Roman Emperor from Romej the passage of Constantine to Constantinople.

The impression first struck me as I stood among the Baroque buildings and classical squares of Warsaw. But I remembered that I had something of the same impression and memory standing in the streets of Madrid. Warsaw and Madrid, at the two opposite ends of civilized Europe, both illustrate this curious passage in the history of our civilization. Both are practically products of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Both are practically products of that "kingcraft" or sense of the supreme importance of the secular prince, which marked the time after the religious schism and the failure of the religious wars. The princes had so little link with their own past, and sometimes so much confidence in their own future, that they left behind them the sacred cities of the dead kings and the dead saints and heroes, as if they were nothing but cities of the dead. They began to build new cities of their own, for purely political or financial reasons j full of the rationalism of the Renaissance. These towns that were meant to be novelties are now necessarily much less interesting as antiquities. There is at least one Polish city much more national than the capital of Poland. There are several cities much more Spanish than the capital of Spain.

France is the working model of Europe 3 like a clock with the clockwork showing clearly in a glass-case. There the movements occur rapidly, sharply, and logically, which appear elsewhere more slowly, more confusedly, and more at large. And French history exhibits a sort of extreme case of this process. It was impossible to dethrone Paris j even by taking the throne away from under it, so to speak. But the eighteenth-century king did try the trick of taking

MARIN COUNTTY FREE LIBRARY SAN RAFAEL, CAUFORNIA the throne awayj though he did not take it very far. He set it up in Versailles j and something in the proximity and the contrast exhibits more vividly than elsewhere the ultimate futility of the affair. Paris was far too powerful as the ancient popular and religious capital, which had once at the command of the populace shut its gates against the king, until he had returned to the religion. The populace continued to count even when the religion had turned to irreligion^ it was still, so to speak, a sort of religion of irreligion. The French king went to his new town late; and he left it early. We might even say that he left it abruptly. We might confidently say that when he had left it, there was nothing left. The French Revolution was always regarded as an innovation j but it is worth noting that if it was the triumph of the new faction, it was also the triumph of the old town. It is curious that while the last court was being held amid the latest and most florid classical ornaments of the Age of Reason, the tocsins of revolution were being rung from old Gothic towers and the rebels were assuming, with deeper irony than they knew, the names of old fraternities of monks and friars. It is worth noting, I say, because what happened in the French Revolution has also happened in the more extreme example of the Russian Revolution. Even where the religion turns to irreligion, even where the irreligion sometimes turns to a sort of religion of devil-worship, the most ancient shrine and citadel in some mysterious manner retains and even recovers its power. Even for the desecraters of all shrines it acts as a shrine. Popular instincts return to it, even when worse or wilder instincts are let loose. The artificial creation of the last few centuries vanishes like Versailles in the conflagration. We no longer talk of St. Petersburg j we no longer talk very much even of Petrograd. The city of Peter the Great has lost its greatness; and once again, after many centuries, when we talk of Muscovy we talk of Mos~ cow. Moscow is again, as the Russian poet said, the heart of Russia 3 even if the heart is broken.

These extremes are not felt in cases like that of Madrid or that of Warsaw; because the process was more natural and gradual and the nation more united and less challenged by internal hatreds. But even in the milder cases I should never be surprised to find that at some time in the future there was a return to the older civic centres. However this may be, it is certain that the older civic centres are generally the more interesting; and sometimes more interested, in the future as well as in the past. Now that Moscow has fallen to the Bolshevists as Constantinople fell to the Moslems, we might almost say of its fate, considered as a Christian capital, that both those imperial experiments have ended. We might almost say, in some mystical sense, that Byzantium may yet go back to Rome. In the rising fortunes of countries like Spain and Poland it is quite possible that further resurrections may take place, and that cities left for dead may begin once more to live even a modern life. In the case of Poland, of course, the more traditional and even mystical site is the town of Cracow. It has always been, and still is, of very great national and international importance as a University town. But it is also the original Royal capital j and the seat of the kings at the moment when Polish kingship had perhaps its highest influence in Europe. There still clings to it something of the quality that belonged to a city of palaces as well as a city of colleges or chapels. Warsaw has become the modern capital of a republic^ but there still lies upon Cracow the shadow of a crown.

But what gives to Cracow a sort of sharp outline of spires and turrets against the background of history is the fact that it is a seat of culture on the edge of the uncultivated wilds. The city, like the nation, is a sort of outpost, and the contrast is of the sort that belongs to capes and islands and the edges of things. That balance of the mind that we call philosophy is here balanced on the edge of an abyss. That great gift of civilization which we call learning, and that greater gift of civilization which is the art of carrying learning lightly, is here poised only with a sort of perilous grace. The Germans, who do

ON NEW CAPITALS 6i not carry learning lightly and the wild Slavs, who do not carry it at all, press upon that more slender and subtle experiment with the weight of less living things. In Cracow can be seen all those crafts and schools of art with which we are familiar in the Western culture, in the free cities of Flanders or the cathedrals of Normandy. But we see them there thrust up against a vast and vague hostility which is something altogether alien to us and different from the internal quarrels of Flemish burghers or Norman knights. For centuries the Tartars rolled around these towers a torrent of Asiatic barbarism. There is little change in the position todays except that the barbarism is called Bolshevism. Sections of the city wall are still shown, which were guarded by the guilds, each lining its part of the wallj first the tanners and then the shoemakers and then the glaziers, and so on round the whole circle. Guilds of that type existed all over Europe j but when they went out to battle, it was commonly against other guilds or against the feudal nobility, as in the flaming victory of Courtrai. But here in Cracow the guildsman standing on that wall looked out across a wilderness that faded away into the formless east, where strange gods were worshipped under strange skies. Out of that mystery of the sunrise strange horsemen came riding from the legendary country of Cathay 5 and he felt himself to be in the ends of the earth. And from the tower of the city a trumpet is still blown every hour to the four winds of heaven, as if uttering the defiance of civilization besieged. Only the trumpet peal breaks on the last notej to commemorate a mediseval trumpeter slain by a Tartar arrow. And so odd and moving is the break that a man listening today can fancy that he hears not only the trumpet, but the bolt of the barbarian singing by.