The settlement of peoples and the gradual development of national states under the joint in fluence of native habit and the living traditions of the ancient world were not matters of a day. They required more than a thousand years. Everywhere natural forces and conscious contrivance can be traced together, although the element of contrivance varied very considerably in extent. Two great kingdoms, Germany and Italy, began to lose their political unity almost as soon as they had acquired it ; they had to wait until the 19th century before they found it again. Switzerland and the Low Countries (the modern Holland and Belgium) were strongly welded into political units in a process in which it is difficult to disentangle the elements of nature, accident and artifice; but the unity, once acquired, has on the whole been permanent. Only a long and complicated pro cess of events could decide that Portugal was to be separated from Castile, and Castile united to Aragon, that Catalonia was to be part of the kingdom of Aragon and not linked up with the Mediterranean littoral north of the Pyrenees, that Hungary was to be attached to the German marchland of Austria and that the River Tweed was to separate a kingdom of Scotland from Eng land.
In these political developments the effect of Roman imperial ism, working through geography and tradition, was not very marked. It might be an obstacle to be overcome, as in Italy and the Rhine valley, or an incentive to unity, as in France. But within the structure of society the element of contrivance was largely proportionate to the strength of classical influence, whether this were continuous or consciously revived. The extent and force of this influence have been the theme of endless discussion. How far the land settlement of the Franks was a continuation of the Roman system in Gaul, whether city life in North Italy and on the Rhine was completely interrupted, or, to take examples of a different kind, the extent to which the folk lore and legendary literature of mediaeval peoples was drawn from native sources or derived from the treasure house of the East and the fancies of sophisticated brains, and whether mediaeval art is mainly pop ular or "learned" in origin—these are some of the problems which still arouse controversy. On the whole the tendency is to empha size the extent of the artificial and learned element in later cen turies and to minimize the importance of continuous classical survivals in the early middle ages. The continuous and ever present influence of the ecclesiastical system is, it is hardly neces sary to say, undisputed and is regarded as exceptional even by those who deprecate the view that it was the really formative factor in mediaeval life.
Whatever the final issue of these discussions may be, it is no longer possible to draw a sharp distinction between culture or intelligence in mediaeval and modern times. Compulsory education and the impact upon our everyday life of scientific inventions are recent developments which separate us in external and possibly in more far reaching ways, from the middle ages, though their civilizing effects are still uncertain. The isolation in which so many people lived in earlier days, and the immense differences in wealth, social importance and external trappings between class and class have largely dis appeared; the sum of human happiness and comfort is probably greater than in mediaeval times; but the contrast, once so fashion able, between the ages of darkness and the ages of light has no more truth in it than have the idealistic fancies which underlie attempts at mediaeval revivalism. The fascinating perplexity felt by students of mediaeval life is due precisely to the fact that our forefathers were not barbarians struggling forward, unaided, to a state of civilization; but were vigorous, intelligent, semi-civilized people who fell at every turn under highly sophisticated influences. Even before they settled down in the fifth century they had, more or less consciously, entered upon what is termed the "heroic age," in which an exotic element, derived perhaps from the east by way of the Black sea and the great trade routes of central Europe, gave direction to their barbaric qualities. Some of them, like the Visigoths, fell at once under the influence of Roman jurisprudence.
All in due course were affected by the Church and were intro duced to forms of organization, thought, art and conduct which they appropriated as best they could. Three or four centuries later their men of learning came under the steadily increasing influence of Greek thought, as transmitted by the Greek speaking scholars of the Eastern empire, by Arabs and Jews; an influence which reached its height in the 13th century. By this time social contact with the East, never entirely lost, had been deepened by the es tablishment of western states in the Levant, the result of the cru sades. Hence the process of sophistication, if the term may be used, was intensified by new periodic injections. However in digenous the expressions of political, social, literary and artistic life were, they flourished in an atmosphere of self-consciousness. They were not all spontaneous, and were rarely "artless." The results were naturally very varied, some bizarre and grotesque, with the seeds of decadence in them, some simple and effortless, some extraordinarily beautiful ; some foolish, others profound; some pagan, others Christian.