It would perhaps be easier to go to the Archaeological Museum in Florence, to look at the etruscan collection, if we decided once and for all that there never were any Etruscans. Because, in the cut-and-dried museum sense, there never were.
The Etruscans were not a race, that is obvious. And they were not a nation. They were not even as much of a people as the Romans of the Augustan age were: and a Roman of the Augustan age might be a Latin, an Etruscan, a Sabine, a Samnite, an Umbrian, a Celt, a Greek, a Jew, or almost anything else of the world of that day. He might come from any tribe or race, almost, and still be first and foremost a Roman. “I am a Roman.”
What makes a civilised people is not blood, but some dominant culture-principle. Certain blood-streams give rise to, or are sympathetic to, certain culture principles. The handful of original Romans in Latium contained the germ of the civilising principle of Rome, that was all.
But there was not even an original handful of original Etruscans. In Etruria there is no starting-point. Just as there is no starting-point for England, once we have the courage to look beyond Julius Caesar and 55 B.C. Britain was active and awake and alive long before Caesar saw it. Nor was it a country of blue-painted savages in bear-skins. It had an old culture of its own, older than the little hill of Romulus.
But then the historical invasions started. Romans, Jutes, Angles, Saxons, Danes, Normans, Jews, French: after all, what is England? What does the word England mean, even? What clue would it give to the rise of the English, should all our history be lost? About as good a clue as Tusci or Tyrrheni give to the make-up of the Etruscan.
Etruria is a parallel case to England. In the dim British days before Julius Caesar, there were dim Italian days too, and endless restless Italian tribes and peoples with their own speech and customs and religious practices. They were not just brutes, nor cave-men, because they lived in the days before Homer. They were men, alive and alert, having their own complex forms of expression.
And in those dim days where history does not exist—not because men, intelligent men did not then exist, but because one culture wipes out another as completely as possible; in those dim days, there were invasions, invasion after invasion no doubt, from the wild north on foot, from the old, cultured Aegean basin, in ships. Men kept on coming, and kept on coming: strangers.
But there were two deep emotions or culture-rhythms which persisted in all the confusion: and one was some old, old Italian rhythm of life, belonging to the soil, which invaded every invader; and the other was the old cosmic consciousness, or culture principle, of the prehistoric Mediterranean, particularly of the eastern Mediterranean. Man is always trying to be conscious of the cosmos, the cosmos of life and passion and feeling, desire and death and despair, as well as of physical phenomena. And there are still millions of undreamed-of ways of becoming aware of the cosmos. Which is to say, there are millions of worlds, whole cosmic worlds, to us yet unborn.
Every religion, every philosophy, and science itself, each has a clue to the cosmos, to the becoming aware of the cosmos. Each clue leads to its own goal of consciousness, then is exhausted. So religions exhaust themselves, so science exhausts itself, once the human consciousness reaches its own limit. The infinite of the human consciousness lies in an infinite number of different starts to an infinite number of different goals; which somehow, we know when we get there, is one goal. But the new start is from a point in the hitherto unknown.
What we have to realise in looking at etruscan things is that they reveal the last glimpses of a human cosmic consciousness—or human attempt at cosmic consciousness—different from our own. The idea that our history emerged out of caves and savage lake-dwellings is puerile. Our history emerges out of the closing of a previous great phase of human history, a phase as great as our own. It is much more likely the monkey is descended from us, than we from the monkey.
What we see, in the etruscan remains, is the fag end of the revelation of another form of cosmic consciousness: and also, that salt of the earth, the revelation of the human existence of people who lived and who were, in a way somewhat different from our way of living and being. There are two separate things: the artistic or impulsive or culture-expression, and the religious or scientific or civilisation expression of a group of people. The first is based on emotion; the second on concepts.
The Etruscans consisted of all sorts of tribes and distinct peoples: that is obvious: and they did not intermingle. Velathri (Volterra) and Tarquinii were two quite distinct peoples, racially. No doubt they spoke different languages, vulgarly. The thing they had in common was the remains of an old cosmic consciousness, an old religion, an old attempt on man’s part to understand, or at least to interpret to himself, the cosmos as he knew it. That was the civilising principle.
Civilisations rise in waves, and pass away in waves. And not till science, or art, tries to catch the ultimate meaning of the symbols that float on the last waves of the prehistoric period; that is, the period before our own; shall we be able to get ourselves into right relation with man as man is and has been and will always be.
In the days before Homer, men in Europe were not mere brutes and savages and prognathous monsters: neither were they simple-minded children. Men are always men, and though intelligence takes different forms, men are always intelligent: they are not empty brutes, or dumb-bells en masse.
The symbols that come down to us on the last waves of prehistoric culture are the remnants of a vast old attempt made by humanity to form a conception of the universe. The conception was shattered and diminished even by the time it rose to new life, in Egypt. It rose up again, in ancient China and India, in Babylonia and in Asia Minor, in the Druid, in the Teuton, in the Aztec and in the Maya of America, in the very negroes. But each time it rose in a smaller, dying wave, as one tide of consciousness slowly changed to another tide, full of cross-currents. Now our own tide of consciousness is on the ebb, so we can catch the ripples of the tide that ebbed as we arose, and we may read their meaning.
There is no unified and homogeneous etruscan people. There is no Etruscan, pure and simple, and never was: any more than, today, there is one absolute American. There are etruscan characteristics, that is all.
And the real etruscan characteristics are the religious symbols. As far as art goes, there is no etruscan art. It is an art of all sorts, dominated by an old religious idea.
The religious idea came presumably from the Aegean, the ancient eastern Mediterranean. It was an ebb from an old wider consciousness. If we look at our world today, as far as culture goes, it has one culture: the christian-scientific. Whether it be Pekin or Dahomey or New York or Paris, it is more or less the same conception of life and the cosmos, nowadays.
And so it must have been before. The pyramid builders of America must have had some old idea, remnant of an idea, in common with the Egyptian and the Etruscan. And the Celt, the Gaul, the Druid, must have had some lingering idea of the ancient cosmic meaning of the waters, of the leaping fish, of the undying, ever re-born dead, shadowily sharing it with the ancient Italic peoples, as well as with the Hittites or the Lydians.
There are no Etruscans out-and-out, and there never were any. There were different prehistoric tribes stimulated by contact with different peoples from the eastern Mediterranean, and lifted on the last wave of a dying conception of the living cosmos.
That is what one feels. If it is wrong it is wrong. But few things, that are felt, are either absolutely wrong or absolutely right. Things absolutely wrong are not felt, they do not arise from contact. They arise from prejudice and pre-conceived notions. As for things absolutely right, they too cannot be felt. Whatever can be felt is capable of many different forms of expression, forms often contradictory, as far as logic or reason goes.
But in the bewildering experience of searching for the Etruscans there is the one steady clue that we can follow: or rather, there are two clues. The first is the peculiar physical or bodily, lively quality of all the art. And this, I take it, is Italian, the result of the Italian soil itself. The Romans got a great deal of their power from resisting this curious Italian physical expressiveness: and for the same reason, in the Roman the salt soon lost its savour, in the true Etruscan, never.
The second clue is the more concrete, because more ideal presence of the symbols. Symbols are at least half ideas: and so they are half fixed. Emotion and the robust physical gesture are always fluid and changing, never fixed.
So we have the two clues, that of the dominant idea, or half-idea, in the religious symbols; and that of the dominant feeling, in the peculiar physical freeness and exuberance and spontaneity. It is the spontaneity of the flesh itself.
These are the two clues to the Etruscan. And they lead from beginning to end, from the point where the Etruscan emerges out of the Oriental, Lydian or Hittite or whatever he may be, till the last days when he is swamped by the Roman and the Greek.