CITIES AND PEOPLES
(A)
THE SOUL OF THE CITY
About the middle of the second millennium before Christ, two worlds lay
over against one another on the Ægean Sea. The one, darkly groping,
big with hopes, drowsy with the intoxication of deeds and sufferings,
ripening quietly towards its future, was the Mycenæan. The other, gay
and satisfied, snugly ensconced in the treasures of an ancient Culture,
elegant, light, with all its great problems far behind it, was the
Minoan of Crete.
We shall never really comprehend this phenomenon, which in these days
is becoming the centre of research-interest, unless we appreciate the
abyss of opposition that separates the two souls. The man of those days
must have felt it deeply, but hardly “cognised” it. I see it before
me: the humility of the inhabitant of Tiryns and Mycenæ before the
unattainable _esprit_ of life in Cnossus, the contempt of the well-bred
of Cnossus for the petty chiefs and their followers, and withal a
secret feeling of superiority in the healthy barbarians, like that of
the German soldier in the presence of the elderly Roman dignitary.
How are we in a position to know this? There are several such moments
in which the men of two Cultures have looked into one another’s eyes.
We know more than one “Inter-Culture” in which some of the most
significant tendencies of the human soul have disclosed themselves.
As it was (we may confidently say) between Cnossus and Mycenæ, so it
was between the Byzantine court and the German chieftains who, like
Otto II, married into it--undisguised wonder on the part of the knights
and counts, answered by the contemptuous astonishment of a refined,
somewhat pale and tired Civilization at that bearish morning vigour of
the German lands which Scheffel has described in _Ekkehard_.[130]
In Charlemagne the mixture of a primitive human spirituality, on the
threshold of its awakening, with a superposed Late intellectuality,
becomes manifest. Certain characteristics of his rulership would
lead us to name him the Caliph of Frankistan, but on his other side
he is but the chief of a Germanic tribe; and it is the mingling of
the two that makes him symbolic, in the same way as the form of
the Aachen palace-chapel--no longer mosque, not yet cathedral. The
Germanic-Western pre-Culture meanwhile is moving on, but slowly and
underground, for that sudden illumination which we most ineptly call
the Carolingian Renaissance is a ray from Baghdad. It must not be
overlooked that the period of Charles the Great is an episode of the
surface, ending, as accidentals do end, without issue. After 900, after
a new deep depression, there begins something really new, something
having the telling force of a Destiny and the depth that promises
duration. But in 800 it was the sun of the Arabian Civilization passing
on from the world-cities of the East to the countryside of the West.
Even so the sunshine of Hellenism had spread to the distant Indus.[131]
That which stands on the hills of Tiryns and Mycenæ is _Pfalz_ and
_Burg_ of root-Germanic type. The palaces of Crete--which are not
kings’ castles, but huge cult-buildings for a crowd of priests and
priestesses--are equipped with megalopolitan--nay, Late-Roman--luxury.
At the foot of those hills were crowded the huts of yeoman and vassals,
but in Crete (Gournia, Hagia Triada) the excavation of towns and villas
has shown that the requirements were those of high civilization,
and the building-technique that of a long experience, accustomed to
catering for the most pampered taste in furniture and wall-decoration,
and familiar with lighting, water-circulation, staircases, and
suchlike problems.[132] In the one, the plan of the house is a strict
life-symbol; in the other, the expression of a refined utilitarianism.
Compare the Kamares vases and the frescoes of smooth stucco with
everything that is genuinely Mycenæan--they are, through and through,
the product of an industrial art, clever and empty, and not of any
grand and deep art of heavy, clumsy, but forceful symbolism like that
which in Mycenæ was ripening towards the geometric style. It is, in a
word, not a style but a taste.[133] In Mycenæ was housed a primitive
race which chose its sites according to soil-value and facilities for
defence, whereas the Minoan population settled in business foci, as may
be observed very clearly in the case of Philakopi on Melos which was
established for the export trade in obsidian. A Mycenæan palace is a
promise, a Minoan something that is ending. But it was just the same in
the West about 800--the Frankish and Visigothic farms and manor-houses
stretched from the Loire to the Ebro, while south of them lay the
Moorish castles, villas, and mosques of Cordova and Granada.
It is surely no accident that the peak of this Minoan luxury coincides
with the period of the great Egyptian revolution, and particularly the
Hyksos time (1780-1580 B.C.).[134] The Egyptian craftsmen may well
have fled in those days to the peaceful islands and even as far as
the strongholds of the mainland, as in a later instance the Byzantine
scholars fled to Italy. For it is axiomatic that the Minoan Culture is
a part of the Egyptian, and we should be able to realize this more
fully were it not that the part of Egypt’s art-store which would have
been decisive in this connexion--viz.: what was produced in the Western
Delta--has perished from damp. We only know the Egyptian Culture in so
far as it flourished on the dry soil of the south, but it has long been
admitted as certain that the centre of gravity of its evolution lay
elsewhere.
It is not possible to draw a strict frontier between the late Minoan
and the young Mycenæan art. Throughout the Egyptian-Cretan world we
can observe a highly modern fad for these alien and primitive things,
and vice versa the war-band kings of the mainland strongholds stole
or bought Cretan _objets d’art_ wherever and however they could come
by them, admiring and imitating--even as the style of the Migrations,
once supposed to be, and prized as, proto-German, borrows the whole
of its form-language from the East.[135] They had their palaces
and tombs built and decorated by captive or invited craftsmen. The
“Treasure-house” (Tomb) of Atreus in Mycenæ, therefore, is exactly
analogous to the tomb of Theoderich at Ravenna.
In this regard Byzantium itself is a marvel. Here layer after layer
has to be carefully separated. In 326 Constantine, rebuilding on the
ruins of the great city destroyed by Septimus Severus, created a _Late
Classical cosmopolis_ of the first rank, into which presently streamed
hoary Apollinism from the West and youthful Magism from the East. And
long afterwards again, in 1096, it is a _Late Magian_ cosmopolis,
confronted in its last autumn days with spring in the shape of Godfrey
of Bouillon’s crusaders, whom that clever royal lady Anna Comnena[136]
portrays with contempt. As the easternmost of the Classical West, this
city bewitched the Goths; then, a millennium later, as the northernmost
of the Arabian world, it enchanted the Russians. And the amazing Vasili
Blazheny in Moscow (1554), the herald of the Russian pre-Culture,
stands “between styles,” just as, two thousand years before, Solomon’s
Temple had stood between Babylon the Cosmopolis and early Christianity.
II
Primeval man is a _ranging_ animal, a being whose waking-consciousness
restlessly feels its way through life, all microcosm, under no
servitude of place or home, keen and anxious in its senses, ever alert
to drive off some element of hostile Nature. A deep transformation
sets in first with agriculture--for that is something _artificial_,
with which hunter and shepherd have no touch. He who digs and ploughs
is seeking not to plunder, but to _alter_ Nature. To plant implies,
not to take something, but to produce something. _But with this, man
himself becomes plant_--namely, as peasant. He roots in the earth that
he tends, the soul of man discovers a soul in the countryside, and a
new earth-boundness of being, a new feeling, pronounces itself. Hostile
Nature becomes the friend; earth becomes _Mother_ Earth. Between
sowing and begetting, harvest and death, the child and the grain, a
profound affinity is set up. A new devoutness addresses itself in
chthonian cults to the fruitful earth that grows up along with man.
And as completed expression of this life-feeling, we find everywhere
the _symbolic shape of the farmhouse_, which in the disposition of
the rooms and in every line of external form tells us about the blood
of its inhabitants. The peasant’s dwelling is the great symbol of
settledness. It is itself plant, thrusts its roots deep into its “own”
soil.[137] It is _property_ in the most sacred sense of the word. The
kindly spirits of hearth and door, floor and chamber--Vesta, Janus,
Lares and Penates--are as firmly fixed in it as the man himself.
This is the condition precedent of every Culture, which itself in
turn grows up out of a mother-landscape and renews and intensifies
the intimacy of man and soil. What his cottage is to the peasant,
that the town is to the Culture-man. As each individual house has
its kindly spirits, so each town has its tutelary god or saint. The
town, too, is a plantlike being, as far removed as a peasantry is from
nomadism and the purely microcosmic. Hence the development of a high
form-language is linked always to a landscape. Neither an art nor a
religion can alter the site of its growth; only in the Civilization
with its giant cities do we come again to despise and disengage
ourselves from these roots. Man as civilized, as _intellectual nomad_,
is again wholly microcosmic, wholly homeless, as free _intellectually_
as hunter and herdsman were free sensually. “_Ubi bene, ibi patria_”
is valid _before_ as well as _after_ a Culture. In the not-yet-spring
of the Migrations it was a Germanic yearning--virginal, yet already
maternal--that searched the South for a home in which to nest its
future Culture. To-day, at the end of this Culture, the rootless
intellect ranges over all landscapes and all possibilities of thought.
But between these limits lies the time in which a man held a bit of
soil to be something _worth dying for_.
It is a conclusive fact--yet one hitherto never appreciated--that
all great Cultures are town-Cultures. Higher man of the Second
Age is a town-tied animal. Here is the real criterion of
“world-history” that differentiates it with utter sharpness from man’s
history--_world-history is the history of civic man_. Peoples, states,
politics, religion, all arts, and all sciences rest upon _one_ prime
phenomenon of human being, the town. As all thinkers of all Cultures
themselves live in the town (even though they may reside bodily in the
country), they are perfectly unaware of what a bizarre thing a town is.
To feel this we have to put ourselves unreservedly in the place of the
wonder-struck primitive who for the first time sees this mass of stone
and wood set in the landscape, with its stone-enclosed streets and its
stone-paved squares--a domicile, truly, of strange form and strangely
teeming with men!
But the real miracle is the birth of the _soul_ of a town. A mass-soul
of a wholly new kind--whose last foundations will remain hidden from
us for ever--suddenly buds off from the general spirituality of its
Culture. As soon as it is awake, it forms for itself a visible body.
Out of the rustic group of farms and cottages, each of which has its
own history, arises a _totality_. And the whole lives, breathes, grows,
and acquires a face and an inner form and history. Thenceforward, in
addition to the individual house, the temple, the cathedral, and the
palace, the town-figure itself becomes a unit objectively expressing
the form-language and style-history that accompanies the Culture
throughout its life-course.
It goes without saying that what distinguishes a town from a village is
not size, but the presence of a soul. Not only in primitive conditions,
such as those of central Africa, but in Late conditions too--China,
India, and industrialized Europe and America--we find very large
settlements that are nevertheless not to be called cities. They are
centres of landscape; they do not inwardly form worlds in themselves.
They have no soul. Every primitive population lives wholly as peasant
and son of the soil--the being “City” does not exist for it. That which
in externals develops from the village is not the city, but the market,
a mere meeting-point of rural life-interests. Here there can be no
question of a separate existence. The inhabitant of a market may be a
craftsman or a tradesman, but he lives and thinks as a peasant. We have
to go back and sense accurately what it means when out of a primitive
Egyptian or Chinese or Germanic village--a little spot in a wide
land--a city comes into being. It is quite possibly not differentiated
in any outward feature, but spiritually it is _a place from which
the countryside is henceforth regarded, felt, and experienced as
“environs,”_ as something different and subordinate. From now on
there are two lives, that of the inside and that of the outside, and
the peasant understands this just as clearly as the townsman. The
village smith and the smith in the city, the village headman and the
burgomaster, live in two different worlds. The man of the land and the
man of the city are different essences. First of all they feel the
difference, then they are dominated by it, and at last they cease to
understand each other at all. To-day a Brandenburg peasant is closer
to a Sicilian peasant than he is to a Berliner. From the moment of
this specific attunement, the City comes into being, and it is this
attunement which underlies, as something that goes without saying, the
entire waking-consciousness of every Culture.
Every springtime of a Culture is _ipso facto_ the springtime of a new
city-type and civism. The men of the pre-Culture are filled with a
deep uneasiness in the presence of these types, with which they cannot
get into any inward relation. On the Rhine and the Danube the Germans
frequently, as at Strassburg, settled down at the gates of Roman cities
that remained uninhabited.[138] In Crete the conquerors built, on the
ruins of the burnt-out cities like Gournia and Cnossus--villages. The
Orders of the Western pre-Culture, the Benedictines, and particularly
the Cluniacs and Premonstratensians, settled like the knights on
free land; it was the Franciscans and Dominicans who began to build
in the Early Gothic city. There the new soul had just awakened. But
even there a tender melancholy still adheres to the architecture,
as to Franciscan art as a whole--an almost mystical fear of the
individual in presence of the new and bright and conscious, which as
yet was only dully accepted by the generality. Man hardly yet dared to
cease to be peasant; the first to live with the ripe and considered
alertness of genuine megalopolitans are the Jesuits. It is a sign that
the countryside is still unconditionally supreme, and does not yet
recognize the city, when the ruler shifts his court every spring from
palace to palace. In the Egyptian Old Kingdom the thickly-populated
centre of the administration was at the “White Wall” (Memphis), but the
residences of the Pharaohs changed incessantly as in Sumerian Babylon
and the Carolingian Empire.[139] The Early Chinese rulers of the Chóu
dynasty had their court as a rule at Lo-Yang (the present Ho-nan-fu)
from about 1160, but it was not until 770--corresponding to our
sixteenth century--that the locality was promoted to be the permanent
royal residence.[140]
Never has the feeling of earth-boundness, of the plantwise-cosmic,
expressed itself so powerfully as it did in the architecture of the
petty early towns, which consisted of hardly more than a few streets
about a market-place or a castle or a place of worship. Here, if
anywhere, it is manifest that every grand style is itself plantlike.
The Doric column, the Egyptian pyramid, the Gothic cathedral,
_grow out of_ the ground, earnest, big with destiny, Being without
waking-consciousness. The Ionic column, the buildings of the Middle
Kingdom and those of the Baroque, calmly aware and conscious of
themselves, free and sure, _stand on_ the ground. There, separated
from the power of the land--cut off from it, even, by the pavement
underfoot--Being becomes more and more languid, sensation and reason
more and more powerful. Man becomes intellect, “free” like the
nomads, whom he comes to resemble, but narrower and colder than they.
“Intellect,” “_Geist_,” “_esprit_,” is the specific urban form of the
understanding waking-consciousness. All art, all religion and science,
become slowly intellectualized, alien to the land, incomprehensible to
the peasant of the soil. With the Civilization sets in the climacteric.
The immemorially old roots of Being are dried up in the stone-masses
of its cities. And the free intellect--fateful word!--appears like a
flame, mounts splendid into the air, and pitiably dies.
III
The new Soul of the City speaks a new language, which soon comes to
be tantamount to the language of the Culture itself. The open land
with its village-mankind is wounded; it no longer understands that
language, it is nonplussed and dumb. All genuine style-history is
played out in the cities. It is exclusively the city’s destiny and the
life-experience of urban men that speaks to the eye in the logic of
visible forms. The very earliest Gothic was still a growth of the soil
and laid hold of the farmhouse with its inhabitants and its contents.
But the Renaissance style flourished only in the Renaissance _city_,
the Baroque only in the Baroque _city_--not to mention the wholly
megalopolitan Corinthian column or Rococo. There was perhaps some quiet
infiltration from these into the landscape; but the land itself was no
longer capable of the smallest creative effort--only of dumb aversion.
The peasant and his dwelling remained in all essentials Gothic, and
Gothic it is to this day. The Hellenic _countryside_ preserved the
geometric style, the Egyptian village the cast of the Old Kingdom.
It is, above all, the expression of the city’s “visage” that has
a history. The play of this facial expression, indeed, is almost
the spiritual history of the Culture itself. First we have the
little proto-cities of the Gothic and other Early Cultures, which
almost efface themselves in the landscape, which are still genuine
peasant-houses crowded under the shadow of a stronghold or a
sanctuary, and without inward change become town-houses merely in
the sense that they have neighbour-houses instead of fields and
meadows around them. The peoples of the Early Culture gradually
became town-peoples, and accordingly there are not only specifically
Chinese, Indian, Apollinian, and Faustian town-forms, but, moreover,
Armenian and Syrian, Ionian and Etruscan, German and French and English
town-physiognomies. There is a city of Phidias, a city of Rembrandt,
a city of Luther. These designations, and the mere names of Granada,
Venice, and Nürnberg conjure up at once quite definite images, for all
that the Culture produces in religion, art, and knowledge has been
produced in such cities. While it was still the spirit of knights’
castles and rural monasteries that evoked the Crusades, the Reformation
is urban and belongs to narrow streets and steep-gabled houses. The
great Epic, which speaks and sings of the blood, belongs to _Pfalz_
and _Burg_, but the Drama, in which _awakened_ life tests itself, is
city-poetry, and the great Novel, the survey of all things human by the
_emancipated_ intellect, presupposes the world-city. Apart from really
genuine folk-song, the only lyrism is of the city. Apart from the
“eternal” peasant-art, there is only urban painting and architecture,
with a swift and soon-ended history.
And these stone visages that have incorporated in their light-world
the humanness of the citizen himself and, like him, are all eye and
intellect--how distinct the language of form that they talk, how
different from the rustic drawl of the landscape! The silhouette of
the great city, its roofs and chimneys, the towers and domes on the
horizon! What a language is imparted to us through _one_ look at
Nürnberg or Florence, Damascus or Moscow, Peking or Benares. What
do we know of the Classical cities, seeing that we do not know the
lines that they presented under the Southern noon, under clouds in the
morning, in the starry night? The courses of the streets, straight or
crooked, broad or narrow; the houses, low or tall, bright or dark,
that in all Western cities turn their façades, _their faces_, and in
all Eastern cities turn their backs, blank wall and railing, towards
the street; the spirit of squares and corners, impasses and prospects,
fountains and monuments, churches or temples or mosques, amphitheatres
and railway stations, bazaars and town-halls! The suburbs, too, of
neat garden-villas or of jumbled blocks of flats, rubbish-heaps and
allotments; the fashionable quarter and the slum area, the Subura of
Classical Rome and the Faubourg Saint-Germain of Paris, ancient Baiæ
and modern Nice, the little town-picture like Bruges and Rothenburg
and the sea of houses like Babylon, Tenochtitlan, Rome, and London!
All this has history and _is_ history. One major political event--and
the visage of the town falls into different folds. Napoleon gave to
Bourbon Paris, Bismarck gave to worthy little Berlin, a new mien. But
the Country stands by, uninfluenced, suspicious and irritated.
In the earliest time the _landscape-figure alone_ dominates man’s eyes.
It gives form to his soul and vibrates in tune therewith. Feelings
and woodland rustlings beat together; the meadows and the copses
adapt themselves to its shape, to its course, even to its dress.
The village, with its quiet hillocky roofs, its evening smoke, its
wells, its hedges, and its beasts, lies completely fused and embedded
in the landscape. The country town _confirms_ the country, is an
intensification of the picture of the country. It is the Late city
that first defies the land, contradicts Nature in the lines of its
silhouette, _denies_ all Nature. It wants to be something different
from and higher than Nature. These high-pitched gables, these Baroque
cupolas, spires, and pinnacles, neither are, nor desire to be, related
with anything in Nature. And then begins the gigantic megalopolis,
the _city-as-world_, which suffers nothing beside itself and sets
about _annihilating_ the country picture. The town that once upon a
time humbly accommodated itself to that picture now insists that it
shall be the same as itself. _Extra muros_, chaussées and woods and
pastures become a park, mountains become tourists’ view-points; and
_intra muros_ arises an imitation Nature, fountains in lieu of springs,
flower-beds, formal pools, and clipped hedges in lieu of meadows and
ponds and bushes. In a village the thatched roof is still hill-like and
the street is of the same nature as the baulk of earth between fields.
But here the picture is of deep, long gorges between high, stony houses
filled with coloured dust and strange uproar, and men dwell in these
houses, the like of which no nature-being has ever conceived. Costumes,
even faces, are adjusted to a background of stone. By day there is a
street traffic of strange colours and tones, and by night a new light
that outshines the moon. And the yokel stands helpless on the pavement,
understanding nothing and understood by nobody, tolerated as a useful
type in farce and provider of this world’s daily bread.
It follows, however--and this is the most essential point of any--that
we cannot comprehend political and economic history at all unless we
realize that the city, with its gradual detachment from and final
bankrupting of the country, is the determinative form to which the
course and sense of higher history generally conforms. _World history
is city history._
An obvious case in point is, of course, the Classical world, in
which the Euclidean feeling of existence connected the city-idea
with its need of minimizing extension and thus, with ever-increasing
emphasis, identified the State with the stone body of the individual
Polis. But, quite apart from this instance, we find in every Culture
(and very soon) the type of the _capital city_. This, as its name
pointedly indicates, is that city whose spirit, with its methods,
aims, and decisions of policy and economics, dominates the land. The
land with its people is for this controlling spirit a tool and an
object. The land does not understand what is going on, and is not
even asked. In all countries of all Late Cultures, the great parties,
the revolutions, the Cæsarisms, the democracies, the parliaments,
are the form in which the spirit of the capital tells the country
what it is expected to desire and, if called upon, to die for. The
Classical forum, the Western press, are, essentially, intellectual
engines of the ruling City. Any country-dweller who really understands
the meaning of politics in such periods, and feels himself on their
level, moves into the City, not perhaps in the body, but certainly in
the spirit.[141] The sentiment and public opinion of the peasant’s
country-side--so far as it can be said to exist--is prescribed and
guided by the print and speech of the city. Egypt is Thebes, the _orbis
terrarum_ is Rome, Islam is Baghdad, France is Paris. The history of
every springtime phase is played out in the many small centres of many
separate districts. The Egyptian nomes, the Greek peoples of Homer, the
Gothic counties and free cities, were the makers of history of old.
But gradually Policy gathers itself up into a very few capitals, and
everything else retains but a shadow of political existence. Even in
the Classical world, the atomizing tendency towards city-states did not
hold out against the major movement. As early as the Peloponnesian War
it was only Athens and Sparta that were really handling policy, the
remaining cities of the Ægean being merely elements within the hegemony
of the one or the other; of policies of _their own_ there is no longer
any question. Finally it is the Forum of the City of Rome alone that
is the scene of Classical history. Cæsar might campaign in Gaul, his
slayers in Macedonia, Antony in Egypt, but, whatever happened in these
fields, _it was from their relation to Rome that events acquired
meaning_.
IV
All effectual history begins with the primary classes, nobility and
priesthood, forming themselves and elevating themselves above the
peasantry as such. The opposition of greater and lesser nobility,
between king and vassal, between worldly and spiritual power, is the
basic form of all primitive politics, Homeric, Chinese, or Gothic,
until with the coming of the City, the burgher, the _Tiers État_,
history changes its style. But it is exclusively in these classes as
such, in their class-consciousness, that the whole meaning of history
inheres. _The peasant is historyless._ The village stands outside
world-history, and all evolution from the “Trojan” to the Mithridatic
War, from the Saxon emperors to the World War of 1914, passes by these
little points on the landscape, occasionally destroying them and
wasting their blood, but never in the least touching their inwardness.
The peasant is the eternal man, independent of every Culture that
ensconces itself in the cities. He precedes it, he outlives it, a dumb
creature propagating himself from generation to generation, limited
to soil-bound callings and aptitudes, a mystical soul, a dry, shrewd
understanding that sticks to practical matters, the origin and the
ever-flowing source of the blood that makes world-history in the cities.
Whatever the Culture up there in the city conceives in the way
of state-forms, economic customs, articles of faith, implements,
knowledge, art, he receives mistrustfully and hesitatingly; though
in the end he may accept these things, never is he altered in kind
thereby. Thus the West-European peasant outwardly took in all the
dogmas of the Councils from the great Lateran to that of Trent, just
as he took in the products of mechanical engineering and those of the
French Revolution--but he remains what he was, what he already was
in Charlemagne’s day. The present-day piety of the peasant is older
than Christianity; his gods are more ancient than those of any higher
religion. Remove from him the pressure of the great cities and he
will revert to the state of nature without feeling that he is losing
anything. His real ethic, his real metaphysic, which no scholar of
the city has yet thought it worth while to discover, lie outside all
religious and spiritual history, have in fact no history at all.
The city is intellect. The Megalopolis is “free” intellect. It is
in resistance to the “feudal” powers of blood and tradition that
the burgherdom or bourgeoisie, the intellectual class, begins to be
conscious of its own separate existence. It upsets thrones and limits
old rights in the name of reason and above all in the name of “the
People,” which henceforward means exclusively the people of the city.
Democracy is the political form in which the townsman’s outlook upon
the world is demanded of the peasantry also. The urban intellect
reforms the great religion of the springtime and sets up by the side
of the old religion of noble and priest, the new religion of the Tiers
État, _liberal science_. The city assumes the lead and control of
economic history in replacing the primitive values of the land, which
are for ever inseparable from the life and thought of the rustic, by
the _absolute idea of money_ as distinct from goods. The immemorial
country word for exchange of goods is “barter”; even when one of the
things exchanged is precious metal, the underlying idea of the process
is not yet _monetary_--i.e., it does not involve the abstraction of
value from things and its fixation in metallic or fictitious quantities
intended to _measure_ things qua “commodities.” Caravan expeditions
and Viking voyages in the springtime are made between land-settlements
and imply barter or booty, whereas in the Late period they are made
between cities and mean “money.” This is the distinction between the
Normans before and the Hansa and Venetians after the Crusades,[142]
and between the seafarers of Mycenæan times and those of the later
colonization period in Greece. The City means not only intellect, but
also money.[143]
Presently there arrived an epoch when the development of the city
had reached such a point of power that it had no longer to defend
itself against country and chivalry, but on the contrary had become a
despotism against which the land and its basic orders of society were
fighting a hopeless defensive battle--in the spiritual domain against
nationalism, in the political against democracy, in the economic
against money. At this period the number of cities that really counted
as historically dominant had already become very small. And with this
there arose the profound distinction--which was above all a spiritual
distinction--between the great city and the little city or town. The
latter, very significantly called the country-town, was a part of the
no longer co-efficient countryside. It was not that the difference
between townsman and rustic had become lessened in such towns, but
that this difference had become negligible as compared with the new
difference between them and the great city. The sly-shrewdness of
the country and the intelligence of the megalopolis are two forms of
waking-consciousness between which reciprocal understanding is scarcely
possible. Here again it is evident that what counts is not the number
of inhabitants, but the spirit. It is evident, moreover, that in all
great cities nooks remained in which relics of an almost rural mankind
lived in their byeways much as if they were on the land, and the people
on the two sides of the street were almost in the relation of two
villages. In fact, a pyramid of mounting civism, of decreasing number
and increasing field of view, leads up from such quasi-rural elements,
in ever-narrowing layers, to the small number of genuine megalopolitans
at the top, who are at home wherever their spiritual postulates are
satisfied.
With this the notion of money attains to full abstractness. It no
longer merely _serves_ for the understanding of economic intercourse,
but _subjects_ the exchange of goods to _its own_ evolution. It
values things, no longer as between each other, but _with reference
to itself_. Its relation to the soil and to the man of the soil has
so completely vanished, that in the economic thought of the leading
cities--the “money-markets”--it is ignored. Money has now become a
power, and, moreover, a power that is wholly intellectual and merely
figured in the metal it uses, a power the reality of which resides
in the waking-consciousness of the upper stratum of an economically
active population, a power that makes those concerned with it just as
dependent upon itself as the peasant was dependent upon the soil. There
is monetary thought, just as there is mathematical or juristic.
But the earth is actual and natural, and money is abstract and
artificial, a mere “category”--like “virtue” in the imagination of the
Age of Enlightenment. And therefore every primary, pre-civic economy
is dependent upon and held in bondage by the cosmic powers, the
soil, the climate, the type of man, whereas money, as the pure form
of economic intercourse within the waking-consciousness, is no more
limited in potential scope by actuality than are the quantities of the
mathematical and the logical world. Just as no view of facts hinders
us from constructing as many non-Euclidean geometries as we please,
so in the developed megalopolitan economics there is no longer any
inherent objection to increasing “money” or to thinking, so to say, in
other money-dimensions. This has nothing to do with the availability
of gold or with any values in actuality at all. There is no standard
and no sort of goods in which the value of the talent in the Persian
Wars can be compared with its value in the Egyptian booty of Pompey.
Money has become, for man as an economic animal, a form of the activity
of waking-consciousness, having no longer any roots in Being. This is
the basis of its monstrous power over every beginning Civilization,
which is always an unconditional _dictatorship of money_, though taking
different forms in different Cultures. But this is the reason, too,
for the want of solidity, which eventually leads to its losing its
power and its meaning, so that at the last, as in Diocletian’s time,
it disappears from the thought of the closing Civilization, and the
primary values of the soil return anew to take its place.
Finally, there arises the monstrous symbol and vessel of the completely
emancipated intellect, the world-city, the centre in which the course
of a world-history ends by winding itself up. A handful of gigantic
places in each Civilization disfranchises and disvalues the entire
motherland of its own Culture under the contemptuous name of “the
provinces.” The “provinces” are now everything whatsoever--land, town,
_and_ city--except these two or three points. There are no longer
noblesse and bourgeoisie, freemen and slaves, Hellenes and Barbarians,
believers and unbelievers, _but only cosmopolitans and provincials_.
All other contrasts pale before this one, which dominates all events,
all habits of life, all views of the world.
The earliest of all world-cities were Babylon and the Thebes of the
New Empire--the Minoan world of Crete, for all its splendour, belonged
to the Egyptian “provinces.” In the Classical the first example is
Alexandria, which reduced old Greece at one stroke to the provincial
level, and which even Rome, even the resettled Carthage, even
Byzantium, could not suppress. In India the giant cities of Ujjaina,
Kanauj, and above all Pataliputra were renowned even in China and Java,
and everyone knows the fairy-tale reputation of Baghdad and Granada in
the West. In the Mexican world, it seems, Uxmal (founded in 950) was
the first world-city of the Maya realms, which, however, with the rise
of the Toltec world-cities Tezcuco and Tenochtitlan sank to the level
of the provinces.
It should not be forgotten that the word “province” first appears
as a constitutional designation given by the Romans to Sicily; the
subjugation of Sicily, in fact, is the first example of a once
pre-eminent Culture-landscape sinking so far as to be purely and
simply an object. Syracuse, the first real great-city of the Classical
world, had flourished when Rome was still an unimportant country town,
but thenceforward, _vis-à-vis_ Rome, it becomes a provincial city.
In just the same way Habsburg Madrid and Papal Rome, leading cities
in the Europe of the seventeenth century, were from the outset of
the eighteenth depressed to the provincial level by the world-cities
of Paris and London. And the rise of New York to the position of
world-city during the Civil War of 1861-5 may perhaps prove to have
been the most pregnant event of the nineteenth century.
V
The stone Colossus “Cosmopolis” stands at the end of the life’s course
of every great Culture. The Culture-man whom the land has spiritually
formed is seized and possessed by his own creation, the City, and is
made into its creature, its executive organ, and finally its victim.
This stony mass is the _absolute_ city. Its image, as it appears with
all its grandiose beauty in the light-world of the human eye, contains
the whole noble death-symbolism of the definitive thing-become. The
spirit-pervaded stone of Gothic buildings, after a millennium of
style-evolution, has become the soulless material of this dæmonic
stone-desert.
These final cities are _wholly_ intellect. Their houses are no longer,
as those of the Ionic and the Baroque were, derivatives of the old
peasant’s house, whence the Culture took its spring into history.
They are, generally speaking, no longer houses in which Vesta and
Janus, Lares and Penates, have any sort of footing, but mere premises
which have been fashioned, not by blood but by requirements, not by
feeling but by the spirit of commercial enterprise. So long as the
hearth has a pious meaning as the actual and genuine centre of a
family, the old relation to the land is not wholly extinct. But when
_that_, too, follows the rest into oblivion, and the mass of tenants
and bed-occupiers in the sea of houses leads a vagrant existence from
shelter to shelter like the hunters and pastors of the “pre-” time,
then the intellectual nomad is completely developed. This city is a
world, is _the_ world. Only as a whole, as a human dwelling-place, has
it meaning, the houses being merely the stones of which it is assembled.
Now the old mature cities with their Gothic nucleus of cathedral,
town-halls, and high-gabled streets, with their old walls, towers,
and gates, ringed about by the Baroque growth of brighter and more
elegant patricians’ houses, palaces, and hall-churches, begin to
overflow in all directions in formless masses, to eat into the
decaying country-side with their multiplied barrack-tenements and
utility buildings, and to destroy the noble aspect of the old time by
clearances and rebuildings. Looking down from one of the old towers
upon the sea of houses, we perceive in this petrification of a historic
being the exact epoch that marks the end of organic growth and the
beginning of an inorganic and therefore unrestrained process of massing
without limit. And now, too, appears that artificial, mathematical,
utterly land-alien product of a pure intellectual satisfaction in the
appropriate, the city of the city-architect. In all Civilizations
alike, these cities aim at the chessboard form, which is the symbol of
soullessness. Regular rectangle-blocks astounded Herodotus in Babylon
and Cortez in Tenochtitlan. In the Classical world the series of
“abstract” cities begins with Thurii, which was “planned” by Hippodamus
of Miletus in 441. Priene, whose chessboard scheme entirely ignores the
ups and downs of the site, Rhodes, and Alexandria follow, and become
in turn models for innumerable provincial cities of the Imperial Age.
The Islamic architects laid out Baghdad from 762, and the giant city of
Samarra a century later, according to plan.[144] In the West-European
and American world the lay-out of Washington in 1791 is the first big
example.[145] There can be no doubt that the world-cities of the
Han period in China and the Maurya dynasty in India possessed this
same geometrical pattern. Even now the world-cities of the Western
Civilization are far from having reached the peak of their development.
I see, long after A.D. 2000, cities laid out for ten to twenty million
inhabitants, spread over enormous areas of country-side, with buildings
that will dwarf the biggest of to-day’s and notions of traffic and
communication that we should regard as fantastic to the point of
madness.[146]
Even in this final shape of his being, the Classical man’s form-ideal
remains the corporeal point. Whereas the giant cities of our present
confess our irresistible tendency towards the infinite--our suburbs
and garden cities, invading the wide country-side, our vast and
comprehensive network of roads, and within the thickly built areas
a controlled fast traffic on, below, and above straight, broad
streets--the genuine Classical world-city ever strove, not to expand,
but to thicken--the streets narrow and cramped, impossible for fast
traffic (although this was fully developed on the great Roman roads),
entire unwillingness to live in suburbs or even to make suburbs
possible.[147] Even at that stage the city must needs be a body, thick
and round, σῶμα in the strictest sense. The synœcism that in the early
Classical had gradually drawn the land-folk into the cities, and so
created the type of the Polis, repeated itself at the last in absurd
form; everyone wanted to live in the middle of the city, in its densest
nucleus, for otherwise he could not feel himself to be the urban man
that he was. All these cities are only _cités_, inner towns. The new
synœcism formed, instead of suburban zones, _the world of the upper
floors_. In the year 74 Rome, in spite of its immense population, had
the ridiculously small perimeter of nineteen and a half kilometres
[twelve miles].[148] Consequently these city-bodies extended in general
not in breadth, but more and more upward. The block-tenements of Rome
such as the famous Insula Feliculæ, rose, with a street breadth of only
three to five metres [ten to seventeen feet][149] to heights that have
never been seen in Western Europe and are seen in only a few cities
in America. Near the Capitol, the roofs already reached to the level
of the hill-saddle.[150] But always the splendid mass-cities harbour
lamentable poverty and degraded habits, and the attics and mansards,
the cellars and back courts are breeding a new type of raw man--in
Baghdad and in Babylon, just as in Tenochtitlan and to-day in London
and Berlin. Diodorus tells of a deposed Egyptian king who was reduced
to living in one of these wretched upper-floor tenements of Rome.
But no wretchedness, no compulsion, not even a clear vision of the
madness of this development, avails to neutralize the attractive force
of these dæmonic creations. The wheel of Destiny rolls on to its end;
the birth of the City entails its death. Beginning and end, a peasant
cottage and a tenement-block are related to one another as soul and
intellect, as blood and stone. But “Time” is no abstract phrase, but a
name for the actuality of Irreversibility. Here there is only forward,
never back. Long, long ago the country bore the country-town and
nourished it with her best blood. Now the giant city sucks the country
dry, insatiably and incessantly demanding and devouring fresh streams
of men, till it wearies and dies in the midst of an almost uninhabited
waste of country. Once the full sinful beauty of this last marvel of
all history has captured a victim, it never lets him go. Primitive folk
can loose themselves from the soil and wander, but the intellectual
nomad never. Homesickness for the great city is keener than any
other nostalgia. Home is for him any one of these giant cities, but
even the nearest village is alien territory. He would sooner die
upon the pavement than go “back” to the land. Even disgust at this
pretentiousness, weariness of the thousand-hued glitter, the _tædium
vitæ_ that in the end overcomes many, does not set them free. They take
the City with them into the mountains or on the sea. They have lost the
country within themselves and will never regain it outside.
What makes the man of the world-cities incapable of living on any but
this artificial footing is that the cosmic beat in his being is ever
decreasing, while the tensions of his waking-consciousness become
more and more dangerous. It must be remembered that in a microcosm
the animal, waking side supervenes upon the vegetable side, that of
being, and not vice versa. Beat and tension, blood and intellect,
Destiny and Causality are to one another as the country-side in bloom
is to the city of stone, as something existing _per se_ to something
existing dependently. Tension without cosmic pulsation to animate it
is the transition to nothingness. But Civilization is nothing but
tension. The head, in all the outstanding men of the Civilizations, is
dominated exclusively by an expression of extreme tension. Intelligence
is only the capacity for understanding at high tension, and in every
Culture these heads are the types of its final men--one has only to
compare them with the peasant heads, when such happen to emerge in
the swirl of the great city’s street-life. The advance, too, from
peasant wisdom--“slimness,” mother wit, instinct, based as in other
animals upon the sensed beat of life--through the city-spirit to the
cosmopolitan intelligence--the very word with its sharp ring betraying
the disappearance of the old cosmic foundation--can be described
as a steady diminution of the Destiny-feeling and an unrestrained
augmentation of needs according to the operation of a Causality.
Intelligence is the replacement of unconscious living by exercise in
thought, masterly, but bloodless and jejune. The intelligent visage is
similar in all races--what is recessive in them is, precisely, race.
The weaker the feeling for the necessity and self-evidence of Being,
the more the habit of “elucidation” grows, the more the fear in the
waking-consciousness comes to be stilled by causal methods. Hence the
assimilation of knowledge with demonstrability, and the substitution
of scientific theory, the causal myth, for the religious. Hence,
too, money-in-the-abstract as the pure causality of economic life,
in contrast to rustic barter, which is pulsation and not a system of
tensions.
Tension, when it has become intellectual, knows no form of recreation
but that which is specific to the world-city--namely, _détente_,
relaxation, distraction. Genuine play, _joie de vivre_, pleasure,
inebriation, are products of the cosmic beat and as such no longer
comprehensible in their essence. But the relief of hard, intensive
brain-work by its opposite--conscious and practised fooling--of
intellectual tension by the bodily tension of sport, of bodily
tension by the sensual straining after “pleasure” and the spiritual
straining after the “excitements” of betting and competitions, of the
pure logic of the day’s work by a consciously enjoyed mysticism--all
this is common to the world-cities of all the Civilizations. Cinema,
Expressionism, Theosophy, boxing contests, nigger dances, poker, and
racing--one can find it all in Rome. Indeed, the connoisseur might
extend his researches to the Indian, Chinese, and Arabian world-cities
as well. To name but one example, if one reads the Kama-sutram one
understands how it was that Buddhism _also_ appealed to men’s tastes,
and then the bullfighting scenes in the Palace of Cnossus will be
looked at with quite different eyes. A cult, no doubt, underlay
them, but there was a savour over it all, as over Rome’s fashionable
Isis-cult in the neighbourhood of the Circus Maximus.
And then, when Being is sufficiently uprooted and Waking-Being
sufficiently strained, there suddenly emerges into the bright light of
history a phenomenon that has long been preparing itself underground
and now steps forward to make an end of the drama--the _sterility of
civilized man_. This is not something that can be grasped as a plain
matter of Causality (as modern science naturally enough has tried to
grasp it); it is to be understood as an essentially _metaphysical_
turn towards death. The last man of the world-city no longer _wants_
to live--he may cling to life as an individual, but as a type, as an
aggregate, no, for it is a characteristic of this collective existence
that it eliminates the terror of death. That which strikes the true
peasant with a deep and inexplicable fear, the notion that the family
and the name may be extinguished, has now lost its meaning. The
continuance of the blood-relation in the visible world is no longer a
duty of the blood, and the destiny of being the last of the line is no
longer felt as a doom. Children do not happen, not because children
have become impossible, but principally because intelligence at the
peak of intensity can no longer find any reason for their existence.
Let the reader try to merge himself in the soul of the peasant. He
has sat on his glebe from primeval times,[151] or has fastened his
clutch in it, to adhere to it with his blood. He is rooted in it as the
descendant of his forbears and as the forbear of future descendants.
_His_ house, _his_ property, means, here, not the temporary connexion
of person and thing for a brief span of years, but an enduring and
inward union of _eternal_ land and _eternal_ blood. It is only from
this mystical conviction of settlement that the great epochs of
the cycle--procreation, birth, and death--derive that metaphysical
element of wonder which condenses in the symbolism of custom and
religion that all land-bound people possess. For the “last men” all
this is past and gone. Intelligence and sterility are allied in old
families, old peoples, and old Cultures, not merely because in each
microcosm the overstrained and fettered animal-element is eating up
the plant element, but also because the waking-consciousness assumes
that being is normally regulated by causality. That which the man
of intelligence, most significantly and characteristically, labels
as “natural impulse” or “life-force,” he not only knows, but also
values, causally, giving it the place amongst his other needs that
his judgment assigns to it. When the ordinary thought of a highly
cultivated people begins to regard “having children” as a question
of _pro’s_ and _con’s_, the great turning-point has come. For Nature
knows nothing of _pro_ and _con_. Everywhere, wherever life is actual,
reigns an inward organic logic, an “it,” a drive, that is utterly
independent of waking-being, with its causal linkages, and indeed not
even observed by it. The abundant proliferation of primitive peoples
is a _natural phenomenon_, which is not even thought about, still
less judged as to its utility or the reverse. When reasons have to
be put forward at all in a question of life, life itself has become
questionable. At that point begins prudent limitation of the number of
births. In the Classical world the practice was deplored by Polybius
as the ruin of Greece, and yet even at his date it had long been
established in the great cities; in subsequent Roman times it became
appallingly general. At first explained by the economic misery of the
times, very soon it ceased to explain itself at all. And at that point,
too, in Buddhist India as in Babylon, in Rome as in our own cities, a
man’s choice of the woman who is to be, not mother of his children as
amongst peasants and primitives, but his own “companion for life,”
becomes a problem of mentalities. The Ibsen marriage appears, the
“higher spiritual affinity” in which both parties are “free”--free,
that is, as intelligences, free from the plantlike urge of the blood
to continue itself, and it becomes possible for a Shaw to say “that
unless Woman repudiates her womanliness, her duty to her husband, to
her children, to society, to the law, and to everyone but herself,
she cannot emancipate herself.”[152] The primary woman, the peasant
woman, is _mother_. The whole vocation towards which she has yearned
from childhood is included in that one word. But now emerges the Ibsen
woman, the comrade, the heroine of a whole megalopolitan literature
from Northern drama to Parisian novel. Instead of children, she has
soul-conflicts; marriage is a craft-art for the achievement of “mutual
understanding.” It is all the same whether the case against children
is the American lady’s who would not miss a season for anything, or
the Parisienne’s who fears that her lover would leave her, or an Ibsen
heroine’s who “belongs to herself”--they all belong to themselves and
they are all unfruitful. The same fact, in conjunction with the same
arguments, is to be found in the Alexandrian, in the Roman, and, as a
matter of course, in every other civilized society--and conspicuously
in that in which Buddha grew up. And in Hellenism and in the nineteenth
century, as in the times of Lao-Tzu and the Charvaka doctrine,[153]
there is an ethic for childless intelligences, and a literature about
the inner conflicts of Nora and Nana. The “quiverful,” which was
still an honourable enough spectacle in the days of Werther, becomes
something rather provincial. The father of many children is for the
great city a subject for caricature; Ibsen did not fail to note it, and
presented it in his _Love’s Comedy_.
At this level all Civilizations enter upon a stage, which lasts for
centuries, of appalling depopulation. The whole pyramid of cultural man
vanishes. It crumbles from the summit, first the world-cities, then the
provincial forms, and finally the land itself, whose best blood has
incontinently poured into the towns, merely to bolster them up awhile.
At the last, only the primitive blood remains, alive, but robbed of
its strongest and most promising elements. This residue is the _Fellah
type_.
If anything has demonstrated the fact that Causality has nothing
to do with history, it is the familiar “decline” of the Classical,
which accomplished itself long before the irruption of Germanic
migrants.[154] The Imperium enjoyed the completest peace; it was rich
and highly developed; it was well organized; and it possessed in its
emperors from Nerva to Marcus Aurelius a series of rulers such as the
Cæsarism of no other Civilization can show. And yet the population
dwindled, quickly and wholesale. The desperate marriage-and-children
laws of Augustus--amongst them the _Lex de maritandis ordinibus_,
which dismayed Roman society more than the destruction of Varus’s
legions--the wholesale adoptions, the incessant plantation of
soldiers of barbarian origin to fill the depleted country-side, the
immense food-charities of Nerva and Trajan for the children of poor
parents--nothing availed to check the process. Italy, then North Africa
and Gaul, and finally Spain, which under the early Cæsars had been one
of the most densely populated parts of the Empire, become empty and
desolate. The famous saying of Pliny--so often and so significantly
quoted to-day in connexion with national economics--“_Latifundia
perdidere Italiam, jam, vero et provincias_,”[155] inverts the order
of the process; the large estates would never have got to this point
if the peasantry had not already been sucked into the towns and, if
not openly, at any rate inwardly, surrendered their soil. The terrible
truth came out at last in the edict of Pertinax, A.D. 193, by which
anyone in Italy or the provinces was permitted to take possession of
untended land, and if he brought it under cultivation, to hold it
as his legal property. The historical student has only to turn his
attention seriously to other Civilizations to find the same phenomenon
everywhere. Depopulation can be distinctly traced in the background
of the Egyptian New Empire, especially from the XIX dynasty onwards.
Street widths like those to Amenophis IV at Tell-el-Amarna--of fifty
yards--would have been unthinkable with the denser population of
the old days. The onset of the “Sea-peoples,” too, was only barely
repulsed--their chances of obtaining possession of the realm were
certainly not less promising than those of the Germans of the fourth
century _vis-à-vis_ the Roman world. And finally the incessant
infiltration of Libyans into the Delta culminated when one of their
leaders seized the power, in 945 B.C.--precisely as Odoacer seized
it in A.D. 476. But the same tendency can be felt in the history of
political Buddhism after the Cæsar Asoka.[156] If the Maya population
literally vanished within a very short time after the Spanish conquest,
and their great empty cities were reabsorbed by the jungle, this
does not prove merely the brutality of the conqueror--which in this
regard would have been helpless before the self-renewing power of a
young and fruitful Culture-mankind--but an extinction from within
that no doubt had long been in progress. And if we turn to our own
civilization, we find that the old families of the French noblesse were
not, in the great majority of cases, eradicated in the Revolution,
but have died out since 1815, and their sterility has spread to
the bourgeoisie and, since 1870, to the peasantry which that very
Revolution almost re-created. In England, and still more in the United
States--particularly in the east, the very states where the stock is
best and oldest--the process of “race suicide” denounced by Roosevelt
set in long ago on the largest scale.
Consequently we find everywhere in these Civilizations that the
provincial cities at an early stage, and the giant cities in turn
at the end of the evolution, stand empty, harbouring in their stone
masses a small population of fellaheen who shelter in them as the men
of the Stone Age sheltered in caves and pile-dwellings.[157] Samarra
was abandoned by the tenth century; Pataliputra, Asoka’s capital, was
an immense and completely uninhabited waste of houses when the Chinese
traveller Hsinan-tang visited it about A.D. 635, and many of the great
Maya cities must have been in that condition even in Cortez’s time. In
a long series of Classical writers from Polybius onward[158] we read of
old, renowned cities in which the streets have become lines of empty,
crumbling shells, where the cattle browse in forum and gymnasium, and
the amphitheatre is a sown field,[159] dotted with emergent statues and
herms. Rome had in the fifth century of our era the population of a
village, but its Imperial palaces were still habitable.
This, then, is the conclusion of the city’s history; growing from
primitive barter-centre to Culture-city and at last to world-city,
it sacrifices first the blood and soul of its creators to the needs
of its majestic evolution, and then the last flower of that growth
to the spirit of Civilization--and so, doomed, moves on to final
self-destruction.
VI
If the Early period is characterized by the birth of the City out of
the country, and the Late by the battle between city and country, the
period of Civilization is that of the victory of city over country,
whereby it frees itself from the grip of the ground, but to its own
ultimate ruin. Rootless, dead to the cosmic, irrevocably committed
to stone and to intellectualism, it develops a form-language that
reproduces every trait of its essence--not the language of a becoming
and growth, but that of a becomeness and completion, capable of
alteration certainly, but not of evolution. Not now Destiny, but
Causality, not now living Direction, but Extension, rules. It follows
from this that whereas every form-language of a Culture, together with
the history of its evolution, adheres to the original spot, civilized
forms are at home anywhere and capable, therefore, of unlimited
extension as soon as they appear. It is quite true that the Hanse Towns
in their north-Russian staples built Gothically, and the Spaniards in
South America in the Baroque style, but that even the smallest chapter
of Gothic style-_history_ should _evolve_ outside the limits of West
Europe was impossible, as impossible as that Attic or English drama,
or the art of fugue, or the Lutheran or the Orphic religion should be
propagated, or even inwardly assimilated, by men of alien Cultures.
But the essence of Alexandrinism and of our Romanticism is something
which belongs to all urban men without distinction. Romanticism marks
the beginning of that which Goethe, with his wide vision, called
world-literature--the literature of the leading world-_city_, against
which a provincial literature, native to the soil but negligible,
struggles everywhere with difficulty to maintain itself. The state of
Venice, or that of Frederick the Great, or the English Parliament (as
an effective reality), cannot be reproduced, but “modern constitutions”
can be “introduced” into any African or Asiatic state as Classical
Poleis could be set up amongst Numidians and ancient Britons. In
Egypt the writing that came into common use was not the hieroglyphic,
but the letter-script, which was without doubt a technical discovery
of the Civilization Age.[160] And so in general--it is not true
Culture-languages like the Greek of Sophocles or the German of Luther,
but world-languages like the Greek Koine and Arabic and Babylonian and
English, the outcome of daily practical usage in a world-city, which
are capable of being acquired by anybody and everybody. Consequently,
in all Civilizations the “modern” cities assume a more and more uniform
type. Go where we may, there are Berlin, London, and New York for us,
just as the Roman traveller would find his columnar architecture,
his fora with their statuary, and his temples in Palmyra or Trier or
Timgad or the Hellenistic cities that extended out to the Indus and
the Aral. But that which was thus disseminated was no longer a style,
but a taste, not genuine custom but mannerism, not national costume
but the fashion. This, of course, makes it possible for remote peoples
not only to accept the “permanent” gains of a Civilization, but even
to re-radiate them in an independent form. Such regions of “moonlight”
civilization are south China and especially Japan (which were first
Sinized at the close of the Han period, about A.D. 220); Java as a
relay of the Brahman Civilization; and Carthage, which obtained its
forms from Babylon.
All these are forms of a waking-consciousness now acute to excess,
mitigated or limited by no cosmic force, purely intellectual and
extensive, but on that very account capable of so powerful an output
that their last flickering rays reach out and superpose effects over
almost the whole earth. Fragments of the forms of Chinese Civilization
are probably to be found in Scandinavian wood-architecture, Babylonian
measures probably in the South Seas, Classical coins in South Africa,
Egyptian and Indian influences probably in the land of the Incas.
But while this process of extension was overpassing all frontiers,
the development of inner form of the Civilization was fulfilling
itself with impressive consistency. Three stages are clearly to be
distinguished--the release from the Culture, the production of the
thoroughbred Civilization-form, and the final hardening. For us this
development has now set in, and, as I see it, it is Germany that is
destined, as the last nation of the West, to crown the mighty edifice.
In this stage all questions of the life--the Apollinian, Magian, or
Faustian life--have been thought upon to the limit, and brought to a
final clear condition of knowledge and not-knowledge. For or about
ideas men fight no more. The last idea--that of the Civilization
itself--is formulated in outline, and technics and economics are, as
_problems_, enunciated and prepared for handling. But this is only
the beginning of a vast task; the postulates have to be unfolded and
these forms applied to the whole existence of the earth. Only when
this has been accomplished and the Civilization has become definitely
established not only in shape, but in mass, does the hardening of
the form set in. Style, in the Cultures, has been the _rhythm of
the process of self-implementing_. But the Civilized style (if we
may use the word at all) arises as the _expression of the state of
completeness_. It attains--in Egypt and China especially--to a splendid
perfection, and imparts this perfection to all the utterances of a life
that is now inwardly unalterable, to its ceremonial and mien as to the
superfine and studied forms of its art-practice. Of history, in the
sense of an urge towards a form-ideal, there can now be no question,
but there is an unfailing and easy superficial adaptiveness which again
and again manages to coax fresh little art-problems and solutions
out of the now basically stable language. Of this kind is the whole
“history” of Chinese-Japanese painting (as we know it) and of Indian
architecture. And just as the real history of the Gothic style differs
from this pseudo-history, so the Knight of the Crusades differs from
the Chinese Mandarin--_the becoming state from the finished_. The one
_is_ history; the other has long ago overcome history. “Long ago,” I
say; for the history of these Civilizations is merely apparent, like
their great cities, which constantly change in face, but never become
other than what they are. In these cities there is no Soul. They are
land in petrified form.
What is it that perishes here? And what that survives? It is a mere
incident that German peoples, under pressure from the Huns, take
possession of the Roman landscape and so prevent the Classical from
prolonging itself in a “Chinese” end-state. The movement of the
“Sea-peoples” (similar to the Germanic, even down to the details) which
set in against the Egyptian Civilization from 1400 B.C. succeeded
only as regards the Cretan island-realm--their mighty expeditions
against the Libyan and Phœnician coasts, with the accompaniment of
Viking fleets, failed, as those of the Huns failed against China. And
thus the Classical is our one example of a Civilization broken off
in the moment of full splendour. Yet the Germans only destroyed the
upper layer of the forms and replaced it by the life of their own
pre-Culture. The “eternal” layer was never reached. It remains, hidden
and completely shrouded by a new form-language, in the underground
of the whole following history, and to this day in southern France,
southern Italy, and northern Spain tangible relics of it endure. In
these countries the popular Catholicism is tinged from beneath with a
Late Classical colouring, that sets it off quite distinctly from the
Church Catholicism of the West-European layer above it. South Italian
Church-festivals disclose Classical (and even pre-Classical) cults, and
generally in this field there are to be found deities (saints) in whose
worship the Classical constitution is visible behind the Catholic names.
Here, however, another element comes into the picture, an element with
a significance of its own. We stand before the problem of Race.