CITIES AND PEOPLES
(C)
PRIMITIVES, CULTURE-PEOPLES, FELLAHEEN
I
Now at last it is possible to approach--if with extreme precaution--the
conception “people,” and to bring order into that chaos of people-forms
that the historical research of the present day has only succeeded in
making worse confounded than before. There is no word that has been
used more freely and more utterly uncritically, yet none that calls
for a stricter critique, than this. Very careful historians, even,
after going to much trouble to clear their theoretical basis (up to a
point) slide back thereafter into treating peoples, race-parts, and
speech-communities as completely equivalent. If they find the name of a
people, it counts without more ado as the designation of a language as
well. If they discover an inscription of three words, they believe they
have established a racial connexion. If a few “roots” correspond, the
curtain rises at once on a primitive people with a primitive habitat
in the background. And the modern nationalist spirit has only enhanced
this “thinking in terms of peoples.”
But is it the Hellenes, the Dorians, or the Spartans that are a people?
If the Romans were a people, what are we to say about the Latins? And
what kind of a unit within the population of Italy at _c._ 400 do we
mean by the name “Etruscan?” Has not their “nationality,” like that
of Basques and Thracians, been made actually to depend upon the build
of their language? What ethnic idea underlies the words “American,”
“Swiss,” “Jew,” “Boer”? Blood, speech, faith, State, landscape--what in
all these is determinative in the formation of a people? In general,
relationships of blood and language are determined only by way of
scholarship, and the ordinary individual is perfectly unconscious
of them. “Indogermanic” is purely and simply a scientific, more
particularly a philological, concept. The attempt of Alexander the
Great to fuse Greeks and Persians together was a complete failure, and
we have recently had experience of the real strength of Anglo-German
community of feeling. But “people” is a linkage of which one is
_conscious_. In ordinary usage, one designates as one’s “people”--and
with feeling--that community, out of the many to which one belongs,
which inwardly stands nearest to one.[215] And then he extends the
use of this concept, which is really quite particular and derived
from personal experience, to collectivities of the most varied kinds.
For Cæsar the Arverni were a “_civitas_”; for us the Chinese are a
“nation.” On this basis, it was the Athenians and not the Greeks who
constituted a nation, and in fact there were only a few individuals
who, like Isocrates, felt themselves _primarily_ as Hellenes. On this
basis, one of two brothers may call himself a Swiss and the other,
with equal right, a German. These are not philosophical concepts, but
historical facts. A people is an aggregate of men which feels itself
a unit. The Spartiates[216] felt themselves a people in _this_ sense;
the “Dorians” of 1100, too, probably, but those of 400 certainly not.
The Crusaders became genuinely a people in taking the oath of Clermont;
the Mormons in their expulsion from Missouri, in 1839;[217] the
Mamertines[218] by their need of winning for themselves a stronghold
of refuge.[219] Was the formative principle very different with the
Jacobins and Hyksos? How many peoples may have originated in a chief’s
following or a band of fugitives? Such a group can change race, like
the Osmanli, who appeared in Asia Minor as Mongols; or language, like
the Sicilian Normans; or name, like Achæans and Danaoi. So long as the
common feeling is there, the people as such is there.
We have to distinguish the destiny of a people from its name. The
latter is often the only thing about which information remains to us;
but can we fairly conclude from a name anything about the history, the
descent, the language, or even merely the identity of those who bore
it? Here again the historical researcher is to blame, in that, whatever
his theory may have been, he has in practice treated the relation
between name and bearer as simply as he would treat, say, the personal
names of to-day. Have we any conception of the number of unexplored
possibilities in this field? To begin with, the very act of name-giving
is of enormous importance in early associations. For with a name the
human group consciously sets itself up with a sort of sacral dignity.
But, here, cult- and war-names may exist side by side; others the land
or the heritage may provide; the tribal name may be exchanged for that
of an eponymous hero, as with the Osmanli;[220] lastly, an unlimited
number of alien names can be applied along the frontiers of a group
without more than a part of the community ever hearing them at all.
If only such names as these be handed down, it becomes practically
inevitable that conclusions about the bearers of them will be wrong.
The indubitably sacral names of Franks, Alemanni, and Saxons have
superseded a host of names of the period of the Varus battle--but if
we did not happen to know this, we should long ago have been convinced
that an expulsion or annihilation of old tribes by new intruders had
taken place here. The names “Romans” and “Quirites,” “Spartans” and
“Lacedæmonians,” “Carthaginian” and “Punic” have endured side by
side--here again there was a risk of supposing two peoples instead of
one. In what relation the names “Pelasgi,” “Achæans,” “Danai,” stand to
one another we shall never learn, and had we nothing more than these
names, the scholar would long ago have assigned to each a separate
people, complete with language and racial affinities. Has it not been
attempted to draw from the regional designation “Doric” conclusions
as to the course of the Dorian migration? How often may a people have
adopted a land-name and taken it along with them? This is the case
with the modern Prussians, but also with the modern Parsees, Jews, and
Turks, while the opposite is the case in Burgundy and Normandy. The
name “Hellenes” arose about 650, and, therefore, cannot be connected
with any movement of population. Lorraine (Lothringen) received the
name of a perfectly unimportant prince, and that, in connexion with
the decision of a heritage and not a folk-migration. Paris called
the Germans Allemands in 1814, Prussians in 1870, Boches in 1914--in
other circumstances three distinct peoples might have been supposed to
be covered by these names. The West-European is called in the East a
Frank, the Jew a Spaniole--the fact is readily explained by historical
circumstances, but what would a philologist have produced from the
_words alone_?
It is not to be imagined at what results the scholars of A.D. 3000
might arrive if they worked by present-day methods on names, linguistic
remains, and the notion of original homes and migration. For example,
the Teutonic Knights about 1300 drove out the heathen “Prussians,” and
in 1870 these people suddenly appear on their wanderings at the gates
of Paris! The Romans, pressed by the Goths, emigrate from the Tiber to
the lower Danube! Or a part of them perhaps settled in Poland, where
Latin was spoken? Charlemagne on the Weser defeated the Saxons, who
thereupon emigrated to the neighbourhood of Dresden, their places being
taken by the Hanoverians, whose original settlement, according to the
dynasty-name, was on the Thames! The historian who writes down the
history of names instead of that of peoples, forgets that names, too,
have their destinies. So also languages, which, with their migrations,
modifications, victories, and defeats, are inconclusive even as to the
existence of peoples associated with them. This is the basic error of
Indo-Germanic research in particular. If in historic times the names
“Pfalz” and “Calabria” have moved about, if Hebrew has been driven
from Palestine to Warsaw, and Persian from the Tigris to India, what
conclusions can be drawn from the history of the Etruscan name and
the alleged “Tyrsenian” inscription at Lemnos?[221] Or did the French
and the Haytian Negroes, as shown by their common language, once
form a single primitive people? In the region between Budapest and
Constantinople to-day two Mongolian, one Semitic, two Classical, and
three Slavonic languages are spoken, and these speech-communities all
feel themselves essentially as peoples.[222] If we were to build up
a migration-story here, the error of the method would be manifested
in some singular results. “Doric” is a dialect designation--that we
know, and that is all we know. No doubt some few dialects of this group
spread rapidly, but that is no proof of the spread or even of the
existence of a human stock belonging with it.[223]
II
Thus we come to the pet idea of modern historical thought. If a
historian meets a people that has achieved something, he feels that he
owes it to these people to answer the question: Whence did it come? It
is a matter of dignity for a people to have come from somewhere and to
have an original home. The notion that it is at home in the place where
we find it is almost an insulting assumption. Wandering is a cherished
saga-motive of primitive mankind, but its employment in serious
research also has become a sheer mania. _Whether_ the Chinese invaded
China or the Egyptians Egypt no one inquires, the question being always
_when_ and _whence_ they did so. It would be less of an effort to
originate the Semites in Scandinavia or the Aryans in Canaan than to
abandon the notion of an original home.
Now, the fact that all early populations were highly mobile is
unquestionable. In it, for example, lies the secret of the Libyan
problem. The Libyans or their predecessors spoke Hamitic, but, as shown
even by old Egyptian reliefs, they were all blond and blue-eyed and,
therefore, doubtless of North-European provenance.[224] In Asia Minor
at least three migration-strata since 1300 have been determined, which
are related probably to the attacks of the “Sea-peoples” in Egypt,
and something similar has been shown in the Mexican Culture. But as
to the nature of these movements we know nothing at all. In any case,
there can be no question of migrations such as modern historians like
to picture--movements of close-pressed peoples traversing the lands
in great masses, pushing and being pushed till finally they come to
rest somewhere or other. It is not the alterations in themselves,
but the conceptions we have formed about them, that have spoilt our
outlook upon the nature of the peoples. Peoples in the modern sense
of the word do not wander, and that which of old _did_ wander needs
to be very carefully examined before it is labelled, as the label
will not always stand for the same thing. The motive, too, that is
everlastingly assigned to these migrations is colourless and worthy of
the century that invented it--material necessity. Hunger would normally
lead to efforts of quite a different sort, and it has certainly been
only the last of the motives that drove men of race out of their
nests--although it is understandable that it would very frequently make
itself felt when such bands suddenly encountered a military obstacle.
It was doubtless, in this simple and strong kind of man, the primary
microcosmic urgency to move in free space which sprang up out of the
depths of his soul as love of adventure, daring, liking for power
and booty; as a blazing desire, to us almost incomprehensible, for
deeds, for joy of carnage, for the death of the hero. Often, too, no
doubt, domestic strife or fear of the revenge of the stronger, was
the motive, but again a strong and manly one. Motives like these are
infectious--the “man who stays at home” is a coward. Was it common
bodily hunger, again, that induced the Crusades, or the expeditions
of Cortez and Pizarro, or in our time the ventures of “wild west”
pioneers? Where, in history, we find the little handful invading
wide lands, it is ever the voices of the blood, the longing for high
destinies, that drive them.
Further, we have to consider the position in the country traversed by
the invaders. Its characteristics are always modified more or less,
but the modifications are due not merely to the influence of the
immigrants, but more and more to the nature of the settled population,
which in the end becomes numerically overwhelming.
Obviously, in spaces almost empty of men it is easy for the weaker
simply to evade the onslaught, and as a rule he was able to do so.
But in later and denser conditions, the inroad spelt dispossession
for the weaker, who must either defend himself successfully or else
win new lands for old. Already there is the out-thrust into space. No
tribe lives without constant contacts on all sides and a mistrustful
readiness to stand to arms. The hard necessity of war breeds men.
Peoples grow by, and against, other peoples to inward greatness.
Weapons become weapons against men and not beasts. And finally we
have the only migration-form that counts in historic times--warrior
bands sweep through thoroughly populated countries, whose inhabitants
remain, undisturbed and upstanding, as an essential part of the spoils
of victory. And then, the victors being in a minority, completely new
situations arise. Peoples of strong inward form spread themselves
on top of much larger but formless populations, and the further
transformations of peoples, languages, and races depend upon very
complicated factors of detail. Since the decisive investigations of
Beloch[225] and Delbrück[226] we know that all migrant peoples--and the
Persians of Cyrus, the Mamertines and the Crusaders, the Ostrogoths and
the “Sea-peoples” of the Egyptian inscriptions were all peoples in this
sense--were, in comparison with the inhabitants of the regions they
occupied, very small in numbers, just a few thousand warriors, superior
to the natives only in respect of their determination to _be_ a Destiny
and not to submit to one. It was not inhabitable, but inhabited, land
of which they took possession, and thus the relation between the two
peoples became a question of status, the migration turned into the
campaign, and the process of settling down became a political process.
And here again, in presence of the fact that at a historic distance
of time the successes of a small war-band, with the consequent spread
of the victor’s names and language, may all too easily be taken for a
“migration of peoples,” it is necessary to repeat our question, what,
in fact, the men, things, and factors are that _can_ migrate.
Here are some of the answers--the name of a district or that of a
collectivity (or of a hero, adopted by his followers), in that it
spreads, becomes extinct here and is taken by or given to a totally
different population there: in that it may pass from land to people and
travel with the latter or vice versa--the language of the conqueror or
that of the conquered, or even a third language, adopted for reciprocal
understanding--the war-band of a chief which subdues whole countries
and propagates itself through captive women, or some accidental group
of heterogeneous adventurers, or a tribe with its women and children,
like the Philistines of 1200, who quite in the Germanic fashion trekked
with their ox-wagons along the Phœnician coast to Egypt.[227] In
such conditions, we may again ask, can conclusions be drawn from the
destinies of names and languages as to those of peoples and races?
There is only one possible answer, a decided negative.
Amongst the “Sea-peoples” that repeatedly attacked Egypt in the
thirteenth century appear the _names_ of Danai and Achæans--but
in Homer both are almost mythical designations--the _name_ of the
Lukka--which adhered later to Lycia, though the inhabitants of that
country called themselves Tramilæ--and the _names_ of the Etruscans,
the Sards, the Siculi--but this in no wise proved that these “Tursha”
spoke the later Etruscan, nor that there was the slightest physical
connexion with the like-named inhabitants of Italy or anything else
entitling us to speak of “one and the same people.” Assuming that the
Lemnos inscription is Etruscan, and Etruscan an Indogermanic language,
much could be deduced therefrom in the domain of linguistic history,
but in that of racial history nothing whatever. Rome was an Etruscan
city, but is not the fact completely without bearing upon the _soul_
of the Roman people? Are the Romans Indogermanic because they happen
to speak a Latin dialect? The ethnologists recognize a Mediterranean
Race and an Alpine Race, and north and south of these an astonishing
physical resemblance between North-Germans and Libyans; but the
philologists know that the Basques are in virtue of their speech a
“pre-Indogermanic”--Iberian--population. The two views are mutually
exclusive. Were the builders of Mycenæ and Tiryns “Hellenes”?--it would
be as pertinent to ask were the Ostrogoths Germans. I confess that I do
not comprehend why such questions are formulated at all.
For me, the “people” is a _unit of the soul_. The great events of
history were not really achieved by peoples; _they themselves created
the peoples_. Every act alters the soul of the doer. Even when the
event is preceded by some grouping around or under a famous name, the
fact that there is a people and not merely a band behind the prestige
of that name is not a condition, but a result of the event. It was
the fortunes of their migrations that made the Ostrogoths and the
Osmanli what they afterwards were. The “Americans” did _not_ immigrate
from Europe; the name of the Florentine geographer Amerigo Vespucci
designates to-day not only a continent, but also a people in the true
sense of the word, whose specific character was born in the spiritual
upheavals of 1775 and, above all, 1861-5.
This is the one and only connotation of the word “people.” Neither
unity of speech nor physical descent is decisive. That which
distinguishes the people from the population, raises it up out of
the population, and will one day let it find its level again in the
population is always the inwardly lived experience of the “we.” The
deeper this feeling is, the stronger is the _vis viva_ of the people.
There are energetic and tame, ephemeral and indestructible, forms of
peoples. They can change speech, name, race, and land, but so long as
their soul lasts, they can gather to themselves and transform human
material of any and every provenance. The Roman name in Hannibal’s day
meant a people, in Trajan’s time nothing more than a population.
Of course, it is often quite justifiable to align peoples with races,
but “race” in this connexion must not be interpreted in the present-day
Darwinian sense of the word. It cannot be accepted, surely, that a
people was ever held together by the mere unity of physical origin,
or, if it were, could maintain that unity even for ten generations.
It cannot be too often reiterated that this physiological provenance
has no existence except for science--never for folk-consciousness--and
that no people was ever yet stirred to enthusiasm for _this_ ideal of
blood-purity. In race there is nothing material, but something cosmic
and directional, the felt harmony of a Destiny, the single cadence
of the march of historical Being. It is inco-ordination of this
(wholly metaphysical) beat that produces race-hatred, which is just
as strong between Germans and Frenchmen as it is between Germans and
Jews, and it is resonance on this beat that makes the true love--so
akin to hate--between man and wife. He who has not race knows nothing
of this perilous love. If a part of the human multitude that now
speaks Indogermanic languages, cherishes a certain race-ideal, what
is evidenced thereby is not the existence of the prototype-people so
dear to the scholar, but the metaphysical force and power of the ideal.
It is highly significant that this ideal is expressed, never in the
whole population, but mainly in its warrior-element and pre-eminently
in its genuine nobility--that is, in men who live entirely in a world
of facts, under the spell of historical becoming, destiny-men who will
and dare--and it was precisely in the early times (another significant
point) that a born alien of quality and dignity could without
particular difficulty gain admittance to the ruling class, and wives
in particular were chosen for their “breed” and not their descent.
Correspondingly, the impress of race-traits is weakest (as may be
observed even to-day) in the true priestly and scholarly natures,[228]
even though these often do stand in close blood-relationship to the
others. A strong spirit trains up the body into a product of art.
The Romans formed, in the midst of the confused and even heteroclite
tribes of Italy, a race of the firmest and strictest inward unity
that was neither Etruscan nor Latin nor merely “Classical,” but quite
specifically Roman.[229] Nowhere is the force that cements a people
set before us more plainly than in Roman busts of the late Republican
period.
I will cite yet another example, than which none more clearly exhibits
the errors that these scholars’ notions of people, language, and
race inevitably entail, and in which lies the ultimate, perhaps
the determining reason why the Arabian Culture has never yet been
recognized as an organism. It is that of the Persians. Persian is an
Aryan language, hence “the Persians” are an “Indogermanic people,”
and hence Persian history and religion are the affair of “Iranian”
philology.
To begin with, is Persian a language of equal rank with the Indian,
derived from a common ancestor, _or is it merely an Indian dialect?_
Seven centuries of linguistic development, scriptless and therefore
very rapid, lie between the Old Vedic of the Indian texts and the
Behistun Inscription[230] of Darius. It is almost as great a gap as
that between the Latin of Tacitus and the French of the Strassburg Oath
of 842.[231] Now the Tell-el-Amarna letters and the archives of Boghaz
Keüi tell us many “Aryan” names of persons and gods of the middle of
the second millennium B.C.--that is, the Vedic Age of Chivalry. It is
Palestine and Syria that furnish these names. Nevertheless, Eduard
Meyer observes[232] that they are Indian and not Persian, and the same
holds good for the numerals that have now been discovered.[233] There
is not a unit of Persians, or of any other “people” in the sense of our
historical writers. They were Indian heroes, who rode westward and with
their precious weapon the warhorse and their own ardent energy made
themselves felt as a power far and wide in the ageing Babylonian Empire.
About 600 there appears in the middle of this world Persis, a little
district with a politically united population of peasant barbarians.
Herodotus says that of its tribes only three were of genuine Persian
nationality. Had the language of these knights of old lived on in
the hills, and is “Persians” really a land-name that passed to a
people? The Medes, who were very similar, bear only the name of a land
where an upper warrior-stratum had learned through great political
successes to feel itself as a unit. In the Assyrian archives of Sargon
and his successors (about 700) are found, along with the non-Aryan
place-names, numerous “Aryan” names of persons, all leading figures,
but Tiglath-Pileser IV (745-727) calls the people black-haired.[234] It
can only have been later that the “Persian people” of Cyrus and Darius
was formed, out of men of varied provenance, but forged to a strong
inner unity of lived experience. But when, scarce two centuries later,
the Macedonians put an end to their lordship--was it that the Persians
in this form were _no longer in existence_? (Was there still a Lombard
people at all in Italy in A.D. 900?) It is certain that the very wide
diffusion of the empire-language of Persia, and the distribution of
the few thousands of adult males from Persia over the immense system
of military and administrative business, must long ago have led to the
dissolution of the Persian nation and set up in its place, as carriers
of the Persian name in upper-class conscious of itself as a _political_
unit, of whose members very few could have claimed descent from the
invaders from Persia.[235] There is, indeed, not even a country that
can be considered as the theatre of Persian history. The events of
the period from Darius to Alexander took place partly in northern
Mesopotamia (that is, in the midst of an Aramaic-speaking population),
partly lower down in old Sinear, anywhere but in Persis, where the
handsome buildings begun by Xerxes were never carried out. The
Parthians of the succeeding Achæmenid period were a Mongol tribe which
had adopted a Persian dialect and in the midst of this people sought to
embody the Persian national feeling in themselves.
Here the Persian religion emerges as a problem no less difficult
than those of race and language.[236] scholarship has associated it
with these as though the association were self-evident, and has,
therefore, treated it always with reference to India. But the religion
of these land-Vikings was not related to, it was identical with the
Vedic, as shown by the divine pairs Mitra-Varuna and Indra-Nasatya
of the Boghaz Keüi texts. And within this religion which held up its
head in the middle of the Babylonian world Zarathustra now appeared,
from out of the lower ranks of the people, as reformer. It is known
that he was not a Persian. That which he created (as I hope to show)
was a transfer of _Vedic_ religion into the forms of the _Aramæan_
world-contemplation, in which already there were the faint beginnings
of the Magian religiousness. The _dævas_, the gods of the old Indian
beliefs, grew to be the demons of the Semitic and the jinn of the
Arabian. Yahweh and Beelzebub are related to one another precisely as
Ahuramazda and Ahriman in this peasant-religion, which was essentially
Aramæan and, therefore, founded in an ethical-dualistic world-feeling.
Eduard Meyer[237] has correctly established the difference between
the Indian and the Iranian view of the world, but, owing to his
erroneous premisses, has not recognized its origin. _Zarathustra is
a travelling-companion of the prophets of Israel_, who like him, and
at the same time, transformed the old (Mosaic-Canaanitish) beliefs of
the people. It is significant that the whole eschatology is a common
possession of the Persian and Jewish religions, and that the Avesta
texts were originally written in Aramaic (in Parthian times) and only
afterwards translated into Pehlevi.[238]
But already in Parthian times there occurred amongst both Persians
and Jews that profoundly intimate change which makes no longer tribal
attachment but orthodoxy the hall-mark of nationality.[239] A Jew who
went over to the Mazda faith _became thereby a Persian_; a Persian who
became a Christian belonged to the Nestorian “people.” The very dense
population of northern Mesopotamia--the motherland of the Arabian
Culture--is partly of Jewish and partly of Persian nationality in
this sense of the word, which is not at all concerned with race and
very little with language. Even before the birth of Christ, “Infidel”
designates the non-Persian as it designates the non-Jew.
This nation is the “Persian people” of the Sassanid empire, and,
connected with the fact, we find that Pehlevi and Hebrew die out
simultaneously, Aramaic becoming the mother tongue of both communities.
If we speak in terms of Aryans and Semites, the Persians in the
time of the Tell-el-Amarna Correspondence were Aryans, but no
“people”: in that of Darius a people, but without race: in Sassanid
times a community of believers, but of Semitic origin. There is no
proto-Persian “people” branched off from the Aryan, nor a general
history of the Persians, and for the three special histories, which are
held together only by certain linguistic relations, there is not even a
common historical theatre.
III
With this are laid, at last, the foundations for a _morphology of
peoples_. Directly its essence is seen, we see also an inward order
in the historical stream of the peoples. They are neither linguistic
nor political nor zoölogical, but spiritual, units. And this leads at
once to the further distinction between _peoples before, within, and
after a Culture_. It is a fact that has been profoundly felt in all
ages that Culture-peoples are _more distinct_ in character than the
rest. Their predecessors I will call primitive peoples. These are the
fugitive and heterogeneous associations that form and dissolve without
ascertainable rule, till at last, in the presentiment of a still unborn
Culture (as, for example, in the pre-Homeric, the pre-Christian, and
the Germanic periods), phase by phase, becoming ever more definite in
type, they assemble the human material of a population into groups,
though all the time little or no alteration has been occurring in the
stamp of man. Such a superposition of phases leads from the Cimbri and
Teutones through the Marcomanni and Goths to the Franks, Lombards,
and Saxons. Instances of primitive peoples are the Jews and Persians
of the Seleucid age, the “Sea-peoples,” the Egyptian Nomes of Menes’s
time.[240] And that which follows a Culture we may call--from its
best-known example, the Egyptians of post-Roman times--fellah-peoples.
In the tenth century of our era the Faustian soul suddenly awoke
and manifested itself in innumerable shapes. Amongst these, side
by side with the architecture and the ornament, there appears a
distinctly characterized form of “people.” Out of the people-shapes
of the Carolingian Empire--the Saxons, Swabians, Franks, Visigoths,
Lombards--arise suddenly the German, the French, the Spaniards, the
Italians. Hitherto (consciously and deliberately or not) historical
research has uniformly regarded these Culture-peoples as something in
being, as primaries, and have treated the Culture itself as secondary,
as their product. The creative units of history, accordingly, were
simply the Indians, the Greeks, the Romans, the Germans, and so on.
As the Greek Culture was the work of the Hellenes, they must have
been in existence as such far earlier; therefore they must have been
immigrants. Any other idea of creator and creation seemed inconceivable.
I regard it, therefore, as a discovery of decisive importance that
the facts here set forth lead to the reverse conclusion. It will be
established in all rigour that the great Cultures are entities,
primary or original, that arise out of the deepest foundations of
spirituality, and that the peoples under the spell of a Culture are,
alike in their inward form and in their whole manifestation, its
products and not its authors. These shapes in which humanity is seized
and moulded possess style and style-history no less than kinds of art
and modes of thought. The people of Athens is a symbol not less than
the Doric temple, the Englishman not less than modern physics. There
are peoples of Apollinian, Magian, Faustian cast. The Arabian Culture
was _not_ created by “the Arabs”--quite the contrary; for the Magian
Culture begins in the time of Christ, and the Arabian people represents
its last great creation of that kind, a community bonded by Islam as
the Jewish and Persian communities before it had been bonded by their
religions. World-history is the history of the great Cultures, and
peoples are but the symbolic forms and vessels in which the men of
these Cultures fulfil their Destinies.
In each of these Cultures, Mexican and Chinese, Indian and Egyptian,
there is--whether our science is aware of it or not--_a group of
great peoples of identical style_, which arises at the beginning of
the springtime, forming states and carrying history, and throughout
the course of its evolution bears its fundamental form onward to the
goal. They are in the highest degree unlike amongst themselves--it is
scarcely possible to conceive of a sharper contrast than that between
Athenians and Spartans, Germans and Frenchmen, Tsin and Tsu--and
all military history shows national hatred as the loftiest method
of inducting historic decisions. But the moment that a people alien
to the Culture makes an appearance in the field of history, there
awakens everywhere an overpowering feeling of spiritual relationship,
and the notion of the barbarian--meaning the man who inwardly does
_not_ belong to the Culture--is as clear-cut in the peoples of the
Egyptian settlements and the Chinese world of states as it is in the
Classical. The energy of the form is so high that it grasps and recasts
neighbouring peoples, witness the Carthaginians of Roman times with
their half-Classical style, and the Russians who have figured as a
people of Western style from Catherine the Great to the fall of Petrine
Tsardom.
Peoples in the style of their Culture we will call _Nations_, the word
itself distinguishing them from the forms that precede and that follow
them. It is not merely a strong feeling of “we” that forges the inward
unity of its most significant of all major associations; _underlying
the nation there is an Idea_. This stream of a collective being
possesses a very deep relation to Destiny, to Time, and to History,
a relation that is different in each instance and one, too, that
determines the relation of the human material to race, language, land,
state, and religion. As the styles of the Old Chinese and the Classical
peoples differ, so also the styles of their histories.
Life as experienced by primitive and by fellaheen peoples is just
the zoölogical up-and-down, a planless happening without goal or
cadenced march in time, wherein occurrences are many, but, in the last
analysis, devoid of significance. The only historical peoples, the
peoples whose existence _is world-history_, are the nations. Let us be
perfectly clear as to what is meant by this. The Ostrogoths suffered
a great destiny, and therefore, inwardly, they have no history. Their
battles and settlements were not necessary and therefore were episodic;
their end was insignificant. In 1500 B.C. that which lived about Mycenæ
and Tiryns was not _as yet_ a nation, and that which lived in Minoan
Crete was _no longer_ a nation. Tiberius was the last ruler who tried
to lead a Roman nation further on the road of history, who sought to
_retrieve_ it for history. By Marcus Aurelius there was only a Romanic
population to be defended--a field for occurrences, but no longer for
history. How many free pre-generations of Mede or Achæan or Hun folk
there were, in what sort of social groups their predecessors and their
descendants lived, cannot be determined and depends upon no rule. But
of a nation the life-period _is_ determinate, and so are the pace and
the rhythm in which its history moves to fulfilment. From the beginning
of the Chóu period to the rulership of Shih-Hwang-ti, from the events
on which the Troy legend was founded to Augustus, and from Thinite
times to the XVIII Dynasty, the numbers of generations are more or less
the same. The “Late” period of the Culture, from Solon to Alexander,
from Luther to Napoleon, embraces no more than about ten generations.
Within such limits the destiny of the genuine Culture-people, and with
it that of world-history in general, reach fulfilment. The Romans, the
Arabs, the Prussians, are late-born nations. How many generations of
Fabii and Junii had already come and gone _as Romans_ by the time Cannæ
was fought?
Further, nations are _the true city-building peoples_. In the
strongholds they arose, with the cities they ripen to the full height
of their world-consciousness, and in the world-cities they dissolve.
Every town-formation that has character has also _national_ character.
The village, which is wholly a thing of race, does not yet possess it;
the megalopolis possesses it no longer. Of this essential, which so
characteristically colours the nation’s public life that its slightest
manifestation identifies it, we cannot exaggerate--we can scarcely
imagine--the force, the self-sufficingness, and the _loneliness_.
If between the souls of two Cultures the screen is impenetrable, if
no Western may ever hope completely to understand the Indian or the
Chinese, this is equally so, even more so, as between well-developed
nations. Nations understand one another as little as individuals do
so. Each understands merely a self-created picture of the other,
and individuals with the insight to penetrate deeper are few and
far between. _Vis-à-vis_ the Egyptians, all the Classical peoples
necessarily felt themselves as relatives in one whole, but as between
themselves they never understood each other. What sharper contrast is
there than that between the Athenian and the Spartan spirit? German,
French, and English modes of philosophical thinking are distinct, not
merely in Bacon, Descartes, and Leibniz, but already in the age of
Scholasticism;[241] and even now, in modern physics and chemistry, the
scientific method, the choice and type of experiments and hypotheses,
their inter-relations, and their relative importance for the course and
aim of the investigation are markedly different in every nation. German
and French piety, English and Spanish social ethics, German and English
habits of life, stand so far apart that for the average man, and,
therefore, for the public opinion of his community, the real inwardness
of every foreign nation remains a deep secret and a source of continual
and pregnant error. In the Roman Empire men began generally to
understand one another, but this was precisely because there had ceased
to be anything worth understanding in the Classical city. With the
advent of mutual comprehension this particular humanity ceased to live
in nations, _and ipso facto ceased to be historic_.[242]
Owing to the very depth of these experiences, it is not possible for
a whole people to be _uniformly and throughout_ a Culture-people,
a nation. Amongst primitives each individual man has the same
feeling of group-obligations, but the awakening of a nation into
self-consciousness invariably takes place in gradations--that is,
pre-eminently in the particular class that is strongest of soul and
holds the others spellbound by a power derived from what it has
experienced. _Every nation is represented in history by a minority._ At
the beginning of the springtime it is the nobility,[243] which in that
period of its first appearance is the fine flowering of the people, the
vessel in which the national character--unconscious, but felt all the
more strongly in its cosmic pulse--receives its destined Style. The
“we” is the knightly class, in the Egyptian feudal period of 2700 not
less than in the Indian and the Chinese of 1200. The Homeric heroes
_are_ the Danai; the Norman barons _are_ England. Centuries later,
Saint-Simon--the embodiment, it is true, of an older France--used to
say that “all France” was assembled in the King’s ante-room, and there
was a time in which Rome and the Senate were actually identical. With
the advent of the town the burgher becomes the vessel of nationality,
and (as we should expect from the growth of intellectuality) of a
national _consciousness_ that it gets from the nobility and carries
through to its fulfilment. Always it is particular circles, graduated
in fine shades, that _in the name of_ the people live, feel, act, and
know how to die, but these circles become larger and larger. In the
eighteenth century arose the Western _concept_ of the Nation which
sets up (and on occasion energetically insists upon) the claim to
be championed by everybody without exception; but in reality, as we
know, the _émigrés_ were just as convinced as the Jacobins that they
were _the_ people, _the_ representatives of the French nation. A
Culture-people which is coincident with “all” does not exist--this is
possible only in primitive and fellaheen peoples, only in a mere joint
being without depth or historical dignity. So long as a people is a
nation and works out the Destiny of a nation, there is in it a minority
which in the name of all represents and fulfils its history.
IV
The Classical nations, in accordance with the static-Euclidean soul of
their Culture, were corporeal units of the smallest imaginable size.
It was not Hellenes or Ionians that were nations, but in each city the
Demos, a union of adult men, legally and _by the same token nationally_
defined between the type of the hero as upper limit and the slave as
lower.[244] Synœcism, that mysterious process of early periods in which
the inhabitants of a countryside give up their villages and assemble
themselves as a town, marks the moment at which, having arrived at
self-consciousness, the Classical nation constitutes itself as such. We
can still trace the way in which this form of the nation steadily makes
good from Homeric times[245] to the epoch of the great colonizations.
It responds exactly to the Classical prime-symbol: each folk was a
body, visible and surveyable, a σῶμα, the express negation of the idea
of geographical space.
It is of no importance to Classical history whether or not the
Etruscans in Italy were identical physically or linguistically with
the bearers of this name amongst the “Sea-peoples,” or what the
relation was between the pre-Homeric units of the Pelasgi or Danai
and the later bearers of the Doric or the Hellenic name. If, about
1100, there are Doric and Etruscan primitive peoples (as is probable),
nevertheless _a Doric or an Etruscan nation never existed_. In
Tuscany as in the Peloponnese there were only City-states, _national
points_ which in the period of colonization _could only multiply,
never expand_. The Etruscan wars of Rome were always waged against
one or more cities,[246] and the nations that the Persians and the
Carthaginians confronted were of this same type. To speak of “the
Greeks and the Romans” as the eighteenth century did (and as we
still do) is completely erroneous. A Greek “nation” in our sense is
a misconception--the Greeks themselves never knew such an idea at
all. The name of “Hellenes,” which arose about 500, did not denote
a people, but the aggregate of Classical Culture-men, the _sum_ of
their nations,[247] in contradistinction to the “Barbarian” world.
And the Romans, a true urban people, could not conceive of their
Empire otherwise than in the form of innumerable nation-points,
the _civitates_ into which, juridically as in other respects, they
dissolved all the primitive peoples of their Imperium.[248] When
national feeling in _this_ shape is extinguished, there is an end to
Classical history.
It will be the task--one of the heaviest tasks of historians--to trace,
generation by generation, the quiet fading-out of the Classical nations
in the eastern Mediterranean during the “Late Classical” age, and the
ever stronger inflow of a new nation-spirit, the Magian.
A nation of the Magian type is the community of co-believers, the group
of all who know the right way to salvation and are inwardly linked
to one another by the _ijma_[249] of this belief. Men belonged to a
Classical nation by virtue of the possession of citizenship, but to
a Magian nation by virtue of a sacramental act--circumcision for the
Jews, specific forms of baptism for the Mandæans or the Christians. An
unbeliever was for a Magian folk what an alien was for a Classical--no
intercourse with him, no _connubium_--and this national separation
went so far that in Palestine a Jewish-Aramaic and a Christian-Aramaic
dialect formed themselves side by side.[250] The Faustian nation,
though necessarily bound up with a particular religiousness, is not
so with a particular confession; the Classical nation is by type
non-exclusive in its relations to different cults; but _the Magian
nation comprises neither more nor less than is covered by the idea of
one or another of the Magian Churches_. Inwardly the Classical nation
is linked with the city, and the Western with a landscape, but the
Arabian knows neither fatherland nor mother tongue. Outwardly its
specific world-outlook is only expressed by the distinctive script
which each such nation develops as soon as it is born. But for that
very reason the inwardness and hidden force--the magic, in fact--of a
Magian nation-feeling impresses us Faustians, who notice the absence of
the home-idea, as something entirely enigmatic and uncanny. This tacit,
self-secure cohesion (that of the Jews, for example, in the homes of
the Western peoples) is what entered “Roman Law” (called by a Classical
label _but worked out by Aramæans_) as the concept of the “juridical
person,”[251] which is nothing but the Magian notion of a community.
Post-exilic Judaism was a juridical person long before anyone had
discovered the concept itself.
The primitives who preceded this evolution were predominantly tribal
associations, among them the South-Arabian Minæans,[252] who appear
about the beginning of the first millennium, and whose name vanishes
in the first century before Christ; the Aramaic-speaking Chaldeans,
who, likewise about 1000 B.C., sprang up as clan-groups and from
659 to 539 ruled the Babylonian world; the Israelites before the
Exile;[253] and the Persians of Cyrus.[254] So strongly already the
populations felt this form that the priesthoods which developed
here, there, and everywhere after the time of Alexander received the
names of foundered or fictitious tribes. Amongst the Jews and the
South-Arabian Sabæans they were called Levites; amongst the Medes
and Persians, Magi (after an extinct Indian tribe); and amongst the
adherents of the new Babylonian religion Chaldeans (also after a
disintegrated clan-grouping).[255] But here, as in all other Cultures,
the energy of the national _consensus_ completely overrode the old
tribal arrangements of the primitives. Just as the _Populus Romanus_
unquestionably contained folk-elements of very varied provenance,
and as the nation of the French took in Salian Franks and Romanic
and Old Celtic natives alike, so the Magian nation also ceased to
regard origin as a distinguishing mark. The process, of course, was an
exceedingly long one. The tribe still counts for much with the Jews
of the Maccabæan period and even with the Arabs of the first Caliphs;
but for the inwardly ripened Culture-peoples of this world, such as
the Jews of the Talmudic period, it no longer possessed any meaning.
He who belongs to the Faith belongs to the Nation--it would have been
blasphemy even to admit any other distinction. In early Christian times
the Prince of Adiabene[256] went over to Judaism with his people in a
body, and they were all _ipso facto_ incorporated in the Jewish nation.
The same applies to the nobility of Armenia and even the Caucasian
tribes (which at that period must have Judaized on a large scale) and,
in the opposite direction, to the Beduins of Arabia, right down to the
extreme south, and beyond them again to African tribes as far afield as
Lake Chad.[257] Here evidently is a national common feeling proof even
against such race-distinctions as these. It is stated that even to-day
Jews can amongst themselves distinguish very different races at the
first glance, and that in the ghettos of eastern Europe the “tribes”
(in the Old Testament sense) are clearly recognized. But none of this
constitutes a difference of _nation_. According to von Erckert[258] the
West-European Jew-type is universally distributed within the non-Jewish
Caucasian peoples, whereas according to Weissenberg[259] it does not
occur at all amongst the long-headed Jews of southern Arabia, where the
Sabæan tomb-sculptures show a human type that might almost claim to be
Roman or Germanic and is the ancestor of these Jews who were converted
by missionary effort at least by the birth of Christ.
But this resolution of the tribal primitives into the Magian nations of
Persians, Jews, Mandæans, Christians, and the rest must have occurred
quite generally and on an immense scale. I have already drawn attention
to the decisive fact that long before the beginning of our era the
Persians represented simply a religious community, and it is certain
that their numbers were indefinitely increased by accessions to the
Mazdaist faith. The Babylonian religion vanished at that time--which
means that its adherents became in part Jews and in part Persians--but
emerging from it there is a _new_ religion, inwardly alien to both
Jewish and Persian, an astral religion, which bears the name of the
Chaldees and whose adherents constituted a genuine Aramaic-speaking
nation. From this Aramæan population of Chaldean-Jewish-Persian
nationality came, firstly the Babylonian Talmud, the Gnosis, and the
religion of Mani, and secondly, in Islamic times, Sufism and the Shia.
Moreover, as seen from Edessa, the inhabitants of the Classical
world, they also, appear as nations in the Magian style. “The Greeks”
in the Eastern idiom means the aggregate of all who adhered to the
Syncretic cults and were bound together by the _ijma_ of the Late
Classical religiousness. The Hellenistic city-nations are no longer
in the picture, which shows only _one_ community of believers, the
“worshippers of the mysteries,” who under the names of Helios,
Jupiter, Mithras, θεός ὕψιστος, worshipped a kind of Yahweh or Allah.
Throughout the East, Greekness is a definite _religious_ notion, and
for that matter one completely concordant with the facts as they
then were. The feeling of the Polis is almost extinct, and a Magian
nation needs neither home nor community of origin. Even the Hellenism
of the Seleucid Empire, which made converts in Turkestan and on the
Indus, was related in inward form to Persian and post-exilic Judaism.
Later, the Aramæan Porphyry, the pupil of Plotinus, attempted to
organize this Greekness as a cult-Church on the model of the Christian
and the Persian, and the Emperor Julian raised it to the dignity of
being the State Church--an act not merely religious, but also and
above all national. When a Jew sacrificed to Sol or to Apollo, he
thereby became a Greek. So, for example Ammonius Saccas (d. 242), the
teacher of Plotinus and probably also of Origen, went over “from the
Christians to the Greeks”; so also Porphyry, born Malchus and (like
the “Roman” jurist Ulpian)[260] a Phœnician of Tyre.[261] In these
cases we see jurists and State officials taking Latin, and philosophers
Greek, names--and for the philological spirit of modern and religious
research, this is quite historical enough to justify these men’s being
regarded as Roman and Greek in the Classical city-national sense!
But how many of the great Alexandrines may have been Greeks only in
the Magian sense of the term? In point of birth were not Plotinus and
Diophantus[262] perhaps Jews or Chaldeans?
Now, the Christians also felt themselves from the outset as a nation
of the Magian cast, and, moreover, the others, Greeks (“heathen”)
and Jews alike, regarded them as such. Quite logically the latter
considered their secession from Judaism as high treason, and the
former their missionary infiltration into the Classical cities as an
invasion and conquest, while the Christians, on their side, designated
people of other faiths as τὰ ἔθνη.[263] When the Monophysites and
the Nestorians separated themselves from the Orthodox, new nations
came into being as well as new Churches. The Nestorians since 1450
have been governed by the Mar Shimun,[264] who was at once prince and
patriarch of his people and, _vis-à-vis_ the Sultan, occupied exactly
the same position as, long before, the Jewish Resh Galutha had occupied
in the Persian Empire.[265] This nation-consciousness, derived from
particular and defined world-feeling and therefore self-evident with
an _a priori_ sureness, cannot be ignored if we are to understand the
later persecutions of the Christians. The Magian State is inseparably
bound up with the concept of orthodoxy. Caliphate, nation, and Church
form an intimate unit. It was as _states_ that Adiabene went over to
Judaism, Osrhoene about 200 (so soon!) from Greekdom to Christendom,
Armenia in the sixth century from the Greek to the Monophysite Church.
Each of these events expresses the fact that the State was identical
with the orthodox community as a juridical person.[266] If Christians
lived in the Islamic State, Nestorians in the Persian, Jews in the
Byzantine, they did not and could not as unbelievers belong to it, and
consequently were thrown back upon their own jurisdictions.[267] If by
reason of their numbers or their missionary spirit they became a threat
to the continuance of the identity of state and creed-community,
persecution became a national duty. It was on this account that first
the “orthodox” (or “Greek”) and then the Nestorian Christians suffered
in the Persian Empire. Diocletian also, who as “Caliph”[268] (_Dominus
et Deus_) had linked the Imperium with the pagan cult-Churches and saw
himself in all sincerity as Commander of _these_ Faithful, could not
evade the duty of suppressing the second Church. Constantine changed
the “true” Church _and in that act changed the nationality_ of the
Byzantine Empire. From that point on, the Greek name slowly passed over
to the Christian nation, and specifically to that Christian nation
which the Emperor as Head of the Faithful recognized and allowed to
sit in the Great Councils. Hence the uncertain lines of the picture
of Byzantine history--in 290 the organization that of a Classical
Imperium, but the substance already a Magian national state; in 312
a change of nationality without change of name. Under this name of
“Greeks,” first Paganism as a nation fought the Christians, and then
Christianity as a nation fought Islam. And in the latter fight, Islam
itself being a nation also (the Arabian), nationality stamped itself
more and more deeply upon events. Hence the present-day Greeks are
a creation of the Magian Culture, developed first by the Christian
Church, then by the sacred language of this Church, and finally by the
name of this Church. Islam brought with it from the home of Mohammed
the Arab name as the badge of its nationality. It is a mistake to
equate these “Arabs” with the Beduin tribes of the desert. What created
the new nation, with its passionate and strongly characteristic soul,
was the _consensus_ of the new faith. Its unity is no more derived
from race and home than that of the Christian, Jewish, or Persian, and
therefore it did not “migrate”; rather it owes its immense expansion to
the incorporation within itself of the greater part of the early Magian
nations. With the end of the first millennium of our era these nations
one and all pass over into the form of fellah-peoples, and it is as
fellaheen that the Christian peoples of the Balkans under Turkish rule,
the Parsees in India, and the Jews in Western Europe have lived ever
since.[269]
In the West, nations of Faustian style emerge, more and more
distinctly, from the time of Otto the Great (936-973), and in them the
primitive peoples of the Carolingian period are swiftly dissolved.[270]
Already by A.D. 1000 the men who “mattered most” were everywhere
beginning to sense themselves as Germans, Italians, Spaniards,
Frenchmen; whereas hardly six generations earlier their ancestors had
been to the depths of their souls Franks, Lombards, and Visigoths.
The people-form of this Culture is founded, like its Gothic
architecture and its Infinitesimal Calculus upon a tendency to
the Infinite, in the spatial as well as the temporal sense. The
nation-feeling comprises, to begin with, a geographical horizon that,
considering the period and its means of communication, can only be
called vast, and is not paralleled in any other Culture. The fatherland
as _extent_, as a region whose boundaries the individual has scarcely,
if ever, seen and which nevertheless he will defend and die for, is
something that in its symbolic depth and force men of other Cultures
can never comprehend. The Magian nation does not as such possess an
earthly home; the Classical possesses it only as a point-focus. The
actuality that, even in Gothic times, united men from the banks of the
Adige with men in the Order-castles of Lithuania in an association of
feeling would have been inconceivable even in ancient China and ancient
Egypt, and stands in the sharpest opposition to the actuality of Rome
and Athens, where every member of the Demos had the rest constantly in
sight.
Still stronger is the sensitivity to distance _in time_. Before the
fatherland-idea (which is a _consequence_ of the existence of the
nation) emerged at all, this passion evolved another idea to which the
Faustian nations owe that existence--the _dynastic_ idea. Faustian
peoples are historical peoples, communities that feel themselves bound
together not by place or consensus, but by history; and the eminent
symbol and vessel of the common Destiny is the ruling “house.” For
Egyptian and for Chinese mankind the dynasty is a symbol of quite
other meaning. Here what it signifies, as a will and an activity, _is
Time_. All that we have been, all that we would be, is manifested in
the being of the one generation; and our sense of this is much too
profound to be upset by the worthlessness of a regent. What matters is
not the person, but the idea, and it is for the sake of the idea that
thousands have so often marched to their deaths with conviction in a
genealogical quarrel. Classical history was for Classical eyes only a
chain of incidents leading from moment to moment; Magian history was
for its members the progressive actualization in and through mankind
of a world-plan laid down by God and accomplished between a creation
and a cataclysm; but Faustian history is in our eyes a single grand
willing of conscious logic, in the accomplishment of which nations are
led and represented by their rulers. It is a trait of race. Rational
foundations it has not and cannot have--it has simply been felt so,
and because it has been felt so, the companion-trust of the Germanic
migration-time developed on into the feudal troth of the Gothic,
the loyalty of the Baroque, and the merely seemingly undynastic
patriotism of the nineteenth century. We must not misjudge the depth
and dignity of this feeling because there is an endless catalogue
of perjured vassals and peoples[271] and an eternal comedy in the
cringing of courtiers and the abjectness of the vulgar. All great
symbols are spiritual and can be comprehended only in their highest
forms. The private life of a pope bears no relation to the idea of
the Papacy. Henry the Lion’s very defection[272] shows how fully in a
time of nation-forming a real ruler feels the destiny of “his” people
incorporated in himself. He represents that destiny in the face of
history, and at times it costs him his honour to do so.
All nations of the West are of dynastic origins. In the Romanesque
and even in Early Gothic architecture the soul of the Carolingian
primitives still quivers through. There is no French or German Gothic,
but Salian, Rhenish, and Suabian, as there is Visigothic (northern
Spain, southern France) and Lombard and Saxon Romanesque. But over it
all there spreads soon the minority, composed of men of race, that
feels membership in a nation as a great historical vocation. From
it proceed the Crusades, and in them there truly were French and
German chivalries. It is the hall-mark of Faustian peoples that they
are conscious of the direction of their history. But this direction
attaches to the sequence of the generations, and so the nature of the
race-ideal is _genealogical_ through and through--Darwinism, even,
with its theories of descent and inheritance is a sort of caricature
of Gothic heraldry--and the world-as-history, when every individual
lives in the plane of it, contains not only the tree of the individual
family, ruling or other, but also the tree of the people as the basic
form of all its happenings.[273] It needs very exact observation to
perceive that this Faustian-genealogical principle, with its eminently
historical notions of “_Ebenbürtigkeit_” (equivalence by virtue of
birth) and of purity of blood, is just as alien to the Egyptians and
Chinese, for all their historical disposition, as it is to the Roman
nobility and the Byzantine Empire. On the other hand, neither our
peasantry nor the patriciate of the cities is conceivable without
it. The scientific conception of the people, which I have dissected
above, is derived essentially from the genealogical sense of the
Gothic period. The notion that the peoples have their trees has made
the Italians proud to be the heirs of Rome, and the Germans proud to
recall their Teuton forefathers, and that is something quite different
from the Classical belief in timeless descent from heroes and gods.
And eventually, when after 1789 the notion of mother tongue came to be
fitted on to the dynastic principle, the once merely scientific fancy
of a primitive Indogermanic people transformed itself into a deeply
felt genealogy of “the Aryan race,” and in the process the word “race”
became almost a designation for Destiny.
But the “races” of the West are not the creators of the great nations,
but _their result_. Not one of them had yet come into existence in
Carolingian times. It was the class-ideal of chivalry that worked
creatively in different ways upon Germany, England, France, and Spain
and impressed upon an immense area that which within the individual
nations is felt and experienced as race. On this rest (as I have said
before) the nations--so _historical_, so alien to the Classical--of
equivalence by birth (_peer_-age, _Ebenbürtigkeit_) and blood-purity.
It was because the blood of the ruling family incorporated the destiny,
the being, of the whole nation, that the state-system of the Baroque
was of genealogical structure and that most of the grand crises assumed
the form of wars of dynastic succession. Even the catastrophic ruin
of Napoleon, which settled the world’s political organization for a
century, took its shape from the fact than an adventurer dared to drive
out with his blood that of the old dynasties, and that his attack upon
a symbol made it historically a sacred duty to resist him. For all
these peoples were the _consequence_ of dynastic destinies. That there
is a Portuguese people, and a Portuguese Brazil in the midst of Spanish
America, is the result of the marriage of Count Henry of Burgundy in
1095. That there are Swiss and Hollanders is the result of a reaction
against the House of Habsburg. That Lorraine is the name of a land and
not of a people is a consequence of the childlessness of Lothar II.
It was the Kaiser-idea that welded the disjunct primitives of
Charlemagne’s time into the German nation. Germany and Empire are
inseparable ideas. The fall of the Hohenstaufens meant the replacement
of one great dynasty by a handful of small and tiny ones; and the
German nation of Gothic style was inwardly shattered even before
the beginning of the Baroque--that is, at the very time when the
nation-idea was being raised to higher levels of intellect in
leader-cities like Paris, Madrid, London, and Vienna. The Thirty Years’
War, so conventional history says, destroyed Germany in its flower. Not
so; the fact that it could occur at all in this wretched form simply
confirmed and showed up a long-completed decadence--it was the final
consequence of the fall of the Hohenstaufens. There could hardly be a
more convincing proof that Faustian nations are dynastic units. But
then again, the Salians and the Hohenstaufens created also--at least in
idea--an Italian nation out of Romans, Lombards, and Normans. Only the
Empire made it possible for them to stretch a hand back to the age of
Rome. Even though alien power evoked the hostility of the townsmen, and
split the two primary orders, the nobles to the Emperor, the priests
to the Pope; even though in these conflicts of Guelph and Ghibelline
the nobility soon lost its importance and the Papacy rose through the
anti-dynastic cities to political supremacy; even though at the last
there was but a tangle of predatory states whose “Renaissance”-politics
opposed the soaring world-policy of the Gothic Empire, as Milan of
old had defied the will of Frederick Barbarossa--yet the ideal of
_Una Italia_, the ideal for which Dante sacrificed the peace of his
life, was a pure dynastic creation of the great Germany emperors. The
Renaissance, whose historical horizon was that of the urban patriciate,
led the nation as far out of the path of self-fulfilment as it is
possible to imagine. All through the Baroque and Rococo the land was
depressed to the state of being a mere pawn in the power-politics
of alien houses. And not until after 1800 did Romanticism arise and
reawaken the Gothic feeling with an intensity that made of it a
political power.
The French people was forged out of Franks and Visigoths by its kings.
It learned to feel itself as a whole for the first time at Bouvines
in 1214.[274] Still more significant is the creation of the House of
Habsburg, which, out of a population linked neither by speech nor
folk-feeling nor tradition caused to arise the Austrian nation, which
proved its nationhood in defending Maria Theresa and in resisting
Napoleon--its first tests, and its last. The political history of the
Baroque age is in essentials the history of the Houses of Bourbon and
Habsburg. The rise of the House of Wettin in place of that of Welf is
the reason why “Saxony” was on the Weser in 800, and is on the Elbe
to-day. Dynastic events, and finally the intervention of Napoleon,
brought it about that half of Bavaria has shared in the history of
Austria and that the Bavarian State consists for the most part of
Franconia and Suabia.
The latest nation of the West is the Prussian, a creation of the
Hohenzollerns as the Roman was the last creation of the Classical
Polis-feeling, and the Arabian the last product of a religious
_consensus_. At Fehbellin[275] the young nation gained its recognition;
at Rossbach[276] it won for Germany. It was Goethe who with his
infallible eye for historic turning-points described the then new
“Minna von Barnhelm” as the first German poetry of specifically
national content. It is one more example, and a deeply significant
one, to show how dynastically the Western nations defined themselves,
that Germany thus at one stroke re-discovered her poetic language.
The collapse of the Hohenstaufen rule had been accompanied by that of
Germany’s Gothic literature also. What did emerge here and there in the
following centuries--the golden age of all the Western literatures--was
undeserving of the name. But with the victories of Frederick the Great
a new poesy began. “From Lessing to Hebbel” means the same as “from
Rossbach to Sedan.” The attempts that were made to restore the lost
connexion by consciously leaning upon, first the French, and then
Shakespeare, upon the Volkslied, and finally (in Romanticism) upon the
poetry of the age of chivalry, produced at least the unique phenomenon
of an art-history which, though it never really attained one aim, was
constituted, for the greater part, of flashes of genius.
The end of the eighteenth century witnessed the accomplishment of that
remarkable turn with which national consciousness sought to emancipate
itself from the dynastic principle. To all appearance this had happened
in England long before. In this connexion Magna Charta (1215) will
occur to most readers, but some will not have failed to observe
that on the contrary, the very recognition of the nation involved
in the recognition of its representatives gave the dynastic feeling
a fresh-enforced depth and refinement to which the peoples of the
Continent remained almost utter strangers. If the modern Englishman is
(without appearing so) the most conservative human being in the world,
and if in consequence his political management solves its problems
so much by wordless harmony of national pulse instead of express
discussion, and therefore has been the most successful up to now, the
underlying cause is the _early emancipation of the dynastic feeling_
from its expression in monarchical power.
The French Revolution, on the contrary, was in this regard only a
victory of Rationalism. It set free not so much the nation as the
concept of the nation. The dynastic has penetrated into the blood
of the Western races, and on that very account it is a vexation
to their intellect. For a dynasty represents history, it is the
history-become-flesh of a land, and intellect is timeless and
unhistorical. The ideas of the Revolution were all “eternal” and
“true.” Universal human rights, freedom, and equality are literature
and abstraction and not facts. Call all this republican if you will, in
reality it was one more case of a minority striving in the name of all
to introduce the new ideal into the world of fact. It became a power,
but at the cost of the ideal, and all it did was to replace the old
felt adherence by the reasoned patriotism of the nineteenth century;
by a civilized nationalism, only possible in our Culture, which in
France itself and even to-day is unconsciously dynastic; and by the
concept of the _fatherland as dynastic unit_ which emerged first in the
Spanish and Prussian uprisings against Napoleon and then in the German
and Italian wars of _dynastic_ unification. Out of the opposition of
race and speech, blood and intellect, a new and specifically Western
ideal arose to confront the genealogical ideal--that of the mother
tongue. Enthusiasts there were in both countries who thought to replace
the unifying force of the Emperor- and King-idea by the linking of
republic and poetry--something of the “return to nature” in this, but
a return of history to nature. In place of the wars of succession came
language-struggles, in which one nation sought to force its language
and therewith its nationality upon the fragments of another. But no one
will fail to observe that even the rationalistic conception of a nation
as a linguistic unit can at best ignore, never abolish, the dynastic
feeling, any more than a Hellenistic Greek could inwardly overcome
his Polis-consciousness or a modern Jew the national _ijma_. The
mother tongue does not arise out of nothing, but is itself a product of
dynastic history. Without the Capetian line there would have been no
French language, but a Romance-Frankish in the north and a Provençal
in the south. The Italian written-language is to be credited to the
German Emperors and above all to Frederick II. The modern nations
are primarily the populations of an old dynastic history. Yet in the
nineteenth century the second concept of the nation as a unit of
written language has annihilated the Austrian, and probably created the
American. Thenceforward there have been in all countries two parties
representing the nation in two opposed aspects, as dynastic-historical
unit and as intellectual unit--the race party and the language
party--but these are reflections that evoke too soon problems of
politics that must await a later chapter.
V
At first, when the land was still without cities, it was the nobility
that represented, in the highest sense of the word, the nation. The
peasantry, “everlasting” and historyless, was a people _before_ the
dawn of the Culture, and in very fundamental characters it continued
to be the primitive people, surviving when the form of the nation had
passed away again. “The nation,” like every other grand symbol of the
Culture, is intimately the cherished possession of a few; those who
have it are born to it as men are born to art or philosophy, and the
distinctions of creator, critic, and layman, or something like them,
hold for it also--alike in a classical Polis, a Jewish consensus, and a
Western people. When a nation rises up ardent to fight for its freedom
and honour, it is always a minority that really fires the multitude.
The people “awakens”--it is more than a figure of speech, for only thus
and then does the waking-consciousness of the whole become manifested.
All these individuals whose “we”-feeling yesterday went content with
a horizon of family and job and perhaps home-town are suddenly to-day
men of nothing less than the People. Their thought and feeling, their
Ego, and therewith the “it” in them have been transformed to the very
depths. It has become _historic_. And then even the unhistorical
peasant becomes a member of the nation, and a day dawns for him in
which he experiences history and not merely lets it pass him by.
But in the world-cities, besides a minority which has history and
livingly experiences, feels, and seeks to lead the nation, there arises
another minority of timeless a-historic, literary men, men not of
destiny, but of reasons and causes, men who are inwardly detached from
the pulse of blood and being, wide-awake thinking consciousnesses,
that can no longer find any “reasonable” connotation for the
nation-idea. Cosmopolitanism is a mere waking-conscious association of
intelligentsias. In it there is hatred of Destiny, and above all of
history as the expression of Destiny. Everything national belongs to
race--so much so that it is incapable of finding language for itself,
clumsy in all that demands thought, and shiftless to the point of
fatalism. _Cosmopolitanism is literature_ and remains literature, very
strong in reasons, very weak in defending them otherwise than with more
reasons, in defending them with the blood.
All the more, then, this minority of far superior intellect chooses the
intellectual weapon, and all the more is it able to do so as the world
cities are pure intellect, rootless, and by very hypothesis the common
property of the civilization. The born world-citizens, world-pacifists,
and world-reconcilers--alike in the China of the “Contending States,”
in Buddhist India, in the Hellenistic age, and in the Western world
to-day--are the _spiritual leaders of fellaheen_. _“Panem et circenses”
is only another formula for pacifism._ In the history of all Cultures
there is an anti-national element, whether we have evidences of it or
not. Pure self-directed thinking was ever alien to life, and therefore
alien to history, unwarlike, raceless. Consider our Humanism and
Classicism, the Sophists of Athens, Buddha and Lao-tze--not to mention
the passionate contempt of all nationalisms displayed by the great
champions of the ecclesiastical and the philosophical world-view.
However the cases differ amongst themselves otherwise, they are alike
in this, that the world-feeling of race; the political (and therefore
national) instinct for fact (“my country, right or wrong!”); the
resolve to be the subject and not the object of evolution (for one or
the other it has to be)--in a word, the _will_-to-power--has to retreat
and make room for a tendency of which the standard-bearers are most
often men without original impulse, but all the more set upon their
logic; men at home in a world of truths, ideals, and Utopias; bookmen
who believe that they can replace the actual by the logical, the might
of facts by an abstract justice, Destiny by Reason. It begins with the
everlastingly fearful who withdraw themselves out of actuality into
cells and study-chambers and spiritual communities, and proclaim the
nullity of the world’s doings, and it ends in every Culture with the
apostles of world-peace. Every people has such (historically speaking)
waste-products. Even their heads constitute physiognomically a group
by themselves. In the “history of intellect” they stand high--and many
illustrious names are numbered amongst them--but regarded from the
point of view of actual history, they are inefficients.
The Destiny of a nation plunged in the events of its world depends
upon how far its race-quality is successful in making these events
historically ineffective against it. It could perhaps be demonstrated
even now that in the Chinese world of states the realm of Tsin won
through (250 B.C.) because it alone had kept itself free from Taoist
sentiments. Be this as it may, the Roman people prevailed over the rest
of the Classical world because it was able to insulate its conduct of
policy from the fellah-instincts of Hellenism.
A nation is humanity brought into living form. The practical result
of world-improving theories is consistently a _formless and therefore
historyless mass_. All world-improvers and world-citizens stand
for fellaheen ideals, whether they know it or not. _Their success
means the historical abdication of the nation in favour, not of
everlasting peace, but of another nation._ World-peace is always a
one-sided resolve. The _Pax Romana_ had for the later soldier-emperors
and Germanic band-kings only the one practical significance that
it made a formless population of a hundred millions a mere object
for the will-to-power of small warrior-groups. This peace cost the
peaceful sacrifices beside which the losses of Cannæ seem vanishingly
small. The Babylonian, Chinese, Indian, Egyptian worlds pass from
one conqueror’s hands to another’s, and it is their own blood that
pays for the contest. That is their--peace. When in 1401 the Mongols
conquered Mesopotamia, they built a victory memorial out of the skulls
of a hundred thousand inhabitants of Baghdad, which had not defended
itself. From the intellectual point of view, no doubt, the extinction
of the nations puts a fellaheen-world above history, civilized at
last and _for ever_. But in the realm of facts it reverts to a state
of nature, in which it alternates between long submissiveness and
brief angers that for all the bloodshed--world-peace never diminishes
that--alter nothing. Of old they shed their blood for themselves; now
they must shed it for others, often enough for the mere entertainment
of others--that is the difference. A resolute leader who collects ten
thousand adventurers about him can do as he pleases. Were the whole
world a single Imperium, it would thereby become merely the maximum
conceivable field for the exploits of such conquering heroes.
“_Lever doodt als Sklav_ (better dead than slave)” is an old Frisian
peasant-saying. The reverse has been the choice of every Late
Civilization, and every Late Civilization has had to experience how
much that choice costs it.