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 Comnena⁠¹³⁶ 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 onward⁠¹⁵⁸ 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.

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.