Cities and Peoples (C): Primitives, Culture-Peoples, Fellaheen

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 Spartiates⁠²¹⁶ 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 Mamertines⁠²¹⁸ 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

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 Beloch⁠²²⁵ and Delbrück⁠²²⁶ 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 Inscription⁠²³⁰ 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 observes⁠²³² 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 Meyer⁠²³⁷ 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.

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.

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 times⁠²⁴⁵ 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 ijma⁠²⁴⁹ 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 Adiabene⁠²⁵⁶ 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 Erckert⁠²⁵⁸ the West-European Jew-type is universally distributed within the non-Jewish Caucasian peoples, whereas according to Weissenberg⁠²⁵⁹ 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 Diophantus⁠²⁶² 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 179“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 peoples⁠²⁷¹ 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 defection⁠²⁷² 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 Fehbellin⁠²⁷⁵ the young nation gained its recognition; at Rossbach⁠²⁷⁶ 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.

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.