Chapter VI: Cities and Peoples (2)

In the West, nations of Faustian style emerge, more and more distinctly, from the time of Otto the Great (936-973), and in them the primitive peoples of the Carolingian period are swiftly dissolved.[270] Already by A.D. 1000 the men who “mattered most” were everywhere beginning to sense themselves as Germans, Italians, Spaniards, Frenchmen; whereas hardly six generations earlier their ancestors had been to the depths of their souls Franks, Lombards, and Visigoths.

The people-form of this Culture is founded, like its Gothic architecture and its Infinitesimal Calculus upon a tendency to the Infinite, in the spatial as well as the temporal sense. The nation-feeling comprises, to begin with, a geographical horizon that, considering the period and its means of communication, can only be called vast, and is not paralleled in any other Culture. The fatherland as _extent_, as a region whose boundaries the individual has scarcely, if ever, seen and which nevertheless he will defend and die for, is something that in its symbolic depth and force men of other Cultures can never comprehend. The Magian nation does not as such possess an earthly home; the Classical possesses it only as a point-focus. The actuality that, even in Gothic times, united men from the banks of the Adige with men in the Order-castles of Lithuania in an association of feeling would have been inconceivable even in ancient China and ancient Egypt, and stands in the sharpest opposition to the actuality of Rome and Athens, where every member of the Demos had the rest constantly in sight.

Still stronger is the sensitivity to distance _in time_. Before the fatherland-idea (which is a _consequence_ of the existence of the nation) emerged at all, this passion evolved another idea to which the Faustian nations owe that existence--the _dynastic_ idea. Faustian peoples are historical peoples, communities that feel themselves bound together not by place or consensus, but by history; and the eminent symbol and vessel of the common Destiny is the ruling “house.” For Egyptian and for Chinese mankind the dynasty is a symbol of quite other meaning. Here what it signifies, as a will and an activity, _is Time_. All that we have been, all that we would be, is manifested in the being of the one generation; and our sense of this is much too profound to be upset by the worthlessness of a regent. What matters is not the person, but the idea, and it is for the sake of the idea that thousands have so often marched to their deaths with conviction in a genealogical quarrel. Classical history was for Classical eyes only a chain of incidents leading from moment to moment; Magian history was for its members the progressive actualization in and through mankind of a world-plan laid down by God and accomplished between a creation and a cataclysm; but Faustian history is in our eyes a single grand willing of conscious logic, in the accomplishment of which nations are led and represented by their rulers. It is a trait of race. Rational foundations it has not and cannot have--it has simply been felt so, and because it has been felt so, the companion-trust of the Germanic migration-time developed on into the feudal troth of the Gothic, the loyalty of the Baroque, and the merely seemingly undynastic patriotism of the nineteenth century. We must not misjudge the depth and dignity of this feeling because there is an endless catalogue of perjured vassals and peoples[271] and an eternal comedy in the cringing of courtiers and the abjectness of the vulgar. All great symbols are spiritual and can be comprehended only in their highest forms. The private life of a pope bears no relation to the idea of the Papacy. Henry the Lion’s very defection[272] shows how fully in a time of nation-forming a real ruler feels the destiny of “his” people incorporated in himself. He represents that destiny in the face of history, and at times it costs him his honour to do so.

All nations of the West are of dynastic origins. In the Romanesque and even in Early Gothic architecture the soul of the Carolingian primitives still quivers through. There is no French or German Gothic, but Salian, Rhenish, and Suabian, as there is Visigothic (northern Spain, southern France) and Lombard and Saxon Romanesque. But over it all there spreads soon the minority, composed of men of race, that feels membership in a nation as a great historical vocation. From it proceed the Crusades, and in them there truly were French and German chivalries. It is the hall-mark of Faustian peoples that they are conscious of the direction of their history. But this direction attaches to the sequence of the generations, and so the nature of the race-ideal is _genealogical_ through and through--Darwinism, even, with its theories of descent and inheritance is a sort of caricature of Gothic heraldry--and the world-as-history, when every individual lives in the plane of it, contains not only the tree of the individual family, ruling or other, but also the tree of the people as the basic form of all its happenings.[273] It needs very exact observation to perceive that this Faustian-genealogical principle, with its eminently historical notions of “_Ebenbürtigkeit_” (equivalence by virtue of birth) and of purity of blood, is just as alien to the Egyptians and Chinese, for all their historical disposition, as it is to the Roman nobility and the Byzantine Empire. On the other hand, neither our peasantry nor the patriciate of the cities is conceivable without it. The scientific conception of the people, which I have dissected above, is derived essentially from the genealogical sense of the Gothic period. The notion that the peoples have their trees has made the Italians proud to be the heirs of Rome, and the Germans proud to recall their Teuton forefathers, and that is something quite different from the Classical belief in timeless descent from heroes and gods. And eventually, when after 1789 the notion of mother tongue came to be fitted on to the dynastic principle, the once merely scientific fancy of a primitive Indogermanic people transformed itself into a deeply felt genealogy of “the Aryan race,” and in the process the word “race” became almost a designation for Destiny.

But the “races” of the West are not the creators of the great nations, but _their result_. Not one of them had yet come into existence in Carolingian times. It was the class-ideal of chivalry that worked creatively in different ways upon Germany, England, France, and Spain and impressed upon an immense area that which within the individual nations is felt and experienced as race. On this rest (as I have said before) the nations--so _historical_, so alien to the Classical--of equivalence by birth (_peer_-age, _Ebenbürtigkeit_) and blood-purity. It was because the blood of the ruling family incorporated the destiny, the being, of the whole nation, that the state-system of the Baroque was of genealogical structure and that most of the grand crises assumed the form of wars of dynastic succession. Even the catastrophic ruin of Napoleon, which settled the world’s political organization for a century, took its shape from the fact than an adventurer dared to drive out with his blood that of the old dynasties, and that his attack upon a symbol made it historically a sacred duty to resist him. For all these peoples were the _consequence_ of dynastic destinies. That there is a Portuguese people, and a Portuguese Brazil in the midst of Spanish America, is the result of the marriage of Count Henry of Burgundy in 1095. That there are Swiss and Hollanders is the result of a reaction against the House of Habsburg. That Lorraine is the name of a land and not of a people is a consequence of the childlessness of Lothar II.

It was the Kaiser-idea that welded the disjunct primitives of Charlemagne’s time into the German nation. Germany and Empire are inseparable ideas. The fall of the Hohenstaufens meant the replacement of one great dynasty by a handful of small and tiny ones; and the German nation of Gothic style was inwardly shattered even before the beginning of the Baroque--that is, at the very time when the nation-idea was being raised to higher levels of intellect in leader-cities like Paris, Madrid, London, and Vienna. The Thirty Years’ War, so conventional history says, destroyed Germany in its flower. Not so; the fact that it could occur at all in this wretched form simply confirmed and showed up a long-completed decadence--it was the final consequence of the fall of the Hohenstaufens. There could hardly be a more convincing proof that Faustian nations are dynastic units. But then again, the Salians and the Hohenstaufens created also--at least in idea--an Italian nation out of Romans, Lombards, and Normans. Only the Empire made it possible for them to stretch a hand back to the age of Rome. Even though alien power evoked the hostility of the townsmen, and split the two primary orders, the nobles to the Emperor, the priests to the Pope; even though in these conflicts of Guelph and Ghibelline the nobility soon lost its importance and the Papacy rose through the anti-dynastic cities to political supremacy; even though at the last there was but a tangle of predatory states whose “Renaissance”-politics opposed the soaring world-policy of the Gothic Empire, as Milan of old had defied the will of Frederick Barbarossa--yet the ideal of _Una Italia_, the ideal for which Dante sacrificed the peace of his life, was a pure dynastic creation of the great Germany emperors. The Renaissance, whose historical horizon was that of the urban patriciate, led the nation as far out of the path of self-fulfilment as it is possible to imagine. All through the Baroque and Rococo the land was depressed to the state of being a mere pawn in the power-politics of alien houses. And not until after 1800 did Romanticism arise and reawaken the Gothic feeling with an intensity that made of it a political power.

The French people was forged out of Franks and Visigoths by its kings. It learned to feel itself as a whole for the first time at Bouvines in 1214.[274] Still more significant is the creation of the House of Habsburg, which, out of a population linked neither by speech nor folk-feeling nor tradition caused to arise the Austrian nation, which proved its nationhood in defending Maria Theresa and in resisting Napoleon--its first tests, and its last. The political history of the Baroque age is in essentials the history of the Houses of Bourbon and Habsburg. The rise of the House of Wettin in place of that of Welf is the reason why “Saxony” was on the Weser in 800, and is on the Elbe to-day. Dynastic events, and finally the intervention of Napoleon, brought it about that half of Bavaria has shared in the history of Austria and that the Bavarian State consists for the most part of Franconia and Suabia.

The latest nation of the West is the Prussian, a creation of the Hohenzollerns as the Roman was the last creation of the Classical Polis-feeling, and the Arabian the last product of a religious _consensus_. At Fehbellin[275] the young nation gained its recognition; at Rossbach[276] it won for Germany. It was Goethe who with his infallible eye for historic turning-points described the then new “Minna von Barnhelm” as the first German poetry of specifically national content. It is one more example, and a deeply significant one, to show how dynastically the Western nations defined themselves, that Germany thus at one stroke re-discovered her poetic language. The collapse of the Hohenstaufen rule had been accompanied by that of Germany’s Gothic literature also. What did emerge here and there in the following centuries--the golden age of all the Western literatures--was undeserving of the name. But with the victories of Frederick the Great a new poesy began. “From Lessing to Hebbel” means the same as “from Rossbach to Sedan.” The attempts that were made to restore the lost connexion by consciously leaning upon, first the French, and then Shakespeare, upon the Volkslied, and finally (in Romanticism) upon the poetry of the age of chivalry, produced at least the unique phenomenon of an art-history which, though it never really attained one aim, was constituted, for the greater part, of flashes of genius.

The end of the eighteenth century witnessed the accomplishment of that remarkable turn with which national consciousness sought to emancipate itself from the dynastic principle. To all appearance this had happened in England long before. In this connexion Magna Charta (1215) will occur to most readers, but some will not have failed to observe that on the contrary, the very recognition of the nation involved in the recognition of its representatives gave the dynastic feeling a fresh-enforced depth and refinement to which the peoples of the Continent remained almost utter strangers. If the modern Englishman is (without appearing so) the most conservative human being in the world, and if in consequence his political management solves its problems so much by wordless harmony of national pulse instead of express discussion, and therefore has been the most successful up to now, the underlying cause is the _early emancipation of the dynastic feeling_ from its expression in monarchical power.

The French Revolution, on the contrary, was in this regard only a victory of Rationalism. It set free not so much the nation as the concept of the nation. The dynastic has penetrated into the blood of the Western races, and on that very account it is a vexation to their intellect. For a dynasty represents history, it is the history-become-flesh of a land, and intellect is timeless and unhistorical. The ideas of the Revolution were all “eternal” and “true.” Universal human rights, freedom, and equality are literature and abstraction and not facts. Call all this republican if you will, in reality it was one more case of a minority striving in the name of all to introduce the new ideal into the world of fact. It became a power, but at the cost of the ideal, and all it did was to replace the old felt adherence by the reasoned patriotism of the nineteenth century; by a civilized nationalism, only possible in our Culture, which in France itself and even to-day is unconsciously dynastic; and by the concept of the _fatherland as dynastic unit_ which emerged first in the Spanish and Prussian uprisings against Napoleon and then in the German and Italian wars of _dynastic_ unification. Out of the opposition of race and speech, blood and intellect, a new and specifically Western ideal arose to confront the genealogical ideal--that of the mother tongue. Enthusiasts there were in both countries who thought to replace the unifying force of the Emperor- and King-idea by the linking of republic and poetry--something of the “return to nature” in this, but a return of history to nature. In place of the wars of succession came language-struggles, in which one nation sought to force its language and therewith its nationality upon the fragments of another. But no one will fail to observe that even the rationalistic conception of a nation as a linguistic unit can at best ignore, never abolish, the dynastic feeling, any more than a Hellenistic Greek could inwardly overcome his Polis-consciousness or a modern Jew the national _ijma_. The mother tongue does not arise out of nothing, but is itself a product of dynastic history. Without the Capetian line there would have been no French language, but a Romance-Frankish in the north and a Provençal in the south. The Italian written-language is to be credited to the German Emperors and above all to Frederick II. The modern nations are primarily the populations of an old dynastic history. Yet in the nineteenth century the second concept of the nation as a unit of written language has annihilated the Austrian, and probably created the American. Thenceforward there have been in all countries two parties representing the nation in two opposed aspects, as dynastic-historical unit and as intellectual unit--the race party and the language party--but these are reflections that evoke too soon problems of politics that must await a later chapter.

V

At first, when the land was still without cities, it was the nobility that represented, in the highest sense of the word, the nation. The peasantry, “everlasting” and historyless, was a people _before_ the dawn of the Culture, and in very fundamental characters it continued to be the primitive people, surviving when the form of the nation had passed away again. “The nation,” like every other grand symbol of the Culture, is intimately the cherished possession of a few; those who have it are born to it as men are born to art or philosophy, and the distinctions of creator, critic, and layman, or something like them, hold for it also--alike in a classical Polis, a Jewish consensus, and a Western people. When a nation rises up ardent to fight for its freedom and honour, it is always a minority that really fires the multitude. The people “awakens”--it is more than a figure of speech, for only thus and then does the waking-consciousness of the whole become manifested. All these individuals whose “we”-feeling yesterday went content with a horizon of family and job and perhaps home-town are suddenly to-day men of nothing less than the People. Their thought and feeling, their Ego, and therewith the “it” in them have been transformed to the very depths. It has become _historic_. And then even the unhistorical peasant becomes a member of the nation, and a day dawns for him in which he experiences history and not merely lets it pass him by.

But in the world-cities, besides a minority which has history and livingly experiences, feels, and seeks to lead the nation, there arises another minority of timeless a-historic, literary men, men not of destiny, but of reasons and causes, men who are inwardly detached from the pulse of blood and being, wide-awake thinking consciousnesses, that can no longer find any “reasonable” connotation for the nation-idea. Cosmopolitanism is a mere waking-conscious association of intelligentsias. In it there is hatred of Destiny, and above all of history as the expression of Destiny. Everything national belongs to race--so much so that it is incapable of finding language for itself, clumsy in all that demands thought, and shiftless to the point of fatalism. _Cosmopolitanism is literature_ and remains literature, very strong in reasons, very weak in defending them otherwise than with more reasons, in defending them with the blood.

All the more, then, this minority of far superior intellect chooses the intellectual weapon, and all the more is it able to do so as the world cities are pure intellect, rootless, and by very hypothesis the common property of the civilization. The born world-citizens, world-pacifists, and world-reconcilers--alike in the China of the “Contending States,” in Buddhist India, in the Hellenistic age, and in the Western world to-day--are the _spiritual leaders of fellaheen_. _“Panem et circenses” is only another formula for pacifism._ In the history of all Cultures there is an anti-national element, whether we have evidences of it or not. Pure self-directed thinking was ever alien to life, and therefore alien to history, unwarlike, raceless. Consider our Humanism and Classicism, the Sophists of Athens, Buddha and Lao-tze--not to mention the passionate contempt of all nationalisms displayed by the great champions of the ecclesiastical and the philosophical world-view. However the cases differ amongst themselves otherwise, they are alike in this, that the world-feeling of race; the political (and therefore national) instinct for fact (“my country, right or wrong!”); the resolve to be the subject and not the object of evolution (for one or the other it has to be)--in a word, the _will_-to-power--has to retreat and make room for a tendency of which the standard-bearers are most often men without original impulse, but all the more set upon their logic; men at home in a world of truths, ideals, and Utopias; bookmen who believe that they can replace the actual by the logical, the might of facts by an abstract justice, Destiny by Reason. It begins with the everlastingly fearful who withdraw themselves out of actuality into cells and study-chambers and spiritual communities, and proclaim the nullity of the world’s doings, and it ends in every Culture with the apostles of world-peace. Every people has such (historically speaking) waste-products. Even their heads constitute physiognomically a group by themselves. In the “history of intellect” they stand high--and many illustrious names are numbered amongst them--but regarded from the point of view of actual history, they are inefficients.

The Destiny of a nation plunged in the events of its world depends upon how far its race-quality is successful in making these events historically ineffective against it. It could perhaps be demonstrated even now that in the Chinese world of states the realm of Tsin won through (250 B.C.) because it alone had kept itself free from Taoist sentiments. Be this as it may, the Roman people prevailed over the rest of the Classical world because it was able to insulate its conduct of policy from the fellah-instincts of Hellenism.

A nation is humanity brought into living form. The practical result of world-improving theories is consistently a _formless and therefore historyless mass_. All world-improvers and world-citizens stand for fellaheen ideals, whether they know it or not. _Their success means the historical abdication of the nation in favour, not of everlasting peace, but of another nation._ World-peace is always a one-sided resolve. The _Pax Romana_ had for the later soldier-emperors and Germanic band-kings only the one practical significance that it made a formless population of a hundred millions a mere object for the will-to-power of small warrior-groups. This peace cost the peaceful sacrifices beside which the losses of Cannæ seem vanishingly small. The Babylonian, Chinese, Indian, Egyptian worlds pass from one conqueror’s hands to another’s, and it is their own blood that pays for the contest. That is their--peace. When in 1401 the Mongols conquered Mesopotamia, they built a victory memorial out of the skulls of a hundred thousand inhabitants of Baghdad, which had not defended itself. From the intellectual point of view, no doubt, the extinction of the nations puts a fellaheen-world above history, civilized at last and _for ever_. But in the realm of facts it reverts to a state of nature, in which it alternates between long submissiveness and brief angers that for all the bloodshed--world-peace never diminishes that--alter nothing. Of old they shed their blood for themselves; now they must shed it for others, often enough for the mere entertainment of others--that is the difference. A resolute leader who collects ten thousand adventurers about him can do as he pleases. Were the whole world a single Imperium, it would thereby become merely the maximum conceivable field for the exploits of such conquering heroes.

“_Lever doodt als Sklav_ (better dead than slave)” is an old Frisian peasant-saying. The reverse has been the choice of every Late Civilization, and every Late Civilization has had to experience how much that choice costs it.