Chapter X: The State (1)

(A)

THE PROBLEM OF THE ESTATES--NOBILITY AND PRIESTHOOD

I[569]

A fathomless secret of the cosmic flowings that we call Life is their separation into two sexes. Already in the earth-bound existence-streams of the plant world they are trying to part from one another, as the symbol of the flower tells us--into a something that _is_ this existence and a something that keeps it going. Animals are free, little worlds in a big world--the cosmic--closed off as microcosms and set up against the macrocosm. And, more and more decisively as the animal kingdom unfolds its history, the dual direction of dual being, of the masculine and the feminine, manifests itself.

The feminine stands closer to the Cosmic. It is rooted deeper in the earth and it is immediately involved in the grand cyclic rhythms of Nature. The masculine is freer, more animal, more mobile--as to sensation and understanding as well as otherwise--more awake and more tense.

The male livingly experiences Destiny, and he _comprehends_ Causality, the causal logic of the Become. The female, on the contrary, _is herself_ Destiny and Time and the organic logic of the Becoming, and for that very reason the principle of Causality is for ever alien to her. Whenever Man has tried to give Destiny any tangible form, he has felt it as of feminine form, and he has called it Moirai, Parcæ, Norns. The supreme deity is never itself Destiny, but always either its representative or its master--just as man represents or controls woman. Primevally, too, woman is the seeress, and not because she knows the future, but because she _is_ the future. The priest merely interprets the oracle; the woman is the oracle itself, and it is Time that speaks through her.

The man _makes_ History, the woman _is_ History. Here, strangely clear yet enigmatic still, we have a dual significance of all living happenings--on the one hand we sense cosmic flow as such, and on the other hand the chain and train of successive individuals brings us back to the microcosms themselves as the recipients, containers, and preservers of the flowing. It is this “second” history that is characteristically masculine--political, social, more conscious, freer, and more agitated than the other. It reaches back deep into the animal world, and receives highest symbolic and world-historical expression in the life-courses of the great Cultures. Feminine, on the contrary, is the primary, the eternal, the maternal, the plantlike (for the plant ever has something female in it), _the cultureless history of the generation-sequence_, which never alters, but uniformly and stilly passes through the being of all animal and human species, through all the short-lived individual Cultures. In retrospect, it is synonymous with Life itself. This history, too, is not without its battles and its tragedies. Woman in childbed wins through to her victory. The Aztecs--the Romans of the Mexican Culture--honoured the woman in labour as a battling warrior, and if she died, she was interred with the same formulæ as the fallen hero. Policy for Woman is eternally the conquest of the Man, through whom she can become mother of children, through whom she can become History and Destiny and Future. The target of her profound shyness, her tactical finesse, is ever the father of her son. The man, on the contrary, whose centre of gravity lies essentially in the other kind of History, wants that son as _his_ son, as inheritor and carrier of his blood and historical tradition.

Here, in man and in woman, _the two kinds of History_ are fighting for power. Woman is strong and wholly what she is, and she experiences the Man and the Sons only in relation to herself and her ordained rôle. In the masculine being, on the contrary, there is a certain contradiction; he is this man, and he is something else besides, which woman neither understands nor admits, which she feels as robbery and violence upon that which to her is holiest. This secret and fundamental war of the sexes has gone on ever since there were sexes, and will continue--silent, bitter, unforgiving, pitiless--while they continue. In it, too, there are policies, battles, alliances, treaties, treasons. Race-feeling of love and hate, which originate in depths of world-yearning and primary instincts of directedness, prevail between the sexes--and with a still more uncanny potency than in the other History that takes place between man and man. There are love-lyrics and war-lyrics, love-dances and weapon-dances, there are two kinds of tragedy--_Othello_ and _Macbeth_. But nothing in the political world even begins to compare with the abysses of a Clytæmnestra’s or a Kriemhild’s vengeance.

And so woman despises that other History--man’s politics--which she never comprehends, and of which all that she sees is that it takes her sons from her. What for her is a triumphant battle that annihilates the victories of a thousand childbeds? Man’s history sacrifices woman’s history to itself, and no doubt there is a female heroism too, that proudly brings the sons to the sacrifice (Catherine Sforza on the walls of Imola), but nevertheless there was and is and ever will be a secret politic of the woman--of the female of the animal world even--that seeks to draw away her male from his kind of history and to weave him body and soul into her own plantlike history of generic succession--that is, into herself. And yet all that is accomplished in the man-history is accomplished under the battle-cries of hearth and home, wives and children, race and the like, and its very object is the covering and upholding of this history of birth and death. The conflict of man and man is ever on account of the blood, of woman. _Woman, as Time, is that for which there is history at all._

The woman with race in her feels this even when she does not know it. She is Destiny, she plays Destiny. The play begins with the fight of men for the possession of her--Helen, and the tragedy of Carmen, and Catherine II, and the story of Napoleon and Désirée Clary, who in the end took Bernadotte over to the side of his enemies--and it is not a human play only, for this fight begins down in the animal world and fills the history of whole species. And it culminates in her swaying, as mother or wife or mistress, the Destiny of empires--Hallgerd in the Njal saga, the Frankish queen Brunhilde, Marozia who gave the Holy See to men of her choice. The man climbs up in _his_ history until he has the future of a country in his hands--and then woman comes and forces him to his knees. Peoples and states may go down in ruin over it, but she in _her_ history has conquered. This, in the last analysis, is always the aim of political ambition in a woman of race.[570]

Thus history has two meanings, neither to be blasphemed. It is cosmic or politic, it _is_ being or it _preserves_ being. There are two sorts of Destiny, two sorts of war, two sorts of tragedy--_public and private_. Nothing can eliminate this duality from the world. It is radical, founded in the essence of the animal that is both microcosm and participant in the cosmic. It appears at all significant conjunctures in the form of a conflict of duties, which exists only for the man, not for the woman, and in the course of a higher Culture it is never overcome, but only deepened. There are public life and private life, public law and private law, communal cults and domestic cults. As Estate,[571] Being is “in form” for the one history; as race, breed, it is in flow as _itself_ the other history. This is the old German distinction between the “sword side” and the “spindle side” of blood-relationships. The double significance of directional Time finds its highest expression in the ideas of _the State_ and _the Family_.

The ordering of the family is in living material what the form of the house is in dead.[572] A change in the structure and import of family life, and the plan of the house changes also. To the Classical mode of housing corresponds the agnate family of Classical style. This is ever more sharply defined in Hellenic city-law than in the later Roman.[573] It refers entirely to the Estate as present in a Euclidean here-and-now, just as the Polis is conceived as an aggregate of bodies availably present. Blood-relationship, therefore, is neither necessary nor sufficient for it; it ceases at the limit of _patria potestas_, of the “house.” The mother as such is not agnatically related to the offspring of her own body; only in so far as, like them, she is subject to the _patria potestas_ of her living husband is she the agnatic sister of her children.[574] To the “Consensus,” on the other hand, corresponds the Magian cognate family (Hebrew, “_Mishpasha_”) which is representatively extended by both the paternal _and_ the maternal blood-relationships, and possesses a “spirit,” a little consensus, of its own, but no special head.[575] It is significant of the extinction of the Classical soul and the unfolding of the Magian that the “Roman” law of Imperial times gradually passes from _agnatio_ to _cognatio_. Justinian’s 118th and 127th novels reforming the law of inheritance affirm the victory of the Magian family-idea.[576]

On the other side, we see masses of individual beings streaming past, growing and passing, but _making_ history. The purer, deeper, stronger, more taken-for-granted the common beat of these sequent generations is, the more blood, the more race they have. Out of the infinite they rise, every one with its soul,[577] bands that feel themselves in the common wave-beat of their being, as a whole--not mind-communities like orders, craft-guilds, or schools of learning, which are linked by common truths, but blood-confederates in the mêlée of fighting life.

There are streams of being which are “in form” in the same sense in which the term is used in sports. A field of steeplechasers is “in form” when the legs swing surely over the fences, and the hoofs beat firmly and rhythmically on the flat. When wrestlers, fencers, ball-players are “in form,” the riskiest acts and moves come off easily and naturally. An art-period is in form when its tradition is second nature, as counterpoint was to Bach. An army is in form when it is like the army of Napoleon at Austerlitz and the army of Moltke at Sedan. Practically everything that has been achieved in world-history, in war and in that continuation of war by intellectual means[578] that we call politics; in all successful diplomacy, tactics, strategy; in the competition of states or social classes or parties; has been the product of living unities that found themselves “in form.”

The word for race- or breed-education is “training” (_Zucht_, _Züchtung_), as against the shaping (_Bildung_) which creates communities of waking-consciousness on a basis of uniform teachings or beliefs. Books, for example, are shaping agents, while the constant felt pulse and harmony of _milieu_ into which one feels oneself, _lives_ oneself--like a novice or a page of early Gothic times--are training influences. The “good form” and ceremonies of a given society are sense-presentations of the beat of a given species of Being, and to master them one must _have_ the beat of them. Hence women, as more instinctive and nearer to cosmic rhythms, adapt themselves more readily than men to the forms of a new _milieu_. Women from the bottom strata move in elegant society with entire certainty after a few years--and sink again as quickly. But men alter slowly, because they are more awake and aware. The proletarian man never becomes wholly an aristocrat, the aristocrat never wholly a proletarian--only in the sons does the beat of the new _milieu_ make its appearance.

The profounder the form, the stricter and more repellent it is. To the outsider, therefore, it appears to be a slavery; the member, on the contrary, has a perfect and easy command of it. The Prince de Ligne was, no less than Mozart, master of the form and not its slave; and the same holds good of _every_ born aristocrat, statesman, and captain.

In all high Cultures, therefore, there is a _peasantry_, which is breed, stock, in the broad sense (and thus to a certain extent nature herself), and a _society_ which is assertively and emphatically “in form.” It is a set of classes or Estates, and no doubt artificial and transitory. But the history of these classes and estates is _world-history at highest potential_. It is only in relation to it that the peasant is seen as historyless. The whole broad and grand history of these six millennia has accomplished itself in the life-courses of the high Cultures, _because_ these Cultures themselves placed their creative foci in Estates possessing breed and training, and so in the course of fulfilment became trained and bred. A Culture is Soul that has arrived at self-expression in sensible forms, but these forms are living and evolving.[579] Their matrix is in the intensified Being of individuals or groups--that is, in that which I have just called Being “in form.” And when, and not until, this Being is sufficiently formed to that high rightness, it becomes representative of a representable Culture.[580]

This Culture is not only a grand thing, but wholly unlike any other thing in the organic world. It is the one point at which man lifts himself above the powers of Nature and becomes himself a Creator. Even as to race, breed, he is Nature’s creature--he _is_ bred. But, as Estate, he breeds himself just as he breeds the noble kinds of animal-plant with which he surrounds himself--and that process, too, is in the deepest and most final sense “Culture.” Culture and class[581] are interchangeable expressions; they arise together and they vanish together. The breeding of select types of wines or fruit or flowers, the breeding of blood horses, _is_ Culture, and the culture, in exactly the same sense, of the human élite arises as the expression of a Being that has brought itself into high “form.”

For that very reason, there is found in every Culture a sharp sense of whether this or that man belongs thereto or not. The Classical notion of the Barbarian, the Arabian of the Unbeliever (Amhaarez, Giaour), the Indian of the Sudra--however differently the lines of cleavage were arrived at--are alike in that the words do not primarily express contempt or hatred, but establish that there are differences in pulse of Being which set an impassable barrier against all contacts on the deeper levels. This perfectly clear and unambiguous idea has been obscured by the Indian concept of a “fourth caste,” which caste, as we know now, has never existed at all.[582] The Code of Manu, with its celebrated regulations for the treatment of the Sudra, is the outcome of the fully developed state of fellahdom in his India, and--irrespective of practical actualities under either existing or even obtainable legislation--described the misty idea of Brahmanism by the negative mode of dealing with its opposite, very much as the Late Classical philosophy used the notion of the working Banausos. The one has led us into misunderstanding caste as a specifically Indian phenomenon, the other to a basically false idea of the attitude of Classical man towards work.

In all such cases what really confronts us is the _residue_ which does not count for the inward life of the Culture and its symbolism, and is in principle left out of every really significant classification, somewhat as the “outcast” is ignored in the far East. The Gothic expression “_corpus christianum_” indicates explicitly in its very terms that the Jewish Consensus does not belong to it. In the Arabian Culture the other-believer is merely tolerated within the respective domains of the Jewish, the Persian, the Christian, and, above all, the Islamic, nations, and contemptuously left to his own administration and his own jurisdiction. In the Classical World it was not only barbarians that were “outcasts”--so also in a measure were slaves, and especially the relics of the autochthonous population like the Penestæ in Thessaly and the Helots of Sparta, whom their masters treated in a way that reminds us of the conduct of the Normans in Anglo-Saxon England and the Teutonic Knights in the Slavonic East. The Code of Manu preserves, as designations of Sudra classes, the names of ancient peoples of the “Colonial” region of the Lower Ganges. (As Magadha is amongst them, Buddha himself may have been a Sudra, like the “Cæsar” Asoka, whose grandfather Chandragupta was of the most humble origin.) Others are names of callings, and this again reminds us that also in the West and elsewhere certain callings were outcast--the beggars, for example (who in Homer are a class), smiths, singers, and the professional poor, who have been bred literally _en masse_ by the _caritas_ of the Church and the benevolence of laymen in the Early Gothic.

But, in sum, “caste” is a word that has been at least as much abused as it has been used. There were no castes in the Old and Middle Kingdoms of Egypt, nor in India before Buddha, nor in China before Han times. It is only in very Late conditions that they appear, and then we find them in all Cultures. From the XXIst Dynasty onwards (_c._ 1100 B.C.) Egypt was in the hands, now of the Theban priest-caste, now of the Libyan warrior-caste; and thereafter the hardening process went on steadily till the time of Herodotus--whose view of the conditions of his day as characteristically Egyptian is just as inaccurate as our view of those prevailing in India. _The distinction between Estate and Caste is that between earliest Culture and latest Civilization._ In the rise of the prime Estates--noble and priest--the Culture is unfolding itself, while the castes are the expression of its definitive fellah-state. The Estate is the most living of all, Culture launched on the path of fulfilment, “the form that living must itself unfold.”[583] The caste is absolute finished-ness, the phase in which development has been succeeded by immutable fixation.

But the great Estates are something quite different from _occupation-groups_ like those of artisans, officials, artists, which are professionally held together by technical tradition and the spirit of their work. They are, in fact, _emblems in flesh and blood_, whose entire being, as phenomenon, as attitude, and as mode of thought, possesses symbolic meaning. Within every Culture, moreover--while peasantry is a piece of pure nature and growth and, therefore, a completely _impersonal_ manifestation--nobility and priesthood are the results of high breeding and forming and therefore express a _thoroughly personal Culture_, which, by the height of its form, rejects not merely barbarians, but presently also all who are not of their status, as a _residue_--regarded by the nobility as the “people” and by clergy as the “laity.” And this _style of personality_ is the material that, when the fellah-age arrives, petrifies into the type of a caste, which thereafter endures unaltered for centuries. As in the living Culture race and estate are in antithesis as the impersonal and the personal, in fellah-times _the mass and the caste_, the coolie and the Brahmin, _are in antithesis as the formless and the formal_. The living form has become formula, still possessing style, but possessing it as stylistic rigidity. This petrified style of the caste is of an extreme subtlety, dignity, and intellectuality, and feels itself infinitely superior to the developing mankind of a Culture--we can hardly form an idea of the lofty height from which the Mandarin or the Brahmin looks down upon European thoughts and actions, or how fundamentally the Egyptian priest must have despised a visiting Pythagoras or Plato. It moves impassive through time with the Byzantine dignity of a soul that has left all its problems and enigmas far behind it.

II

In the Carolingian pre-Culture men distinguished _Knechte_, _Freie_, and _Edle_. This is a primitive differentiation based merely on the facts of external life. But in Early Gothic times it runs:

God hath shapen lives three,
Boor and knight and priest they be.[584]

Here we have status-differences of a high Culture that has just awakened. And the stole and the sword stand together in face of the plough in strongest assertiveness as estates _vis-à-vis_ the rest, the Non-Estate, that which, like themselves, is fact, but, unlike themselves, fact without deeper significance. The separation, inward and felt, is so destined, so potent, that no understanding can ignore it. Hatred wells up out of the villages, contempt flashes back from the castles. Neither possession nor power nor calling produced this abyss between the “lives.” Logical justification for it there is none. It is metaphysical nature.

Later, with the cities, but younger than they, _burgherdom, bourgeoisie_, arises as the “Third Estate.” The burgher, too, now looks with contempt upon the countryside, which lies about him dull, unaltered, and patient, and in contrast to which he feels himself more awake and freer and therefore further advanced on the road of the Culture. He despises also the primary estates, “squire and parson,” as something lying intellectually below him and historically behind him. Yet, as compared with these two, the burgher is, as the boor was, a residue, a non-estate. In the minds of the “privileged” the peasant hardly now counts at all--the burgher counts, but as an opposite and a background. He is the foil against which the others become conscious of their own significance and of the fact that this significance is something lying outside all practical considerations. When we find that in all Cultures the same occurs in exactly the same form, and that, however different the symbolism of one Culture from that of another, their history fulfils itself everywhere in and by opposition of these groups--impulsive peasant wars in the Springtime, intellectually-based _civil_ wars in the later period--then it is evident that the meaning of the facts must be looked for in the deepest foundations of Life itself.

It is an _idea_ that lies at the base of these two prime Estates, and only these. It gives them the potent feeling of a rank derived from a divine investiture and therefore beyond all criticism--a standing which imposes self-respect and self-consciousness, but the sternest self-discipline as well (and death itself if need be), as a duty and imbues both with the historical superiority, the soul-magic, that does not draw upon power but actually generates it. Those who--inwardly, and not merely nominally--belong to these Estates are _actually_ something other than the residue; their lives, in contrast to those of burgher and peasant, are sustained in every part by a symbolic dignity. These lives do not exist in order to be merely lived, but to have meaning. It is the two sides of all freely moving life that come to expression in these Estates; _the one is wholly being, the other wholly waking-consciousness_.

Every nobility is a living symbol of _Time_, every priesthood of _Space_. Destiny and sacred Causality, History and Nature, the When and the Where, race and language, sex-life and feeling-life--all these attain in them to the highest possible expression. The noble lives in a world of facts, the priest in one of truths; the one has shrewdness, the other knowledge; the one is a doer, the other a thinker. Aristocratic world-feeling is essentially pulse-sense; priestly world-feeling proceeds entirely by tensions. Between the time of Charlemagne and that of Conrad II something formed itself in the time-stream that cannot be elucidated, but has to be felt if we are to understand the dawn of the new Culture. There had long been noblemen and ecclesiastics, but then first--and not for long--there were nobility and clergy, in the grand sense of the words and the full force of their symbolic significance.[585] So mighty is this onset of a symbolism that at first all other distinctions, such as those of country, people, and language, fall into the background. In all the lands from Ireland to Calabria the Gothic hierarchy was a single great community; the Early Classical chivalry before Troy, or the Early Gothic before Jerusalem, seems to us as of _one_ great family. The old Egyptian nomes and the feudal states of the first Chóu times appear, in comparison with such Estates as these (and _because_ of the comparison) just as colourless as Burgundy and Lorraine in the Hohenstaufen period. There is a cosmopolitan condition both at the beginning and at the end of every Culture, but in the first case it exists because the symbolic might of aristocratic-hierarchic forms still towers above those of nationality, and in the second because the formless mass sinks below them.

The two Estates in principle exclude one another. The prime opposition of cosmic and microcosmic, which pervades all being that moves freely in space, underlies this dual existence also. Each is possible and necessary only through the other. The Homeric world maintained a conspiracy of hostile silence towards the Orphic, and in turn (as we see from the Pre-Socratics) the former became an object of anger and contempt for the latter. In Gothic times the reforming spirits set themselves with a sacred enthusiasm across the path of the Renaissance-natures. State and Church have never really come to equilibrium, and in the conflict of Empire and Papacy their opposition rose to an intensity only possible for Faustian man.

Of the two, moreover, it is the nobility that is the true Estate, the sum of blood and race, being-stream in the fullest imaginable form. And therefore nobility is a higher peasantry. Even in 1250 the West had a widespread proverb: “One who ploughs in the forenoon jousts in the afternoon,” and it was quite usual for a knight to marry the daughter of a peasant. In contrast to the cathedral, the castle was a development, by way of the country noble’s house of Frankish times, from the peasant-dwelling. In the Icelandic sagas peasants’ crofts are besieged and stormed like castles. Nobility and peasantry are plantlike and instinctive, deep-rooted in the ancestral land, propagating themselves in the family tree, breeding and bred. In comparison with them the priesthood is essentially the counter-estate, the estate of negation, of non-race, of detachment from earth--of free, timeless, and historyless waking-consciousness. In every peasant village, in every peasant family from the Stone Age to the peaks of the Culture, world-history plays itself out in little. Substitute for peoples families, and for lands farms--still the ultimate meaning of their strivings is the same--the maintenance of the blood, the succession of the generations, the cosmic, woman, power. _Macbeth_ and _King Lear_ might perfectly well have been thought out as village tragedies--and the fact is a proof of their tragic truth. In all Cultures nobility and peasantry appear in forms of _family descent_, and language itself connects them with the sexes, through which life propagates itself, has history, and is history. And as woman _is_ history, the inward rank of peasant and noble families is determined by how much of race their women have in them, how far they _are_ Destiny. And, therefore, there is deep meaning in the fact that the purer and more race-pervaded world-history is, the more the stream of its public life passes into and adapts itself to the private lives of individual great families. This, of course, is the basis of the dynastic principle, and not only that, but the basis of the idea of world-historical personality. The existence of entire states comes to depend on a few private destinies, vastly magnified. The history of Athens in the fifth century is in the main that of the Alcmæonidæ, the history of Rome is that of a few families of the type of the Fabii or the Claudii. The history of states in the Baroque is, broadly speaking, that of the operations of Habsburg and Bourbon family-politics, and its crises take form as marriages and wars of succession. The history of Napoleon’s second marriage comprises also the burning of Moscow and the battle of Leipzig. The history of the Papacy is, right into the eighteenth century, that of a few noble families which competed for the tiara in order to found princely family-fortunes. This is true equally of Byzantine dignitaries and English premiers (witness the Cecils) and even, in numerous instances, of great revolution-leaders.

Of all this the priesthood (and philosophy so far as it is priesthood) is the direct negative. The Estate of pure waking-consciousness and eternal truths combats time and race and sex in every sense. Man as peasant or noble turns towards, man as priest turns away from, woman. Aristocracy runs the danger of dissipating and losing the broad being-stream of public life in the petty channels of its minor ancestors and relatives. The true priest, on the other hand, refuses in principle to recognize private life, sex, family, the “house.” For the man of race death begins to be real and appalling only when it is death without heirs--Icelandic sagas no less than Chinese ancestor-worship teach us this. He does not entirely die who lives on in sons and nephews. But for the true priest _media vita in morte sumus_; what he shall bequeath is intellectual, and rejected woman bears no part in it. The phenomenal forms of this second Estate that occur again and again are celibacy, cloister, battlings with sex-impulse fought to the extreme of self-emasculation, and a contempt for motherhood which expresses itself in orgiasm and hallowed prostitution, and not less in the intellectual devaluation of sexual life down to the level of Kant’s vile definition of marriage.[586] Throughout the Classical world it was the rule that in the sacred precinct, the Temenos, no one must be born or die. The timeless must not come into contact with time. It is possible for the priest to have an intellectual recognition of the great moments of generation and birth, and to honour them sacramentally, but experience them he may not.

For while nobility _is_ something, priesthood _signifies_ something, and this alone would be enough to tell us that it is the opposite of all that is Destiny and Race and Estate. The castle, with its chambers and towers, walls and moats, tells of a strong-flowing life, but the cathedral, with its vaulting and pillars and choir, is, through and through, Meaning--that is to say, Ornament--and every venerable priesthood has developed itself up to that marvellous gravity and beauty of bearing in which every item, from facial expression and voice-inflection to costume and walk, is ornament, from which private life and even inward life have been eliminated as unessential--whereas that which a ripe aristocracy (such as that of eighteenth-century France) displays and parades is a finished living. It was Gothic thought that developed out of the priest-concept the _character indelebilis_, which makes the idea indestructible and wholly independent of the worthiness of its bearer’s life in the world-as-history--but every priesthood, and consequently also all philosophy (in the sense of the schools), contain it implicitly. If a priest has race, he leads an outward existence like peasant, knight, or prince. The Pope and cardinals of the Gothic period were feudal princes, leaders of armies, fond of the chase, connoisseurs and adepts in family politics. Among the Brahmins of the pre-Buddha “Baroque” were great landowners, well-groomed abbés, courtiers, spendthrifts, gourmets.[587] But it was the early period that had learned to distinguish the idea from the person--a notion diametrically opposed to the essence of nobility--and not until the Age of Enlightenment did the priest come to be judged, as priest, by his private life, and then not because that age had acquired sharper eyes, but because it had lost the idea.

The noble is the _man as history_, the priest is _the man as nature_. History of the high kind is always the expression and effect of the being of a noble society; and the criterion for the relative importance of its different events is always the pulse of this stream of being. That is why the battle of Cannæ matters much and the battles of Late Roman emperors matter not at all. The coming of a Springtime consistently coincides with the birth of a primary nobility, in whose sentiments the prince is merely “_primus inter pares_” and an object of mistrust. For not only does a strong race not need the big individual, but his existence is a reflection upon its worth; hence vassal-wars are pre-eminently the form in which the history of Early periods fulfils itself, and thenceforth the nobility has the fate of the Culture in hand. With a creative force that is all the more impressive because it is silent, Being is brought into form and “condition.” The pulse in the blood is heightened and confirmed, _and for good_. For what this creative rise to living form is to the Spring--every Spring--the _might of tradition_ is for the Late--every Late--period--namely, the old firm discipline, the life-beat, so sure that it outlives the extinction of all the old families and continually draws under its spell new men and new being-streams out of the deep. Beyond a shadow of doubt, all the history of Late periods, in respect of form and beat and tempo, is inherent (and irrevocably so) in the very earliest generations. Its successes are neither more nor less than the strength of the tradition in the blood. In politics, as in all other great and mature arts, success presupposes a being in high condition, a great stock of pristine experiences unconsciously and unquestioningly stored up as instincts and impulses. There is no other sort of political _maestria_ but this. The big individual is only something better than an incident, only master of the future, in that he is effective (or is made effective), is Destiny (or has Destiny), in and through this form. This is what distinguishes necessary from superfluous art and therefore, also, _historically necessary from unnecessary politics_. It matters little if many of the big men come up out of the “people” (that is, the aggregate of the traditionless) into the governing stratum, or even if they are the only ones left to occupy it--the great tide of tradition takes charge of them, all unwitting, forms their intellectual and practical conduct, and rules their methods. And this tradition is nothing but the pulse of ancient and long-extinguished lines.

But Civilization, the real “return to Nature,” is the extinction of nobility--not as physical stock (which would not matter), but as living tradition--and the supplanting of destiny-pulse by causal intelligence. With this, nobility becomes no more than a prefix. And, for that very reason, Civilized history is superficial history, directed disjointedly to obvious aims, and so become formless in the cosmic, dependent on the accident of great individuals, destitute of inward sureness, line, and meaning. With Cæsarism history relapses back into the historyless, the old beat of primitive life, with endless and meaningless battles for material power, such as those of the Roman soldier-emperors of the third century and the corresponding “Sixteen States” of China (265-420), which differ only in unessentials from the events of beast-life in a jungle.

III

It follows from this that true history is _not_ “cultural” in the sense of anti-political, as the philosophers and doctrinaires of all commencing Civilizations assert. On the contrary, it is breed history, war history, diplomatic history, the history of being-streams in the form of man and woman, family, people, estate, state, reciprocally defensive and offensive in the wave-beat of grand facts. _Politics in the highest sense is life, and life is politics._ Every man is willy-nilly a member of this battle-drama, as subject or as object--there is no third alternative. The kingdom of the spirit is _not_ of this world. True, but it presupposes it, as waking-being presupposes being. It is only possible as a consistent _saying_ of “no” to the actuality that nevertheless exists and, indeed, must exist before it can be renounced. Race can dispense with language, but the very speaking of a language is an expression of antecedent race,[588] as are religions and arts and styles of thought and everything else that happens in the history of the spirit--and that there _is_ such a history is shown by the power that blood possesses over feeling and reason. For all these are active waking-consciousness “in form,” expressive, in their evolution and symbolism and passion, of the blood (again the blood) that courses through these forms in the waking-being of generation after generation. A hero does not need to know anything at all of this second world--he is life through and through--but a saint can only by the severest asceticism beat down the life that is in him and gain solitary communion with his spirit--and his strength for this again comes from life itself. The hero despises death and the saint life, but in the contrast between the heroism of great ascetics and martyrs and the piety of most (which is of the kind described in Revelation iii, 16[589]) we discover that greatness, even in religion, presupposes Race, that life must be strong indeed to be worthy of such wrestlers. The rest is mere philosophy.

For this very reason nobility in the world-historical sense is much more than comfortable Late periods consider it; it is not a sum of titles and privileges and ceremonies, but an inward possession, hard to acquire, hard to retain--worth, indeed, for those who understand, the sacrifice of a whole life. An old family betokens not simply a set of ancestors (we all have ancestors), but ancestors who lived through whole generations on the heights of history; who not merely had Destiny, but were Destiny; in whose blood the form of happening was bred up to its perfection by the experience of centuries. As history in the grand sense begins with the Culture, it was mere panache for a Colonna to trace back his ancestry into Late Roman times. But it was not meaningless for the grandee of Late Byzantium to derive himself from Constantine, nor is it so for an American of to-day to trace his ancestry to a _Mayflower_ immigrant of 1620. In actual fact Classical nobility begins with the Trojan period and not the Mycenæan, and the Western with the Gothic and not the Franks and Goths--in England with the Normans and not the Saxons. Only from these real starting-points is there History, and, therefore, only from then can there be an original aristocracy, as distinct from nobles and heroes. That which in the first chapter of this volume[590] called cosmic beat or pulse receives in this aristocracy its fulfilment. For all that in riper times we call diplomatic and social “tact”--which includes strategic and business flair, the collector’s eye for precious things, and the subtle insight of the judge of men--and generally all that which one has and does not learn; which arouses the impotent envy of the rest who cannot participate; which as “form” directs the course of events; is nothing but a particular case of the same cosmic and dreamlike sureness that is visibly expressed in the circlings of a flock of birds or the controlled movements of a thoroughbred horse.

The priest _circumscribes_ the world-as-nature and deepens his picture of it by _thinking_ into it. The noble _lives_ in the world-as-history and deepens it by altering its picture. Both evolve towards the great tradition, but the evolution of the one comes of shaping and that of the other from training. This is a fundamental difference between the two Estates, and consequently only one of them is truly an Estate, and the other only _appears_ to be such because of the completeness of the contrast. The field of effect of breed and training is the blood, and they pass on, therefore, from the fathers to the sons. Shaping (_Bildung_), on the other hand, presupposes talents, and consequently a true and strong priesthood is always a sum of individual gifts--a community of waking-consciousness--having no relation to origin in the race sense; and thus, in this respect as in others, it is a negation of Time and History. Intellectual affinity and blood-affinity--ponder and probe into the depths of these contrasted expressions! Heritable priesthood is a contradiction in terms. It existed indeed, in a sense, in Vedic India, but the basis of that existence was the fact that there was a second nobility, which reserved the privilege of priesthood to the gifted members of its own circle.[591] And elsewhere celibacy made an end even of this much infringement of principle. The “priest in the man”--whether the man be noble or not--stands for a focus of sacred Causality in the world. The priestly power is itself of a causal nature, brought about by higher causes and itself in turn an efficient cause. The priest is the _middleman_ in the timeless extended that is stretched taut between the waking-consciousness and the ultimate secret; and, therefore, the importance of the clergy in each Culture is determined by its prime-symbol. The Classical soul denies Space and therefore needs no middleman for dealings with it, and so the Classical priesthood disappears in its very beginnings. Faustian man stands face to face with the Infinite, nothing _a priori_ shields him from the crushing force of this aspect, and so the Gothic priesthood elevated itself to the heights of the Papal idea.

As two world-outlooks, two modes of blood-flow in the veins and of thought in the daily being and doing, are interwoven, there arise in the end (in every Culture) two sorts of moral, of which each looks down upon the other--namely, noble custom, and priestly askesis, reciprocally censured as worldly and as servile. It has been shown already[592] how the one proceeds from the castle and the other from the cloister and the minster, the one from full being in the flood of History and the other, aloof therefrom, out of pure waking-consciousness in the ambiance of a God-pervaded nature. The force with which these primary impressions act upon men is something that later periods will be unable even to imagine. The secular and the spiritual class-feeling are starting on their upward career, and cutting out for themselves an ethical _class-ideal_ which is accessible only to the right people, and even to them only by way of long and strict schooling. The _great_ being-stream _feels_ itself as a unit as against the residue of dull, pulseless, and aimless blood. The _great_ mind-community _knows_ itself as a unit as against the residue of uninitiated. These units are the band of heroes and the community of saints.

It will always remain the great merit of Nietzsche that he was the first to recognize the dual nature of all moral.[593] His designations of “master-” and “slave-” moral were inexact, and his presentation of “Christianity” placed it much too definitely on the one side of the dividing line, but at the basis of all his opinions this lies strong and clear, that _good and bad are aristocratic, and good and evil priestly, distinctions_. Good and bad, which are Totemistic distinctions among primitive groups of men and tribes, describe, not dispositions, but men, and describe them comprehensively in respect of their living-being. The good are the powerful, the rich, the fortunate. Good means strong, brave, thoroughbred, in the idiom of every Springtime. Bad, cheap, wretched, common, in the original sense, are the powerless, propertyless, unfortunate, cowardly, negligible--the “sons of nobody” as ancient Egypt said.[594] Good and evil, Taboo concepts, assign value to a man according to his perceptions and reason--that is, his waking disposition and his _conscious_ actions. To offend against love-ethic in the race sense is ungentle, to sin against the Church’s love-command is wicked. The noble habit is the perfectly unconscious result of a long and continuous training. It is learned in intercourse and not from books. It is a felt rhythm, and not a notion. But the other moral is enunciated, ordered on the basis of cause and consequence, and therefore learnable and expressive of a _conviction_.

The one is historical through and through, and recognizes rank-distinctions and privileges as actual and axiomatic. Honour is always class-honour--there is no such thing as an “honour of humanity.” The duel is not an obligation of unfree persons. Every man, be he Bedouin or Samurai or Corsican, peasant or workman, judge or bandit, has his own binding notions of honour, loyalty, courage, revenge, that do not apply to other kinds of life. Every life _has_ custom-ethic--it is unthinkable without it. Children have it already in their play; they know at once, of themselves, what is fitting. No one has laid down these rules, but they exist. They arise, quite unconsciously, out of the “we” that has formed itself out of the uniform pulse of the group. Here, too, each being is “in form.” Every crowd that, under one or another stimulus, has collected in the street has for the moment its own ethic, and anyone who does not absorb it and stand for it as self-evident--to say “follow it” would presume more rationality in the action than there is--is a poor, mean creature, an outsider. Uneducated people and children possess an astonishingly fine reactivity to this. Children, however, are also required to learn the Catechism, and in it they hear about the good and evil that are laid down--and are any thing rather than self-evident. Custom-ethic is not that which is _true_, but that which is _there_; it is a thing of birth and growth, feeling and organic logic. Moral, in contrast to this, is never actuality (for, if it were, all the world would be saintly), but an eternal demand hanging over the consciousness--and, _ex hypothesi_, over that of all men alike, irrespective of all differences of actual life and history. And, therefore, all moral is negative and all custom-ethic affirmative. In the latter “devoid of honour” is the worst, in the former “devoid of sin” is the highest, that can be said of anyone.

The basic concept of all living custom-ethic is honour. Everything else--loyalty, modesty, bravery, chivalry, self-control, resolution--is comprised in it. And honour is a matter of the blood and not of the reason. One does not reflect on a point of honour--that is already dishonour. To lose honour means to be annulled so far as Life and Time and History are concerned. The honour of one’s class, one’s family, of man and woman, of one’s people and one’s country, the honour of peasant and soldier and even bandit--honour means that the life in a person is something that has worth, historical dignity, delicacy, nobility. It belongs to directional Time, as sin belongs to timeless Space. To have honour in one’s body means about the same as to have race. The opposite sort are the Thersites-natures, the mud-souled, the riff-raff, the “kick-me-but-let-me-live’s.” To submit to insult, to forget a humiliation, to quail before an enemy--all these are signs of a life become worthless and superfluous. But this is not at all the same thing as priestly moral, for that moral does not cleave to life at any cost of degradation, but rather rejects and abstains from life as such, and therefore incidentally from honour. As has been said already, every moral action is, at the very bottom, a piece of askesis and a killing of being. And _eo ipso_ it stands outside the field of life and the world of history.

IV

Here it is necessary to anticipate somewhat, and to consider whence it is that world-history (especially in the Late periods of the grand Cultures and the beginnings of the Civilizations) derives its rich variety of colour and the profound symbolism of its events. The primary Estates, nobility and clergy, are the purest expressions of the two sides of life, but they are not the only ones. In very early times--often, indeed, foreshadowed in the Primitive Age itself--yet other being-streams and waking-linkages break forth, in which the symbolism of Time and Space comes to living expression, and which, when (and not until) combined with these two, make up the whole fullness of what we call _social organization_ or _society_.

While Priesthood is microcosmic and animal-like, Nobility is cosmic and plantlike (hence its profound connexion with the land). It is itself a plant, strongly rooted in the soil, established on the soil--in this, as in so many other respects, a supreme peasantry. It is from this kind of cosmic boundness that the idea of _property_ arises, which to the microcosm as such, freely moving in space, is wholly alien. Property is a primary feeling and not a concept; it belongs to Time and History and Destiny, and not to Space and Causality. It cannot be logically based, but it is there.[595] “Having” begins with the plant, and propagates itself in the history of higher mankinds just to the precise extent that history contains plant-character and race. Hence property in the most genuine sense is always ground-property, and the impulse to convert other acquisitions into ground and soil is an evidence of sound stock. The plant _possesses_ the ground in which it roots. It is its property,[596] which it defends to the utmost, with the desperate force of its whole being, against alien seeds, against overshadowing neighbour plants, against all nature. So, too, a bird defends the nest in which it is hatching. The bitterness fights over property occur--not in the Late periods of great Cultures, between rich and poor, and about movable goods--but here in the beginnings of the plant-world. When, in a wood, one feels all about one the silent, merciless battle for the soil that goes on day and night, one is appalled by the depth of an impulse that is almost identical with life itself. Here is a yearlong, tenacious, embittered wrestle, a hopeless resistance of the weak against the strong, that goes on to the point that the victor too is broken--such as is only paralleled in the most primitive of mankind when an old peasant-family is expelled from the clod, _from the nest_, or a family of noble stock is uprooted or, more truly, cut off from its roots, by money.[597] The far more conspicuous conflicts in the later cities have quite another meaning, for here--in communism of all kinds--it is not the experience of possessing, but the idea of property purely as material means that is fought for. The negation of property is never race-impulse, but the doctrinaire protest of the purely intellectual, urban, uprooted, anti-vegetal waking-consciousness of saints, philosophers, and idealists. The same reason actuates the monk of the hermitage and the scientific Socialist--be his name Moh-ti, Zeno, or Marx--to reject the plantlike; the same feeling impels men of race to defend it. Here, as ever, fact and truth are opposed. “Property is theft” is the ultra-materialistic form of the old thought: “What shall it profit a man if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul?” When the priest gives up property, he is giving up something dangerous and alien; when a noble does so, he is giving up himself.

This brings us to a duality of the property-idea feeling--_Having as power_ and _Having as spoil_. Both, in primitive men of race, lie immediately together. Every Bedouin or Viking intends both. The sea-hero is always a sea-robber also; every war is concerned with possessions and, above all, possessions in land. But a step, and the knight becomes the robber-knight, the adventurer becomes conqueror and king, like Rurik the Norman in Russia and many an Achæan and Etruscan pirate in Homeric times. In all heroic poetry we find, side by side with the strong and natural satisfaction of winning battles and power and women, and the unbridled outbursts of joy and grief, anger, and love, the immense delight of “having.” When Odysseus lands at home, the first thing he does is to count the treasures in his boat, and when, in the Icelandic Saga, the peasants Hjalmar and Ölvarod perceive each that the other has no goods in his ship, they abandon their duel at once--he who fights from pride and for honour is a fool for his pains. In the Indian hero-epic, eagerness for battle means eagerness for cattle, and the “colonizing” Greeks of the tenth century were primarily corsairs like the Normans. On the high seas an alien ship is _a priori_ good prize. But out of the feuds of South-Arabian and Persian Knights of A.D. 200, and the “private wars” of the Provençal barons of A.D. 1200--which were hardly more than cattle-raids--there developed at the end of the feudal period the war proper, the great war with acquisition of land and people as its object. All this, in the end, brings the aristocratic Culture to the “top of its form,” while, correspondingly, priests and philosophers despise it.

As the Culture rises to its height, these two primary urges trend widely apart, and hostility develops between them. _The history of this hostility is almost the same thing as world-history. From the feeling of power come conquest and politics and law; from that of spoil, trade and economy and money._ Law is the property of the powerful. Their law is the law of all. Money is the strongest weapon of the acquiring: with it he subdues the world. Economics likes and intends a state that is weak and subservient to it. Politics demands that economic life shall adapt itself to and within the State--Adam Smith and Friedrich List, Capitalism and Socialism. All Cultures exhibit at the outset a war- and a trade-nobility, then a land- and a money-nobility, and finally a military and an economic war-management and a ceaseless struggle of money against law.