Chapter II: Origin and Landscape (2)

The Arabian Culture[47] is a discovery. Its unity was suspected by late Arabians, but it has so entirely escaped Western historical research that not even a satisfactory name can be found for it. Conformably to the dominant languages, the seed-time and the spring might be called the Aramaic and the later time the Arabian, but there is no really effectual name. In this field the Cultures were close to one another, and the extension of the corresponding Civilizations led to much overlaying. The pre-Cultural period of the Arabian, which we can follow out in Persian and Jewish history, lay completely within the area of the old Babylonian world, but the springtime was under the mighty spell of the Classical Civilization, which invaded from the West with all the power of a just-attained maturity, and the Egyptian and Indian Civilizations also made themselves distinctly felt. And then in turn the Arabian spirit--under Late Classical disguises for the most part--cast its spell over the nascent Culture of the West. The Arabian Civilization stratified over a still surviving Classical in the popular soul of south Spain, Provence, and Sicily, and became the model upon which the Gothic soul educated itself. The proper landscape of this Culture is remarkably extended and singularly fragmented. Let one put oneself at Palmyra or Ctesiphon, and, musing, look outwards all round. In the north is Osrhoene; Edessa became the Florence of the Arabian spring. To the west are Syria and Palestine--the home of the New Testament and of the Jewish Mishna, with Alexandria as a standing outpost. To the east Mazdaism experienced a mighty regeneration, which corresponded to the birth of Jesus in Jewry and about which the fragmentary state of Avesta literature enables us to say only _that_ it happened.[48] Here, too, were born the Talmud and the religion of Mani. Deep in the south, the future home of Islam, an age of chivalry was able to develop as fully as in the realm of the Sassanids; even to-day there survive, unexplored, the ruins of castles and strongholds whence the decisive wars were waged between the Christian state of Axum and the Jewish state of the Himyarites on the two shores of the Red Sea, with Roman and Persian diplomacy poking the fire. In the extreme north was Byzantium, that strange mixture of sere, civilized, Classical, with vernal and chevaleresque which is manifested above all in the bewildering history of the Byzantine army system. Into this world Islam at last--and far too late--brought a consciousness of unity, and this accounts for the self-evident character of its victorious progress and the almost unresisting adhesion of Christians, Jews, and Persians alike. Out of Islam in due course arose the Arabian Civilization which was at the peak of its intellectual completeness when the barbarians from the West broke in for a moment, marching on Jerusalem. How, we may ask ourselves, did this inroad appear in the eyes of cultivated Arabians of the time? Somewhat like Bolshevism, perhaps? For the statecraft of the Arabian World the political relations of “Frankistan” were something on a lower plane. Even in our Thirty Years’ War--from that point of view a drama of the “Far West”--when an English envoy[49] strove to stir up the Porte against the house of Habsburg, the statesman who handled policy over a field stretching from Morocco to India, evidently judged that the little predatory states on the horizon were of no real interest. And even when Napoleon landed in Egypt, there were still many without an inkling of the future.

Meantime yet another new Culture developed in Mexico. This lay so remote from the rest that no word even passed between them. All the more astonishing, therefore, is the similarity of its development to that of the Classical. No doubt the archæologist standing before a teocalli would be horrified to think of his Doric temple in such a connexion; yet it was a thoroughly Classical trait--feebleness of the will-to-power in the matter of technics--that kept the Aztecs ill armed and so made possible their catastrophe.

For, as it happens, this is the one example of a Culture ended by violent death. It was not starved, suppressed, or thwarted, but murdered in the full glory of its unfolding, destroyed like a sunflower whose head is struck off by one passing. All these states--including a world-power and more than one federation--with an extent and resources far superior to those of the Greek and Roman states of Hannibal’s day; with a comprehensive policy, a carefully ordered financial system, and a highly developed legislation; with administrative ideas and economic tradition such as the ministers of Charles V could never have imagined; with a wealth of literature in several languages, an intellectually brilliant and polite society in great cities to which the West could not show one single parallel--all this was not broken down in some desperate war, but washed out by a handful of bandits in a few years, and so entirely that the relics of the population retained not even a memory of it all. Of the giant city Tenochtitlan[50] not a stone remains above ground. The cluster of great Mayan cities in the virgin forests of Yucatan succumbed swiftly to the attack of vegetation, and we do not know the old name of any one of them. Of the literature three books survive, but no one can read them.

The most appalling feature of the tragedy was that it was not in the least a necessity of the Western Culture that it should happen. It was a private affair of adventurers, and at the time no one in Germany, France, or England had any idea of what was taking place. This instance shows, as no other shows, that _the history of humanity has no meaning whatever_ and that deep significances reside only in the life-courses of the separate Cultures. Their inter-relations are unimportant and accidental. In this case the accident was so cruelly banal, so supremely absurd, that it would not be tolerated in the wildest farce. A few cannon and handguns began and ended the drama.[51]

A sure knowledge of even the most general history of this world is now for ever impossible. Events as important as our Crusades and Reformation have vanished without leaving a trace. Only in recent years has research managed to settle the outline, at any rate, of the later course of development, and with the help of these data comparative morphology may attempt to widen and deepen the picture by means of those of other Cultures.[52] On this basis the epochal points of this Culture lie about two hundred years later than those of the Arabian and seven hundred years before those of our own. There was a pre-Cultural period which, as in China and Egypt, developed script and calendar, but of this we now know nothing. The time-reckoning began with an initial date which lies far behind the birth of Christ, but it is impossible now to fix it with certainty relative to that event.[53] In any case, it shows an extraordinarily strongly developed history-sense in Mexican mankind.

The springtime of the “Hellenic” Maya states is evidenced by the dated relief-pillars of the old cities of Copan (in the south), Tikal, and somewhat later Chichen Itza (in the north), Naranjo, and Seibal[54]--about 160-450. At the end of this period Chichen Itza was a model of architecture that was followed for centuries. The full glory of Palenque and Piedras Negras (in the west) may correspond to our Late Gothic and Renaissance (450-600 = European 1250-1400?). In the Baroque or Late period Champutun appears as the centre of style-formation, and now the “Italic” Nahua peoples of the high plateau of Anahuac began to come under the cultural influence. Artistically and spiritually these peoples were mere recipients, but in their political instincts they were far superior to the Maya (about 600-960, = Classical 750-400 = Western 1400-1750?). And now Maya entered on the “Hellenistic” phase. About 960 Uxmal was founded, soon to be a cosmopolis of the first rank, an Alexandria or Baghdad, founded like these on the threshold of the Civilization. With it we find a series of brilliant cities like Labna, Mayapan, Chacmultun, and a revived Chichen Itza. These places mark the culminating point of a grandiose architecture, which thereafter produced no new style, but applies the old motives with taste and discrimination to mighty masses. Politically this is the age of the celebrated League of Mayapan, an alliance of three leading states, which appears to have maintained the position successfully--if somewhat artificially and arbitrarily--in spite of great wars and repeated revolutions (960-1165 = Classical 350-150 = Western 1800-2000).

The end of this period was marked by a great revolution, and with it the definitive intervention of the (“Roman”) Nahua powers in the Maya affair. With their aid Hunac Ceel brought about a general overthrow and destroyed Mayapan (about 1190 = Classical 150). The sequel was typical of the history of the over-ripened Civilization in which different peoples contend for military lordship. The great Maya cities sink into the same bland contentment as Roman Athens and Alexandria, but out on the horizon of the Nahua lands was developing the last of these peoples, the Aztecs--young, vigorous, barbaric, and filled with an insatiable will-to-power. In 1325 (= the Age of Augustus) they founded Tenochtitlan, which soon became the paramount and capital city of the whole Mexican world. About 1400 military expansion began on the grand scale. Conquered regions were secured by military colonies and a network of military roads, and a superior diplomacy kept the dependent states in check and separated. Imperial Tenochtitlan grew enormous and housed a cosmopolitan population speaking every tongue of this world-empire.[55] The Nahua provinces were politically and militarily secure, the southward thrust was developing rapidly, and a hand was about to be laid on the Maya states; there is no telling what the course of the next centuries would have been. And suddenly--the end.

At that date the West was at a level which the Maya had already overpassed by 700; nothing short of the age of Frederick the Great would have been ripe enough to comprehend the politics of the Mayapan League, and what the Aztecs of A.D. 1500 were organizing lies for us well in the future. But that which distinguished Faustian man, even then, from the man of any other Culture was his irrepressible urge into distance. It was this, in the last resort, that killed and even annihilated the Mexican and Peruvian Culture--the unparalleled drive that was ready for service in any and every domain. Certainly the Ionic style was imitated in Carthage and in Persepolis, and Hellenistic taste in the Gandara art of India found admirers. Future investigation will probably find some Chinese in the primitive German wood-architecture. The Mosque style ruled from Farther India to North Russia, to West Africa, and to Spain. But all that amounts to nothing as compared with the expansion-power of the Western Soul. The true style-history of that soul, it need hardly be said, accomplished itself only on the mother soil, but its resultant effects knew no bounds. On the spot where Tenochtitlan had stood, the Spaniards erected a Baroque cathedral adorned with masterpieces of Spanish painting and plastic. Already at that date the Portuguese had got to work in Hither India and Late-Baroque architects from Spain and Italy in the heart of Poland and Russia. The English Rococo, and especially Empire, made for themselves a broad province in the Plantation States of North America, whose wonderful rooms and furniture are far less well known in Germany than they ought to be. Classicism was at work already in Canada and at the Cape, and presently there were no limits at all. It was just the same in every other domain of form; the relation between this forceful young Civilization and the still remaining old ones--is that it covers them, all alike, with ever-thickening layers of West-European-American life-forms under which, slowly, the ancient native form disappears.

VI

In the presence of this picture of the world of man--which is destined to displace the older one of “Ancient-Mediæval-Modern” that is still firmly established even in the best minds--it will become possible, too, to give a new answer (and for our Civilization, I think, a final answer) to the old question: What is History?

Ranke, in the preface of his _World History_ says: “History only begins when the monuments become intelligible, and trustworthy written evidences are available.” This is the answer of a collector and arranger of data; obviously, it confuses that which has happened with that which happened within the field of view open at the particular time to the particular student. Mardonius was defeated at Platæa--has this ceased to be history if two thousand years later it has somehow dropped out of the ken of the historians? For a fact to be a fact, must it be mentioned in books?

The weightiest historian since Ranke, Eduard Meyer,[56] says: “Historic is that which is, or has been, effective.... Only through historical treatment does the individual process, lifted by history from among the infinite mass of contemporary processes, become the historical event.” The remark is thoroughly in the manner and spirit of Hegel. Firstly, its starting-point is the fact and not any accidental knowledge or ignorance of the fact, and if there is any mode of picturing history which necessarily imposes such a starting-point, it is that presented in these pages, since it compels us to assume the existence of facts of the first order in majestic sequences, even when we do not (and never will) know them in the scientific sense. We have to learn to handle the unknown in the most comprehensive way. Secondly, truths exist for the mind, facts only in relation to life. Historical treatment--in my terminology, _physiognomic fact_--is decided by the _blood_, the gift of judging men broadened out into past and future, the innate flair for persons and situations, for the event, for that which had to be, must have been. It does _not_ consist in bare scientific criticism and knowing of data. The scientific mode of experience is, for every true historian, something additional or subordinate. It addresses to the waking-consciousness, by the way of understanding and imparting, laborious and repetitive proof of that which _one moment_ of illumination has already, and instantly, demonstrated to Being.

Just because the force of our Faustian being has by now worked up about us a circumcircle of inner experiences such as no other men and no other time could acquire--just because for us the remotest events become increasingly significant and disclose relationships that no one else, not even the closest contemporaries of these events, could perceive--much has now become history (i.e., life in tune with our life) that centuries ago was not history. Tacitus probably “knew” the data concerning Tiberius Gracchus’s revolution, but for him it no longer meant anything effectively, whereas for us it is full of meaning. The history of the Monophysites and their relation to Mohammed’s _milieu_ signify nothing whatever to the Islamic believer, but for _us_ it is recognizably the story of English Puritanism in another setting. For the world-view of a Civilization which has made the whole earth its stage, nothing is in the last resort quite unhistorical. The scheme of ancient-mediæval-modern history, as understood by the nineteenth century, contained only a selection of the more obvious relations. But the influence that old Chinese and Mexican history are beginning to exercise on us to-day is of a subtler and more intellectual kind. There we are sounding the last necessities of life itself. We are learning out of another life-course to know ourselves what we are, what we must be, what we shall be. It is the great school of our future. We who have history still, are making history still, find here on the extreme frontiers of historical humanity what history _is_.

A battle between two Negro tribes in the Sudan, or between the Cherusci and Chatti of Cæsar’s time, or--what is substantially the same--between ant-communities, is merely a drama of “living Nature.” But when the Cherusci beat the Romans, as in the year 9,[57] or the Aztecs the Tlascalans, it is _history_. Here the “when” is of importance and each decade, or even year, matters, for here one is dealing with the march of a grand life-course, in which every decision takes rank as an epoch. Here there is an object towards which every happening impels, a being that strives to fulfil its predestination, a tempo, an organic duration--and not the disorderly ups and downs of Scythians, Gauls, or Caribs, of which the particular detail is as unimportant as that of doings in a colony of beavers or a steppe-herd of gazelles. These are _zoölogical happenings_ and have their place in an altogether different orientation of our outlook, that in which we are concerned not with the destiny of individual peoples or herds, but with that of “man,” or “the” gazelle, or “the” ants, _as species_. Primitive man has history only in the biological sense, and all prehistoric study boils down to the investigation of this sense. The increasing familiarity of men with fire, stone tools, and the mechanical laws which make weapons effective, characterizes only the development of the type and of its latent possibilities. The objects for which one tribe employed these weapons against another tribe are of no importance in this plane of history. Stone Age and Baroque are age-grades in the existence of respectively a genus and a Culture--i.e., two organisms belonging to two fundamentally different settings. And here I would protest against two assumptions that have so far vitiated all historical thought: the assertion of an ultimate aim of mankind as a whole and the denial of there being ultimate aims at all. The life _has_ an aim. It is the fulfilment of that which was ordained at its conception. But the individual belongs by birth to the particular high Culture on the one hand and to the type Man on the other--there is no third unit of being for him. His destiny must lie either in the zoölogical or in the world-historical field. “Historical” man, as I understand the word and as all great historians have meant it to be taken, is the man of a Culture that is in full march towards self-fulfilment. Before this, after this, outside this, man is _historyless_; and the destinies of the people to which he belongs matter as little as the Earth’s destiny matters when the plane of attention is the astronomical and not the geological.

From this there follows a fact of the most decisive importance, and one that has never before been established: that man is not only historyless before the birth of the Culture, but again becomes so as soon as a Civilization has worked itself out fully to the definitive form which betokens the end of the living development of the Culture and the exhaustion of the last potentialities of its significant existence. That which we see in the Egyptian Civilization after Seti I (1300) and in the Chinese, the Indian, the Arabian to this day is--notwithstanding all the cleverness of the religious, philosophical and, especially, political forms in which it is wrapped--just the old zoölogical up-and-down of the primitive age again. Whether the lords sitting in Babylon were wild war-hordes like the Kassites or refined inheritors like the Persians, when, for how long, and with what success they kept their seats, signified nothing from the standpoint of Babylon. The comfort of the population was affected by such things, naturally, but they made no difference either way to the fact that the soul of this world was extinct and its events, therefore, void of any deep meaning. A new dynasty, native or foreign, in Egypt, a revolution or a conquest in China, a new Germanic people in the Roman Empire, were elements in the history of the landscape like a change in the fauna or the migration of a flock of birds.

In the history, the genuine history, of higher men the stake fought for and the basis of the animal struggle to prevail is ever--even when driver and driven are completely unconscious of the symbolic force of their doings, purposes, and fortunes--the actualization of something that is essentially spiritual, the translation of an idea into a living historical form. This applies equally to the struggle of big style-tendencies in art (Gothic and Renaissance), of philosophy (Stoics and Epicureans), of political ideals (Oligarchy and Tyrannis), and of economic forms (Capitalism and Socialism). But the post-history is void of all this. All that remains is the struggle for mere power, for animal advantage _per se_. Whereas previously power, even when to all appearance destitute of any inspiration, was always serving the Idea somehow or other, in the late Civilization even the most convincing illusion of an idea is only the mask for purely zoölogical strivings.

The distinction between Indian philosophy before and after Buddha is that the former is a grand movement towards attaining the aim of Indian thought by and in the Indian soul, and the latter the perpetual turning-up of new facets of a now crystallized and undevelopable thought-stock. The solutions are there, for good, though the fashions of expressing them change. The same is true of Chinese painting before and after the Han dynasties--whether we know it or not--and of Egyptian architecture before and after the beginning of the New Empire. So also with technics. The West’s discoveries of the steam-engine and of electricity are accepted by the Chinese to-day in just the same way--and with just the same religious awe--as bronze and the plough were accepted four thousand years ago, and fire in a still remoter age. Both, spiritually, differ _in toto_ from the discoveries which the Chinese made for themselves in the Chóu period and which in each instance signified an epoch in their inner history.[58] Before and after that time, centuries play a vastly less important rôle than decades and even years within the Culture, _for the spans of time are gradually returning to the biological order_. This it is that confers upon these very Late conditions--which to the people living in them seem almost self-evident--that character of changeless pageantry which the genuine Culture-man--e.g., Herodotus in Egypt and the Western successors of Marco Polo in China--has found so astonishing in comparison with his own vigorous pulse of development. It is the changelessness of non-history.

Is not Classical history at an end with Actium and the _Pax Romana?_ There are no more of those great decisions which concentrate the inner meaning of a whole Culture. Unreason, biology, is beginning to dominate, and it is becoming a matter of indifference for the world--though not for the actions of the private individual--whether an event turns out thus or thus. All great political questions are solved, as they are solved sooner or later in every Civilization, inasmuch as questions are no longer felt as questions and are not asked. Yet a little while, and man will cease to understand what problems were really involved in the earlier catastrophes; what is not livingly experienced of oneself cannot be livingly experienced of another. When the later Egyptians speak of the Hyksos time, or the later Chinese of the corresponding period of the “Contending States,” they are judging the outward picture according to the criteria of their own ways of life, in which there are no riddles more. They see in these things merely struggles for power, and they do not see that those desperate wars, external and internal, wars in which men stirred up the alien against their own kin, were fought for an idea. To-day we understand what was taking place, in fearful alternations of tension and discharge, round the murder of Tiberius Gracchus and that of Clodius. In 1700 we could not have done so, and in 2200 we shall again be unable to do so. It is just the same with that of Chian, a Napoleonic figure, in whom later Egyptian historians could discover nothing more characterized than a “Hyksos king.” Had it not been for the coming of the Germans, Roman historians a thousand years later might have put the Gracchi, Marius, Sulla, and Cicero together as a dynasty which was overthrown by Cæsar.

Compare the death of Tiberius Gracchus with the death of Nero, when Rome received the news of Galba’s rising, or the victory of Sulla over the Marian party with that of Septimius Severus over Pescennius Niger. If in these later cases the event had gone otherwise, would the course of the Imperial Age have been altered in any way? The distinction so carefully drawn by Mommsen and Eduard Meyer[59] between the “principate” of Pompey and Augustus and the “monarchy” of Cæsar misses the mark completely. At that stage, the point is merely a constitutional one, though fifty years before it would still have signified an opposition between ideas. When Vindex and Galba in 68 set out to restore “the Republic,” they were gambling on a notion in days when notions having genuine symbolic force had ceased to be, and the only question was who should have the plain material power. The struggle for the Cæsar-title became steadily more and more negroid, and might have gone on century after century in increasingly primitive and, therefore, “eternal” forms.

These populations no longer possessed a soul. Consequently they could no longer have a history proper to themselves. At best they might acquire some significance as an object in the history of an alien Culture, and whatever deeper meaning this relation possessed would be derived entirely from the will of the alien Life. Any effective historical happening that does take place on the soil of an old Civilization acquires its consistency as a course of events from elsewhere and never from any part played in it by the man of that soil. And so once again we find ourselves regarding the phenomenon of “world-history” under the two aspects--life-courses of the great Cultures and relations between them.