Volume 2 — CHAPTER XI THE STATE (B) STATE AND HISTORY (continued 3)

At the beginning, where the Civilization is developing to full bloom (to-day), there stands the miracle of the Cosmopolis, the great petrifact, a symbol of the formless—vast, splendid, spreading in insolence. It draws within itself the being-streams of the now impotent countryside, human masses that are wafted as dunes from one to another or flow like loose sand into the chinks of the stone. Here money and intellect celebrate their greatest and their last triumphs. It is the most artificial, the cleverest phenomenon manifested in the light-world of human eyes—uncanny, “too good to be true,” standing already almost beyond the possibilities of cosmic formation.

Presently, however, the idea-less facts come forward again, naked and gigantic. The eternal-cosmic pulse has finally overcome the intellectual tensions of a few centuries. In the form of democracy, money has won. There has been a period in which politics were almost its preserve. But as soon as it has destroyed the old orders of the Culture, the chaos gives forth a new and overpowering factor that penetrates to the very elementals of Becoming—the Cæsar-men. Before them the money collapses. The Imperial Age, in every Culture alike, signifies the end of the politics of mind and money. The powers of the blood, unbroken bodily forces, resume their ancient lordship. “Race” springs forth, pure and irresistible—the strongest win and the residue is their spoil. They seize the management of the world, and the realm of books and problems petrifies or vanishes from memory. From now on, new destinies in the style of the pre-Culture time are possible afresh, and visible to the consciousness without cloaks of causality. There is no inward difference more between the lives of Septimius Severus and Gallienus and those of Alaric and Odoacer. Rameses, Trajan, Wu-ti belong together in a uniform up-and-down of historyless time-stretches.⁠[778]

Once the Imperial Age has arrived, there are no more political problems. People manage with the situation as it is and the powers that be. In the period of Contending States, torrents of blood had reddened the pavements of all world-cities, so that the great truths of Democracy might be turned into actualities, and for the winning of rights without which life seemed not worth the living. Now these rights are won, but the grandchildren cannot be moved, even by punishment, to make use of them. A hundred years more, and even the historians will no longer understand the old controversies. Already by Cæsar’s time reputable people had almost ceased to take part in the elections.⁠[779] It embittered the life of the great Tiberius that the most capable men of his time held aloof from politics, and Nero could not even by threats compel the Equites to come to Rome in order to exercise their rights. This is the end of the great politics. The conflict of intelligences that had served as substitute for war must give place to war itself in its most primitive form.

It is, therefore, a complete misunderstanding of the meaning of the period to presume, as Mommsen did,⁠[780] a deep design of subdivision in the “dyarchy” fashioned by Augustus, with its partition of powers between Princeps and Senate. A century earlier this constitution would have been a real thing, but that would in itself suffice to make it impossible for such an idea to have entered the heads of the present force-men. Now it meant nothing but the attempt of a weak personality to deceive itself as to inexorable facts by mantling them in empty forms. Cæsar saw things as they were and was guided in the exercise of his rulership by definite and unsentimental practical considerations. The legislation of his last months was concerned wholly with transitional provisions, none of which were intended to be permanent. This precisely is what has generally been overlooked. He was far too deep a judge of things to anticipate development or to settle its definitive forms at this moment, with the Parthian War impending. But Augustus, like Pompey before him, was not the master of his following, but thoroughly dependent upon it and its views of things. The form of the Principate was not at all his discovery, but the doctrinaire execution of an obsolete party-ideal that Cicero—another weakling—had formulated.⁠[781] When, on the 13th January 27, Augustus gave back the state-power to the “Senate and People” of Rome—a scene all the more meaningless because of its sincerity—he kept the Tribunate for himself. In fact, this was the one element of the polity that could manifest itself in actuality. The Tribune was the legitimate successor of the Tyrant,⁠[782] and as long ago as 122 B.C. Caius Gracchus had put into the title a connotation limited no longer by the legal bounds of the office, but only by the personal talents of the incumbent. From him it is a direct line through Marius and Cæsar to the young Nero, who set himself to defeat the political purposes of his mother Agrippina. The Princeps,⁠[783] on the other hand, was thenceforth only a costume, a rank—very likely a fact in society, certainly not a fact in politics. And this, precisely, was the conception invested with light and glamour by the theory of Cicero, and already—and by him of all people—associated with the Divus-idea.⁠[784] The “co-operation” of the Senate and People, on the contrary, was an antiquated ceremonial, with about as much life in it as the rites of the Fratres Arvales—also restored by Augustus. The great parties of the Gracchan age had long become retinues—Cæsarians and Pompeians—and finally there only remained on the one side the formless omnipotence, the plain brutal “fact,” the Cæsar—or whoever managed to get the Cæsar under his influence—and on the other side the handful of narrow ideologues who concealed dissatisfaction under philosophy and thenceforward sought to advance their ideals by conspiracy. What these Stoics were in Rome, the Confucians were in China—and, seen thus, the episode of the “Burning of the Books,” decreed by the Chinese Augustus in 212, begins to be intelligible through the reproach of immense vandalism that the minds of later literates fastened upon it. But, after all, these Stoic enthusiasts for an ideal that had become impossible had killed Cæsar:⁠[785] to the Divus-cult they opposed a Cato- and Brutus-cult; the philosophers in the Senate (which by then was only a noble club) never wearied of lamenting the downfall of “freedom” and fomenting conspiracies such as Piso’s in 65. Had this been the state of things at Nero’s death, it would have been Sulla over again; and that is why Nero put to death the Stoic Thrasea Pætus, why Vespasian executed Helvidius Priscus, and why copies of the history of Cremutius Cordus, which lauded Brutus as the last of the Romans, were collected and burnt in Rome. These were acts of defensive State necessity vis-à-vis blind ideology—acts such as those we know of Cromwell and Robespierre—and it was in exactly the same position that the Chinese Cæsars found themselves vis-à-vis the school of Confucius, which had formerly worked out their ideal of a state-constitution and now had no notion of enduring the actuality. This great Burning of the Books was nothing but the destruction of one part of the politico-philosophical literature and the abolition of propaganda and secret organizations.⁠[786] This defensive lasted in both Imperia for a century, and then even reminiscences of party-political passions faded out and the two philosophies became the ruling world-outlook of the Imperial age in its maturity.⁠[787] But the world was now the theatre of tragic family-histories into which state-histories were dissolved; the Julian-Claudian house destroyed Roman history, and the house of Shi-hwang-ti (even from 206 B.C.) destroyed Chinese, and we darkly discern something of the same kind in the destinies of the Egyptian Queen Hatshepsut and her brothers (1501–1447). It is the last step to the definitive. With world-peace—the peace of high policies—the “sword side”⁠[788] of being retreats and the “spindle side” rules again; henceforth there are only private histories, private destinies, private ambitions, from top to bottom, from the miserable troubles of fellaheen to the dreary feuds of Cæsars for the private possession of the world. The wars of the age of world-peace are private wars, more fearful than any State wars because they are formless.

For world-peace—which has often existed in fact—involves the private renunciation of war on the part of the immense majority, but along with this it involves an unavowed readiness to submit to being the booty of others who do not renounce it. It begins with the State-destroying wish for universal reconciliation, and it ends in nobody’s moving a finger so long as misfortune only touches his neighbour. Already under Marcus Aurelius each city and each land-patch was thinking of itself, and the activities of the ruler were his private affair as other men’s were theirs. The remoter peoples were as indifferent to him and his troops and his aims as they were to the projects of Germanic war-bands. On this spiritual premiss a second Vikingism develops. The state of being “in form” passes from nations to bands and retinues of adventurers, self-styled Cæsars, seceding generals, barbarian kings, and what not—in whose eyes the population becomes in the end merely a part of the landscape. There is a deep relation between the heroes of the Mycenæan primitive age and the soldier-emperors of Rome, and between, say, Menes and Rameses II. In our Germanic world the spirits of Alaric and Theodoric will come again—there is a first hint of them in Cecil Rhodes—and the alien executioners of the Russian preface, from Jenghiz Khan to Trotski (with the episode of Petrine Tsarism between them) are, when all is said and done, very little different from most of the pretenders of the Latin-American republics, whose private struggles have long since put an end to the form-rich age of the Spanish Baroque.

With the formed state, high history also lays itself down weary to sleep. Man becomes a plant again, adhering to the soil, dumb and enduring. The timeless village and the “eternal” peasant⁠[789] reappear, begetting children and burying seed in Mother Earth—a busy, not inadequate swarm, over which the tempest of soldier-emperors passingly blows. In the midst of the land lie the old world-cities, empty receptacles of an extinguished soul, in which a historyless mankind slowly nests itself. Men live from hand to mouth, with petty thrifts and petty fortunes, and endure. Masses are trampled on in the conflicts of the conquerors who contend for the power and the spoil of this world, but the survivors fill up the gaps with a primitive fertility and suffer on. And while in high places there is eternal alternance of victory and defeat, those in the depths pray, pray with that mighty piety of the Second Religiousness that has overcome all doubts for ever.⁠[790] There, in the souls, world-peace, the peace of God, the bliss of grey-haired monks and hermits, is become actual—and there alone. It has awakened that depth in the endurance of suffering which the historical man in the thousand years of his development has never known. Only with the end of grand History does holy, still Being reappear. It is a drama noble in its aimlessness, noble and aimless as the course of the stars, the rotation of the earth, and alternance of land and sea, of ice and virgin forest upon its face. We may marvel at it or we may lament it—but it is there.