The stone Colossus “Cosmopolis” stands at the end of the life’s course of every great Culture. The Culture-man whom the land has spiritually formed is seized and possessed by his own creation, the City, and is made into its creature, its executive organ, and finally its victim. This stony mass is the _absolute_ city. Its image, as it appears with all its grandiose beauty in the light-world of the human eye, contains the whole noble death-symbolism of the definitive thing-become. The spirit-pervaded stone of Gothic buildings, after a millennium of style-evolution, has become the soulless material of this dæmonic stone-desert.

These final cities are _wholly_ intellect. Their houses are no longer, as those of the Ionic and the Baroque were, derivatives of the old peasant’s house, whence the Culture took its spring into history. They are, generally speaking, no longer houses in which Vesta and Janus, Lares and Penates, have any sort of footing, but mere premises which have been fashioned, not by blood but by requirements, not by feeling but by the spirit of commercial enterprise. So long as the hearth has a pious meaning as the actual and genuine centre of a family, the old relation to the land is not wholly extinct. But when _that_, too, follows the rest into oblivion, and the mass of tenants and bed-occupiers in the sea of houses leads a vagrant existence from shelter to shelter like the hunters and pastors of the “pre-” time, then the intellectual nomad is completely developed. This city is a world, is _the_ world. Only as a whole, as a human dwelling-place, has it meaning, the houses being merely the stones of which it is assembled.

Now the old mature cities with their Gothic nucleus of cathedral, town-halls, and high-gabled streets, with their old walls, towers, and gates, ringed about by the Baroque growth of brighter and more elegant patricians’ houses, palaces, and hall-churches, begin to overflow in all directions in formless masses, to eat into the decaying country-side with their multiplied barrack-tenements and utility buildings, and to destroy the noble aspect of the old time by clearances and rebuildings. Looking down from one of the old towers upon the sea of houses, we perceive in this petrification of a historic being the exact epoch that marks the end of organic growth and the beginning of an inorganic and therefore unrestrained process of massing without limit. And now, too, appears that artificial, mathematical, utterly land-alien product of a pure intellectual satisfaction in the appropriate, the city of the city-architect. In all Civilizations alike, these cities aim at the chessboard form, which is the symbol of soullessness. Regular rectangle-blocks astounded Herodotus in Babylon and Cortez in Tenochtitlan. In the Classical world the series of “abstract” cities begins with Thurii, which was “planned” by Hippodamus of Miletus in 441. Priene, whose chessboard scheme entirely ignores the ups and downs of the site, Rhodes, and Alexandria follow, and become in turn models for innumerable provincial cities of the Imperial Age. The Islamic architects laid out Baghdad from 762, and the giant city of Samarra a century later, according to plan.[144] In the West-European and American world the lay-out of Washington in 1791 is the first big example.[145] There can be no doubt that the world-cities of the Han period in China and the Maurya dynasty in India possessed this same geometrical pattern. Even now the world-cities of the Western Civilization are far from having reached the peak of their development. I see, long after A.D. 2000, cities laid out for ten to twenty million inhabitants, spread over enormous areas of country-side, with buildings that will dwarf the biggest of to-day’s and notions of traffic and communication that we should regard as fantastic to the point of madness.[146]

Even in this final shape of his being, the Classical man’s form-ideal remains the corporeal point. Whereas the giant cities of our present confess our irresistible tendency towards the infinite--our suburbs and garden cities, invading the wide country-side, our vast and comprehensive network of roads, and within the thickly built areas a controlled fast traffic on, below, and above straight, broad streets--the genuine Classical world-city ever strove, not to expand, but to thicken--the streets narrow and cramped, impossible for fast traffic (although this was fully developed on the great Roman roads), entire unwillingness to live in suburbs or even to make suburbs possible.[147] Even at that stage the city must needs be a body, thick and round, σῶμα in the strictest sense. The synœcism that in the early Classical had gradually drawn the land-folk into the cities, and so created the type of the Polis, repeated itself at the last in absurd form; everyone wanted to live in the middle of the city, in its densest nucleus, for otherwise he could not feel himself to be the urban man that he was. All these cities are only _cités_, inner towns. The new synœcism formed, instead of suburban zones, _the world of the upper floors_. In the year 74 Rome, in spite of its immense population, had the ridiculously small perimeter of nineteen and a half kilometres [twelve miles].[148] Consequently these city-bodies extended in general not in breadth, but more and more upward. The block-tenements of Rome such as the famous Insula Feliculæ, rose, with a street breadth of only three to five metres [ten to seventeen feet][149] to heights that have never been seen in Western Europe and are seen in only a few cities in America. Near the Capitol, the roofs already reached to the level of the hill-saddle.[150] But always the splendid mass-cities harbour lamentable poverty and degraded habits, and the attics and mansards, the cellars and back courts are breeding a new type of raw man--in Baghdad and in Babylon, just as in Tenochtitlan and to-day in London and Berlin. Diodorus tells of a deposed Egyptian king who was reduced to living in one of these wretched upper-floor tenements of Rome.

But no wretchedness, no compulsion, not even a clear vision of the madness of this development, avails to neutralize the attractive force of these dæmonic creations. The wheel of Destiny rolls on to its end; the birth of the City entails its death. Beginning and end, a peasant cottage and a tenement-block are related to one another as soul and intellect, as blood and stone. But “Time” is no abstract phrase, but a name for the actuality of Irreversibility. Here there is only forward, never back. Long, long ago the country bore the country-town and nourished it with her best blood. Now the giant city sucks the country dry, insatiably and incessantly demanding and devouring fresh streams of men, till it wearies and dies in the midst of an almost uninhabited waste of country. Once the full sinful beauty of this last marvel of all history has captured a victim, it never lets him go. Primitive folk can loose themselves from the soil and wander, but the intellectual nomad never. Homesickness for the great city is keener than any other nostalgia. Home is for him any one of these giant cities, but even the nearest village is alien territory. He would sooner die upon the pavement than go “back” to the land. Even disgust at this pretentiousness, weariness of the thousand-hued glitter, the _tædium vitæ_ that in the end overcomes many, does not set them free. They take the City with them into the mountains or on the sea. They have lost the country within themselves and will never regain it outside.

What makes the man of the world-cities incapable of living on any but this artificial footing is that the cosmic beat in his being is ever decreasing, while the tensions of his waking-consciousness become more and more dangerous. It must be remembered that in a microcosm the animal, waking side supervenes upon the vegetable side, that of being, and not vice versa. Beat and tension, blood and intellect, Destiny and Causality are to one another as the country-side in bloom is to the city of stone, as something existing _per se_ to something existing dependently. Tension without cosmic pulsation to animate it is the transition to nothingness. But Civilization is nothing but tension. The head, in all the outstanding men of the Civilizations, is dominated exclusively by an expression of extreme tension. Intelligence is only the capacity for understanding at high tension, and in every Culture these heads are the types of its final men--one has only to compare them with the peasant heads, when such happen to emerge in the swirl of the great city’s street-life. The advance, too, from peasant wisdom--“slimness,” mother wit, instinct, based as in other animals upon the sensed beat of life--through the city-spirit to the cosmopolitan intelligence--the very word with its sharp ring betraying the disappearance of the old cosmic foundation--can be described as a steady diminution of the Destiny-feeling and an unrestrained augmentation of needs according to the operation of a Causality. Intelligence is the replacement of unconscious living by exercise in thought, masterly, but bloodless and jejune. The intelligent visage is similar in all races--what is recessive in them is, precisely, race. The weaker the feeling for the necessity and self-evidence of Being, the more the habit of “elucidation” grows, the more the fear in the waking-consciousness comes to be stilled by causal methods. Hence the assimilation of knowledge with demonstrability, and the substitution of scientific theory, the causal myth, for the religious. Hence, too, money-in-the-abstract as the pure causality of economic life, in contrast to rustic barter, which is pulsation and not a system of tensions.

Tension, when it has become intellectual, knows no form of recreation but that which is specific to the world-city--namely, _détente_, relaxation, distraction. Genuine play, _joie de vivre_, pleasure, inebriation, are products of the cosmic beat and as such no longer comprehensible in their essence. But the relief of hard, intensive brain-work by its opposite--conscious and practised fooling--of intellectual tension by the bodily tension of sport, of bodily tension by the sensual straining after “pleasure” and the spiritual straining after the “excitements” of betting and competitions, of the pure logic of the day’s work by a consciously enjoyed mysticism--all this is common to the world-cities of all the Civilizations. Cinema, Expressionism, Theosophy, boxing contests, nigger dances, poker, and racing--one can find it all in Rome. Indeed, the connoisseur might extend his researches to the Indian, Chinese, and Arabian world-cities as well. To name but one example, if one reads the Kama-sutram one understands how it was that Buddhism _also_ appealed to men’s tastes, and then the bullfighting scenes in the Palace of Cnossus will be looked at with quite different eyes. A cult, no doubt, underlay them, but there was a savour over it all, as over Rome’s fashionable Isis-cult in the neighbourhood of the Circus Maximus.

And then, when Being is sufficiently uprooted and Waking-Being sufficiently strained, there suddenly emerges into the bright light of history a phenomenon that has long been preparing itself underground and now steps forward to make an end of the drama--the _sterility of civilized man_. This is not something that can be grasped as a plain matter of Causality (as modern science naturally enough has tried to grasp it); it is to be understood as an essentially _metaphysical_ turn towards death. The last man of the world-city no longer _wants_ to live--he may cling to life as an individual, but as a type, as an aggregate, no, for it is a characteristic of this collective existence that it eliminates the terror of death. That which strikes the true peasant with a deep and inexplicable fear, the notion that the family and the name may be extinguished, has now lost its meaning. The continuance of the blood-relation in the visible world is no longer a duty of the blood, and the destiny of being the last of the line is no longer felt as a doom. Children do not happen, not because children have become impossible, but principally because intelligence at the peak of intensity can no longer find any reason for their existence. Let the reader try to merge himself in the soul of the peasant. He has sat on his glebe from primeval times,[151] or has fastened his clutch in it, to adhere to it with his blood. He is rooted in it as the descendant of his forbears and as the forbear of future descendants. _His_ house, _his_ property, means, here, not the temporary connexion of person and thing for a brief span of years, but an enduring and inward union of _eternal_ land and _eternal_ blood. It is only from this mystical conviction of settlement that the great epochs of the cycle--procreation, birth, and death--derive that metaphysical element of wonder which condenses in the symbolism of custom and religion that all land-bound people possess. For the “last men” all this is past and gone. Intelligence and sterility are allied in old families, old peoples, and old Cultures, not merely because in each microcosm the overstrained and fettered animal-element is eating up the plant element, but also because the waking-consciousness assumes that being is normally regulated by causality. That which the man of intelligence, most significantly and characteristically, labels as “natural impulse” or “life-force,” he not only knows, but also values, causally, giving it the place amongst his other needs that his judgment assigns to it. When the ordinary thought of a highly cultivated people begins to regard “having children” as a question of _pro’s_ and _con’s_, the great turning-point has come. For Nature knows nothing of _pro_ and _con_. Everywhere, wherever life is actual, reigns an inward organic logic, an “it,” a drive, that is utterly independent of waking-being, with its causal linkages, and indeed not even observed by it. The abundant proliferation of primitive peoples is a _natural phenomenon_, which is not even thought about, still less judged as to its utility or the reverse. When reasons have to be put forward at all in a question of life, life itself has become questionable. At that point begins prudent limitation of the number of births. In the Classical world the practice was deplored by Polybius as the ruin of Greece, and yet even at his date it had long been established in the great cities; in subsequent Roman times it became appallingly general. At first explained by the economic misery of the times, very soon it ceased to explain itself at all. And at that point, too, in Buddhist India as in Babylon, in Rome as in our own cities, a man’s choice of the woman who is to be, not mother of his children as amongst peasants and primitives, but his own “companion for life,” becomes a problem of mentalities. The Ibsen marriage appears, the “higher spiritual affinity” in which both parties are “free”--free, that is, as intelligences, free from the plantlike urge of the blood to continue itself, and it becomes possible for a Shaw to say “that unless Woman repudiates her womanliness, her duty to her husband, to her children, to society, to the law, and to everyone but herself, she cannot emancipate herself.”[152] The primary woman, the peasant woman, is _mother_. The whole vocation towards which she has yearned from childhood is included in that one word. But now emerges the Ibsen woman, the comrade, the heroine of a whole megalopolitan literature from Northern drama to Parisian novel. Instead of children, she has soul-conflicts; marriage is a craft-art for the achievement of “mutual understanding.” It is all the same whether the case against children is the American lady’s who would not miss a season for anything, or the Parisienne’s who fears that her lover would leave her, or an Ibsen heroine’s who “belongs to herself”--they all belong to themselves and they are all unfruitful. The same fact, in conjunction with the same arguments, is to be found in the Alexandrian, in the Roman, and, as a matter of course, in every other civilized society--and conspicuously in that in which Buddha grew up. And in Hellenism and in the nineteenth century, as in the times of Lao-Tzu and the Charvaka doctrine,[153] there is an ethic for childless intelligences, and a literature about the inner conflicts of Nora and Nana. The “quiverful,” which was still an honourable enough spectacle in the days of Werther, becomes something rather provincial. The father of many children is for the great city a subject for caricature; Ibsen did not fail to note it, and presented it in his _Love’s Comedy_.

At this level all Civilizations enter upon a stage, which lasts for centuries, of appalling depopulation. The whole pyramid of cultural man vanishes. It crumbles from the summit, first the world-cities, then the provincial forms, and finally the land itself, whose best blood has incontinently poured into the towns, merely to bolster them up awhile. At the last, only the primitive blood remains, alive, but robbed of its strongest and most promising elements. This residue is the _Fellah type_.

If anything has demonstrated the fact that Causality has nothing to do with history, it is the familiar “decline” of the Classical, which accomplished itself long before the irruption of Germanic migrants.[154] The Imperium enjoyed the completest peace; it was rich and highly developed; it was well organized; and it possessed in its emperors from Nerva to Marcus Aurelius a series of rulers such as the Cæsarism of no other Civilization can show. And yet the population dwindled, quickly and wholesale. The desperate marriage-and-children laws of Augustus--amongst them the _Lex de maritandis ordinibus_, which dismayed Roman society more than the destruction of Varus’s legions--the wholesale adoptions, the incessant plantation of soldiers of barbarian origin to fill the depleted country-side, the immense food-charities of Nerva and Trajan for the children of poor parents--nothing availed to check the process. Italy, then North Africa and Gaul, and finally Spain, which under the early Cæsars had been one of the most densely populated parts of the Empire, become empty and desolate. The famous saying of Pliny--so often and so significantly quoted to-day in connexion with national economics--“_Latifundia perdidere Italiam, jam, vero et provincias_,”[155] inverts the order of the process; the large estates would never have got to this point if the peasantry had not already been sucked into the towns and, if not openly, at any rate inwardly, surrendered their soil. The terrible truth came out at last in the edict of Pertinax, A.D. 193, by which anyone in Italy or the provinces was permitted to take possession of untended land, and if he brought it under cultivation, to hold it as his legal property. The historical student has only to turn his attention seriously to other Civilizations to find the same phenomenon everywhere. Depopulation can be distinctly traced in the background of the Egyptian New Empire, especially from the XIX dynasty onwards. Street widths like those to Amenophis IV at Tell-el-Amarna--of fifty yards--would have been unthinkable with the denser population of the old days. The onset of the “Sea-peoples,” too, was only barely repulsed--their chances of obtaining possession of the realm were certainly not less promising than those of the Germans of the fourth century _vis-à-vis_ the Roman world. And finally the incessant infiltration of Libyans into the Delta culminated when one of their leaders seized the power, in 945 B.C.--precisely as Odoacer seized it in A.D. 476. But the same tendency can be felt in the history of political Buddhism after the Cæsar Asoka.[156] If the Maya population literally vanished within a very short time after the Spanish conquest, and their great empty cities were reabsorbed by the jungle, this does not prove merely the brutality of the conqueror--which in this regard would have been helpless before the self-renewing power of a young and fruitful Culture-mankind--but an extinction from within that no doubt had long been in progress. And if we turn to our own civilization, we find that the old families of the French noblesse were not, in the great majority of cases, eradicated in the Revolution, but have died out since 1815, and their sterility has spread to the bourgeoisie and, since 1870, to the peasantry which that very Revolution almost re-created. In England, and still more in the United States--particularly in the east, the very states where the stock is best and oldest--the process of “race suicide” denounced by Roosevelt set in long ago on the largest scale.

Consequently we find everywhere in these Civilizations that the provincial cities at an early stage, and the giant cities in turn at the end of the evolution, stand empty, harbouring in their stone masses a small population of fellaheen who shelter in them as the men of the Stone Age sheltered in caves and pile-dwellings.[157] Samarra was abandoned by the tenth century; Pataliputra, Asoka’s capital, was an immense and completely uninhabited waste of houses when the Chinese traveller Hsinan-tang visited it about A.D. 635, and many of the great Maya cities must have been in that condition even in Cortez’s time. In a long series of Classical writers from Polybius onward[158] we read of old, renowned cities in which the streets have become lines of empty, crumbling shells, where the cattle browse in forum and gymnasium, and the amphitheatre is a sown field,[159] dotted with emergent statues and herms. Rome had in the fifth century of our era the population of a village, but its Imperial palaces were still habitable.

This, then, is the conclusion of the city’s history; growing from primitive barter-centre to Culture-city and at last to world-city, it sacrifices first the blood and soul of its creators to the needs of its majestic evolution, and then the last flower of that growth to the spirit of Civilization--and so, doomed, moves on to final self-destruction.