THE STATE

(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.