Chapter XI: The State (2)

It requires a close insight into the political form-language of the Classical world to perceive that here also the course of things was exactly the same, and that it comprised not only the transition from feudal union to class-State, but even the dynastic principle as well. Classical being, indeed, said no to everything that might draw it into distances either of space or of time, and even in the fact-world of history ringed itself with creations that had something of the defensive in them. But all this narrowing and curtailing presupposes the thing against which it is striving to maintain itself. The Dionysiac squandering, and the Orphic negation, of the Classical body contained in the very _form_ of their protest the Apollinian ideal of perfect bodily being.

Individual rulership and the will to transmit to heirs were unmistakably taken for granted in the oldest kingship.[668] But they had become questionable even by 800, as the rôle of Telemachus in the older parts of the Odyssey indicates. The royal title was frequently borne by great vassals and the most conspicuous of the nobles. In Sparta and in Lycia there were two of them, and in the Phæacian city of the epic and in many actual cities there were more. Next comes the splitting-off of offices from dignities. Lastly, the kingship itself becomes an office which the nobility confers (though at first, perhaps, only upon members of the old royal family); thus in Sparta the Ephors, as representing the First Estate, were in no wise limited in their choice by rule; and in Corinth from about 750 the royal clan of the Bacchiadæ abolished hereditary succession, and on each occasion set up a _prytaneus_ with royal rank from within their own body. The great offices, which likewise were hereditary at first, came to be for one life only, then were limited to a term, and lastly became annual, and, further, were so arranged that there were more holders than offices, and the leadership was exercised by each in turn--the custom which, as is well known, led to the disaster of Cannæ. These annual offices, from the Etruscan annual dictature[669] to the Doric ephorate (which is found in Heraclea and Messene as well as Sparta) are firmly bound up with the essence of the Polis, and they reach their full structure about 650. Exactly at the corresponding date of the Western class-State (end of the fifteenth century), the hereditary power of dynasties was being secured by the Emperor Maximilian and his marriage-politics (against the claims of the Electors), by Ferdinand of Aragon, Henry VII of England, and Louis XI of France.[670]

But with the increasing emphasis upon the Classical here and now, the priesthood, which had the beginnings of an Estate in it, became _pari passu_ a mere aggregate of city officials. The capital, so to call it, of the Homeric kingship, instead of being the centre for the radiation of State influence in all directions into the distance, contracted its magic circle until State and city became identical. Thereby, of course, the nobility was fused with the patriciate, and if even in the Gothic the representation of the young cities (for example, the English Commons or the French States-General) was exclusively by patricians, how much more so in the powerful city-state of the Classical! Not indeed in idea, _but in fact_, it was a pure kingless aristocratic State. The strictly Apollinian “form” of the growing Polis is called _oligarchy_.

And thus, at the close of the early periods of both these Cultures, we see two principles parallel and contrasted, the Faustian-genealogical and the Apollinian-oligarchic; two kinds of constitutional law, of Dike. The one is supported by an unmeasured sense of expanse, reaches back deep into the past with form-tradition, thinks forward with the same intense will-to-endure into the remotest future; but in the present, too, works for political effectiveness over broad expanses by well-considered dynastic marriages and by the truly Faustian, dynamic, and contrapuntal politics that we call _diplomacy_. The other, wholly corporeal and statuesque, is self-limited by its policy of _autarkeia_ to the nearest and the most immediate present, and at every point stoutly denies that which Western being affirms.

Both the dynastic state and the city-state presuppose the city itself. But there is this difference, that a seat of government in the West, though it may be (and frequently is) far from being the greatest city of the land, is a force-centre in a field of political tensions such that every occurrence, in however remote a corner, vibrates generally throughout the whole--whereas in the Classical, life huddles closer and closer until it reaches the grotesque phenomenon of Synœcism--the very acme of the Euclidean will-to-form in the political world. It is impossible to imagine the State unless and until the nation sits physically concentrated in one heap, as one _body_; it must be _seen_, and even seen “at a glance.” And while the Faustian tendency is more and more to diminish the number of dynastic centres--so that even Maximilian I could see looming in the distance a dynastically secure universal monarchy of his house--the Classical world fell apart into innumerable petty points, which, almost as soon as they came into existence, started to do that which for Classical mankind was almost a necessity of thought and the purest expression of _autarkeia_--to destroy one another.[671]

Synœcism with its consequence, the creation of the Polis-type proper, was exclusively the work of _aristocracy_. It was they that established the Classical city-state, and for themselves alone; it was the drawing-together of country nobility and patriciate that brought it into form. The vocational classes were already on the spot, and the peasantry ceased to count from the class point of view. And by the concentration of noble power at one point the kingship of the feudal period was shattered.

With these glimpses into Greece to go upon, we may venture, though under all reserves of course, to outline the history of primitive Rome. The Roman synœcism--the assembling of widely scattered noble families--is identical with the “founding” of the city, an Etruscan undertaking of the beginning of the seventh century.[672] Facing the royal stronghold of the Capitol, there had long been two other settlements on the Palatine and the Quirinal. To the first of these belonged the ancient goddess Diva Rumina[673] and the Etruscan Ruma clan;[674] the god of the second was Quirinus Pater. From these comes the dual name of Romans and “Quirites,” and the dual priesthoods of the Salii and Luperci, which adhered to the two hills. Now, as the three blood-tribes named Ramnes, Tities, and Luceres are in all probability common to all Etruscan localities,[675] they must have existed in both of those which concern us here; and thus are explained, on the one hand, the number _six_ of centuries of equites, of military tribunes, of aristocratic Vestals, and, on the other, the number _two_ of the prætors (or consuls) who were, quite early, attached to the King as representatives of the nobles and gradually deprived him of all influence. Already by 600 the constitution of Rome must have been a strong oligarchy of “Patres” with a shadow-kingship[676] as figure-head. Thus both the older theory of an expulsion of the kings, and the newer of a slow disintegration of the royal power, can stand side by side after all, the former as referring to the fall of the Tarquinian Tyrannis, which (as everywhere else in the Classical world--Pisistratus in Athens, for example) had set itself up in opposition to the oligarchy about the middle of the sixth century; the latter as referring to the slow disintegration of the feudal power of the (may we say) Homeric kingship by the aristocratic city-state, _before_ the “foundation,” so-called--the crisis, probably, in which the prætors emerged, as the Archons and Ephors emerged elsewhere.

This Polis was no less strictly aristocratic than the Western class-State, with its nobility, clergy, and higher burgesses. The residue of the people belonging to it was merely its _object_, but--in the West the object of its political _care_, and in the Classical the object of its political _carelessness_. For here “_Carpe diem_” was the motto of the oligarchy as well as of others. It proclaims itself aloud in the poems of Theognis and the Song of Hybrias the Cretan. It made Classical finance till right into its latest phases--from the piracy practised by Polycrates upon his own people to the proscriptions of the Roman Triumvirs--into a more or less hand-to-mouth seizing of resources for the moment. In jurisprudence it emerges with unparalleled logic in the limitation of Roman edict-law to the term of office of the one-year prætor.[677] And, lastly, it is seen in the ever-growing practice of filling military, legal, and administrative offices (particularly the _more_ important of them) by lot--a kind of homage to Tyche, the goddess of the Moment.

This was the Classical world’s manner of being politically “in form” and, correspondingly, of thinking and feeling. There are no exceptions. The Etruscans were as much under its domination as the Dorians and the Macedonians.[678] When Alexander and his successors dotted the Orient far and wide with their Hellenistic cities, they did so without conscious choice, for they could not imagine any other form of political organization. Antioch was to be Syria, and Alexandria Egypt. The latter, under the Ptolemies and later under the Cæsars, was, not indeed legally, but certainly in practice, a Polis on a vast scale--for the country outside, long reverted to townless fellahdom and managed by immemorial precedents, stood at its gates like an alien frontier.[679] The Roman Imperium was nothing but the last and greatest Classical city-state standing on foundations of a colossal synœcism. Under Marcus Aurelius the rhetor Aristides could say with perfect justification that it had “brought together this world in the name of one city: wheresoever a man may be born in it, it is at its centre that he dwells.” Even the conquered populations of the Empire--the wandering desert-tribes, the upland-valley communities of the Alps--were constituted as _civitates_. Livy thinks invariably in the forms of the city-state, and for Tacitus provincial history simply does not exist. When, in 49, Pompey, withdrawing before Cæsar, gave up Rome as militarily unimportant and betook himself to the East to create there a firm base of operations, he was doomed. Giving up the city, he had, in the eyes of the ruling classes, given up the State. To them Rome was all.[680]

These city-states were in principle inextensible. Their number could increase, but not their ambit. The notion that the transformation of the Roman _clientela_ into a voting _plebs_, and the creation of the country tribes, meant a breach in the Polis-idea is incorrect. It was in Rome as in Attica--the whole life of the State remained as before limited to one point, which was the Agora, the Forum. However far away those to whom citizenship was granted might live--in Hannibal’s day it might be anywhere in Italy, and later anywhere in the world--the _exercise_ of his political right depended upon _personal presence_ in the Forum. Hence the majority of the citizens were, not legally, but practically without influence in political business.[681] What citizenship meant for them, therefore, was simply the duty of military service and the enjoyment of the city’s domestic law.[682] But even for the citizen coming to Rome, political power was limited by a second and _artificial_ synœcism which came into existence after, and as the result of, enfranchisement of the peasant, and can only be understood as an unconscious effort to maintain the idea of the Polis strictly unimpaired; the new citizens were inscribed, regardless of their numbers, in a very few tribes (eight, under the Lex Julia), and were always, therefore, in a minority in the Comitia relatively to the citizens of the older franchise.

And naturally so, for this _civitas_ was regarded through and through as one body, a σῶμα. That which did not belong to it was out of its law, _hostis_. The gods and the heroes stood above, the slave (not quite to be called human, according to Aristotle) below, this aggregate of persons.[683] But the individual was a ζῶον πολιτικόν in a sense that would be regarded by us, who think and live in our expanse-feeling, as an utter slavery; he existed _only_ by reason of his membership of an individual Polis. Owing to this Euclidean feeling, the nobility as a self-contained body was at first synonymous with the Polis--to such an extent, indeed, that even in the Twelve Tables marriage between patricians and plebeians was forbidden and the Spartan Ephors began their term of office, according to ancient custom, with a declaration of war against the Helots. The relation was reversed whenever in consequence of a revolution the non-noble became _the_ Demos--but its meaning remained. As in inward, so also in outward relationships, the _body_ politic was the foundation of all events throughout Classical history. The cities, hundreds of them, lay in wait for each other, each as self-gathered, politically and economically, as it was possible to make it, ready to bite, letting fly on the smallest excuse, and having as its war-aim, not the extension of its own state, but the extinction of the other side’s. Wars ended with the destruction of the enemy’s city and the killing or enslavement of his citizens, just as revolutions ended with the massacre or expulsion of the losers and the confiscation of their property by the victorious party. The natural interstate condition of the West is a close network of diplomatic relations, which may be broken through by wars; but the Classical law of nations assumes war as a normal condition, interrupted from time to time by peace treaties, and a declaration of war merely re-established the natural state of policy. Only so do the forty- and fifty-year peace treaties, _spondai_ (such as the famous one of Nicias in 421), become intelligible, as temporary guarantee-treaties.

These two State-forms, with the styles of policy appropriate to each, are assured by the close of the Early period. The State-idea has triumphed over the feudal union, but it is the Estates that carry that idea, and the nation has political existence only as their sum.

V

With the beginning of the Late period there is a decisive turn, where city and country are in equilibrium and the powers proper to the city, money and brains, have become so strong that they feel themselves, as non-estate, an equal match for the old Estates. It is the moment when the State-idea finally rises superior to the Estates and begins to set up _in their place_ the concept of the Nation.

The State has fought and won to its rights along a line of advance from feudal union to the aristocratic State. In the latter the Estates exist only with reference to the State, instead of vice versa, but, on the other hand, the disposition of things is such that the Government only meets the governed nation when and in so far as the nation is class-ordered. Everyone belongs to the nation, but only an élite to the classes, and these alone count politically.

But the nearer the State approaches its pure form, and the more it becomes _absolute_--that is, independent of any other form-ideal--the more heavily the concept of the nation tells against that of class, and there comes a moment when the nation is governed _as such_, and distinctions of “standing” become purely social. Against this evolution--which is one of the necessities of the Culture, inevitable, irrevocable--the old noble and priestly classes make one more effort of resistance. For them, now, _everything_ is at stake--the heroic and the saintly, the old law, rank, blood--and, from their point of view, against what?

In the West this struggle of the old Estates against the State-power took the form of the _Fronde_. In the Classical world, where there was no dynasty to represent the future and the aristocracy alone had political existence, we find that a dynastic or quasi-dynastic embodiment of the State-idea actually _formed itself_, and, supported by the non-privileged part of the nation, raised this latter for the first time to power. That was the mission of the _Tyrannis_.

In this change from the class-State to the absolute State, which allowed no measures of validity but its own, the dynasties of the West--and those of Egypt and of China likewise--called the non-estate to their aid, _thereby recognizing it as a political quantity_. Herein lies the real importance of the struggle against the Fronde, in which, initially, the powers of the greater cities could not but see advantage to themselves, for here the ruler was standing forth in the name of the State, the care of all, and he was fighting the nobility because it wanted to uphold the _Estate_ as a political magnitude.

In the Polis, on the contrary, where the State consisted exclusively in the form and embodied no hereditary head, the necessity of bringing out the unclassed on behalf of the State-idea produced the Tyrannis, in which a family or a faction of the nobility itself assumed the dynastic rôle, without which action on the part of the Third Estate would have been impossible. Late Classical historians were too remote from this process to seize its meaning, and dealt with it merely in terms of externals of private life. In reality, the Tyrannis was _the State_, and oligarchy opposed it under the banner of class. It rested, therefore, upon the support of peasants and burghers--in Athens (_c._ 580) the Diakrii and Paralii parties. Therefore, again, it backed the Dionysiac and Orphic cults against the Apollinian; thus in Attica Pisistratus forced the worship of Dionysus[684] on the peasantry, in Sicyon Clisthenes forbade the recital of the Homeric poems,[685] and in Rome it was almost certainly in the time of the Tarquins that the trinity Demeter (Ceres)-Dionysus-Kore was introduced.[686] Its temple was dedicated in 483 by Spurius Cassius, the same who perished later in an attempt to reintroduce the Tyrannis. The Ceres temple was the sanctuary of the Plebs, and its managers, the ædiles, were their trusted spokesmen before the tribunate was ever heard of.[687] The Tyrants, like the princes of the Western Baroque, were liberals in a broad sense of the word that ceased to be possible for them in the subsequent stage of bourgeois dominance. But the Classical also began at that time to pass round the word that “money makes the man (χρήματ’ ἀνήρ).”[688] The sixth-century Tyrannis brought the Polis-idea to its conclusions and created the constitutional concept of the Citizen, the _Polites_, the _Civis_, the sum of these, irrespective of their class-provenance, forming the _soma_ of the city-state. When, therefore, the oligarchy contrived to win after all--thanks once more to the Classical craving for the present, and the consequent fear and hatred evoked by the quasi-will-to-duration of the dynasts--the concept of the citizen was there, firmly established, and the non-patrician had learned to regard _himself_ as an estate _vis-à-vis_ a “rest.” He had become a political party--the word “democracy” (in its specifically Classical sense) now acquired a really serious content--and what he set himself to do was, no longer to come to the aid of the State, but _to be himself the State_ as the nobility had been before. He began to count--money and heads, for the money-census and the general franchise are alike bourgeois weapons--whereas an aristocracy does not count, but values, and votes not by heads, but by classes. As the absolute State came out of Fronde and First Tyrannis, so it perished in French Revolution and Second Tyrannis. In this second conflict, which is already one of defence, the dynasty returns to the side of the nobility in order to guard the State-idea against a new class-rule, that of the bourgeois.

In Egypt, too, the period between Fronde and Revolution is hall-marked. It is the Middle Kingdom. The XIIth Dynasty (2000-1788)--in particular Amenemhet I and Sesostris I--had established the absolute State in severe conflicts with the baronage. The first of these rulers, as a famous poem of the time relates, barely escaped from a court conspiracy, and the biography of Sinuhet[689] shows us that after his death, which was kept secret for a time, rebellion threatened. The third was murdered by palace officials. We learn from the inscriptions in the family grave of the earl Chmenotep[690] that the cities had become rich and almost independent, and warred with each other. Certainly they cannot have been smaller at that time than the Greek cities at the time of the Persian Wars. It was on them and on a certain number of loyal magnates that the dynasty rested.[691] Finally, Sesostris III (1887-1850) succeeded in completely abolishing feudal nobility. Thenceforward there was only a court-nobility and a single, admirably ordered bureau-State;[692] but already some lamented that people of standing were reduced to misery and that the “sons of nobodies” enjoyed rank and consideration.[693] Democracy was beginning and the great social evolution of the Hyksos period was brewing.

The corresponding place in China is that of the Ming-Chu (or Pa, 685-591). These were Protectors of princely origin, who exercised an unconstitutional, but none the less real, power over a world of states weltering in anarchy, and called congresses of princes for the restoration of order and the recognition of stable political principles, even summoning the “Ruler of the Middle” himself (now become totally unimportant) out of the house of Chóu. The first was Hwang of Tsi (d. 645), who called the Diet of 659 and of whom Confucius wrote that he had rescued China from a reversion to barbarism. Their name Ming-dshu became later, like the word “tyrant,” a term of obloquy, because later men were unwilling to see in the phenomenon anything but a power unauthorized by law--but it is beyond all question that these great diplomatists were an element working with a devoted care for the State and the historical future against the old Estates, and supported by the young classes of mind and money. It is a high Culture that speaks to us in the little that we so far know about them from Chinese sources. Some were writers; others selected philosophers to be their ministers. It is a matter of indifference whether we mentally parallel them with Richelieu or with Wallenstein or with Periander--in any case it is with them that the “people” first emerges as a political quantity.[694] It is the outlook and high diplomacy of genuine Baroque--the absolute State sets itself up in principle as the opponent of the aristocratic State, and wins through.

In this lies the close parallelism of these events with the Fronde of Western Europe. In France the Crown after 1614 ceased to summon the State-General, this body having shown itself to be too strong for the united forces of State and bourgeoisie. In England Charles I similarly tried to govern without Parliament after 1628. In Germany, at the same time, the Thirty Years’ War broke out. The magnitude of its religious significance is apt to overshadow for us the other issue involved, and it must not be forgotten that it was also an effort to bring to a decision the struggle between imperial power and the Fronde of the _great_ electors, and that between the individual princes and the lesser Frondes of their local estate-assemblies. But the centre of world-politics then lay in _Spain_. There, in conjunction with the high courtesies generally, the diplomatic style of the Baroque had evolved in the cabinet of Philip II; and the dynastic principle--which embodied the absolute State _vis-à-vis_ the Cortes--had attained to its highest development in the course of the long struggle with the House of Bourbon. The attempt to align England also in the Spanish system had failed under Philip II, when Queen Mary, his wife, was disappointed of an heir already expected and announced. But now, under Philip IV, the idea of a universal monarchy spanning the oceans revived--no longer the mystic dream-monarchy of the early Gothic, the “Holy Roman Empire, German by nation,” but the tangible ideal of a world-dominion in Habsburg hands, which was to centre in Madrid and to have the solid possession of India and America and the already sensible power of money as its foundations. It was at this time, too, that the Stuarts were tempted to secure their endangered position by marrying the heir of the English and Scottish thrones to a Spanish Infanta; but in the end Madrid preferred to link itself with its own collateral line in Vienna, and so James I readdressed his marriage-alliance proposals to the opposition party of the Bourbons. The futile complications of this family policy contributed more than anything else to bind the Puritan movement and the English Fronde into one great Revolution.

In these great decisions the actual occupants of the thrones were--as in “contemporary” China--only secondary figures compared with great individual statesmen, in whose hands the fate of the West rested for whole decades. Olivarez in Madrid and the Spanish Ambassador Oñate in Vienna were then the most powerful personages in Europe. Their opponents were Wallenstein, standing for the Empire-idea in Germany, and Richelieu, standing for the absolute State in France--and these were succeeded a little later by Mazarin in France, Cromwell in England, Oldenbarneveldt in Holland, Oxenstierna in Sweden. Not until the Great Elector of Brandenburg do we meet again a monarch having political importance of his own.

Wallenstein, unconsciously, began where the Hohenstaufen had stopped. Since the death of Frederick II, in 1250, the power of the Estates of the Empire had become unlimited, and it was against them, and as champion of an absolute emperor’s state, that he fought during the first tenure of command. Had he been a greater diplomatist, had he been clearer and above all more resolute (for actually he was timid in the presence of decisive turnings), and had he, in particular, taken the trouble as Richelieu did to bring the person of the monarch under his influence--then probably it would have been all up with princedom within the Empire. He saw in these princes rebels, to be unseated and dispossessed of their lands; at the peak of his power (end of 1629), when militarily he held Germany in the hollow of his hand, he said aloud in conversation that the Emperor ought to be master in the Empire as the Kings of France and Spain were masters of their own. His army, which was “self-supporting” and by reason of its numbers also independent of the Estates, was the first instance in German history of an Imperial army of European significance; in comparison with it Tilly’s army of the Fronde (for that was what the League really was) counted for little. When Wallenstein, in 1628, leaguered before Stralsund, visualizing a Habsburg sea-power in the Baltic wherewith to take the Bourbon system in the rear--and just then Richelieu was besieging La Rochelle, with better fortune--hostilities between himself and the League had become almost unavoidable. He absented himself from the Diet of Regensburg in 1630, saying that its seat “would presently be in Paris.” This was the most serious political error of his life, for in his absence the Frondist Electors defeated the Emperor by threatening to displace him in favour of Louis XIII, and forced him to dismiss his general. And with that, though it did not realize the consequence of the step, the central power in Germany gave away its army. Henceforth Richelieu supported the greater Fronde in Germany with the object of breaking the Spanish power there, while on the other side Olivarez, and Wallenstein as soon as he regained his power, allied themselves with the French aristocrats, who thereupon took the offensive under the Queen-mother and Gaston of Orléans. But the Imperial power had missed its grand chance. The Cardinal won in both games. In 1632 he executed the last of the Montmorencys[695] and brought the Catholic Electors of Germany into open alliance with France. And thenceforward Wallenstein, becoming unsure of his own final purposes, learned more and more against the Spanish idea, thinking that he could keep the Empire-idea clear of it, and so _ipso facto_ approached nearer and nearer to the standpoint of the Estates--like Marshal Turenne in the French Fronde a few years later. _This was the decisive turn in later German history._ With Wallenstein’s secession the absolute emperor-state became impossible, and his murder in 1634 did not remedy matters, for the Emperor had no substitute to take his place.

And yet it was just then that the conjuncture was favourable once more. For in 1640 the decisive conflict between Crown and estates broke out simultaneously in Spain, France, and England. In almost every Spanish province the Cortes rose against Olivarez; Portugal, and with it India and Africa, fell away for ever, and it took years to regain even Catalonia and Naples. In England--just as in the Thirty Years’ War--the constitutional conflict between the Crown and the gentry who dominated the Commons was carefully separated from the religious side of the Revolution, deep as was the interpenetration of the two. But the growing resistance that Cromwell encountered in the lower class in particular--which drove him, all unwillingly, into military dictatorship--and the later popularity of the restored monarchy show the extent to which, over and above all religious differences, aristocratic interest had been concerned in bringing about the fall of the dynasty.

At the very time of Charles I’s trial and execution an insurrection in Paris was forcing the French Court to flee. Men shouted for a republic and built barricades. Had Cardinal de Retz been more of a Cromwell, victory of the Estates over Mazarin would have been at least a possibility. But the issue of this grand general crisis of the West was determined by the weight and the destinies of a few personalities, and took shape in such a way that it was in England _alone_ that the Fronde (represented by Parliament) subjected the State and the kingship to its control--confirming this control, in the “glorious Revolution” of 1688, so permanently that even to-day essential parts of the old Norman State continue established. In France and Spain the kingship won unqualified victory. In Germany the Peace of Westphalia placed the Fronde of the greater princes in an English relation towards the Emperor and in the French relation towards the lesser Fronde of the local princes. In the Empire as such, the Estates ruled; in its provinces, the Dynasty. Thenceforth the Imperial dignity, like the English kingship, was a name, surrounded by relics of Spanish stateliness dating from the early Baroque; while the individual princes, like the leading families of the English aristocracy, succumbed to the model of Paris and their duodecimo absolutism was, politically and socially, bound in the Versailles style. So, in this field and in that, the decision fell in favour of the Bourbons and against the Habsburgs, a decision already visible to all men in the Peace of the Pyrenees of 1659.

With this epochal turn the State, which as a possibility is inherent in every Culture, was actualized and attained to such a height of “condition” as could neither be surpassed nor for long maintained. Already there is a quiet breath of autumn in the air when Frederick the Great is entertaining at Sans Souci. These are the years too, in which the great special arts attain to their last, most refined, and most intellectual maturity--side by side with the fine orators of the Athenian Agora there are Zeuxis and Praxiteles, side by side with the filigree of Cabinet-diplomacy the music of Bach and Mozart.

This cabinet-politics has itself become a high art, an artistic satisfaction to all who have a finger in it, marvellous in its subtlety and elegance, courtly, refined, working mysteriously at great distances--for already Russia, the North American colonies, even the Indian states are put into play in order by the mere weight of surprising combinations to bring about decisions at quite other points on the globe. It is a game with strict rules, a game of intercepted letters and secret confidants, of alliances and congresses within a system of governments which even then was called (with deep meaning) the “concert” of the powers--full of _noblesse_ and _esprit_, to use the phrases of the period, a mode of keeping history “in form” never and nowhere else imagined, or even imaginable.

In the Western world, whose sphere of influence is already almost the sphere itself, the period of the absolutist State covers scarcely a century and a half--from 1660, when Bourbon triumphed over Habsburg in the Peace of the Pyrenees and the Stuarts returned to England, to the Coalition Wars directed against the French Revolution, in which London triumphed over Paris, or, if one prefers it so, over that Congress of Vienna in which the old diplomacy, that of blood and not money, gave the world its grand farewell performance. Corresponding periods are the Age of Pericles between the First and the Second Tyrannis, and the Tshun-tsiu, “Spring and Autumn,” as the Chinese call the time, between the Protectors and the “Contending States.”

In this last phase of dignified politics with forms traditional but not popular, familiar but not smiled at, the culminating points are marked by the extinction of the two Habsburg lines in quick succession and the diplomatic and warlike events that throng in 1700-10 round the Spanish, and in 1740-60 round the Austrian succession.[696] It is the climax also of the genealogical principle. _Bella gerant alii; tu, felix Austria, nube!_ was indeed “an extension of war by other means.” The phrase indeed was coined long before (in connexion with Maximilian I), but it was not until now that it reached its fullest effects. Fronde Wars pass over into Succession Wars, decided upon in cabinets and fought out chivalrously by small armies and according to strict conventions.[697] What was contended for was the heritage of half the world which the marriage-politics of early Baroque had brought together in Habsburg hands. The State is still “well up to form”; the nobility has become a loyal aristocracy of court and service, carrying on the wars of the Crown and organizing its administration. Side by side with the France of Louis XIV, there presently arose in Prussia a masterpiece of State organization. From the conflicts of the Great Elector with his Estates (1660) to the death of Frederick the Great (who received Mirabeau in audience three years before the Fall of the Bastille) Prussia’s road is the same as France’s, and the outcome in each case is a State which was in every point the opposite of the English order.

For the situation was otherwise in the Empire and in England. There the Frondes had won, and the nations were governed, not absolutely, but aristocratically. But between England and the Empire, again, there was the immense difference that England, as an island, could largely dispense with governmental watchfulness, and that her peers in the Upper House and her gentry in the Lower founded their actions on the self-evidentness of England’s greatness;[698] whereas in the Empire the upper stratum of the land-princes--with the Diet at Regensburg as their Upper House--were chiefly concerned with educating into distinct “peoples” the fragments of the nation that had accidentally fallen to their respective hands, and with marking off their scattered bits of fatherland as strictly as possible from other “peoples’” bits. In place of the world-horizon that there had been in Gothic days, provincial horizon was cultivated by thought and deed. The idea of the Nation itself was abandoned to the realm of dreams--that _other_ world which is not of race but of language, not of Destiny but of Causality. And in it arose the idea, and finally the fact, of the “people” as conceived by poets and thinkers, who founded themselves a republic in the clouds of verse and logic and at last came to believe that politics consisted in idealistic writing and reading and speaking, and not in deed and resolve--so that even to-day real deeds and resolves are confused with mere expressions of inclination.

In England the victory of the gentry and the Declaration of Rights (1689) in reality put an end to the State. Parliament put William III on his throne, just as later it prevented George I and George II from vacating theirs, in the interest of its class. The word “State,” which had been current as early as the Tudors, fell into disuse--it has become impossible to translate into English either Louis XIV’s “_L’état c’est moi_” or Frederick the Great’s “_Ich bin der erste Diener meiner Staates_.” On the other hand, the word “society” established itself as the expression of the fact that the nation was “in form” under the class- and not under the state-régime; the same word that with a significant misunderstanding Rousseau and the Continental rationalists generally took over to express the hatred of the Third Estate for authority.[699] But in England authority as “the Government” was clear-cut and well understood. From George I onwards its centre was the Cabinet, a body which constitutionally did not exist at all[700] and factually was an executive committee of the faction of the nobility in command for the time being. Absolutism existed, but it was the absolutism of a class-delegation. The idea of “_lèse-majeste_” was transferred to Parliament, as the immunity of the Roman kings passed to the tribunes. The genealogical principle is there, too, but it is expressed in the family relations within the higher nobility and the influence of the same upon the parliamentary situation. Even in 1902 Lord Salisbury acted as a Cecil in proposing his nephew Balfour as his successor as against Joseph Chamberlain. The noble factions of Tory and Whig separated themselves more and more distinctly, very often, indeed, within the same family, according to whether the “power-” outweighed the “booty-” outlook--that is, according as land was valued above money[701]--or vice versa, a contrast that even in the eighteenth century was expressed within the higher bourgeoisie by the words “respectable” and “fashionable,” standing for two opposed conceptions of the gentleman. The State’s care for all is frankly replaced by class-interest. It is for this that the individual claims his freedom--that is what “freedom” means in English--but the insular existence and the build of “society” have created such relations that in the last resort everyone _who belongs to it_ (which is a matter of moment in a status-dictatorship) finds his interests represented by those of one or the other noble party.

This steadiness of last, deepest, and ripest form, which springs from the historical feeling of Western mankind, was denied to the Classical. Tyrannis vanished. Strict oligarchy vanished. The Demos which the politics of the sixth century had created as the sum of all men belonging to the Polis burst into factions and spasmodic shocks of noble _versus_ non-noble, and conflicts began within states, _and between states_, in which each party tried to exterminate the other lest it should itself be exterminated. When in 511--that is, still in the age of the Tyrants--Sybaris was annihilated by the Pythagoreans, the event, the first of its kind, shocked the entire Classical world; even in distant Miletus mourning was worn. But now the elimination of a Polis or a party was so usual that a regular form and choice of methods--corresponding to the typical peace-treaties of Western Baroque--arose for the disposal of the vanquished--for example, the inhabitants might be massacred or sold into slavery, the houses razed or divided as spoil. The will to absolutism is there--after the Persian Wars it is universal, in Rome and Sparta no less than in Athens--but the _willed_ narrowness of the Polis, the point-politic, and the _willed_ brevity of office-holding and immediacy of schemes made it impossible ever to reach a firm decision as to who should be “the State.”[702] The high craft of diplomacy, which in the West was practised by cabinets inspired by a tradition, was here handicapped by an amateurism founded not on any accidental inadequacy of persons--the men were available--but solely in the political form itself. The course of this form from the First to the Second Tyrannis is unmistakable and corresponds to the same evolution in all other Late periods; but the specifically Classical style of it appears in the disorder and subjection to incidentals which naturally and inevitably followed from a life that could not and would not dissociate itself from the moment.

The most important example of this is the evolution of Rome during the fifth century--a period over which hitherto historians have wrangled, precisely because they have tried to find in it a consistency that can no more have existed there than anywhere else in the Classical State. A further source of misunderstanding is that the conditions of that development have been regarded as something quite primitive, whereas in fact even the city of the Tarquins must have already been in a very advanced state, and primitive Rome lay much further back. The relations of the fifth century are on a small scale in comparison with those of Cæsar’s age, but they were not antiquated. Because written tradition is defective (as it was everywhere save in Athens), the literary movement which followed the Punic Wars set itself to fill the blanks with poetry and in particular (as was to be expected in the Hellenistic age) with the evocation of an idyllic past, as, for example, in the story of Cincinnatus. And modern scholarship, though it has ceased to believe these legends, has nevertheless remained under the influence of the taste that inspired their invention, and continues to look at the conditions of the time through its eyes--the more readily as Greek and Roman history are treated as two separate worlds, and the evil practice of identifying the beginning of history with the beginning of sure documentation is followed as usual. In truth, the conditions of 500 B.C. are anything but Homeric. The trace of its walls shows that Rome under the Tarquins was, with Capua, the greatest city in Italy and bigger than the Athens of Themistocles.[703] A city that concludes commercial treaties with Carthage is no peasant commune. And it follows that the population in the four city tribes of 471 must have been very numerous, probably greater than the whole total of the sixteen country tribes scattered insignificantly in space.

The great success of the landowning nobility in overthrowing a Tyrannis that was almost certainly very popular, and establishing unrestricted senatorial rule, was nullified again by a series of violent events about 471--the replacement of the family tribes by four great city-wards, the representation of these by tribunes (who were sacrosanct--i.e., who enjoyed a _royal_ privilege that no single official of the aristocratic administration possessed) and lastly the liberation of the small peasantry from the _clientela_ of the nobility.

The Tribunate was the happiest inspiration, not only of this period, but of the Classical Polis generally. It was _the Tyrannis raised to the position of an integral part of the Constitution_, and set in parallel, moreover, with the old oligarchical offices, all of which continued in being. This meant that the social revolution also was carried out in _legal forms_, so that what was elsewhere a wild discharge in shock and countershock became here a forum-contest, limited as a rule to debate and vote. There was no need to evoke the tyrant, for he was there already. The Tribune possessed rights inherent in position, not rights arising out of an office, and with his immunity he could carry out revolutionary acts that would have been inconceivable without street-fighting in any other Polis. This creation was an incident, but no other of its creations helped Rome to rise as this did. In Rome alone the transition from the First to the Second Tyrannis, and the further development therefrom till beyond the days of Zama, was accomplished, not indeed without shocks, but at any rate without catastrophe. The Tribune was the link between the Tarquins and Cæsar. With the Lex Hortensia of 287 he became all-powerful, _he is the Second Tyrannis in constitutional “form.”_ In the second century, tribunes caused consuls and censors to be arrested. The Gracchi were tribunes, Cæsar assumed the perpetual tribunate, and in the principate of Augustus the tribunician dignity was the essential element of his position, the only one in virtue of which he possessed sovereign rights.

The crisis of 471 was not unique but generically Classical. Its target was the oligarchy, which even now, within the Demos created by the Tyrannis, strove to be the impulsive force in affairs. It was no longer, as in Hesiod’s day, the oligarchy as estate _versus_ non-estate, but the _oligarchic party against a second party_--both in the cadre of the absolute state, which as such was not brought into the controversy. In Athens, 487 B.C., the archons were overthrown and their rights transferred to the college of strategi.[704] In 461 the Areopagus, the Athenian equivalent of the Senate, was overthrown. In Sicily (where relations with Rome were close) the democracy triumphed at Acragas (Agrigentum) in 471, at Syracuse in 465, at Rhegium and Messana in 461. In Sparta the kings Cleomenes (488) and Pausanias (470) tried in turn, without success, to free the Helots--in Roman terms, the Clientela--and thereby to acquire for the kingship, _vis-à-vis_ the oligarchic Ephors, the importance of the tribunate in Rome. The missing element in this case, which was present (though overlooked by our scholars) in that of Rome, was the population-strength of the mercantile city that gives such movements both weight and leadership; it was on this that even the great Helot rising of 464 broke down (an event which probably inspired the Roman legends of a secession of the Plebs to the Mons Sacer).

In a Polis, the country nobility and the patriciate fuse (that is the object of synœcism, as we have seen), but not so the burgher and the peasant. So far as concerns their struggle with the oligarchy these are a single party--namely, the democratic--but otherwise they are _two_. This is what comes to expression in the next crisis. In this (_c._ 450) the Roman patriciate sought to re-establish its power _as a party_--for so we must interpret the introduction of the Decemvirs and the abolition of the Tribunate; the legislation of the Twelve Tables by which the plebs, which had recently attained political existence, was denied “Connubium” and “Commercium”; and above all the creation of the small country tribes in which the influence of the old families (not legally but in fact) predominated and which (in the Comitia Tributa now set up alongside the old Centuriata) enjoyed the unchallengeable majority of 16 to 4. This, of course, meant the disfranchisement of the townspeople by the peasantry, and there can be no doubt that it was a move of the Patrician party to make effective in one common blow the common antipathy of the countryside and themselves towards the money economics of the city.

The counterstroke came quickly; it is recognizable in the number _ten_ of the tribunes who appear after the withdrawal of the Decemvirs,[705] but there were other events too that cannot but have belonged with it--the attempt of Sp. Mælius to set up a Tyrannis (439), the setting-up of Consular Tribunes by the army in place of the civil officials (438), and the Lex Canuleia (445) which made an end of the prohibition of connubium between patricians and plebeians.

There can be no doubt, of course, that there were factions within both the patrician and the plebeian parties which would have liked to upset this fundamental trait of the Roman Polis, the opposition of Senate and Tribunate, by abolishing the one or the other; but the form turned out to be so right that it was never seriously challenged. With the enforcement by the Army of plebeian eligibility to the highest offices (399) the contest took a quite different turn. The fifth century may be summed up, under the aspect of internal politics, as that of the struggle for lawful Tyrannis; thenceforward the polarity of the constitution was admitted, and the parties contended no longer for the abolition, but for the capture, of the great offices. This was the substance of the revolution that took place in the period of the Samnite Wars. From 287 the Plebes had the entrée to _all_ offices, and the proposals of the tribunes, when approved by them, automatically became law; on the other hand, it was thenceforward always practicable for the Senate by corruption or otherwise to induce some one tribune to exercise his veto and thus to deprive the institution of its power. It was in the _struggle of two competent authorities_ that the juristic subtlety of the Romans was developed. Elsewhere decisions were usually by way of fist and bludgeon--the technical word is “Cheirocracy”--but in this “best” period of Roman constitutional law, the fourth century, the habit was formed of using the weapons of thesis and interpretation, a mode of contest in which the slightest points of legal wording could be decisive.

But Rome was unique in all Classical history in this equilibrium of Senate and Tribunate. Everywhere else it was a matter not of swaying balance, but of sheer alternatives, namely Oligarchy _or_ Ochlocracy. The absolute Polis and the Nation which was identical with it were accepted as given premisses, but of the inward forms none possessed stability. The victory of one party meant the abolition of all the institutions of the other, and people became accustomed to regard nothing as either venerable enough or useful enough to be exempt from the chances of the day’s battle. Sparta’s “form,” so to say, was senatorial, Athens’s tribunician, and by the beginning of the Peloponnesian War, in 431, the idea that forms must be alternative was so firmly fixed that only radical solutions were henceforth possible.

With this, the future was set for Rome. It was the one state in which political passions had persons only, and no longer institutions, as their target; the only one which was firmly in “form.” _Senatus Populusque Romanus_--that is, _Senate and Tribunate_--was the form of forged bronze that no party would henceforward batter, whereas all the rest, with the narrowness of their individual power-horizons in the world of Classical states, were only able to prove once more the fact that domestic politics exist simply in order that foreign politics may be possible.

VI

At this point, when the Culture is beginning to turn itself into the Civilization, the non-Estate intervenes in affairs decisively--and for the first time--as an independent force. Under the Tyrannis and the Fronde, the State has invoked its aid against the Estates proper, and it has for the first time learned to feel itself a power. Now it employs its strength _for itself_, and does so as a class standing for its freedom against the rest. It sees in the absolute State, in the Crown, in rooted institutions, the natural allies of the old Estates and the true and last representatives of symbolic tradition. This is the difference between the First and the Second Tyrannis, between Fronde and Bourgeois Revolution, between Cromwell and Robespierre.

The State, with its heavy demands on each individual in it, is felt by urban reason as a burden. So, in the same phase, the great forms of the Baroque arts begin to be felt as restrictive and become Classicist or Romanticist--that is, sickly or unformed; German literature from 1770 is one long revolt of strong individual personalities against strict poetry. The idea of the whole nation being “in training” or “in form” for anything becomes intolerable, for the individual himself inwardly is no longer in condition. This holds good in morals, in arts, and in modes of thought, but most of all in politics. Every bourgeois revolution has as its scene the great city, and as its hall-mark the incomprehension of old symbols, which it replaces by tangible interests and the craving (or even the mere wish) of enthusiastic thinkers and world-improvers to see their conceptions actualized. Nothing now has value but that which can be justified by reason. But, deprived thus of the exaltation of a form that is essentially symbolical and works metaphysically, the national life loses the power of keeping its head up in the being-streams of history. Follow the desperate attempts of the French Government--the handful of capable and farsighted men under the mediocre Louis XVI--to keep their country in “condition” when, after the death of Vergennes in 1787, the whole gravity of the external situation had become manifest. With the death of this diplomatist France disappeared for years from the political combinations of Europe; at the same time the great reform that the Crown had carried through against all resistances--above all, the general administrative reform of that year, based on the freest self-management--remained completely ineffective, because in view of the pliancy of the State, the question of the moment for the Estates became, suddenly, the question of power.[706] As a century before and a century afterwards, European war was drawing visibly nearer with an inexorable necessity, but no one now took any notice of the external situation. The nobility as an Estate had rarely, but the bourgeoisie as an Estate had never, thought in terms of foreign policy and world-history. Whether the State in its new form would be able to hold its own at all amongst the other States, no one asked. All that mattered was whether it secured men’s “rights.”