IX
We may now point our moral with a few examples, which, though hazardous, ought not at this stage to be open to misunderstanding. Imagine Columbus supported by France instead of by Spain, as was in fact highly probable at one time. Had Francis I been the master of America, without doubt he and not the Spaniard Charles V would have obtained the imperial crown. The early Baroque period from the Sack of Rome to the Peace of Westphalia, which was actually the Spanish century in religion, intellect, art, politics and manners, would have been shaped from Paris and not from Madrid. Instead of the names of Philip, Alva, Cervantes, Calderon, Velasquez we should be talking to-day of great Frenchmen who in fact—if we may thus roundly express a very difficult idea—remained unborn. The style of the Church which was definitively fixed in this epoch by the Spaniard Loyola and the Council of Trent which he spiritually dominated; the style of politics to which the war-technique of Spanish captains, the diplomacy of Spanish cardinals and the courtly spirit of the Escorial gave a stamp that lasted till the Congress of Vienna and in essential points till beyond Bismarck; the architecture of the Baroque; the great age of Painting; ceremonial and the polite society of the great cities—all these would have been represented by other profound heads, noble and clerical, by wars other than Philip II’s wars, by another architect than Vignola, by another Court. The Incidental chose the Spanish gesture for the late period of the West. But the inward logic of that age, which was bound to find its fulfilment in the great Revolution (or some event of the same connotation), remained intact.
This French revolution might have been represented by some other event of different form and occurring elsewhere, say in England or Germany. But its “idea,”—which (as we shall see later) was the transition from Culture to Civilization, the victory of the inorganic megalopolis over the organic countryside which was henceforward to become spiritually “the provinces,”—was necessary, and the moment of its occurrence was also necessary. To describe such a moment we shall use the term (long blurred, or misused as a synonym for period) epoch. When we say an event is epoch-making we mean that it marks in the course of a Culture a necessary and fateful turning-point. The merely incidental event, a crystallization-form of the historical surface, may be represented by other appropriate incidents, but the epoch is necessary and predeterminate. And it is evident that the question of whether, in respect of a particular Culture and its course, an event ranks as an epoch or as an episode is connected with its ideas of Destiny and Incidents, and therefore also with its idea of the Tragic as “epochal” (as in the West) or as “episodic” (as in the Classical world).
We can, further, distinguish between impersonal or anonymous and personal epochs, according to their physiognomic type in the picture of history. Amongst “incidents” of the first rank we include those great persons who are endowed with such formative force that the destiny of thousands, of whole peoples, and of ages, are incorporated in their private destinies; but at the same time we can distinguish the adventurer or successful man who is destitute of inward greatness (like Danton or Robespierre) from the Hero of history by the fact that his personal destiny displays only the traits of the common destiny. Certain names may ring, but “the Jacobins” collectively and not individuals amongst them were the type that dominated the time. The first part of this epoch of the Revolution is therefore thoroughly anonymous, just as the second or Napoleonic is in the highest degree personal. In a few years the immense force of these phenomena accomplished what the corresponding epoch of the Classical (c. 386-322), fluid and unsure of itself, required decades of undermining-work to achieve. It is of the essence of all Culture that at the outset of each stage the same potentiality is present, and that necessity fulfils itself thereafter either in the form of a great individual person (Alexander, Diocletian, Mohammed, Luther, Napoleon) or in that of an almost anonymous happening of powerful inward constitution (Peloponnesian War, Thirty Years’ War, Spanish Succession War) or else in a feeble and indistinct evolution (periods of the Diadochi and of the Hyksos, the Interregnum in Germany). And the question which of these forms is the more likely to occur in any given instance, is one that is influenced in advance by the historical and therefore also the tragic style of the Culture concerned.[[166]]
The tragic in Napoleon’s life—which still awaits discovery by a poet great enough to comprehend it and shape it—was that he, who rose into effective being by fighting British policy and the British spirit which that policy so eminently represented, completed by that very fighting the continental victory of this spirit, which thereupon became strong enough, in the guise of “liberated nations” to overpower him and to send him to St. Helena to die. It was not Napoleon who originated the expansion principle. That had arisen out of the Puritanism of Cromwell’s milieu which called into life the British Colonial Empire.[[167]] Transmitted through the English-schooled intellects of Rousseau and Mirabeau to the Revolutionary armies, of which English philosophical ideas were essentially the driving force, it became their tendency even from that day of Valmy which Goethe alone read aright. It was not Napoleon who formed the idea, but the idea that formed Napoleon, and when he came to the throne he was obliged to pursue it further against the only power, England namely, whose purpose was the same as his own. His Empire was a creation of French blood but of English style. It was in London, again, that Locke, Shaftesbury, Samuel Clarke and, above all, Bentham built up the theory of “European Civilization”—the Western Hellenism—which Bayle, Voltaire and Rousseau carried to Paris. Thus it was in the name of this England of Parliamentarianism, business morality and journalism that Valmy, Marengo, Jena, Smolensk and Leipzig were fought, and in all these battles it was the English spirit that defeated the French Culture of the West.[[168]] The First Consul had no intention of incorporating West Europe in France; his primary object was—note the Alexander-idea on the threshold of every Civilization!—to replace the British Colonial Empire by a French one. Thereby, French preponderance in the Western culture-region would have been placed on a practically unassailable foundation; it would have been the Empire of Charles V on which the sun never set, but managed from Paris after all, in spite of Columbus and Philip, and organized as an economic-military instead of as an ecclesiastical-chivalric unit. So far-reaching, probably, was the destiny that was in Napoleon. But the Peace of Paris in 1763 had already decided the question against France, and Napoleon’s great plans time and again came to grief in petty incidents. At Acre a few guns were landed in the nick of time from the British warships: there was a moment, again, just before the signature of the Peace of Amiens, when the whole Mississippi basin was still amongst his assets and he was in close touch with the Maratha powers that were resisting British progress in India; but again a minor naval incident[[169]] obliged him to abandon the whole of a carefully-prepared enterprise: and, lastly, when by the occupation of Dalmatia, Corfu and all Italy he had made the Adriatic a French lake, with a view to another expedition to the East, and was negotiating with the Shah of Persia for action against India, he was defeated by the whims of the Tsar Alexander, who at times was undoubtedly willing to support a march on India and whose aid would infallibly have secured its success. It was only after the failure of all extra-European combinations that he chose, as his ultima ratio in the battle against England, the incorporation of Germany and Spain, and so, raising against himself his own English-Revolutionary ideas, the very ideas of which he had been the vehicle,[[170]] he took the step that made him “no longer necessary.”
At one time it falls to the Spanish spirit to outline, at another to the British or the French to remould, the world-embracing colonial system. A “United States of Europe,” actualized through Napoleon as founder of a romantic and popular military monarchy, is the analogue of the Realm of the Diadochi; actualized as a 21st-Century economic organism by a matter-of-fact Cæsar, it is the counterpart of the imperium Romanum. These are incidentals, but they are in the picture of history. But Napoleon’s victories and defeats (which always hide a victory of England and Civilization over Culture), his Imperial dignity, his fall, the Grande Nation, the episodic liberation of Italy (in 1796, as in 1859, essentially no more than a change of political costume for a people long since become insignificant), the destruction of the Gothic ruin of the Roman-German Empire, are mere surface phenomena, behind which is marching the great logic of genuine and invisible History, and it was in the sense of this logic that the West, having fulfilled its French-formed Culture in the ancien régime, closed it off with the English Civilization. As symbols of “contemporary” epochal moments, then, the storming of the Bastille, Valmy, Austerlitz, Waterloo and the rise of Prussia correspond to the Classical-history facts of Chæronea, Gaugamela (Arbela), Alexander’s Indian expedition and the Roman victory of Sentinum.[[171]] And we begin to understand that in wars and political catastrophies—the chief material of our historical writings—victory is not the essence of the fight nor peace the aim of a revolution.