Every Culture possesses a proper conception of home and fatherland, which is hard to comprehend, scarcely to be expressed in words, full of dark metaphysical relations, but nevertheless unmistakable in its tendency. The Classical home-feeling which tied the individual corporally and Euclidean-ly to the Polis[[420]] is the very antithesis of that enigmatic “Heimweh” of the Northerner which has something musical, soaring and unearthly in it. Classical man felt as “Home” just what he could see from the Acropolis of his native city. Where the horizon of Athens ended, the alien, the hostile, the “fatherland” of another began. Even the Roman of late Republican times understood by “patria” nothing but Urbs Roma, not even Latium, still less Italy. The Classical world, as it matured, dissolved itself into a large number of point-patriæ, and the need of bodily separation between them took the form of hatreds far more intense than any hatred that there was of the Barbarian. And it is therefore the most convincing of all evidences of the victory of the Magian world-feeling that Caracalla[[421]] in 212 A.D. granted Roman citizenship to all provincials. For this grant simply abolished the ancient, statuesque, idea of the citizen. There was now a Realm and consequently a new kind of membership. The Roman notion of an army, too, underwent a significant change. In genuinely Classical times there had been no Roman Army in the sense in which we speak of the Prussian Army, but only “armies,” that is, definite formations (as we say) created as corps, limited and visibly present bodies, by the appointment of a Legatus to command—an exercitus Scipionis, Crassi for instance—but never an exercitus Romanus. It was Caracalla, the same who abolished the idea of “civis Romanus” by decree and wiped out the Roman civic deities by making all alien deities equivalent to them, who created the un-Classical and Magian idea of an Imperial Army, something manifested in the separate legions. These now meant something, whereas in Classical times they meant nothing, but simply were. The old “fides exercituum” is replaced by “fides exercitus” in the inscriptions and, instead of individual bodily-conceived deities special to each legion and ritually honoured by its Legatus, we have a spiritual principle common to all. So also, and in the same sense, the "fatherland"-feeling undergoes a change of meaning for Eastern men—and not merely Christians—in Imperial times. Apollinian man, so long as he retained any effective remnant at all of his proper world-feeling, regarded “home” in the genuinely corporeal sense as the ground on which his city was built—a conception that recalls the “unity of place” of Attic tragedy and statuary. But to Magian man, to Christians, Persians, Jews, “Greeks,”[[422]] Manichæans, Nestorians and Mohammedans, it means nothing that has any connexion with geographical actualities. And for ourselves it means an impalpable unity of nature, speech, climate, habits and history—not earth but “country,” not point-like presence but historic past and future, not a unit made up of men, houses and gods but an idea, the idea that takes shape in the restless wanderings, the deep loneliness, and that ancient German impulse towards the South which has been the ruin of our best, from the Saxon Emperors to Hölderlin and Nietzsche.
The bent of the Faustian Culture, therefore, was overpoweringly towards extension, political, economic or spiritual. It overrode all geographical-material bounds. It sought—without any practical object, merely for the Symbol’s own sake—to reach North Pole and South Pole. It ended by transforming the entire surface of the globe into a single colonial and economic system. Every thinker from Meister Eckhardt to Kant willed to subject the “phenomenal” world to the asserted domination of the cognizing ego, and every leader from Otto the Great to Napoleon did it. The genuine object of their ambitions was the boundless, alike for the great Franks and Hohenstaufen with their world-monarchies, for Gregory VII and Innocent III, for the Spanish Habsburgs “on whose empire the sun never set,” and for the Imperialism of to-day on behalf of which the World-War was fought and will continue to be fought for many a long day. Classical man, for inward reasons, could not be a conqueror, notwithstanding Alexander’s romantic expedition—for we can discern enough of the inner hesitations and unwillingnesses of his companions not to need to explain it as an “exception proving the rule.”[[423]] The never-stilled desire to be liberated from the binding element, to range far and free, which is the essence of the fancy-creatures of the North—the dwarfs, elves and imps—is utterly unknown to the Dryads and Oreads of Greece. Greek daughter-cities were planted by the hundred along the rim of the Mediterranean, but not one of them made the slightest real attempt to conquer and penetrate the hinterlands. To settle far from the coast would have meant to lose sight of “home,” while to settle in loneliness—the ideal life of the trapper and prairie-man of America as it had been of Icelandic saga-heroes long before—was something entirely beyond the possibilities of Classical mankind. Dramas like that of the emigration to America—man by man, each on his own account, driven by deep promptings to loneliness—or the Spanish Conquest, or the Californian gold-rush, dramas of uncontrollable longings for freedom, solitude, immense independence, and of giantlike contempt of all limitations whatsoever upon the home-feeling—these dramas are Faustian and only Faustian. No other Culture, not even the Chinese, knows them.
The Hellenic emigrant, on the contrary, clung as a child clings to its mother’s lap. To make a new city out of the old one, exactly like it, with the same fellow citizens, the same gods, the same customs, with the linking sea never out of sight, and there to pursue in the Agora the familiar life of the ζῷον πολιτικόν—this was the limit of change of scene for the Apollinian life. To us, for whom freedom of movement (if not always as a practical, yet in any case as an ideal, right) is indispensable, such a limit would have been the most crying of all slaveries. It is from the Classical point of view that the oft-misunderstood expansion of Rome must be looked at. It was anything rather than an extension of the fatherland; it confined itself exactly within fields that had already been taken up by other culture-men whom they dispossessed. Never was there a hint of dynamic world-schemes of the Hohenstaufen or Habsburg stamp, or of an imperialism comparable with that of our own times. The Romans made no attempt to penetrate the interior of Africa. Their later wars were waged only for the preservation of what they already possessed, not for the sake of ambition nor under a significant stimulus from within. They could give up Germany and Mesopotamia without regret.
If, in fine, we look at it all together—the expansion of the Copernican world-picture into that aspect of stellar space that we possess to-day; the development of Columbus’s discovery into a worldwide command of the earth’s surface by the West; the perspective of oil-painting and of tragedy-scene; the sublimed home-feeling; the passion of our Civilization for swift transit, the conquest of the air, the exploration of the Polar regions and the climbing of almost impossible mountain-peaks—we see, emerging everywhere the prime-symbol of the Faustian soul, Limitless Space. And those specially (in form, uniquely) Western creations of the soul-myth called “Will,” “Force” and “Deed” must be regarded as derivatives of this prime-symbol.
CHAPTER X
SOUL-IMAGE AND LIFE-FEELING
II
BUDDHISM, STOICISM, SOCIALISM