Page:Decline of the West (Volume 2).djvu/182

166 beat that produces race-hatred, which is just as strong between Germans and Frenchmen as it is between Germans and Jews, and it is resonance on this beat that makes the true love — so akin to hate — between man and wife. He who has not race knows nothing of this perilous love. If a part of the human multitude that now speaks Indogermanic languages, cherishes a certain race-ideal, what is evidenced thereby is not the existence of the prototype-people so dear to the scholar, but the metaphysical force and power of the ideal. It is highly significant that this ideal is expressed, never in the whole population, but mainly in its warrior-element and pre-eminently in its genuine nobility — that is, in men who live entirely in a world of facts, under the spell of historical becoming, destiny-men who will and dare — and it was precisely in the early times (another significant point) that a born alien of quality and dignity could without particular difficulty gain admittance to the ruling class, and wives in particular were chosen for their "breed" and not their descent. Correspondingly, the impress of race-traits is weakest (as may be observed even to-day) in the true priestly and scholarly natures, even though these often do stand in close blood-relationship to the others. A strong spirit trains up the body into a product of art. The Romans formed, in the midst of the confused and even heteroclite tribes of Italy, a race of the firmest and strictest inward unity that was neither Etruscan nor Latin nor merely "Classical," but quite specifically Roman. Nowhere is the force that cements a people set before us more plainly than in Roman busts of the late Republican period.

I will cite yet another example, than which none more clearly exhibits the errors that these scholars' notions of people, language, and race inevitably entail, and in which lies the ultimate, perhaps the determining reason why the Arabian Culture has never yet been recognized as an organism. It is that of the Persians. Persian is an Aryan language, hence "the Persians" are an "Indogermanic people," and hence Persian history and religion are the affair of "Iranian" philology.

To begin with, is Persian a language of equal rank with the Indian, derived from a common ancestor, or is it merely an Indian dialect? Seven centuries of linguistic development, scriptless and therefore very rapid, lie between the Old Vedic of the Indian texts and the Behistun Inscription of Darius. It is almost as great a gap as that between the Latin of Tacitus and the French of the Strassburg Oath of 842. Now the Tell-el-Amarna letters and the archives