Page:Decline of the West (Volume 2).djvu/197

Rh And eventually, when after 1789 the notion of mother tongue came to be fitted on to the dynastic principle, the once merely scientific fancy of a primitive Indogermanic people transformed itself into a deeply felt genealogy of "the Aryan race," and in the process the word "race" became almost a designation for Destiny.

But the "races" of the West are not the creators of the great nations, but their result. Not one of them had yet come into existence in Carolingian times. It was the class-ideal of chivalry that worked creatively in different ways upon Germany, England, France, and Spain and impressed upon an immense area that which within the individual nations is felt and experienced as race. On this rest (as I have said before) the nations — so historical, so alien to the Classical — of equivalence by birth (peer-age, Ebenbürtigkeit) and blood-purity. It was because the blood of the ruling family incorporated the destiny, the being, of the whole nation, that the state-system of the Baroque was of genealogical structure and that most of the grand crises assumed the form of wars of dynastic succession. Even the catastrophic ruin of Napoleon, which settled the world's political organization for a century, took its shape from the fact than an adventurer dared to drive out with his blood that of the old dynasties, and that his attack upon a symbol made it historically a sacred duty to resist him. For all these peoples were the consequence of dynastic destinies. That there is a Portuguese people, and a Portuguese Brazil in the midst of Spanish America, is the result of the marriage of Count Henry of Burgundy in 1095. That there are Swiss and Hollanders is the result of a reaction against the House of Habsburg. That Lorraine is the name of a land and not of a people is an consequence of the childlessness of Lothar II.

It was the Kaiser-idea that welded the disjunct primitives of Charlemagne's time into the German nation. Germany and Empire are inseparable ideas. The fall of the Hohenstaufens meant the replacement of one great dynasty by a handful of small and tiny ones; and the German nation of Gothic style was inwardly shattered even before the beginning of the Baroque — that is, at the very time when the nation-idea was being raised to higher levels of intellect in leader-cities like Paris, Madrid, London, and Vienna. The Thirty Years' War, so conventional history says, destroyed Germany in its flower. Not so; the fact that it could occur at all in this wretched form simply confirmed and showed up a long-completed decadence — it was the final consequence of the fall of the Hohenstaufens. There could hardly be a more convincing proof that Faustian nations are dynastic units. But then again, the Salians and the Hohenstaufens created also — at least in idea — an Italian nation out of Romans, Lombards, and Normans. Only the Empire made it possible for them to stretch a hand back to the age of Rome. Even though alien power evoked the hostility of the townsmen, and split the two primary orders, the nobles to the Emperor, the priests to the Pope; even though in these conflicts of Guelph and Ghibelline