Page:Decline of the West (Volume 2).djvu/349

Rh of ancient peoples of the "Colonial" region of the Lower Ganges. (As Magadha is amongst them, Buddha himself may have been a Sudra, like the "Cæsar" Asoka, whose grandfather Chandragupta was of the most humble origin.) Others are names of callings, and this again reminds us that also in the West and elsewhere certain callings were outcast — the beggars, for example (who in Homer are a class), smiths, singers, and the professional poor, who have been bred literally en masse by the caritas of the Church and the benevolence of laymen in the Early Gothic.

But, in sum, "caste" is a word that has been at least as much abused as it has been used. There were no castes in the Old and Middle Kingdoms of Egypt, nor in India before Buddha, nor in China before Han times. It is only in very Late conditions that they appear, and then we find them in all Cultures. From the XXIst Dynasty onwards (c. 1100 B.C) Egypt was in the hands, now of the Theban priest-caste, now of the Libyan warrior-caste; and thereafter the hardening process went on steadily till the time of Herodotus — whose view of the conditions of his day as characteristically Egyptian is just as inaccurate as our view of those prevailing in India. The distinction between Estate and Caste is that between earliest Culture and latest Civilization. In the rise of the prime Estates — noble and priest — the Culture is unfolding itself, while the castes are the expression of its definitive fellah-state. The Estate is the most living of all, Culture launched on the path of fulfilment, "the form that living must itself unfold." The caste is absolute finished-ness, the phase in which development has been succeeded by immutable fixation.

But the great Estates are something quite different from occupation-groups like those of artisans, officials, artists, which are professionally held together by technical tradition and the spirit of their work. They are, in fact, emblems in flesh and blood, whose entire being, as phenomenon, as attitude, and as mode of thought, possesses symbolic meaning. Within every Culture, moreover — while peasantry is a piece of pure nature and growth and, therefore, a completely impersonal manifestation — nobility and priesthood are the results of high breeding and forming and therefore express a thoroughly personal Culture, which, by the height of its form, rejects not merely barbarians, but presently also all who are not of their status, as a residue — regarded by the nobility as the "people" and by clergy as the "laity." And this style of personality is the material that, when the fellah-age arrives, petrifies into the type of a caste, which thereafter endures unaltered for centuries. As in the living Culture race and estate are in antithesis as the impersonal and the personal, in fellah-times the mass and the caste, the coolie and the Brahmin, are in antithesis as the formless and the formal. The living form has become formula, still possessing style, but possessing it as stylistic rigidity. This petrified style of the caste is of an extreme subtlety, dignity, and intellectuality, and feels itself infinitely superior