Page:The Dial (Volume 73).djvu/770

652 In the case of the Chinese it is called the "time of the fighting states." We are in that period. With the beginning of the twentieth century the politics of private power has taken the place of party politics which is always swayed by abstract ideals. The personal force, the great individual, rules over degenerate masses of fellaheen which he treats simply as cannon fodder. A Caesar can return, and shall; but a Goethe never. And it would be silly romanticism to pay any serious attention now to matters of culture, art, poetry, and education. Such things are not fitting for a race of fellaheen. Our literary life, for instance, has nothing to show but a completely unimportant struggle between intellectualistic super-civilized metropolitan art and backward idyllic family art. He who understands our fate bothers himself devilishly little about such twaddle, but confines himself to those things which are the future and which have a future: mechanics, technology, economics, and above all politics. Any one is a fool who has enough goodwill to flatter himself that benevolence, spirit, and the desire for a worthier human order form part of our destiny and can exert a corrective influence on the course of the world. The future is certain: colossal wars of the Caesars for power and booty; streams of blood; and, as to the race of fellaheen, silence and suffering. Man, sunk back into the Zoological, into the Cosmic and the Unhistoric, lives as a peasant bound to his native earth, or putters about among the ruins of former metropolises. As a narcotic his wretched soul invents the so-called "second religiosity," a makeshift for the earlier kind which was cultural and creative; it is futile, and simply leads him to bear his miseries with all the more resignation.

The man who gives us this refreshing prospect is a peculiarly vexatious phenomenon. Although his doctrine seems to be coldly scientific, unimpassioned, raised above all human prejudices, rigidly deterministic, pure observation, nevertheless it in turn shows evidence of a will, an attitude towards life, sympathies and antipathies. Fundamentally it is not unimpassioned, for it is secretly conservative. One does not present such a doctrine, one does not arrange things thus, one does not identify history and culture in that manner, one does not oppose form to spirit with this sharpness, unless he is a conservative, unless in his heart he is affirming form and culture, and hating their dissolution through civilization. The complexity and the perversity of the Spenglerian case consists, or