private affair as other men's were theirs. The remoter peoples were as indifferent to him and his troops and his aims as they were to the projects of Germanic war-bands. On this spiritual premiss a second Vikingism develops. The state of being "in form" passes from nations to bands and retinues of adventurers, self-styled Cæsars, seceding generals, barbarian kings, and what not — in whose eyes the population becomes in the end merely a part of the landscape. There is a deep relation between the heroes of the Mycenæan primitive age and the soldier-emperors of Rome, and between, say, Menes and Rameses II. In our Germanic world the spirits of Alaric and Theodoric will come again — there is a first hint of them in Cecil Rhodes — and the alien executioners of the Russian preface, from Jenghiz Khan to Trotski (with the episode of Petrine Tsarism between them) are, when all is said and done, very little different from most of the pretenders of the Latin-American republics, whose private struggles have long since put an end to the form-rich age of the Spanish Baroque.
With the formed state, high history also lays itself down wean- to sleep. Man becomes a plant again, adhering to the soil, dumb and enduring. The timeless village and the "eternal" peasant[1] reappear, begetting children and burying seed in Mother Earth — a busy, not inadequate swarm, over which the tempest of soldier-emperors passingly blows. In the midst of the land lie the old world-cities, empty receptacles of an extinguished soul, in which a historyless mankind slowly nests itself. Men live from hand to mouth, with petty thrifts and petty fortunes, and endure. Masses are trampled on in the conflicts of the conquerors who contend for the power and the spoil of this world, but the survivors fill up the gaps with a primitive fertility and suffer on. And while in high places there is eternal alternance of victory and defeat, those in the depths pray, pray with that mighty piety of the Second Religiousness that has overcome all doubts for ever.[2] There, in the souls, world-peace, the peace of God, the bliss of grey-haired monks and hermits, is become actual — and there alone. It has awakened that depth in the endurance of suffering which the historical man in the thousand years of his development has never known. Only with the end of grand History does holy, still Being reappear. It is a drama noble in its aimlessness, noble and aimless as the course of the stars, the rotation of the earth, and alternance of land and sea, of ice and virgin forest upon its face. We may marvel at it or we may lament it — but it is there.
