ancestors; the careful ordering of the genealogical tree, which is potent enough to make present possession and inheritance dependent upon the fortunes of a single marriage contracted perhaps five hundred years ago; the conceptions of pure blood, birth-equivalence, mésalliance — all this is will-to-direction in time, will towards Time's remote distances. There is no second example of it, save perhaps in the Egyptian nobility, and there the comparable forms that were attained were far weaker.
Nobility of the Classical style, on the contrary, relates to the present estate of the agnatic family, and from it straight to a mythical origin, which does not imply the historical sense in the least, but only a craving, sublimely regardless of historic probability, for splendid backgrounds to the here and now of the living. Only thus can we explain the otherwise baffling naivete with which an individual saw behind his grandfather Theseus and Heracles in one plane, and fashioned himself a family tree (or several, perhaps, as Alexander did), and the light-heartedness with which respectable Roman families would forge the names of reputed ancestors into the old consular lists. At the funeral of a Roman noble the wax masks of great forefathers were introduced into the cortège, but it was only for the number and sound of the famous names and not in the least on account of any genealogical connexion with the present. This trait appears throughout the Classical nobility, which like the Gothic formed, structurally and spiritually, one inward unit from Etruria to Asia Minor. On it rested the power that, even at the beginning of the Late period, was still in the possession of order-like family-groupings throughout the cities (phylæ, phratriæ, tribus, and what not) which maintained a purely present membership and unity by means of sacral forms — for example, the three Doric and the four Ionic phylæ, and the three Etruscan tribes that appear in the earlier Roman history as Tities, Ramnes, and Luceres. In the Vedas the "father-" and the "mother-"souls had claims to soul-rites only in respect of three nearer and three further generations,[1] after which the past claimed them; and nowhere do we find the Classical cult of souls reaching any further back than the Indian. It is the very reverse of the ancestor-worship of the Chinese and the Egyptians, which was by hypothesis without end, and therefore maintained the family in a definite ordering even beyond bodily death. In China there still lives to-day a duke, Kong, who is the descendant of Confucius and equally the descendant of Lao-tse, of Chang-lu, and others. It is not a question of a many-branched tree, but of carrying the line, the tao of being, straight on — if necessary, frankly by adoption (the adopted member, pledged to the ancestor-cult, is thereby spiritually incorporated in the family) or other expedients.
An unbridled joy of life streams through the flourishing centuries of this estate, the Estate par excellence, which is direction and destiny and race through and through. Love, because woman is history, and war because fighting makes
- ↑ Hardy, Indische Religionsgesch., p. 260.
