the kind described in Revelation iii, 16[1]) we discover that greatness, even in religion, presupposes Race, that life must be strong indeed to be worthy of such wrestlers. The rest is mere philosophy.
For this very reason nobility in the world-historical sense is much more than comfortable Late periods consider it; it is not a sum of titles and privileges and ceremonies, but an inward possession, hard to acquire, hard to retain — worth, indeed, for those who understand, the sacrifice of a whole life. An old family betokens not simply a set of ancestors (we all have ancestors), but ancestors who lived through whole generations on the heights of history; who not merely had Destiny, but were Destiny; in whose blood the form of happening was bred up to its perfection by the experience of centuries. As history in the grand sense begins with the Culture, it was mere panache for a Colonna to trace back his ancestry into Late Roman times. But it was not meaningless for the grandee of Late Byzantium to derive himself from Constantine, nor is it so for an American of to-day to trace his ancestry to a Mayflower immigrant of 1620. In actual fact Classical nobility begins with the Trojan period and not the Mycenæan, and the Western with the Gothic and not the Franks and Goths — in England with the Normans and not the Saxons. Only from these real starting-points is there History, and, therefore, only from then can there be an original aristocracy, as distinct from nobles and heroes. That which in the first chapter of this volume[2] I called cosmic beat or pulse receives in this aristocracy its fulfilment. For all that in riper times we call diplomatic and social "tact" — which includes strategic and business flair, the collector's eye for precious things, and the subtle insight of the judge of men — and generally all that which one has and does not learn; which arouses the impotent envy of the rest who cannot participate; which as "form" directs the course of events; is nothing but a particular case of the same cosmic and dreamlike sureness that is visibly expressed in the circlings of a flock of birds or the controlled movements of a thoroughbred horse.
The priest circumscribes the world-as-nature and deepens his picture of it by thinking into it. The noble lives in the world-as-history and deepens it by altering its picture. Both evolve towards the great tradition, but the evolution of the one comes of shaping and that of the other from training. This is a fundamental difference between the two Estates, and consequently only one of them is truly an Estate, and the other only appears to be such because of the completeness of the contrast. The field of effect of breed and training is the blood, and they pass on, therefore, from the fathers to the sons. Shaping (Bildung), on the other hand, presupposes talents, and consequently a true and strong priesthood is always a sum of individual gifts — a community of waking-
