The Barbarian hopes — and that is the mark of him, that he can have his cake and eat it too.He will consume what civilization has slowly produced after generations of selection and effort, but he will not be at pains to replace such goods, nor indeed has he a comprehension of the virtue that has brought them into being. Discipline seems to him irrational, on which account he is ever marvelling that civilization, should have offended him with priests and soldiers.... In a word, the Barbarian is discoverable everywhere in this, that he cannot make: that he can befog and destroy but that he cannot sustain; and of every Barbarian in the decline or peril of every civilization exactly that has been true.

We sit by and watch the barbarian. We tolerate him in the long stretches of peace, we are not afraid. We are tickled by his irreverence; his comic inversion of our old certitudes and our fixed creed refreshes us; we laugh. But as we laugh we are watched by large and awful faces from beyond, and on these faces there are no smiles.

The ancient tale, thought Burke: barbarism triumphant over civilization.

He who conquers himself is the mightiest warrior.

The Aryan invaders, few in number, who were settled on the banks of the Upper Indus, are found gradually advancing to the south and the east in continual conflict with the Dasyu or dark-skinned aborigines, who spoke a strange language, worshipped strange gods, and followed strange customs, till finally the barbarians are subdued and admitted into the Aryan state as a fourth caste, called the "blacks," or Sudras. The higher civilisation and the superior physique of the northern invaders ultimately prevailed, and they imposed their language and their creed on the subject tribes; but the purity of the race was soiled by marriage with native women, the language was infected with peculiar Dravidian sounds, and the creed with foul Dra- vidian worships of Siva and Kali, and the adoration of the lingam and the snake. The Aryanisation of Europe doubtless resembled that of India. The Aryan speech and the Aryan civilisation prevailed, but the Aryan race either disappeared or its purity was lost.

For the barbarian is the man who regards his passions as their own excuse for being; who does not domesticate them either by understanding their cause or by conceiving their ideal goal. He is the man who does not know his derivations nor perceive his tendencies, but who merely feels and acts, valuing in his life its force and its filling, but being careless of its purpose and its form. His delight is in abundance and vehemence; his art, like his life, shows an exclusive respect for quantity and splendour of materials. His scorn for what is poorer and weaker than himself is only surpassed by his ignorance of what is higher.

The most powerful monarch of the world relentlessly attempted to destroy one man, and he braved all adversities to emerge triumphant.... Thus died the greatest hero of medieval India, the bravest of the brave whose sturdy frame was exhausted by almost two decades of constant fighting. We may here quote V. Smith’s fitting epitome of his reign: “The emperor desired the death of the Rani and the absorption of his territory in the imperial dominions. The Rana, while fully prepared to sacrifice his life if necessary, was resolved that his blood should never be contaminated by intermixture with that of the foreigner, and that his country should remain a land of freemen. After much tribulation he succeeded, and Akbar failed.”™ (338-9)

The more we claim to discriminate between cultures and customs as good and bad, the more completely do we identify ourselves with those we would condemn. By refusing to consider as human those who seem to us to be the most “savage” or “barbarous” of their representatives, we merely adopt one of their own characteristic attitudes. The barbarian is, first and foremost, the man who believes in barbarism.

There lies the most perfect ruler of men the world has ever seen. Now he belongs to the ages.

There was a time when the ancestors of the Celts. the Germans, the Slavonians. the Greeks and Italians, the Persians and the Hindus. were living together beneath the same roof. separate from the ancestors of the Semitic and Turanian races.... The Aryan nations who pursued a north- westerly direction, stand before us in history as the principal nations of north*western Asia and Europe. They have been the prominent actors in the great drama of history, and have carried to their fullest growth all the elements of active life with which our nature is endowed. They have perfected society and morals, and we learn from their literature. and works of art the element of science, the laws of art, and the principles of philosophy. In continual struggle with each other and with Semitic and Turanian races, these Aryan nations have become the rulers of history. and it seems to be their mission to link all parts of the world together by the chains of civilisation. commerce, and religion. ... But while most of the members of the Aryan family followed this glorious path. the southern tribes were slowly migrating toward the mountains which gird the north of India.... Left to themselves in a world of their own, without a past, and without a future before them, they had nothing but themselves to ponder on. Struggles there must have been in India also. Old dynasties were destroyed. whole f.uni.lies annihilated. and new empires founded. Yet the inward life of the Hindu was not changed by these convulsions. His mind was like the lotus leaf arter a shower of rain has passed over it; its character remained the same, passive, meditative, quiet, and thoughtful.