statistics tell me, that in an army of over 600,000 men there were
some 500 cases brought to the notice of the superior officers last
year. In 1911 there were 12,919 convictions for crimes and
misdemeanors and 578 desertions. Of the 32,711 common soldiers in the
Saxon army in 1911, 30 committed suicide; in 1909, 29; in 1905, 24; in
1901, 36; that is to say, roughly, one man per thousand. Of the why
and wherefore I cannot say, but Saxony is a peculiarly overpopulated
section of Germany, and the population is overdriven; and the German
everywhere is a dreamy creature compared with us, of less toughness of
fibre either morally or physically, and no doubt, here and there,
under-exercising and over-thinking make the world seem to be a mad
place and impossible to live in. Indeed, it is no place to live in for
the best of us if we take it, or ourselves, too seriously. The German
army is an educated army, as is no other army in the world, and there
are the diseases peculiar to education to combat. A mediocre ability
to think, and a limited intellectual experience, coupled with a
craving for miscellaneous reading, breed new microbes almost as fast
as science discovers remedies for the old ones.
Bismarck's words, "Ohne Armee kein Deutschland," meant to him, and
mean to-day, far more than that the army is necessary for defence. It
is the best all-round democratic university in the world; it is a
necessary antidote for the physical lethargy of the German race; it is
essential to discipline; it is a cement for holding Germany together;
it gives a much-worried and many-times-beaten people confidence; the
poverty of the great bulk of its officers keeps the level of social
expenditure on a sensible scale; it offers a brilliant example, in a
material age, of men scorning ease for the service of their country;
it keeps the peace in Europe; and until there is a second coming, of a
Christ of pity, and patience, and peace, it is as good a substitute
for that far-off divine event as puzzled man has to offer.
It is silly and superficial to look upon the German army only as a
menace, only as a cloud of provocations in glittering uniforms, only
as a helmeted frown with a turned-up moustache. It is not, and I make
no such claim for it, an army or an officers' corps of Puritans or of
self-sacrificing saints, but it does partake of the dreamy, idealistic
German nature, as does every other institution in Germany. Though, as
a whole, it is a fighting machine, the various parts of it are not
imbued with that spirit alone. The uneasy pessimism of the dreamer,
which distrusts the comfortable solutions of the business-like
politicians, and leaders, in their own and in other countries, is as
noticeable in the army as in all other departments of German life.
"And all through life I see a cross,
Where sons of God yield up their breath;
There is no gain except by loss,
There is no life except by death,
There is no vision but by faith;
Nor glory but by bearing shame,
Nor justice but by taking blame."
There have been many, and there are still, soldiers who hold that
creed. There are not a few of them in Germany.
IX GERMAN PROBLEMS
A great nation like Germany must have characteristics, anxieties,
problems, and responsibilities, some of which are peculiar to itself.
The individual must be of small importance who has not problems and
burdens of his own arising from his environment, position, work, and
his personal relations with other men; as well as problems of temper,
temperament, health, education, and traditions peculiar to himself.
Wise men recognize two things about every other man: that he has his
own problems, and that no one else thoroughly understands either
another man's handicaps or his advantages; and that the only way to
judge him is not to go behind the returns, but to note how he lives
with these same problems. They are there, there is no doubt about
that; the question is, does he smile or scowl? does he work away
toward a solution, or allow himself to be swamped by them? do they
dominate him, or he them? has he that sun of life, vitality,
sufficient to burn away the fog, or does he live and die in a moist,
semi-impenetrable fog, in which he flounders timidly and rather
aimlessly about, always rather discouraged, rather in the dark, and
lamentably damp in person and in spirits? The only fair test of a
man's life is his living of it, and the same is true of a nation.
Of Germany's history, traditions, and temperament I have written. No
one can fail to note the chief characteristics: their gregariousness,
their melancholic and subjective way of looking at life, their passion
for music. It is more what they think, than what they do or see, that
gives them pleasure. They agree with Erasmus, that "it is a foolish
error to believe that happiness is dependent upon things; it is
dependent entirely upon one's opinion of them." The indefinite has no
terrors for them, they delight indeed in the indefinable. They have
done little in great sculpture and architecture, or the founding and
ruling of colonies, as compared with their supreme achievements in
music, in philosophy, in lyric poetry.
The art of music, which moves one greatly toward nothing in
particular; which supplies sounds but not a language for the mysteries
of feeling; which easily carries a sensitive soul away from its
sorrows or drowns it in tears, and all without offering a semblance of
a practical solution; which orchestrates a greater fury, a more
poignant jealousy, a sweeter note of bird, a harsher clang of weapons,
than any human energy can even imagine to exist; this art with which
marching soldiers sing away their fatigue, but not really; with which
disconsolate lovers wing their hopes, but not really; with which the
pious pipe themselves to heaven, but not really; with which, by
strings and beaten skins, organ-pipes and blowing brass, an
anaesthesia of ecstasy is produced, leaving one only the weaker
against the dourness and doggedness of the devil; with which men and
women hymn themselves home to God, only to lose Him when they leave
the threshold of His house; which choruses from a thousand throats
patriotism, defiance, self-confidence, but arms none of them with any
useful weapon; which with drums and brass can send any lout to heroism
without his knowing why; this art which burns up the manhood of its
devotees -- who ever heard of a great tenor who was a great man, or
even of a great musician for more than half of whose life one must
needs not apologize? -- this art flourishes in Germany not without
reason, and not for nothing.
In a ragged school in the neighborhood of Posen where the children
could hardly speak German they could sing; in a public school in
Charlottenburg fifty boys, aged between eight and fifteen, sang the
part-song known to every college man in America, "On a Bank Two Roses
Grew," as well as a college glee club; those who know Bayreuth, or
have attended a musical festival, or listened to one of the great
clubs of male voices, or heard the orchestras and military bands, will
not deny the delights of music in Germany. In Berlin there is not a
hall suitable for a musical recital that is not engaged a year,
sometimes more, in advance.
In the beautiful Golden Hall of the castle of the Grand Duke of
Mecklenburg-Schwerin, at Schwerin, I have attended a concert given by
the Grand Duke's own orchestra, where the selections were all
compositions of former leaders or members of the orchestra, dating
back over a period of two hundred years. For centuries in this
particular grand duchy music and the theatre, supported and guided by
the sovereign, have offered a school of entertainment and instruction
to the people. At this present writing, special trains are run to
Schwerin from the surrounding country districts, and the people for
miles around subscribe for their seats for the whole winter, and
attend the theatre and certain concerts as regularly as children go to
school. It sounds oddly to the ears of an American to hear criticism
to the effect, that there are more high-class music and more classical
plays than the people have either time or money for. Here is a
population which is actually overindulging in culture. We complain of
too little; here they complain of too much. It makes one wonder
whether any of the problems of social life are satisfactorily soluble;
whether indeed it be not true that even the virtues carried to an
extreme do not become vices. Philanthropy in more than one city in
America is spending time, money, and energy to bring about this very
enthusiasm for music and the more intellectual arts which, it is
maintained, here in Schwerin at least, has gone too far.
These problems are not so easy of solution as the ignorant and the
inexperienced think. Imagine the inhabitants of Hoboken, New Jersey;
of Lynn, Massachusetts; of Kalamazoo, Michigan; of Bloody Gulch,
Idaho, spending too much time and money listening to the music of
Palestrina and Bach, or to the plays of Shakespeare; and yet what
money and energy would not be spent by certain enthusiasts for the
arts did they think such a result possible! And, after all, it might
prove not a blessing, but a danger.
Whenever or wherever you are in the company of Germans you notice
their pleasure and their keen interest in the subjective, rather than
in the objective side of life. It is from within out that they are
stirred, not as we are, by outside things working upon us. They are
still the dreaming, drinking, singing, impulsive Germans of Tacitus.
Titus Livius, Plutarch, and Machiavelli, all maintained that the
successive invasions of the Germans into Italy were for the sake of
the wine to be found there. Plutarch writes that "the Gauls were
introduced to the Italian wine by a Tuscan named Arron, and so excited
were they by the desire for more that, taking their wives and children
with them, they journeyed across the Alps to conquer the land of such
good vintages, looking upon other countries as sterile and savage by
comparison. Even if this be not history, it is an impression; and at
any rate, from that day to this the Germans have agreed with the
dictum of Aulus Gellius: "Prandium autem abstemium, in quo nihil vini
potatur, canium dicitur: quoniam canis vino caret." When the Roman
historian first came into contact with them he notes, that their bread
was lighter than other bread, because "they use the foam from their
beer as yeast."
Tacitus writes of them: "The Germans abound with rude strains of
verse, the reciters of which, in the language of the country, are
called 'Bards.'"
I visited a private stable in Bavaria, as well ordered and as well
kept as any private stable in America or in England, and the head
coachman was a reader of poetry; and though he had received numerous
offers of higher wages in the city, declined them, giving as one
reason that the view from the window of his room could not be equalled
elsewhere! Where can one find a stable-man in our country who reads
Shelley or Edgar Allan Poe, or who ever heard of William James and
Pragmatism? I may be doing an injustice to the stable-men of Boston,
but I doubt it.
There are scores of pages of notes to my hand, recounting similar if
not such startling examples of the German temperament among high and
low. Musical, melancholic, gregarious, subjective, these are their
true characteristics, but the superficial among us do not see these
things because they are hidden behind the great army, the new navy and
mercantile marine, the factories, the increased commercial values, the
strenuous agricultural and industrial pushing ahead of the last thirty
years. But they are there, they represent the German temperament, they
are the internal character of Germania, always to be taken into
account in judging her, or in wondering why she does this or that, or
why she does it in this or that way.
"As imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name."
This is what the purely subjective mind is ever doing, and when it is
carried too far it is insanity. The individual no longer sees things
as they are, but he sees others and himself in strange, horrible, or
ludicrous shapes.
Barring Japan, I suppose Germany yields more easily
to the temptation of the subjective malady of suicide than any other
country. In Saxony, for example, the rate was lately 39.2 per 100,000
of the population, in England and Wales 7.5. During the five years
ending with 1908 there were for every 100 suicides among males in the
United States 136 in Germany, and for every 100 suicides of females
125 in Germany. In Vienna, and for racial purposes this is Germany,
1,558 persons killed themselves in 1912. Children committing suicide
because they have failed in their examinations is not uncommon in
Germany; in America and in England the teachers are more likely to
succumb than the children. We do not commit suicide in America from
any sense of shame at our intellectual shortcomings -- what a
decimating of the population there would be if we did! -- it is more
apt to be caused by ill health consequent upon a straining chase for
dollars. In Prussia during the five years, 1902-1907, divorce
increased from 17.7 to 20.8 per 100,000 inhabitants, and suicide from
20 to 30.7.
If the observer does not take this difference of temperament into
account, he does not realize how new and strange it is to find Germany
these days, making its first and strongest impression upon the
outsider by its industrial progress. The more intelligent men in
Germany are beginning to see the dangers to real progress in such
feverish devotion to industry, and to recognize that the life of the
population is absorbed too largely by science, finance, and commerce.
To see so much of the intelligence of the nation exercising itself in
material researches, to see such undue fervor in calculations of self-
interest, does not leave an enlivening impression. Such an ideal of
life is paltry in itself and involves grave dangers in the future. It
is a long stride in the wrong direction since Hegel wrote of Germany
as "the guardian of the sacred fire of intellect."
Out of this temperament has grown the self-consciousness, the uneasy
vanity, the "touchiness" which has made Germany of late years the
despair of the diplomats all over the world. She has become a
chameleon-like menace to peace everywhere in the world. What she
wants, what will offend her dignity, when she will feel hurt, what
amount of consideration will suffice, when she will change color to
match a changed situation, and in what color she will choose to hide
her plans or to make manifest her demands, no man knows. She will not
see things as they are, but always as an exhalation from her own mind.
As one of her own poets has written: "Deutschland ist Hamlet."
At this present moment she does not see either England or America as
they are, quite peaceably disposed toward her but she sees them, and
persists in seeing them, as they would be were Germany in their place.
She is forever looking into a mirror instead of through the open
window. "The mailed fist," "the rattling of the sabre," "the friend in
shining armor," "querelle allemande," are all phrases born in Germany
in the last thirty years.
She even sees herself a little out of focus, and though I admit her
precarious position in the heart of Europe, she exaggerates the
necessity for her autocratic military government to meet the
situation. That philosophical and literary radical Lord Morley, now
wearing a coronet, in the land where logic is a foundling and
compromise a darling, writes: "A weak government throws power to
something which usurps the name of public opinion, and public opinion
as expressed by the ventriloquists of the newspapers is at once more
capricious and more vociferous than it ever was." This, strange to
say, is exactly the opinion of the German autocrats, who maintain that
no democracy can be a strong military power. It remains for England,
and perhaps later America, to prove her wrong.
The sovereign lady
Germania, being of this temper and disposition, of this psychological
make-up, let us look at her dealings with certain embarrassing
problems in her own household. The over-stimulation of ill-regulated
mental activity as the result of regimental education is one of the
minor problems. Some fourteen million dollars worth of cheap and nasty
literature is peddled by the agents of certain publishing houses, and
sold all over Germany to those recently taught to read but not trained
to think; and this, it is to be remembered, is still a land of low
wages, of strict economies, and of small expenditures on books. For
Germany that is an enormous sum and represents a very wide-spread
evil. I recognize that it is not only in Germany, but in France,
England, and America, that the ethically hysterical have assumed that
modesty and health and common-sense are characteristics of the
intellectually mediocre. That the neglect of all, and the breaking of
some, of the Ten Commandments is essential to the creation of art or
literature, or necessary to a courageous freedom of living, is a
contention with which I agree less and less the more I know of art,
literature, and life. But, as I have remarked elsewhere in this
volume, the Strindbergs and Wildes and Gorkis are having their day in
Germany just now, and beneath this again is this large distribution of
the lawless and sooty literature, frankly intended as a debauch for
the gutter-snipe and his consort. Even the coarse, and in no line
squeamish, Rabelais wrote that, "Science sans conscience n'est que
ruine de l'ame."
There is but a puny barrier against this, for the statistical year-book
of German cities gives the number of public libraries in forty-two
cities as 179. Twenty-seven of these cities gave an annual support
to 114 of these libraries of only $64,847! According to the figures of
Herr Ernest Schultze, in 1907 the forty largest German cities, with a
population of 11,380,000, had public libraries containing a sum total
of 807,000 volumes. In the year 1906-1907, 5,437,000 volumes were
taken out and 1,607,476 persons frequented the public reading-rooms,
and in these forty-two cities $280,095 were contributed from private
sources for such library purposes. In 1910 Germany had in some 400
cities, each of more than 10,000 inhabitants, about 650 public
libraries and reading-rooms, with together about 3,250,000 volumes.
Berlin has thirty public libraries with 231,300 volumes; the number of
books taken out in 1910 was 1,655,000. Hamburg has one public library
with 100,000 volumes, of which 1,364,000 were taken out. Breslau has 7
libraries and 4 reading-rooms, with 75,578 volumes. Leipzig has 7
libraries and 3 reading-rooms, with 42,100 volumes. Munich has 6
libraries and 26,671 volumes. Cologne has 7 libraries and 6 reading-
rooms, with 24,898 volumes.
The smallest library is in the village
community of Dudweiler, in the Rhine province, which contains 132
volumes for the 22,000 inhabitants.
There were 14,941 books published
in Germany in 1880, 18,875 in 1890, 24,792 in 1900, and 31,281 in
1910.
There were 13,470 books published in America in 1910, 9,209 of
them by American authors.
There were 10,914 books published in England in 1911, of which 2,384
were new editions. Of this number 2,215, which includes 933 new
editions and 40 translations, were fiction; religion, 930; sociology,
725; science, 650; geography, 601; biography, 476; history, 429;
technology, 525. In 1820, there were only 26 novels published in
England.
Of the 31,281 books published in Germany in 1910, 4,852 dealt with
education and juvenile literature; 4,134, belles-lettres; 3,215, law
and political economy; 2,510, theology; 2,082, commerce and industry;
1,981, medicine; 1,884, philology and literary history; 1,480,
geography, including maps; 667, military science and equestry; 1,030,
agriculture and forestry; 1,750, natural science and mathematics;
1,108, engineering and construction; 1,254, history and biography;
981, art; and 668 on philosophy and theosophy.
There were some 9,000 writers of books in America in 1910, or one
author in 10,000 of the population, already more than enough; there
were some 8,000 in Great Britain, or one author in about 5,500 of the
population; while in Germany there are over 31,000 writers, or one
author in every 2,097 of the population, including men, women, and
children of all ages, an unreasonable and disastrous proportion. If we
estimate the number of adult males of Germany at 14,000,000, the
number who voted at the last election, then there was one author to
every 450, a most unhealthy proportion, and bearing out exactly what
has been said of the German temperament and constitutional bias.
Furthermore, this accounts for the fact that Germany imports some
700,000 agricultural laborers each year to garner the food harvests,
for which she has not sufficient recruits, and who, by the way, take
out of the country each year some $35,000,000 in wages. Twenty per
cent. of the miners in Westphalia are foreigners, eight per cent. of
them Italians, and there are nearly half a million foreigners employed
as common laborers in the various industries of Germany.
Wherever one travels now in the world, he finds that most courageous
and self-sacrificing of all the pioneers, the missionary: American,
British, French, Italian. The best of them, on the plains of North
America, in the destructive climate of India, in China, in all the
islands of all the seas, are, whatever their creed, soldiers of whom
we are all proud; for they fight not only against the overwhelming
prejudice of those whom they seek to save, but against the widespread
prejudice of their own people, and against the well-founded suspicion
and contempt aroused by their own black sheep. I have found them, here
a Jesuit, there a Presbyterian, winning my friendship and my
admiration, despite fundamental differences of belief about many
things. There are few Germans among them! Even in this field Germany
produces theological controversialists whom we have all studied,
orthodox and destructive, but few pioneers, and practically no
Augustines or Loyolas, Wesleys or Booths, Livingstones or Stanleys.
Columba, an Irish refugee, founded on the island of Iona, off the west
coast of Scotland, a mission station, whence went missionaries and
preachers to the conversion not only of England, but of the tribes of
Germany. It was only in the sixth century that the Franks, only in the
ninth century that the Saxons, and only in the tenth century that the
Danes became Christians.
Neither at home nor abroad are her successes
those which deal with men by winning their allegiance, their
submission, their loyalty, or their respectful regard. She is pre-eminent
in the things of the mind, in subjective matters, and in her
regimental dealings with, and arrangements for, the inanimate side of
life.