Thoughtful and competent judges to whom I have submitted the foregoing
section of my work have said to me: This is Hell. That is perhaps
going too far, since those who will live in that generation and who
have themselves helped it into being will have become more or less
adapted to their circumstances.
A large part of the proletariat of to-day will certainly not be
daunted by the prospect, but will regard it as a distinct improvement
on their present situation. That is the terrible fact, a fact for
which we are responsible and for which we must atone, with what ruin
to German culture remains to be seen.
Who, in this Age of Mechanism, who on the side of the bourgeoisie, who
of our statesmen, our professors, our captains of industry, above all
who of our clergy, has pitied the lot of the working-man? The
statesmen, for peace' sake, worked out the Insurance Laws; the
professors, with their emphatic dislike to the world of finance and
their unemphasized devotion to the monopoly of their own stipends,
preached a doctrinaire socialism; the clergy lauded the
divinely-appointed principle of subordination; the great
industrialists, wallowing in their own greed for power, money, favour,
titles and connexions, scolded the workers for wanting anything. The
silent subjugation of our brothers was assured through the laws of
inheritance, our leaders put the socialistic legislation in fetters,
freedom of combination was thwarted, electoral reform in Prussia was
scornfully denied, demands for better conditions of living, conditions
which to-day we think ridiculously low, were suppressed by force. And
all the time, the cost of a single year of war, a tiny fraction of the
war-reparations, would have sufficed to banish want for ever from the
land. At last the millions of the defenceless and disappointed were
driven into that war of the dynasties and the bourgeois, which was
unloosed by the folly of years, the dazzlement of weeks, the
helplessness of hours.
If the state of things I have foreseen is hell, then we have earned
hell. And it ill becomes us to wrap ourselves in the superiority of
our culture, to rebuke the masses for their want of intellect, their
want of character, their greed, and to keep insisting on the
unchangeability of human character, on the virtues of rulership and
leadership, on the spiritual unselfishness and intellectual priesthood
of the classes born to freedom. Where was this heaven-nurtured
priestly virtue sleeping when Wrong straddled the land and the great
crime was wrought? It was composing feeble anthologies and pompous
theories, cooking its culture-soup, confusing, with true professorial
want of instinct, 1913 with 1813[15]--and putting itself at the
disposition of the Press Bureau. _That_ was the hour in which to fight
for the supremacy of the spirit. Now romance comes, as it always does,
too late.
What is romance in history? It is sterility. It is incapacity to
imagine, still less to shape, the yet unknown. It is an inordinate
capacity for flinging oneself with feminine adaptability into anything
that is historically presented and accomplished--from Michael Angelo
to working samplers. Fearing the ugly present and the anxious future,
the romantic takes refuge with the dear good dead people, and spins
out further what it has learned from them. But every big man was a
shaper of his own time, a respecter of antiquity and conscious of his
inheritance as a grown and capable man may be; not a youth in
sheltered tutelage, but a master of the living world, and a herald of
the future. "Modernity" is foolish, but antiquarianism is rubbish;
life in its vigour is neither new nor antique, but young.
True it is indeed that we love the old, many-coloured, concrete,
pre-mechanistic world; we cannot take an antique thing in our hands or
read an antique word without feeling its enchantment. It is a joy to
the heart, and one prohibited to no man, to dream at times romantic
dreams, to live in the past, and to forget, as we do it, that this
very dreaming, this very life, owes its charm to the fact that we
are of another age. It is a magic like that of childhood--but to want
to go back to it is not only childish, but a deliberate fraud and
self-deception. We should realize, as I have shown years ago, that the
difference of our age from that age is the ever-present fact of the
density of our population. Any one who wants to go back, really wants
that forty million Germans should die, while he survives. It is
ignorant, it is insincere, to put on a frown of offended virtue and to
say: For shame, what are you thronging into the towns for? Go back to
the land; plough, spin, weave, ply the blacksmith's hammer, as did our
forefathers, who were the proper sort of people. And leave the people
like us, who think and write poetry and brood and dream for you, a
house embowered in vines--there will be room enough for that!--Ah, you
thinkers and brooders, what would you say if men answered you: No! Go
yourself and spin in a factory, for you have shown clearly enough that
your thinking and brooding are futile. All your fine phrases amount to
nothing but the one dread monosyllable--Die! Are you so wicked as
that, and know it? or so stupid, and know it not?
Thought is the most responsible of all functions. He who thinks for
others must look after them, and if they live he may not slay them. It
is therefore a mischievous piece of romantic folly to point us to the
past. We must all pass through the dark gateway, and the sage has no
right to growl: Leave me out--I am the salt of the earth! The first
thing we have to do is to save humanity; not a selected pair in the
Ark but the whole race, criminals and harlots, fools, beggars and
cripples. We ourselves have cast down Authority, and there will be a
crush, and many things will look very different from what the sages
would wish and what the romantics dream. And if it is going to be hell
for people like you and me, we must only accept it in the name of
justice, and think of Dante's terrible inscription: "I was made by the
Might of God, by the supreme Wisdom and by the primal Love."[16]
But is it hell? That depends on ourselves.