Alva to persecute Dutch Protestants, then helped Cromwell to persecute
Irish Catholics, and then helped Claverhouse to persecute Scotch Puritans,
we should find it rather easier to call him a persecutor than to call him a
Protestant or a Catholic. Curiously enough this is actually the position in
which the Prussian stands in Europe. No argument can alter the fact that in
three converging and conclusive cases he has been on the side of three
distinct rulers of different religions, who had nothing whatever in common
except that they were ruling oppressively. In these three Governments,
taken separately, one can see something excusable or at least human. When
the Kaiser encouraged the Russian rulers to crush the Revolution, the
Russian rulers undoubtedly believed they were wrestling with an inferno of
atheism and anarchy. A Socialist of the ordinary English kind cried out
upon me when I spoke of Stolypin, and said he was chiefly known by the
halter called "Stolypin's Necktie." As a fact, there were many other things
interesting about Stolypin besides his necktie: his policy of peasant
proprietorship, his extraordinary personal courage, and certainly none more
interesting than that movement in his death agony, when he made the sign of
the cross towards the Czar, as the crown and captain of his Christianity.
But the Kaiser does not regard the Czar as the captain of Christianity. Far
from it. What he supported in Stolypin was the necktie and nothing but the
necktie: the gallows and not the cross. The Russian ruler did believe that
the Orthodox Church was orthodox. The Austrian Archduke did really desire
to make the Catholic Church catholic. He did really believe that he was
being Pro-Catholic in being Pro-Austrian. But the Kaiser cannot be
Pro-Catholic, and therefore cannot have been really Pro-Austrian, he was
simply and solely Anti-Servian. Nay, even in the cruel and sterile strength
of Turkey, any one with imagination can see something of the tragedy and
therefore of the tenderness of true belief. The worst that can be said of
the Moslems is, as the poet put it, they offered to man the choice of the
Koran or the sword. The best that can be said for the German is that he
does not care about the Koran, but is satisfied if he can have the sword.
And for me, I confess, even the sins of these three other striving empires
take on, in comparison, something that is sorrowful and dignified: and I
feel they do not deserve that this little Lutheran lounger should patronise
all that is evil in them, while ignoring all that is good. He is not
Catholic, he is not Orthodox, he is not Mahomedan. He is merely an old
gentleman who wishes to share the crime though he cannot share the creed.
He desires to be a persecutor by the pang without the palm. So strongly do
all the instincts of the Prussian drive against liberty, that he would
rather oppress other people's subjects than think of anybody going without
the benefits of oppression. He is a sort of disinterested despot. He is as
disinterested as the devil who is ready to do any one's dirty work.
This would seem obviously fantastic were it not supported by solid facts
which cannot be explained otherwise. Indeed it would be inconceivable if we
were thinking of a whole people, consisting of free and varied individuals.
But in Prussia the governing class is really a governing class: and a very
few people are needed to think along these lines to make all the other
people act along them. And the paradox of Prussia is this: that while its
princes and nobles have no other aim on this earth but to destroy democracy
wherever it shows itself, they have contrived to get themselves trusted,
not as wardens of the past but as forerunners of the future. Even they
cannot believe that their theory is popular, but they do believe that it is
progressive. Here again we find the spiritual chasm between the two
monarchies in question. The Russian institutions are, in many cases,
really left in the rear of the Russian people, and many of the Russian
people know it. But the Prussian institutions are supposed to be in advance
of the Prussian people, and most of the Prussian people believe it. It is
thus much easier for the warlords to go everywhere and impose a hopeless
slavery upon every one, for they have already imposed a sort of hopeful
slavery on their own simple race.
And when men shall speak to us of the hoary iniquities of Russia and of how
antiquated is the Russian system, we shall answer "Yes; that is the
superiority of Russia." Their institutions are part of their history,
whether as relics or fossils. Their abuses have really been uses: that is
to say, they have been used up. If they have old engines of terror or
torment, they may fall to pieces from mere rust, like an old coat of
armour. But in the case of the Prussian tyranny, if it be tyranny at all,
it is the whole point of its claim that it is not antiquated, but just
going to begin, like the showman. Prussia has a whole thriving factory of
thumbscrews, a whole humming workshop of wheels and racks, of the newest
and neatest pattern, with which to win back Europe to the Reaction ...
_infandum renovare dolorem_. And if we wish to test the truth of this, it
can be done by the same method which showed us that Russia, if her race or
religion could sometimes make her an invader and an oppressor, could also
be made an emancipator and a knight errant. In the same way, if the Russian
institutions are old-fashioned, they honestly exhibit the good as well as
the bad that can be found in old-fashioned things. In their police system
they have an inequality which is against our ideas of law. But in their
commune system they have an equality that is older than law itself. Even
when they flogged each other like barbarians, they called upon each other
by their Christian names like children. At their worst they retained all
the best of a rude society. At their best, they are simply good, like good
children or good nuns. But in Prussia all that is best in the civilised
machinery is put at the service of all that is worst in the barbaric mind.
Here again the Prussian has no accidental merits, none of those lucky
survivals, none of those late repentances, which make the patchwork glory
of Russia. Here all is sharpened to a point and pointed to a purpose and
that purpose, if words and acts have any meaning at all, is the destruction
of liberty throughout the world.
IV
THE ESCAPE OF FOLLY
In considering the Prussian point of view we have been considering what
seems to be mainly a mental limitation: a kind of knot in the brain.
Towards the problem of Slav population, of English colonisation, of French
armies and reinforcements, it shows the same strange philosophic sulks. So
far as I can follow it, it seems to amount to saying "It is very wrong that
you should be superior to me, because I am superior to you." The spokesmen
of this system seem to have a curious capacity for concentrating this
entanglement or contradiction, sometimes into a single paragraph, or even a
single sentence. I have already referred to the German Emperor's celebrated
suggestion that in order to avert the peril of Hunnishness we should all
become Huns. A much stronger instance is his more recent order to his
troops touching the war in Northern France. As most people know, his words
ran "It is my Royal and Imperial command that you concentrate your
energies, for the immediate present, upon one single purpose, and that is
that you address all your skill and all the valour of my soldiers to
exterminate first the treacherous English and to walk over General French's
contemptible little Army." The rudeness of the remark an Englishman can
afford to pass over; what I am interested in is the mentality; the train of
thought that can manage to entangle itself even in so brief a space. If
French's little Army is contemptible, it would seem clear that all the
skill and valour of the German Army had better not be concentrated on it,
but on the larger and less contemptible allies. If all the skill and
valour of the German Army are concentrated on it, it is not being treated
as contemptible. But the Prussian rhetorician had two incompatible
sentiments in his mind; and he insisted on saying them both at once. He
wanted to think of an English Army as a small thing; but he also wanted to
think of an English defeat as a big thing. He wanted to exult, at the same
moment, in the utter weakness of the British in their attack; and the
supreme skill and valour of the Germans in repelling such an attack.
Somehow it must be made a common and obvious collapse for England; and yet
a daring and unexpected triumph for Germany. In trying to express these
contradictory conceptions simultaneously, he got rather mixed. Therefore he
bade Germania fill all her vales and mountains with the dying agonies of
this almost invisible earwig; and let the impure blood of this cockroach
redden the Rhine down to the sea.
But it would be unfair to base the criticism on the utterance of any
accidental and hereditary prince: and it is quite equally clear in the case
of the philosophers who have been held up to us, even in England, as the
very prophets of progress. And in nothing is it shown more sharply than in
the curious confused talk about Race and especially about the Teutonic
Race. Professor Harnack and similar people are reproaching us, I
understand, for having broken "the bond of Teutonism": a bond which the
Prussians have strictly observed both in breach and observance. We note it
in their open annexation of lands wholly inhabited by negroes, such as
Denmark. We note it equally in their instant and joyful recognition of the
flaxen hair and light blue eyes of the Turks. But it is still the abstract
principle of Professor Harnack which interests me most; and in following it
I have the same complexity of enquiry, but the same simplicity of result.
Comparing the Professor's concern about "Teutonism" with his unconcern
about Belgium, I can only reach the following result: "A man need not keep
a promise he has made. But a man must keep a promise he has not made."
There certainly was a treaty binding Britain to Belgium; if it was only a
scrap of paper. If there was any treaty binding Britain to Teutonism it is,
to say the least of it, a lost scrap of paper: almost what one might call a
scrap of waste-paper. Here again the pendants under consideration exhibit
the illogical perversity that makes the brain reel. There is obligation and
there is no obligation: sometimes it appears that Germany and England must
keep faith with each other; sometimes that Germany need not keep faith with
anybody and anything; sometimes that we alone among European peoples are
almost entitled to be Germans; sometimes that beside us Russians and
Frenchmen almost rise to a Germanic loveliness of character. But through
all there is, hazy but not hypocritical, this sense of some common
Teutonism.
Professor Haeckel, another of the witnesses raised up against us, attained
to some celebrity at one time through proving the remarkable resemblance
between two different things by printing duplicate pictures of the same
thing. Professor Haeckel's contribution to biology, in this case, was
exactly like Professor Harnack's contribution to ethnology. Professor
Harnack knows what a German is like. When he wants to imagine what an
Englishman is like, he simply photographs the same German over again. In
both cases there is probably sincerity as well as simplicity. Haeckel was
so certain that the species illustrated in embryo really are closely
related and linked up, that it seemed to him a small thing to simplify it
by mere repetition. Harnack is so certain that the German and Englishman
are almost alike, that he really risks the generalisation that they are
exactly alike. He photographs, so to speak, the same fair and foolish face
twice over; and calls it a remarkable resemblance between cousins. Thus he
can prove the existence of Teutonism just about as conclusively as Haeckel
has proved the more tenable proposition of the non-existence of God. Now
the German and the Englishman are not in the least alike--except in the
sense that neither of them are negroes. They are, in everything good and
evil, more unlike than any other two men we can take at random from the
great European family. They are opposite from the roots of their history,
nay, of their geography. It is an understatement to call Britain insular.
Britain is not only an island, but an island slashed by the sea till it
nearly splits into three islands; and even the Midlands can almost smell
the salt. Germany is a powerful, beautiful and fertile inland country,
which can only find the sea by one or two twisted and narrow paths, as
people find a subterranean lake. Thus the British Navy is really national
because it is natural; it has co-hered out of hundreds of accidental
adventures of ships and shipmen before Chaucer's time and after it. But the
German Navy is an artificial thing; as artificial as a constructed Alp
would be in England. William II has simply copied the British Navy as
Frederick II copied the French Army: and this Japanese or anti-like
assiduity in imitation is one of the hundred qualities which the Germans
have and the English markedly have not. There are other German
superiorities which are very much superior. The one or two really jolly
things that the Germans have got are precisely the things which the English
haven't got: notably a real habit of popular music and of the ancient songs
of the people, not merely spreading from the towns or caught from the
professionals. In this the Germans rather resemble the Welsh: though heaven
knows what becomes of Teutonism if they do. But the difference between the
Germans and the English goes deeper than all these signs of it; they differ
more than any other two Europeans in the normal posture of the mind. Above
all, they differ in what is the most English of all English traits; that
shame which the French may be right in calling "the bad shame"; for it is
certainly mixed up with pride and suspicion, the upshot of which we call
shyness. Even an Englishman's rudeness is often rooted in his being
embarrassed. But a German's rudeness is rooted in his never being
embarrassed. He eats and makes love noisily. He never feels a speech or a
song or a sermon or a large meal to be what the English call "out of place"
in particular circumstances. When Germans are patriotic and religious they
have no reactions against patriotism and religion as have the English and
the French. Nay, the mistake of Germany in the modern disaster largely
arose from the facts that she thought England was simple when England is
very subtle. She thought that because our politics have become largely
financial that they had become wholly financial; that because our
aristocrats had become pretty cynical that they had become entirely
corrupt. They could not seize the subtlety by which a rather used-up
English gentleman might sell a coronet when he would not sell a fortress;
might lower the public standards and yet refuse to lower the flag. In
short, the Germans are quite sure that they understand us entirely, because
they do not understand us at all. Possibly if they began to understand us
they might hate us even more: but I would rather be hated for some small
but real reason than pursued with love on account of all kinds of qualities
which I do not possess and which I do not desire. And when the Germans get
their first genuine glimpse of what modern England is like they will
discover that England has a very broken, belated and inadequate sense of
having an obligation to Europe, but no sort of sense whatever of having any
obligation to Teutonism.
This is the last and strongest of the Prussian qualities we have here
considered. There is in stupidity of this sort a strange slippery
strength: because it can be not only outside rules but outside reason. The
man who really cannot see that he is contradicting himself has a great
advantage in controversy; though the advantage breaks down when he tries to
reduce it to simple addition, to chess, or to the game called war. It is
the same about the stupidity of the one-sided kinship. The drunkard who is
quite certain that a total stranger is his long-lost brother, has a greater
advantage until it comes to matters of detail. "We must have chaos within"
said Nietzsche, "that we may give birth to a dancing star."
In these slight notes I have suggested the principal strong points of the
Prussian character. A failure in honour which almost amounts to a failure
in memory: an egomania that is honestly blind to the fact that the other
party is an ego; and, above all, an actual itch for tyranny and
interference, the devil which everywhere torments the idle and the proud.
To these must be added a certain mental shapelessness which can expand or
contract without reference to reason or record; a potential infinity of
excuses. If the English had been on the German side, the German professors
would have noted what irresistible energies had evolved the Teutons. As the
English are on the other side, the German professors will say that these
Teutons were not sufficiently evolved. Or they will say that they were
just sufficiently evolved to show that they were not Teutons. Probably they
will say both. But the truth is that all that they call evolution should
rather be called evasion. They tell us they are opening windows of
enlightenment and doors of progress. The truth is that they are breaking up
the whole house of the human intellect, that they may abscond in any
direction. There is an ominous and almost monstrous parallel between the
position of their over-rated philosophers and of their comparatively
under-rated soldiers. For what their professors call roads of progress are
really routes of escape.
LETTERS TO AN OLD GARIBALDIAN
Italy, twice hast thou spoken; and time is athirst
for the third.
--SWINBURNE.
My Dear ------
It is a long time since we met; and I fear these letters may never reach
you. But in these violent times I remember with a curious vividness how you
brandished a paintbrush about your easel when I was a boy; and how it
thrilled me to think that you had so brandished a bayonet against the
Teutons--I hope with the same precision and happy results. Round about
that period, the very pigments seemed to have some sort of picturesque
connection with your national story. There seemed to be something gorgeous
and terrible about Venetian Red; and something quite catastrophic about
Burnt Sienna. But somehow or other, when I saw in the street yesterday the
colours on your flag, it reminded me of the colours on your palette.
You need not fear that I shall try to entangle you or your countrymen in
the matters which it is for Italians alone to decide. You know the perils
of either course much better than I do. Italy, most assuredly, has no need
to prove her courage. She has risked everything in standing out that she
could risk by coming in. The proclamations and press of Germany make it
plain that the Germans have risen to a height of sensibility hardly to be
distinguished from madness. Supposing the nightmare of a Prussian victory,
they will revenge themselves on things more remote than the Triple
Alliance. There was a promise of peace between them and Belgium; there was
none between them and England. The promise to Belgium they broke. The
promise of England they invented. It is called the Treaty of Teutonism. No
one ever heard of it in this country; but it seems well known in academic
circles in Germany. It seems to be something, connected with the colour of
one's hair. But I repeat that I am not concerned to interfere with your
decision, save in so far as I may provide some materials for it by
describing our own.
For I think the first, perhaps the only, fruitful work an Englishman can do
now for the formation of foreign opinion is to talk about what he really
understands, the condition of British opinion. It is as simple as it is
solid. For the first time, perhaps, what we call the United Kingdom
entirely deserves its name. There has been nothing like such unanimity
within an Englishman's recollection. The Irish and even the Welsh were
largely pro-Boers, so were some of the most English of the English. No one
could have been more English than Fox, yet he denounced the war with
Napoleon. No one could be more English than Cobden, but he denounced the
war in the Crimea. It is really extraordinary to find a united England.
Indeed, until lately, it was extraordinary to find a united Englishman.
Those of us who, like the present writer, repudiated the South African war
from its beginnings, had yet a divided heart in the matter, and felt
certain aspects of it as glorious as well as infamous. The first fact I can
offer you is the unquestionable fact that all these doubts and divisions
have ceased. Nor have they ceased by any compromise; but by a universal
flash of faith--or, if you will, of suspicion. Nor were our internal
conflicts lightly abandoned; nor our reconciliations an easy matter. I am,
as you are, a democrat and a citizen of Europe; and my friends and I had
grown to loathe the plutocracy and privilege which sat in the high places
of our country with a loathing which we thought no love could cast out. Of
these rich men I will not speak here; with your permission, I will not
think of them. War is a terrible business in any case; and to some
intellectual temperaments this is the most terrible part of it. That war
takes the young; that war sunders the lovers; that all over Europe brides
and bridegrooms are parting at the church door: all that is only a
commonplace to commonplace people. To give up one's love for one's country
is very great. But to give up one's hate for one's country, this may also
have in it something of pride and something of purification.
What is it that has made the British peoples thus defer not only their
artificial parade of party politics but their real social and moral
complaints and demands? What is it that has united all of us against the
Prussian, as against a mad dog? It is the presence of a certain spirit, as
unmistakable as a pungent smell, which we feel is capable of withering all
the good things in this world. The burglary of Belgium, the bribe to
betray France, these are not excuses; they are facts. But they are only
the facts by which we came to know of the presence of the spirit. They do
not suffice to define the whole spirit itself. A good rough summary is to
say that it is the spirit of barbarism; but indeed it is something worse.
It is the spirit of second-rate civilisation; and the distinction involves
the most important differences. Granted that it could exist, pure barbarism
could not last long; as pure babyhood cannot last long. Of his own nature
the baby is interested in the ticking of a watch; and the time will come
when you will have to tell him, if you only tell him the wrong time. And
that is exactly what the second-rate civilisation does.
But the vital point is here. The abstract barbarian would copy. The cockney
and incomplete civilisation always sets itself up to be copied. And in the
case here considered, the German thinks that it is not only his business to
spread education, but to spread compulsory education. "Science combined
with organisation," says Professor Ostwald of Berlin University, "makes us
terrible to our opponents and ensures a German future for Europe." That is,
as shortly as it can be put, what we are fighting about. We are fighting to
prevent a German future for Europe. We think it would be narrower, nastier,
less sane, less capable of liberty and of laughter, than any of the worst
parts of the European past. And when I cast about for a form in which to
explain shortly why we think so, I thought of you. For this is a matter so
large that I know not how to express it except in terms of artists like
you, in the service of beauty and the faith in freedom. Prussia, at least
cannot help me; Lord Palmerston, I believe, called it a country of damned
professors. Lord Palmerston, I fear, used the word "damned" more or less
flippantly. I use it reverently.
Rome, at her very weakest, has always been a river that wanders and widens
and that waters many fields. Berlin, at its strongest, will never be
anything but a whirlpool, which seeks its own centre, and is sucked down.
It would only narrow all the rest of Europe, as it has already narrowed all
the rest of Germany. There is a spirit of diseased egoism, which at last
makes all things spin upon one pin-point in the brain. It is a spirit
expressed more often in the slangs than in the tongues of men. The English
call it a fad. I do not know what the Italians call it; the Prussians call
it philosophy.