Cobbett was defeated because the English people was defeated. After the

frame-breaking riots, men, as men, were beaten: and machines, as

machines, had beaten them. Peterloo was as much the defeat of the

English as Waterloo was the defeat of the French. Ireland did not get

Home Rule because England did not get it. Cobbett would not forcibly

incorporate Ireland, least of all the corpse of Ireland. But before his

defeat Cobbett had an enormous following; his "Register" was what the

serial novels of Dickens were afterwards to be. Dickens, by the way,

inherited the same instinct for abrupt diction, and probably enjoyed

writing "gas and gaiters" more than any two other words in his works.

But Dickens was narrower than Cobbett, not by any fault of his own, but

because in the intervening epoch of the triumph of Scrooge and Gradgrind

the link with our Christian past had been lost, save in the single

matter of Christmas, which Dickens rescued romantically and by a

hair's-breadth escape. Cobbett was a yeoman; that is, a man free and

farming a small estate. By Dickens's time, yeomen seemed as antiquated

as bowmen. Cobbett was mediaeval; that is, he was in almost every way

the opposite of what that word means to-day. He was as egalitarian as

St. Francis, and as independent as Robin Hood. Like that other yeoman in

the ballad, he bore in hand a mighty bow; what some of his enemies would

have called a long bow. But though he sometimes overshot the mark of

truth, he never shot away from it, like Froude. His account of that

sixteenth century in which the mediaeval civilisation ended, is not more

and not less picturesque than Froude's: the difference is in the dull

detail of truth. That crisis was _not_ the foundling of a strong Tudor

monarchy, for the monarchy almost immediately perished; it _was_ the

founding of a strong class holding all the capital and land, for it

holds them to this day. Cobbett would have asked nothing better than to

bend his mediaeval bow to the cry of "St. George for Merry England," for

though he pointed to the other and uglier side of the Waterloo medal,

he was patriotic; and his premonitions were rather against Blucher than

Wellington. But if we take that old war-cry as his final word (and he

would have accepted it) we must note how every term in it points away

from what the modern plutocrats call either progress or empire. It

involves the invocation of saints, the most popular and the most

forbidden form of mediævalism. The modern Imperialist no more thinks of

St. George in England than he thinks of St. John in St. John's Wood. It

is nationalist in the narrowest sense; and no one knows the beauty and

simplicity of the Middle Ages who has not seen St. George's Cross

separate, as it was at Creçy or Flodden, and noticed how much finer a

flag it is than the Union Jack. And the word "merry" bears witness to an

England famous for its music and dancing before the coming of the

Puritans, the last traces of which have been stamped out by a social

discipline utterly un-English. Not for two years, but for ten decades

Cobbett has been in prison; and his enemy, the "efficient" foreigner,

has walked about in the sunlight, magnificent, and a model for men. I

do not think that even the Prussians ever boasted about "Merry Prussia."

VI--_Hamlet and the Danes_

In the one classic and perfect literary product that ever came out of

Germany--I do not mean "Faust," but Grimm's Fairy Tales--there is a

gorgeous story about a boy who went through a number of experiences

without learning how to shudder. In one of them, I remember, he was

sitting by the fireside and a pair of live legs fell down the chimney

and walked about the room by themselves. Afterwards the rest fell down

and joined up; but this was almost an anti-climax. Now that is very

charming, and full of the best German domesticity. It suggests truly

what wild adventures the traveller can find by stopping at home. But it

also illustrates in various ways how that great German influence on

England, which is the matter of these essays, began in good things and

gradually turned to bad. It began as a literary influence, in the lurid

tales of Hoffmann, the tale of "Sintram," and so on; the revisualising

of the dark background of forest behind our European cities. That old

German darkness was immeasurably livelier than the new German light. The

devils of Germany were much better than the angels. Look at the Teutonic

pictures of "The Three Huntsmen" and observe that while the wicked

huntsman is effective in his own way, the good huntsman is weak in every

way, a sort of sexless woman with a face like a teaspoon. But there is

more in these first forest tales, these homely horrors. In the earlier

stages they have exactly this salt of salvation, that the boy does _not_

shudder. They are made fearful that he may be fearless, not that he may

fear. As long as that limit is kept, the barbaric dreamland is decent;

and though individuals like Coleridge and De Quincey mixed it with worse

things (such as opium), they kept that romantic rudiment upon the whole.

But the one disadvantage of a forest is that one may lose one's way in

it. And the one danger is not that we may meet devils, but that we may

worship them. In other words, the danger is one always associated, by

the instinct of folk-lore, with forests; it is _enchantment_, or the

fixed loss of oneself in some unnatural captivity or spiritual

servitude. And in the evolution of Germanism, from Hoffmann to

Hauptmann, we do see this growing tendency to take horror seriously,

which is diabolism. The German begins to have an eerie abstract sympathy

with the force and fear he describes, as distinct from their objective.

The German is no longer sympathising with the boy against the goblin,

but rather with the goblin against the boy. There goes with it, as

always goes with idolatry, a dehumanised seriousness; the men of the

forest are already building upon a mountain the empty throne of the

Superman. Now it is just at this point that I for one, and most men who

love truth as well as tales, begin to lose interest. I am all for "going

out into the world to seek my fortune," but I do not want to find

it--and find it is only being chained for ever among the frozen figures

of the Sieges Allees. I do not want to be an idolator, still less an

idol. I am all for going to fairyland, but I am also all for coming

back. That is, I will admire, but I will not be magnetised, either by

mysticism or militarism. I am all for German fantasy, but I will resist

German earnestness till I die. I am all for Grimm's Fairy Tales; but if

there is such a thing as Grimm's Law, I would break it, if I knew what

it was. I like the Prussian's legs (in their beautiful boots) to fall

down the chimney and walk about my room. But when he procures a head and

begins to talk, I feel a little bored. The Germans cannot really be deep

because they will not consent to be superficial. They are bewitched by

art, and stare at it, and cannot see round it. They will not believe

that art is a light and slight thing--a feather, even if it be from an

angelic wing. Only the slime is at the bottom of a pool; the sky is on

the surface. We see this in that very typical process, the Germanising

of Shakespeare. I do not complain of the Germans forgetting that

Shakespeare was an Englishman. I complain of their forgetting that

Shakespeare was a man; that he had moods, that he made mistakes, and,

above all, that he knew his art was an art and not an attribute of

deity. That is what is the matter with the Germans; they cannot "ring

fancy's knell"; their knells have no gaiety. The phrase of Hamlet about

"holding the mirror up to nature" is always quoted by such earnest

critics as meaning that art is nothing if not realistic. But it really

means (or at least its author really thought) that art is nothing if not

artificial. Realists, like other barbarians, really _believe_ the

mirror; and therefore break the mirror. Also they leave out the phrase

"as 'twere," which must be read into every remark of Shakespeare, and

especially every remark of Hamlet. What I mean by believing the mirror,

and breaking it, can be recorded in one case I remember; in which a

realistic critic quoted German authorities to prove that Hamlet had a

particular psycho-pathological abnormality, which is admittedly nowhere

mentioned in the play. The critic was bewitched; he was thinking of

Hamlet as a real man, with a background behind him three dimensions

deep--which does not exist in a looking-glass. "The best in this kind

are but shadows." No German commentator has ever made an adequate note

on that. Nevertheless, Shakespeare was an Englishman; he was nowhere

more English than in his blunders; but he was nowhere more successful

than in the description of very English types of character. And if

anything is to be said about Hamlet, beyond what Shakespeare has said

about him, I should say that Hamlet was an Englishman too. He was as

much an Englishman as he was a gentleman, and he had the very grave

weaknesses of both characters. The chief English fault, especially in

the nineteenth century, has been lack of decision, not only lack of

decision in action, but lack of the equally essential decision in

thought--which some call dogma. And in the politics of the last century,

this English Hamlet, as we shall see, played a great part, or rather

refused to play it.

There were, then, two elements in the German influence; a sort of pretty

playing with terror and a solemn recognition of terrorism. The first

pointed to elfland, and the second to--shall we say, Prussia. And by

that unconscious symbolism with which all this story develops, it was

soon to be dramatically tested, by a definite political query, whether

what we really respected was the Teutonic fantasy or the Teutonic fear.

The Germanisation of England, its transition and turning-point, was well

typified by the genius of Carlyle. The original charm of Germany had

been the charm of the child. The Teutons were never so great as when

they were childish; in their religious art and popular imagery the

Christ-Child is really a child, though the Christ is hardly a man. The

self-conscious fuss of their pedagogy is half-redeemed by the

unconscious grace which called a school not a seed-plot of citizens, but

merely a garden of children. All the first and best forest-spirit is

infancy, its wonder, its wilfulness, even its still innocent fear.

Carlyle marks exactly the moment when the German child becomes the

spoilt child. The wonder turns to mere mysticism; and mere mysticism

always turns to mere immoralism. The wilfulness is no longer liked, but

is actually obeyed. The fear becomes a philosophy. Panic hardens into

pessimism; or else, what is often equally depressing, optimism.

Carlyle, the most influential English writer of that time, marks all

this by the mental interval between his "French Revolution" and his

"Frederick the Great." In both he was Germanic. Carlyle was really as

sentimental as Goethe; and Goethe was really as sentimental as Werther.

Carlyle understood everything about the French Revolution, except that

it was a French revolution. He could not conceive that cold anger that

comes from a love of insulted truth. It seemed to him absurd that a man

should die, or do murder, for the First Proposition of Euclid; should

relish an egalitarian state like an equilateral triangle; or should

defend the Pons Asinorum as Codes defended the Tiber bridge. But anyone

who does not understand that does not understand the French

Revolution--nor, for that matter, the American Revolution. "We hold

these truths to be self-evident": it was the fanaticism of truism. But

though Carlyle had no real respect for liberty, he had a real reverence

for anarchy. He admired elemental energy. The violence which repelled

most men from the Revolution was the one thing that attracted him to it.

While a Whig like Macaulay respected the Girondists but deplored the

Mountain, a Tory like Carlyle rather liked the Mountain and quite unduly

despised the Girondists. This appetite for formless force belongs, of

course, to the forests, to Germany. But when Carlyle got there, there

fell upon him a sort of spell which is his tragedy and the English

tragedy, and, in no small degree, the German tragedy too. The real

romance of the Teutons was largely a romance of the Southern Teutons,

with their castles, which are almost literally castles in the air, and

their river which is walled with vineyards and rhymes so naturally to

wine. But as Carlyle's was rootedly a romance of conquest, he had to

prove that the thing which conquered in Germany was really more poetical

than anything else in Germany. Now the thing that conquered in Germany

was about the most prosaic thing of which the world ever grew weary.

There is a great deal more poetry in Brixton than in Berlin. Stella said

that Swift could write charmingly about a broom-stick; and poor Carlyle

had to write romantically about a ramrod. Compare him with Heine, who

had also a detached taste in the mystical grotesques of Germany, but who

saw what was their enemy: and offered to nail up the Prussian eagle like

an old crow as a target for the archers of the Rhine. Its prosaic

essence is not proved by the fact that it did not produce poets: it is

proved by the more deadly fact that it did. The actual written poetry of

Frederick the Great, for instance, was not even German or barbaric, but

simply feeble--and French. Thus Carlyle became continually gloomier as

his fit of the blues deepened into Prussian blues; nor can there be any

wonder. His philosophy had brought out the result that the Prussian was

the first of Germans, and, therefore, the first of men. No wonder he

looked at the rest of us with little hope.

But a stronger test was coming both for Carlyle and England. Prussia,

plodding, policing, as materialist as mud, went on solidifying and

strengthening after unconquered Russia and unconquered England had

rescued her where she lay prostrate under Napoleon. In this interval the

two most important events were the Polish national revival, with which

Russia was half inclined to be sympathetic, but Prussia was implacably

coercionist; and the positive refusal of the crown of a united Germany

by the King of Prussia, simply because it was constitutionally offered

by a free German Convention. Prussia did not want to lead the Germans:

she wanted to conquer the Germans. And she wanted to conquer other

people first. She had already found her brutal, if humorous, embodiment

in Bismarck; and he began with a scheme full of brutality and not

without humour. He took up, or rather pretended to take up, the claim of

the Prince of Augustenberg to duchies which were a quite lawful part of

the land of Denmark. In support of this small pretender he enlisted two

large things, the Germanic body called the Bund and the Austrian Empire.

It is possibly needless to say that after he had seized the disputed

provinces by pure Prussian violence, he kicked out the Prince of

Augustenberg, kicked out the German Bund, and finally kicked out the

Austrian Empire too, in the sudden campaign of Sadowa. He was a good

husband and a good father; he did not paint in water colours; and of

such is the Kingdom of Heaven. But the symbolic intensity of the

incident was this. The Danes expected protection from England; and if

there had been any sincerity in the ideal side of our Teutonism they

ought to have had it. They ought to have had it even by the pedantries

of the time, which already talked of Latin inferiority: and were never

weary of explaining that the country of Richelieu could not rule and the

country of Napoleon could not fight. But if it was necessary for

whosoever would be saved to be a Teuton, the Danes were more Teuton than

the Prussians. If it be a matter of vital importance to be descended

from Vikings, the Danes really were descended from Vikings, while the

Prussians were descended from mongrel Slavonic savages. If Protestantism

be progress, the Danes were Protestant; while they had attained quite

peculiar success and wealth in that small ownership and intensive

cultivation which is very commonly a boast of Catholic lands. They had

in a quite arresting degree what was claimed for the Germanics as

against Latin revolutionism: quiet freedom, quiet prosperity, a simple

love of fields and of the sea. But, moreover, by that coincidence which

dogs this drama, the English of that Victorian epoch had found their

freshest impression of the northern spirit of infancy and wonder in the

works of a Danish man of genius, whose stories and sketches were so

popular in England as almost to have become English. Good as Grimm's

Fairy Tales were, they had been collected and not created by the modern

German; they were a museum of things older than any nation, of the

dateless age of once-upon-a-time. When the English romantics wanted to

find the folk-tale spirit still alive, they found it in the small

country of one of those small kings, with whom the folk-tales are almost

comically crowded. There they found what we call an original writer, who

was nevertheless the image of the origins. They found a whole fairyland

in one head and under one nineteenth-century top hat. Those of the

English who were then children owe to Hans Andersen more than to any of

their own writers, that essential educational emotion which feels that

domesticity is not dull but rather fantastic; that sense of the

fairyland of furniture, and the travel and adventure of the farmyard.

His treatment of inanimate things as animate was not a cold and awkward

allegory: it was a true sense of a dumb divinity in things that are.

Through him a child did feel that the chair he sat on was something like

a wooden horse. Through him children and the happier kind of men did

feel themselves covered by a roof as by the folded wings of some vast

domestic fowl; and feel common doors like great mouths that opened to

utter welcome. In the story of "The Fir Tree" he transplanted to

England a living bush that can still blossom into candles. And in his

tale of "The Tin Soldier" he uttered the true defence of romantic

militarism against the prigs who would forbid it even as a toy for the

nursery. He suggested, in the true tradition of the folk-tales, that the

dignity of the fighter is not in his largeness but rather in his

smallness, in his stiff loyalty and heroic helplessness in the hands of

larger and lower things. These things, alas, were an allegory. When

Prussia, finding her crimes unpunished, afterwards carried them into

France as well as Denmark, Carlyle and his school made some effort to

justify their Germanism, by pitting what they called the piety and

simplicity of Germany against what they called the cynicism and ribaldry

of France. But nobody could possibly pretend that Bismarck was more

pious and simple than Hans Andersen; yet the Carlyleans looked on with

silence or approval while the innocent toy kingdom was broken like a

toy. Here again, it is enormously probable that England would have

struck upon the right side, if the English people had been the English

Government. Among other coincidences, the Danish princess who had

married the English heir was something very like a fairy princess to the

English crowd. The national poet had hailed her as a daughter of the

sea-kings; and she was, and indeed still is, the most popular royal

figure in England. But whatever our people may have been like, our

politicians were on the very tamest level of timidity and the fear of

force to which they have ever sunk. The Tin Soldier of the Danish army

and the paper boat of the Danish navy, as in the story, were swept away

down the great gutter, down that colossal _cloaca_ that leads to the

vast cesspool of Berlin.

Why, as a fact, did not England interpose? There were a great many

reasons given, but I think they were all various inferences from one

reason; indirect results and sometimes quite illogical results, of what

we have called the Germanisation of England. First, the very insularity

on which we insisted was barbaric, in its refusal of a seat in the

central senate of the nations. What we called our splendid isolation

became a rather ignominious sleeping-partnership with Prussia. Next, we

were largely trained in irresponsibility by our contemporary historians,

Freeman and Green, teaching us to be proud of a possible descent from

King Arthur's nameless enemies and not from King Arthur. King Arthur

might not be historical, but at least he was legendary. Hengist and

Horsa were not even legendary, for they left no legend. Anybody could

see what was obligatory on the representative of Arthur; he was bound to

be chivalrous, that is, to be European. But nobody could imagine what

was obligatory on the representative of Horsa, unless it were to be

horsy. That was perhaps the only part of the Anglo-Saxon programme that

the contemporary English really carried out. Then, in the very real

decline from Cobbett to Cobden (that is, from a broad to a narrow

manliness and good sense) there had grown up the cult of a very curious

kind of peace, to be spread all over the world not by pilgrims, but by

pedlars. Mystics from the beginning had made vows of peace--but they

added to them vows of poverty. Vows of poverty were not in the

Cobdenite's line. Then, again, there was the positive praise of Prussia,

to which steadily worsening case the Carlyleans were already committed.

But beyond these, there was something else, a spirit which had more

infected us as a whole. That spirit was the spirit of Hamlet. We gave

the grand name of "evolution" to a notion that things do themselves. Our

wealth, our insularity, our gradual loss of faith, had so dazed us that

the old Christian England haunted us like a ghost in whom we could not

quite believe. An aristocrat like Palmerston, loving freedom and hating

the upstart despotism, must have looked on at its cold brutality not

without that ugly question which Hamlet asked himself--am I a coward?

It cannot be

But I am pigeon-livered and lack gall

To make oppression bitter; or 'ere this

I should have fatted all the region kites

With this slave's offal.

We made dumb our anger and our honour; but it has not brought us peace.

VII--_The Midnight of Europe_

Among the minor crimes of England may be classed the shallow criticism

and easy abandonment of Napoleon III. The Victorian English had a very

bad habit of being influenced by words and at the same time pretending

to despise them. They would build their whole historical philosophy upon

two or three titles, and then refuse to get even the titles right. The

solid Victorian Englishman, with his whiskers and his Parliamentary

vote, was quite content to say that Louis Napoleon and William of

Prussia both became Emperors--by which he meant autocrats. His whiskers

would have bristled with rage and he would have stormed at you for

hair-splitting and "lingo," if you had answered that William was German

Emperor, while Napoleon was not French Emperor, but only Emperor of the

French. What could such mere order of the words matter? Yet the same

Victorian would have been even more indignant if he had been asked to

be satisfied with an Art Master, when he had advertised for a Master of

Arts. His irritation would have increased if the Art Master had promised

him a sea-piece and had brought him a piece of the sea; or if, during

the decoration of his house, the same aesthetic humourist had undertaken

to procure some Indian Red and had produced a Red Indian.

The Englishman would not see that if there was only a verbal difference

between the French Emperor and the Emperor of the French, so, if it came

to that, it was a verbal difference between the Emperor and the

Republic, or even between a Parliament and no Parliament. For him an

Emperor meant merely despotism; he had not yet learned that a Parliament

may mean merely oligarchy. He did not know that the English people would

soon be made impotent, not by the disfranchising of their constituents,

but simply by the silencing of their members; and that the governing

class of England did not now depend upon rotten boroughs, but upon

rotten representatives. Therefore he did not understand Bonapartism. He

did not understand that French democracy became more democratic, not

less, when it turned all France into one constituency which elected one

member. He did not understand that many dragged down the Republic

because it was not republican, but purely senatorial. He was yet to

learn how quite corruptly senatorial a great representative assembly can

become. Yet in England to-day we hear "the decline of Parliament" talked

about and taken for granted by the best Parliamentarians--Mr. Balfour,

for instance--and we hear the one partly French and wholly Jacobin

historian of the French Revolution recommending for the English evil a

revival of the power of the Crown. It seems that so far from having left

Louis Napoleon far behind in the grey dust of the dead despotisms, it is

not at all improbable that our most extreme revolutionary developments

may end where Louis Napoleon began.

In other words, the Victorian Englishman did not understand the words

"Emperor of the French." The type of title was deliberately chosen to

express the idea of an elective and popular origin; as against such a

phrase as "the German Emperor," which expresses an almost

transcendental tribal patriarchate, or such a phrase as "King of

Prussia," which suggests personal ownership of a whole territory. To

treat the _Coup d'état_ as unpardonable is to justify riot against

despotism, but forbid any riot against aristocracy. Yet the idea

expressed in "The Emperor of the French" is not dead, but rather risen

from the dead. It is the idea that while a government may pretend to be

a popular government, only a person can be really popular. Indeed, the

idea is still the crown of American democracy, as it was for a time the

crown of French democracy. The very powerful official who makes the

choice of that great people for peace or war, might very well be called,

not the President of the United States, but the President of the

Americans. In Italy we have seen the King and the mob prevail over the

conservatism of the Parliament, and in Russia the new popular policy

sacramentally symbolised by the Czar riding at the head of the new

armies. But in one place, at least, the actual form of words exists; and

the actual form of words has been splendidly justified. One man among

the sons of men has been permitted to fulfil a courtly formula with

awful and disastrous fidelity. Political and geographical ruin have

written one last royal title across the sky; the loss of palace and

capital and territory have but isolated and made evident the people that

has not been lost; not laws but the love of exiles, not soil but the

souls of men, still make certain that five true words shall yet be

written in the corrupt and fanciful chronicles of mankind: "The King of

the Belgians."

It is a common phrase, recurring constantly in the real if rabid

eloquence of Victor Hugo, that Napoleon III. was a mere ape of Napoleon

I. That is, that he had, as the politician says, in "L'Aiglon," "le

petit chapeau, mais pas la tête"; that he was merely a bad imitation.

This is extravagantly exaggerative; and those who say it, moreover,

often miss the two or three points of resemblance which really exist in

the exaggeration. One resemblance there certainly was. In both Napoleons

it has been suggested that the glory was not so great as it seemed; but

in both it can be emphatically added that the eclipse was not so great

as it seemed either. Both succeeded at first and failed at last. But

both succeeded at last, even after the failure. If at this moment we owe

thanks to Napoleon Bonaparte for the armies of united France, we also

owe some thanks to Louis Bonaparte for the armies of united Italy. That

great movement to a freer and more chivalrous Europe which we call

to-day the Cause of the Allies, had its forerunners and first victories

before our time; and it not only won at Arcola, but also at Solferino.

Men who remembered Louis Napoleon when he mooned about the Blessington

_salon_, and was supposed to be almost mentally deficient, used to say

he deceived Europe twice; once when he made men think him an imbecile,

and once when he made them think him a statesman. But he deceived them a

third time; when he made them think he was dead; and had done nothing.

In spite of the unbridled verse of Hugo and the even more unbridled

prose of Kinglake, Napoleon III. is really and solely discredited in

history because of the catastrophe of 1870. Hugo hurled any amount of

lightning on Louis Napoleon; but he threw very little light on him. Some

passages in the "Châtiments" are really caricatures carved in eternal

marble. They will always be valuable in reminding generations too vague

and soft, as were the Victorians, of the great truth that hatred is

beautiful, when it is hatred of the ugliness of the soul. But most of

them could have been written about Haman, or Heliogabalus, or King John,

or Queen Elizabeth, as much as about poor Louis Napoleon; they bear no

trace of any comprehension of his quite interesting aims, and his quite

comprehensible contempt for the fat-souled senatorial politicians. And

if a real revolutionist like Hugo did not do justice to the

revolutionary element in Cæsarism, it need hardly be said that a rather

Primrose League Tory like Tennyson did not. Kinglake's curiously acrid

insistence upon the _Coup d'état_ is, I fear, only an indulgence in one

of the least pleasing pleasures of our national pen and press, and one

which afterwards altogether ran away with us over the Dreyfus case. It

is an unfortunate habit of publicly repenting for other people's sins.

If this came easy to an Englishman like Kinglake, it came, of course,

still easier to a German like Queen Victoria's husband and even to

Queen Victoria herself, who was naturally influenced by him. But in so

far as the sensible masses of the English nation took any interest in

the matter, it is probable that they sympathised with Palmerston, who

was as popular as the Prince Consort was unpopular. The black mark

against Louis Napoleon's name until now, has simply been Sedan; and it

is our whole purpose to-day to turn Sedan into an interlude. If it is

not an interlude, it will be the end of the world. But we have sworn to

make an end of that ending: warring on until, if only by a purgatory of

the nations and the mountainous annihilation of men, the story of the

world ends well.

There are, as it were, valleys of history quite close to us, but hidden

by the closer hills. One, as we have seen, is that fold in the soft

Surrey hills where Cobbett sleeps with his still-born English

Revolution. Another is under that height called The Spy of Italy, where

a new Napoleon brought back the golden eagles against the black eagles

of Austria. Yet that French adventure in support of the Italian

insurrection was very important; we are only beginning to understand

its importance. It was a defiance to the German Reaction and 1870 was a

sort of revenge for it, just as the Balkan victory was a defiance to the

German Reaction and 1914 was the attempted revenge for it. It is true

that the French liberation of Italy was incomplete, the problem of the

Papal States, for instance, being untouched by the Peace of Villafranca.

The volcanic but fruitful spirit of Italy had already produced that

wonderful, wandering, and almost omnipresent personality whose red shirt

was to be a walking flag: Garibaldi. And many English Liberals

sympathised with him and his extremists as against the peace. Palmerston

called it "the peace that passeth all understanding": but the profanity

of that hilarious old heathen was nearer the mark than he knew: there

were really present some of those deep things which he did not

understand. To quarrel with the Pope, but to compromise with him, was an

instinct with the Bonapartes; an instinct no Anglo-Saxon could be

expected to understand. They knew the truth; that Anti-Clericalism is

not a Protestant movement, but a Catholic mood. And after all the

English Liberals could not get their own Government to risk what the

French Government had risked; and Napoleon III. might well have retorted

on Palmerston, his rival in international Liberalism, that half a war

was better than no fighting. Swinburne called Villafranca "The Halt

before Rome," and expressed a rhythmic impatience for the time when the

world

"Shall ring to the roar of the lion

Proclaiming Republican Rome."

But he might have remembered, after all, that it was not the British

lion, that a British poet should have the right to say so imperiously,

"Let him roar again. Let him roar again."

It is true that there was no clear call to England from Italy, as there

certainly was from Denmark. The great powers were not bound to help

Italy to become a nation, as they were bound to support the unquestioned

fact that Denmark was one. Indeed the great Italian patriot was to

experience both extremes of the English paradox, and, curiously enough,

in connection with both the two national and anti-German causes. For

Italy he gained the support of the English, but not the support of

England. Not a few of our countrymen followed the red shirt; but not in

the red coat. And when he came to England, not to plead the cause of

Italy but the cause of Denmark, the Italian found he was more popular

with the English than any Englishman. He made his way through a forest

of salutations, which would willingly have turned itself into a forest

of swords. But those who kept the sword kept it sheathed. For the ruling

class the valour of the Italian hero, like the beauty of the Danish

Princess, was a thing to be admired, that is enjoyed, like a novel--or a

newspaper. Palmerston was the very type of Pacifism, because he was the

very type of Jingoism. In spirit as restless as Garibaldi, he was in

practice as cautious as Cobden. England had the most prudent

aristocracy, but the most reckless democracy in the world. It was, and

is, the English contradiction, which has so much misrepresented us,

especially to the Irish. Our national captains were carpet knights; our

knights errant were among the dismounted rabble. When an Austrian

general who had flogged women in the conquered provinces appeared in

the London streets, some common draymen off a cart behaved with the

direct quixotry of Sir Lancelot or Sir Galahad. He had beaten women and

they beat him. They regarded themselves simply as avengers of ladies in

distress, breaking the bloody whip of a German bully; just as Cobbett

had sought to break it when it was wielded over the men of England. The

boorishness was in the Germanic or half-Germanic rulers who wore crosses

and spurs: the gallantry was in the gutter. English draymen had more

chivalry than Teuton aristocrats--or English ones.

I have dwelt a little on this Italian experiment because it lights up

Louis Napoleon as what he really was before the eclipse, a

politician--perhaps an unscrupulous politician--but certainly a

democratic politician. A power seldom falls being wholly faultless; and

it is true that the Second Empire became contaminated with cosmopolitan

spies and swindlers, justly reviled by such democrats as Rochefort as

well as Hugo. But there was no French inefficiency that weighed a hair

in the balance compared with the huge and hostile efficiency of

Prussia; the tall machine that had struck down Denmark and Austria, and

now stood ready to strike again, extinguishing the lamp of the world.

There was a hitch before the hammer stroke, and Bismarck adjusted it, as

with his finger, by a forgery--for he had many minor accomplishments.

France fell: and what fell with her was freedom, and what reigned in her

stead only tyrants and the ancient terror. The crowning of the first

modern Kaiser in the very palace of the old French kings was an

allegory; like an allegory on those Versailles walls. For it was at once

the lifting of the old despotic diadem and its descent on the low brow

of a barbarian. Louis XI. had returned, and not Louis IX.; and Europe

was to know that sceptre on which there is no dove.

The instant evidence that Europe was in the grip of the savage was as

simple as it was sinister. The invaders behaved with an innocent impiety

and bestiality that had never been known in those lands since Clovis was

signed with the cross. To the naked pride of the new men nations simply

were not. The struggling populations of two vast provinces were simply

carried away like slaves into captivity, as after the sacking of some

prehistoric town. France was fined for having pretended to be a nation;

and the fine was planned to ruin her forever. Under the pressure of such

impossible injustice France cried out to the Christian nations, one

after another, and by name. Her last cry ended in a stillness like that

which had encircled Denmark.

One man answered; one who had quarrelled with the French and their

Emperor; but who knew it was not an emperor that had fallen. Garibaldi,

not always wise but to his end a hero, took his station, sword in hand,

under the darkening sky of Christendom, and shared the last fate of

France. A curious record remains, in which a German commander testifies

to the energy and effect of the last strokes of the wounded lion of

Aspromonte. But England went away sorrowful, for she had great

possessions.

VIII--_The Wrong Horse_

In another chapter I mentioned some of the late Lord Salisbury's remarks

with regret, but I trust with respect; for in certain matters he

deserved all the respect that can be given to him. His critics said that

he "thought aloud"; which is perhaps the noblest thing that can be said

of a man. He was jeered at for it by journalists and politicians who had

not the capacity to think or the courage to tell their thoughts. And he

had one yet finer quality which redeems a hundred lapses of anarchic

cynicism. He could change his mind upon the platform: he could repent in

public. He could not only think aloud; he could "think better" aloud.

And one of the turning-points of Europe had come in the hour when he

avowed his conversion from the un-Christian and un-European policy into

which his dexterous Oriental master, Disraeli, had dragged him; and

declared that England had "put her money on the wrong horse." When he

said it, he referred to the backing we gave to the Turk under a

fallacious fear of Russia. But I cannot but think that if he had lived

much longer, he would have come to feel the same disgust for his long

diplomatic support of the Turk's great ally in the North. He did not

live, as we have lived, to feel that horse run away with us, and rush on

through wilder and wilder places, until we knew that we were riding on

the nightmare.

What was this thing to which we trusted? And how may we most quickly

explain its development from a dream to a nightmare, and the

hair's-breadth escape by which it did not hurl us to destruction, as it

seems to be hurling the Turk? It is a certain spirit; and we must not

ask for too logical a definition of it, for the people whom it possesses

disown logic; and the whole thing is not so much a theory as a confusion

of thought. Its widest and most elementary character is adumbrated in

the word Teutonism or Pan-Germanism; and with this (which was what

appeared to win in 1870) we had better begin. The nature of

Pan-Germanism may be allegorised and abbreviated somewhat thus:

The horse asserts that all other creatures are morally bound to

sacrifice their interests to his, on the specific ground that he

possesses all noble and necessary qualities, and is an end in himself.

It is pointed out in answer that when climbing a tree the horse is less

graceful than the cat; that lovers and poets seldom urge the horse to

make a noise all night like the nightingale; that when submerged for

some long time under water, he is less happy than the haddock; and that

when he is cut open pearls are less often found in him than in an

oyster. He is not content to answer (though, being a muddle-headed

horse, he does use this answer also) that having an undivided hoof is

more than pearls or oceans or all ascension or song. He reflects for a

few years on the subject of cats; and at last discovers in the cat "the

characteristic equine quality of caudality, or a tail"; so that cats

_are_ horses, and wave on every tree-top the tail which is the equine

banner. Nightingales are found to have legs, which explains their power

of song. Haddocks are vertebrates; and therefore are sea-horses. And

though the oyster outwardly presents dissimilarities which seem to

divide him from the horse, he is by the all-filling nature-might of the

same horse-moving energy sustained.

Now this horse is intellectually the wrong horse. It is not perhaps

going too far to say that this horse is a donkey. For it is obviously

within even the intellectual resources of a haddock to answer, "But if a

haddock is a horse, why should I yield to you any more than you to me?

Why should that singing horse commonly called the nightingale, or that

climbing horse hitherto known as the cat, fall down and worship you

because of your horsehood? If all our native faculties are the

accomplishments of a horse--why then you are only another horse without

any accomplishments." When thus gently reasoned with, the horse flings

up his heels, kicks the cat, crushes the oyster, eats the haddock and

pursues the nightingale, and that is how the war began.

This apologue is not in the least more fantastic than the facts of the

Teutonic claim. The Germans do really say that Englishmen are only

Sea-Germans, as our haddocks were only sea-horses. They do really say

that the nightingales of Tuscany or the pearls of Hellas must somehow be

German birds or German jewels. They do maintain that the Italian

Renaissance was really the German Renaissance, pure Germans having

Italian names when they were painters, as cockneys sometimes have when

they are hair-dressers. They suggest that Jesus and the great Jews were

Teutonic. One Teutonist I read actually explained the fresh energy of

the French Revolution and the stale privileges of its German enemies by

saying that the Germanic soul awoke in France and attacked the Latin

influence in Germany. On the advantages of this method I need not dwell:

if you are annoyed at Jack Johnson knocking out an English

prize-fighter, you have only to say that it was the whiteness of the

black man that won and the blackness of the white man that was beaten.

But about the Italian Renaissance they are less general and will go into

detail. They will discover (in their researches into 'istry, as Mr.

Gandish said) that Michael Angelo's surname was Buonarotti; and they

will point out that the word "roth" is very like the word "rot." Which,

in one sense, is true enough. Most Englishmen will be content to say it

is all rot and pass on. It is all of a piece with the preposterous

Prussian history, which talks, for instance, about the "perfect

religious tolerance of the Goths"; which is like talking about the legal

impartiality of chicken-pox. He will decline to believe that the Jews

were Germans; though he may perhaps have met some Germans who were Jews.

But deeper than any such practical reply, lies the deep inconsistency of

the parable. It is simply this; that if Teutonism be used for

comprehension it cannot be used for conquest. If all intelligent peoples

are Germans, then Prussians are only the least intelligent Germans. If

the men of Flanders are as German as the men of Frankfort, we can only

say that in saving Belgium we are helping the Germans who are in the

right against the Germans who are in the wrong. Thus in Alsace the

conquerors are forced into the comic posture of annexing the people for

being German and then persecuting them for being French. The French

Teutons who built Rheims must surrender it to the South German Teutons

who have partly built Cologne; and these in turn surrender Cologne to

the North German Teutons, who never built anything, except the wooden

Aunt Sally of old Hindenburg. Every Teuton must fall on his face before

an inferior Teuton; until they all find, in the foul marshes towards the

Baltic, the very lowest of all possible Teutons, and worship him--and

find he is a Slav. So much for Pan-Germanism.

But though Teutonism is indefinable, or at least is by the Teutons

undefined, it is not unreal. A vague but genuine soul does possess all

peoples who boast of Teutonism; and has possessed ourselves, in so far

as we have been touched by that folly. Not a race, but rather a

religion, the thing exists; and in 1870 its sun was at noon. We can most

briefly describe it under three heads.

The victory of the German arms meant before Leipzic, and means now, the

overthrow of a certain idea. That idea is the idea of the Citizen. This

is true in a quite abstract and courteous sense; and is not meant as a

loose charge of oppression. Its truth is quite compatible with a view

that the Germans are better governed than the French. In many ways the

Germans are very well governed. But they might be governed ten thousand

times better than they are, or than anybody ever can be, and still be

as far as ever from governing. The idea of the Citizen is that his

individual human nature shall be constantly and creatively active in

_altering_ the State. The Germans are right in regarding the idea as

dangerously revolutionary. Every Citizen _is_ a revolution. That is, he

destroys, devours and adapts his environment to the extent of his own

thought and conscience. This is what separates the human social effort

from the non-human; the bee creates the honey-comb, but he does not

criticise it. The German ruler really does feed and train the German as

carefully as a gardener waters a flower. But if the flower suddenly

began to water the gardener, he would be much surprised. So in Germany

the people really are educated; but in France the people educates. The

French not only make up the State, but make the State; not only make it,

but remake it. In Germany the ruler is the artist, always painting the

happy German like a portrait; in France the Frenchman is the artist,

always painting and repainting France like a house. No state of social

good that does not mean the Citizen _choosing_ good, as well as getting

it, has the idea of the Citizen at all. To say the Germanies are

naturally at war with this idea is merely to respect them and take them

seriously: otherwise their war on the French Revolution would be only an

ignorant feud. It is this, to them, risky and fanciful notion of the

critical and creative Citizen, which in 1870 lay prostrate under United

Germany--under the undivided hoof.

Nevertheless, when the German says he has or loves freedom, what he says

is not false. He means something; and what he means is the second

principle, which I may summarise as the Irresponsibility of Thought.

Within the iron framework of the fixed State, the German has not only

liberty but anarchy. Anything can be said although, or rather because,

nothing can be done. Philosophy is really free. But this practically

means only that the prisoner's cell has become the madman's cell: that

it is scrawled all over inside with stars and systems, so that it looks

like eternity. This is the contradiction remarked by Dr. Sarolea, in his

brilliant book, between the wildness of German theory and the tameness

of German practice. The Germans _sterilise_ thought, making it active

with a wild virginity; which can bear no fruit.

But though there are so many mad theories, most of them have one root;

and depend upon one assumption. It matters little whether we call it,

with the German Socialists, "the Materialist Theory of History"; or,

with Bismarck, "blood and iron." It can be put most fairly thus: that

all _important_ events of history are biological, like a change of

pasture or the communism of a pack of wolves. Professors are still

tearing their hair in the effort to prove somehow that the Crusaders

were migrating for food like swallows; or that the French Revolutionists

were somehow only swarming like bees. This works in two ways often

accounted opposite; and explains both the German Socialist and the

Junker. For, first, it fits in with Teutonic Imperialism; making the

"blonde beasts" of Germania into lions whose nature it is to eat such

lambs as the French. The highest success of this notion in Europe is

marked by praise given to a race famous for its physical firmness and

fighting breed, but which has frankly pillaged and scarcely pretended

to rule; the Turk, whom some Tories called "the gentleman of Europe."

The Kaiser paused to adore the Crescent on his way to patronise the

Cross. It was corporately embodied when Greece attempted a solitary

adventure against Turkey and was quickly crushed. That English guns

helped to impose the mainly Germanic policy of the Concert upon Crete,

cannot be left out of mind while we are making appeals to Greece--or

considering the crimes of England.

But the same principle serves to keep the internal politics of the

Germans quiet, and prevent Socialism being the practical hope or peril

it has been in so many other countries. It operates in two ways; first,

by a curious fallacy about "the time not being ripe"--as if _time_ could

ever be ripe. The same savage superstition from the forests had infected

Matthew Arnold pretty badly when he made a personality out of the

Zeitgeist--perhaps the only ghost that was ever entirely fabulous. It is

tricked by a biological parallel, by which the chicken always comes out

of the egg "at the right time." He does not; he comes out when he comes

out. The Marxian Socialist will not strike till the clock strikes; and

the clock is made in Germany, and never strikes. Moreover, the theory of

all history as a search for food makes the masses content with having

food and physic, but not freedom. The best working model in the matter

is the system of Compulsory Insurance; which was a total failure and

dead letter in France but has been, in the German sense, a great success

in Germany. It treats employed persons as a fixed, separate, and lower

caste, who must not themselves dispose of the margin of their small

wages. In 1911 it was introduced into England by Mr. Lloyd George, who

had studied its operations in Germany, and, by the Prussian prestige in

"social reform," was passed.

These three tendencies cohere, or are cohering, in an institution which

is not without a great historical basis and not without great modern

conveniences. And as France was the standard-bearer of citizenship in

1798, Germany is the standard-bearer of this alternative solution in

1915. The institution which our fathers called Slavery fits in with, or

rather logically flows from, all the three spirits of which I have

spoken, and promises great advantages to each of them. It can give the

individual worker everything except the power to alter the State--that

is, his own status. Finality (or what certain eleutheromaniacs would

call hopelessness) of status is the soul of Slavery--and of Compulsory

Insurance. Then again, Germany gives the individual exactly the liberty

that has always been given to a slave--the liberty to think, the liberty

to dream, the liberty to rage; the liberty to indulge in any

intellectual hypotheses about the unalterable world and state--such as

have always been free to slaves, from the stoical maxims of Epictetus to

the skylarking fairy tales of Uncle Remus. And it has been truly urged

by all defenders of slavery that, if history has merely a material test,

the material condition of the subordinate under slavery tends to be good

rather than bad. When I once pointed out how precisely the "model

village" of a great employer reproduces the safety and seclusion of an

old slave estate, the employer thought it quite enough to answer

indignantly that he had provided baths, playing-grounds, a theatre,

etc., for his workers. He would probably have thought it odd to hear a

planter in South Carolina boast that he had provided banjos, hymn-books,

and places suitable for the cake-walk. Yet the planter must have

provided the banjos, for a slave cannot own property. And if this

Germanic sociology is indeed to prevail among us, I think some of the

broad-minded thinkers who concur in its prevalence owe something like an

apology to many gallant gentlemen whose graves lie where the last battle

was fought in the Wilderness; men who had the courage to fight for it,

the courage to die for it and, above all, the courage to call it by its

name.

With the acceptance by England of the German Insurance Act, I bring this

sketch of the past relations of the two countries to an end. I have

written this book because I wish, once and for all, to be done with my

friend Professor Whirlwind of Prussia, who has long despaired of really

defending his own country, and has fallen back upon abusing mine. He has

dropped, amid general derision, his attempt to call a thing right when

even the Chancellor who did it called it wrong. But he has an idea that

if he can show that somebody from England somewhere did another wrong,

the two wrongs may make a right. Against the cry of the Roman Catholic

Poles the Prussian has never done, or even pretended to do, anything but

harden his heart; but he has (such are the lovable inconsistencies of

human nature) a warm corner in his heart for the Roman Catholic Irish.

He has not a word to say for himself about the campaign in Belgium, but

he still has many wise, reproachful words to utter about the campaign in

South Africa. I propose to take those words out of his mouth. I will

have nothing to do with the fatuous front-bench pretensions that our

governors always govern well, that our statesmen are never whitewashed

and never in need of whitewash. The only moral superiority I claim is

that of not defending the indefensible. I most earnestly urge my

countrymen not to hide behind thin official excuses, which the sister

kingdoms and the subject races can easily see through. We can confess

that our crimes have been as mountains, and still not be afraid of the

present comparison. There may be, in the eyes of some, a risk in

dwelling in this dark hour on our failures in the past: I believe

profoundly that the risk is all the other way. I believe that the most

deadly danger to our arms to-day lies in any whiff of that self-praise,

any flavour of that moral cowardice, any glimpse of that impudent and

ultimate impenitence, that may make one Boer or Scot or Welshman or

Irishman or Indian feel that he is only smoothing the path for a second

Prussia. I have passed the great part of my life in criticising and

condemning the existing rulers and institutions of my country: I think

it is infinitely the most patriotic thing that a man can do. I have no

illusions either about our past or our present. _I_ think our whole

history in Ireland has been a vulgar and ignorant hatred of the

crucifix, expressed by a crucifixion. I think the South African War was

a dirty work which we did under the whips of moneylenders. I think

Mitchelstown was a disgrace; I think Denshawi was a devilry.

Yet there is one part of life and history in which I would assert the

absolute spotlessness of England. In one department we wear a robe of

white and a halo of innocence. Long and weary as may be the records of

our wickedness, in one direction we have done nothing but good. Whoever

we may have wronged, we have never wronged Germany. Again and again we

have dragged her from under the just vengeance of her enemies, from the

holy anger of Maria Teresa, from the impatient and contemptuous common

sense of Napoleon. We have kept a ring fence around the Germans while

they sacked Denmark and dismembered France. And if we had served our God

as we have served _their_ kings, there would not be to-day one remnant

of them in our path, either to slander or to slay us.

IX--_The Awakening of England_

In October 1912 silent and seemingly uninhabited crags and chasms in the

high western region of the Balkans echoed and re-echoed with a single

shot. It was fired by the hand of a king--real king, who sat listening

to his people in front of his own house (for it was hardly a palace),

and who, in consequence of his listening to the people, not unfrequently

imprisoned the politicians. It is said of him that his great respect for

Gladstone as the western advocate of Balkan freedom was slightly

shadowed by the fact that Gladstone did not succeed in effecting the

bodily capture of Jack the Ripper. This simple monarch knew that if a

malefactor were the terror of the mountain hamlets, his subjects would

expect him personally to take arms and pursue the ruffian; and if he

refused to do so, would very probably experiment with another king. And

the same primitive conception of a king being kept for some kind of

purpose, led them also to expect him to lead in a foreign campaign, and

it was with his own hand that he fired the first shot of the war which

brought down into the dust the ancient empire of the Grand Turk.

His kingdom was little more than the black mountain after which it was

named: we commonly refer to it under its Italian translation of

Montenegro. It is worth while to pause for a moment upon his picturesque

and peculiar community, because it is perhaps the simplest working model

of all that stood in the path of the great Germanic social machine I

have described in the last chapter--stood in its path and was soon to be

very nearly destroyed by its onset. It was a branch of the Serbian stock

which had climbed into this almost inaccessible eyrie, and thence, for

many hundred years, had mocked at the predatory empire of the Turks. The

Serbians in their turn were but one branch of the peasant Slavs,

millions of whom are spread over Russia and subject on many sides to

empires with which they have less sympathy; and the Slavs again, in the

broad features which are important here, are not merely Slavonic but

simply European. But a particular picture is generally more pointed and

intelligible than tendencies which elsewhere are mingled with subtler

tendencies; and of this unmixed European simplicity Montenegro is an

excellent model.

Moreover, the instance of one small Christian State will serve to

emphasise that this is not a quarrel between England and Germany, but

between Europe and Germany. It is my whole purpose in these pages not to

spare my own country where it is open to criticism; and I freely admit

that Montenegro, morally and politically speaking, is almost as much in

advance of England as it is of Germany. In Montenegro there are no

millionaires--and therefore next to no Socialists. As to why there are

no millionaires, it is a mystery, and best studied among the mysteries

of the Middle Ages. By some of the dark ingenuities of that age of

priestcraft a curious thing was discovered--that if you kill every

usurer, every forestaller, every adulterater, every user of false

weights, every fixer of false boundaries, every land-thief, every

water-thief, you afterwards discover by a strange indirect miracle, or

disconnected truth from heaven, that you have no millionaires. Without

dwelling further on this dark matter, we may say that this great gap in

the Montenegrin experience explains the other great gap--the lack of

Socialists. The Class-conscious Proletarian of All Lands is curiously

absent from this land. The reason (I have sometimes fancied) is that the

Proletarian is class-conscious, not because he is a Proletarian of All

Lands, but because he is a Proletarian with no lands. The poor people in

Montenegro have lands--not landlords. They have roots; for the peasant

is the root of the priest, the poet, and the warrior. And _this_, and

not a mere recrimination about acts of violence, is the ground of the

age-long Balkan bitterness against the Turkish conqueror. Montenegrins

are patriotic for Montenegro; but Turks are not patriotic for Turkey.

They never heard of it, in fact. They are Bedouins, as homeless as the

desert. The "wrong horse" of Lord Salisbury was an Arab steed, only

stabled in Byzantium. It is hard enough to rule vagabond people, like

the gypsies. To be ruled by them is impossible.

Nevertheless what was called the nineteenth century, and named with a

sort of transcendental faith (as in a Pythagorean worship of number),

was wearing to its close with reaction everywhere, and the Turk, the

great type of reaction, stronger than ever in the saddle. The most

civilised of the Christian nations overshadowed by the Crescent dared to

attack it and was overwhelmed in a catastrophe that seemed as

unanswerable as Hittin. In England Gladstone and Gladstonism were dead;

and Mr. Kipling, a less mystical Carlyle, was expending a type of praise

upon the British Army which would have been even more appropriate to the

Prussian Army. The Prussian Army ruled Prussia; Prussia ruled Germany;

Germany ruled the Concert of Europe. She was planting everywhere the

appliances of that new servile machinery which was her secret; the

absolute identification of national subordination with business

employment; so that Krupp could count on Kaiser and Kaiser on Krupp.

Every other commercial traveller was pathetically proud of being both a

slave and a spy. The old and the new tyrants had taken hands. The "sack"

of the boss was as silent and fatal as the sack of the Bosphorus. And

the dream of the citizen was at an end.

It was under a sky so leaden and on a road so strewn with bones that the

little mountain democracy with its patriarchal prince went out, first

and before all its friends, on the last and seemingly the most hopeless

of the rebellions against the Ottoman Empire. Only one of the omens

seemed other than disastrous; and even that was doubtful. For the

successful Mediterranean attack on Tripoli while proving the gallantry

of the Italians (if that ever needed proving) could be taken in two

ways, and was seen by many, and probably most, sincere liberals as a

mere extension of the Imperialist reaction of Bosnia and Paardeberg, and

not as the promise of newer things. Italy, it must be remembered, was

still supposed to be the partner of Prussia and the Hapsburgs. For days

that seemed like months the microscopic state seemed to be attempting

alone what the Crusades had failed to accomplish. And for days Europe

and the great powers were thunderstruck, again and yet again, by the

news of Turkish forts falling, Turkish cohorts collapsing, the

unconquerable Crescent going down in blood. The Serbians, the

Bulgarians, the Greeks had gathered and risen from their lairs; and men

knew that these peasants had done what all the politicians had long

despaired of doing, and that the spirit of the first Christian Emperor

was already standing over the city that is named after his name.

For Germany this quite unexpected rush was a reversal of the whole tide

of the world. It was as if the Rhine itself had returned from the ocean

and retired into the Alps. For a long time past every important

political process in Europe had been produced or permitted by Prussia.

She had pulled down ministers in France and arrested reforms in Russia.

Her ruler was acclaimed by Englishmen like Rhodes, and Americans like

Roosevelt, as the great prince of the age. One of the most famous and

brilliant of our journalists called him "the Lord Chief Justice of

Europe." He was the strongest man in Christendom; and he had confirmed

and consecrated the Crescent. And when he had consecrated it a few hill

tribes had risen and trampled it like mire. One or two other things

about the same time, less important in themselves, struck in the

Prussian's ear the same new note of warning and doubt. He sought to

obtain a small advantage on the north-west coast of Africa; and England

seemed to show a certain strange stiffness in insisting on its

abandonment. In the councils over Morocco, England agreed with France

with what did not seem altogether an accidental agreement. But we shall

not be wrong if we put the crucial point of the German surprise and

anger at the attack from the Balkans and the fall of Adrianople. Not

only did it menace the key of Asia and the whole Eastern dream of German

commerce; not only did it offer the picture of one army trained by

France and victorious, and another army trained by Germany and beaten.

There was more than the material victory of the Creusot over the Krupp

gun. It was also the victory of the peasant's field over the Krupp

factory. By this time there was in the North German brain an awful

inversion of all the legends and heroic lives that the human race has

loved. Prussia _hated_ romance. Chivalry was not a thing she neglected;

it was a thing that tormented her as any bully is tormented by an

unanswered challenge. That weird process was completed of which I have

spoken on an earlier page, whereby the soul of this strange people was

everywhere on the side of the dragon against the knight, of the giant

against the hero. Anything unexpected--the forlorn hopes, the

eleventh-hour inspirations, by which the weak can elude the strong, and

which take the hearts of happier men like trumpets--filled the Prussian

with a cold fury, as of a frustrated fate. The Prussian felt as a

Chicago pork butcher would feel if the pigs not only refused to pass

through his machine, but turned into romantic wild boars, raging and

rending, calling for the old hunting of princes and fit to be the crests

of kings.

The Prussian saw these things and his mind was made up. He was silent;

but he laboured: laboured for three long years without intermission at

the making of a military machine that should cut out of the world for

ever such romantic accident or random adventure; a machine that should

cure the human pigs for ever of any illusion that they had wings. That

he did so plot and prepare for an attack that should come from him,

anticipating and overwhelming any resistance, is now, even in the

documents he has himself published, a fact of common sense. Suppose a

man sells all his lands except a small yard containing a well; suppose

in the division of the effects of an old friend he particularly asks for

his razors; suppose when a corded trunk is sent him he sends back the

trunk, but keeps the cord. And then suppose we hear that a rival of his

has been lassoed with a rope, his throat then cut, apparently with a

razor, and his body hidden in a well, we do not call in Sherlock Holmes

to project a preliminary suspicion about the guilty party. In the

discussions held by the Prussian Government with Lord Haldane and Sir

Edward Grey we can now see quite as plainly the meaning of the things

that were granted and the things that were withheld, the things that

would have satisfied the Prussian plotter and the things that did not

satisfy him. The German Chancellor refused an English promise not to be

aggressive and asked instead for an English promise to be neutral. There

is no meaning in the distinction, except in the mind of an aggressor.

Germany proposed a pacific arrangement which forbade England to form a

fighting alliance with France, but permitted Germany to retain her old

fighting alliance with Austria. When the hour of war came she used

Austria, used the old fighting alliance and tried to use the new idea of

English neutrality. That is to say, she used the rope, the razor, and

the well.

But it was either by accident or by individual diplomatic skill that

England at the end of the three years even had her own hands free to

help in frustrating the German plot. The mass of the English people had

no notion of such a plot; and indeed regarded the occasional suggestion

of it as absurd. Nor did even the people who knew best know very much

better. Thanks and even apologies are doubtless due to those who in the

deepest lull of our sleeping partnership with Prussia saw her not as a

partner but a potential enemy; such men as Mr. Blatchford, Mr. Bart

Kennedy, or the late Emil Reich. But there is a distinction to be made.

Few even of these, with the admirable and indeed almost magical

exception of Dr. Sarolea, saw Germany as she was; occupied mainly with

Europe and only incidentally with England; indeed, in the first stages,

not occupied with England at all. Even the Anti-Germans were too

insular. Even those who saw most of Germany's plan saw too much of

England's part in it. They saw it almost wholly as a commercial and

colonial quarrel; and saw its issue under the image of an invasion of

England, which is even now not very probable. This fear of Germany was

indeed a very German fear of Germany. This also conceived the English as

Sea-Germans. It conceived Germany as at war with something like

itself--practical, prosaic, capitalist, competitive Germany, prepared to

cut us up in battle as she cut us out in business. The time of our

larger vision was not yet, when we should realise that Germany was more

deeply at war with things quite unlike herself, things from which we

also had sadly strayed. Then we should remember what we were and see

whence we also had come; and far and high upon that mountain from which

the Crescent was cast down, behold what was everywhere the real enemy of

the Iron Cross--the peasant's cross, which is of wood.

Even our very slight ripples of panic, therefore, were provincial, and

even shallow; and for the most part we were possessed and convinced of

peace. That peace was not a noble one. We had indeed reached one of the

lowest and flattest levels of all our undulating history; and it must be

admitted that the contemptuous calculation with which Germany counted on

our submission and abstention was not altogether unfounded, though it

was, thank God, unfulfilled. The full fruition of our alliances against

freedom had come. The meek acceptance of Kultur in our books and schools

had stiffened what was once a free country with a German formalism and a

German fear. By a queer irony, even the same popular writer who had

already warned us against the Prussians, had sought to preach among the

populace a very Prussian fatalism, pivoted upon the importance of the

charlatan Haeckel. The wrestle of the two great parties had long

slackened into an embrace. The fact was faintly denied, and a pretence

was still made that no pact: existed beyond a common patriotism. But the

pretence failed altogether; for it was evident that the leaders on

either side, so far from leading in divergent directions, were much

closer to each other than to their own followers. The power of these

leaders had enormously increased; but the distance between them had

diminished, or, rather, disappeared. It was said about 1800, in derision

of the Foxite rump, that the Whig Party came down to Parliament in a

four-wheeler. It might literally be said in 1900 that the Whig Party and

the Tory Party came to Parliament in a hansom cab. It was not a case of

two towers rising into different roofs or spires, but founded in the

same soil. It was rather the case of an arch, of which the

foundation-stones on either side might fancy they were two buildings;

but the stones nearest the keystone would know there was only one. This

"two-handed engine" still stood ready to strike, not, indeed, the other

part of itself, but anyone who ventured to deny that it was doing so. We

were ruled, as it were, by a Wonderland king and queen, who cut off our

heads, not for saying they quarrelled but for saying they didn't. The

libel law was now used, not to crush lies about private life, but to

crush truths about public life. Representation had become mere

misrepresentation; a maze of loopholes. This was mainly due to the

monstrous presence of certain secret moneys, on which alone many men

could win the ruinous elections of the age, and which were contributed

and distributed with less check or record than is tolerated in the

lowest trade or club. Only one or two people attacked these funds;

nobody defended them. Through them the great capitalists had the handle

of politics, as of everything else. The poor were struggling hopelessly

against rising prices; and their attempts at collective bargaining, by

the collective refusal of badly-paid work, were discussed in the press,

Liberal and Tory, as attacks upon the State. And so they were; upon the

Servile State.

Such was the condition of England in 1914, when Prussia, now at last

armed to the teeth and secure of triumph, stood up before the world, and

solemnly, like one taking a sacrament, consecrated her campaign with a

crime. She entered by a forbidden door, one which she had herself

forbidden--marching upon France through neutralised Belgium, where every

step was on her broken word. Her neutralised neighbours resisted, as

indeed they, like ourselves, were pledged to do. Instantly the whole

invasion was lit up with a flame of moral lunacy, that turned the

watching nations white who had never known the Prussian. The statistics

of non-combatants killed and tortured by this time only stun the

imagination. But two friends of my own have been in villages sacked by

the Prussian march. One saw a tabernacle containing the Sacrament

patiently picked out in pattern by shot after shot. The other saw a

rocking-horse and the wooden toys in a nursery laboriously hacked to

pieces. Those two facts together will be enough to satisfy some of us of

the name of the Spirit that had passed.

And then a strange thing happened. England, that had not in the modern

sense any army at all, was justified of all her children. Respected

institutions and reputations did indeed waver and collapse on many

sides: though the chief of the states replied worthily to a bribe from

the foreign bully, many other politicians were sufficiently wild and

weak, though doubtless patriotic in intention. One was set to restrain

the journalists, and had to be restrained himself, for being more

sensational than any of them. Another scolded the working-classes in the

style of an intoxicated temperance lecturer. But England was saved by a

forgotten thing--the English. Simple men with simple motives, the chief

one a hate of injustice which grows simpler the longer we stare at it,

came out of their dreary tenements and their tidy shops, their fields

and their suburbs and their factories and their rookeries, and asked for

the arms of men. In a throng that was at last three million men, the

islanders went forth from their island, as simply as the mountaineers

had gone forth from their mountain, with their faces to the dawn.

X--_The Battle of the Marne_

The impression produced by the first week of war was that the British

contingent had come just in time for the end of the world. Or rather,

for any sensitive and civilised man, touched by the modern doubt but by

the equally modern mysticism, that old theocratic vision fell far short

of the sickening terror of the time. For it was a day of judgment in

which upon the throne in heaven and above the cherubim, sat not God, but

another.

The British had been posted at the extreme western end of the allied

line in the north. The other end rested on the secure city and fortress

of Namur; their end rested upon nothing. It is not wholly a sentimental

fancy to say that there was something forlorn in the position of that

loose end in a strange land, with only the sad fields of Northern France

between them and the sea. For it was really round that loose end that

the foe would probably fling the lasso of his charge; it was here that

death might soon be present upon every side. It must be remembered that

many critics, including many Englishmen, doubted whether a rust had not

eaten into this as into other parts of the national life, feared that

England had too long neglected both the ethic and the technique of war,

and would prove a weak link in the chain. The enemy was absolutely

certain that it was so. To these men, standing disconsolately amid the

hedgeless plains and poplars, came the news that Namur was gone, which

was to their captains one of the four corners of the earth. The two

armies had touched; and instantly the weaker took an electric shock

which told of electric energy, deep into deep Germany, battery behind

battery of abysmal force. In the instant it was discovered that the

enemy was more numerous than they had dreamed. He was actually more

numerous even than they discovered. Every oncoming horseman doubled as

in a drunkard's vision; and they were soon striving without speech in a

nightmare of numbers. Then all the allied forces at the front were

overthrown in the tragic battle of Mons; and began that black retreat,

in which so many of our young men knew war first and at its worst in

this terrible world; and so many never returned.

In that blackness began to grow strange emotions, long unfamiliar to our

blood. Those six dark days are as full of legends as the six centuries

of the Dark Ages. Many of these may be exaggerated fancies, one was

certainly an avowed fiction, others are quite different from it and more

difficult to dissipate into the daylight. But one curious fact remains

about them if they were all lies, or even if they were all deliberate

works of art. Not one of them referred to those close, crowded, and

stirring three centuries which are nearest to us, and which alone are

covered in this sketch, the centuries during which the Teutonic

influence had expanded itself over our islands. Ghosts were there

perhaps, but they were the ghosts of forgotten ancestors. Nobody saw

Cromwell or even Wellington; nobody so much as thought about Cecil

Rhodes. Things were either seen or said among the British which linked

them up, in matters deeper than any alliance, with the French, who spoke

of Joan of Arc in heaven above the fated city; or the Russians who

dreamed of the Mother of God with her hand pointing to the west. They

were the visions or the inventions of a mediæval army; and a prose poet

was in line with many popular rumours when he told of ghostly archers

crying "Array, Array," as in that long-disbanded yeomanry in which I

have fancied Cobbett as carrying a bow. Other tales, true or only

symptomatic, told of one on a great white horse who was not the victor

of Blenheim or even the Black Prince, but a faint figure out of far-off

martyrologies--St. George. One soldier is asserted to have claimed to

identify the saint because he was "on every quid." On the coins, St.

George is a Roman soldier.

But these fancies, if they were fancies, might well seem the last sickly

flickerings of an old-world order now finally wounded to the death. That

which was coming on, with the whole weight of a new world, was something

that had never been numbered among the Seven Champions of Christendom.

Now, in more doubtful and more hopeful days, it is almost impossible to

repicture what was, for those who understood, the gigantic finality of

the first German strides. It seemed as if the forces of the ancient

valour fell away to right and left; and there opened a grand, smooth

granite road right to the gate of Paris, down which the great Germania

moved like a tall, unanswerable sphinx, whose pride could destroy all

things and survive them. In her train moved, like moving mountains,

Cyclopean guns that had never been seen among men, before which walled

cities melted like wax, their mouths set insolently upwards as if

threatening to besiege the sun. Nor is it fantastic to speak so of the

new and abnormal armaments; for the soul of Germany was really expressed

in colossal wheels and cylinders; and her guns were more symbolic than

her flags. Then and now, and in every place and time, it is to be noted

that the German superiority has been in a certain thing and of a certain

kind. It is _not_ unity; it is not, in the moral sense, discipline.

Nothing can be more united in a moral sense than a French, British, or

Russian regiment. Nothing, for that matter, could be more united than a

Highland clan at Killiecrankie or a rush of religious fanatics in the

Soudan. What such engines, in such size and multiplicity, really meant

was this: they meant a type of life naturally intolerable to happier and

more healthy-minded men, conducted on a larger scale and consuming

larger populations than had ever been known before. They meant cities

growing larger than provinces, factories growing larger than cities;

they meant the empire of the slum. They meant a degree of detailed

repetition and dehumanised division of labour, to which no man born

would surrender his brief span in the sunshine, if he could hope to beat

his ploughshare into a sword. The nations of the earth were not to

surrender to the Kaiser; they were to surrender to Krupp, his master and

theirs; the French, the British, the Russians were to surrender to Krupp

as the Germans themselves, after a few swiftly broken strikes, had

already surrendered to Krupp. Through every cogwheel in that

incomparable machinery, through every link in that iron and unending

chain, ran the mastery and the skill of a certain kind of artist; an

artist whose hands are never idle through dreaming or drawn back in

disgust or lifted in wonder or in wrath; but sure and tireless in their

touch upon the thousand little things that make the invisible machinery

of life. That artist was there in triumph; but he had no name. The

ancient world called him the Slave.

From this advancing machine of millions, the slighter array of the

Allies, and especially the British at their ultimate outpost, saved

themselves by a succession of hair's-breadth escapes and what must have

seemed to the soldiers the heartrending luck of a mouse before a cat.

Again and again Von Kluck's cavalry, supported by artillery and

infantry, clawed round the end of the British force, which eluded it as

by leaping back again and again. Sometimes the pursuer was, so to speak,

so much on top of his prey that it could not even give way to him; but

had to hit such blows as it could in the hope of checking him for the

instant needed for escape. Sometimes the oncoming wave was so close that

a small individual accident, the capture of one man, would mean the

washing out of a whole battalion. For day after day this living death

endured. And day after day a certain dark truth began to be revealed,

bit by bit, certainly to the incredulous wonder of the Prussians, quite

possibly to the surprise of the French, and quite as possibly to the

surprise of themselves; that there was something singular about the

British soldiers. That singular thing may be expressed in a variety of

ways; but it would be almost certainly expressed insufficiently by

anyone who had not had the moral courage to face the facts about his

country in the last decades before the war. It may perhaps be best

expressed by saying that some thousands of Englishmen were dead: and

that England was not.

The fortress of Maubeuge had gaped, so to speak, offering a refuge for

the unresting and tormented retreat; the British Generals had refused it

and continued to fight a losing fight in the open for the sake of the

common plan. At night an enormous multitude of Germans had come

unexpectedly through the forest and caught a smaller body of the British

in Landrecies; failed to dislodge them and lost a whole battalion in

that battle of the darkness. At the extreme end of the line

Smith-Dorrien's division, who seemed to be nearly caught or cut off, had

fought with one gun against four, and so hammered the Germans that they

were forced to let go their hold; and the British were again free. When

the blowing up of a bridge announced that they had crossed the last

river, something other than that battered remnant was saved; it was the

honour of the thing by which we live.

The driven and defeated line stood at last almost under the walls of

Paris; and the world waited for the doom of the city. The gates seemed

to stand open; and the Prussian was to ride into it for the third and

the last time: for the end of its long epic of liberty and equality was

come. And still the very able and very French individual on whom rested

the last hope of the seemingly hopeless Alliance stood unruffled as a

rock, in every angle of his sky-blue jacket and his bulldog figure. He

had called his bewildered soldiers back when they had broken the

invasion at Guise; he had silently digested the responsibility of

dragging on the retreat, as in despair, to the last desperate leagues

before the capital; and he stood and watched. And even as he watched the

whole huge invasion swerved.

Out through Paris and out and around beyond Paris, other men in dim blue

coats swung out in long lines upon the plain, slowly folding upon Von

Kluck like blue wings. Von Kluck stood an instant; and then, flinging a

few secondary forces to delay the wing that was swinging round on him,

dashed across the Allies' line at a desperate angle, to smash it in the

centre as with a hammer. It was less desperate than it seemed; for he

counted, and might well count, on the moral and physical bankruptcy of

the British line and the end of the French line immediately in front of

him, which for six days and nights he had chased before him like autumn

leaves before a whirlwind. Not unlike autumn leaves, red-stained,

dust-hued, and tattered, they lay there as if swept into a corner. But

even as their conquerors wheeled eastwards, their bugles blew the

charge; and the English went forward through the wood that is called

Creçy, and stamped it with their seal for the second time, in the

highest moment of all the secular history of man.

But it was not now the Creçy in which English and French knights had met

in a more coloured age, in a battle that was rather a tournament. It was

a league of all knights for the remains of all knighthood, of all

brotherhood in arms or in arts, against that which is and has been

radically unknightly and radically unbrotherly from the beginning. Much

was to happen after--murder and flaming folly and madness in earth and

sea and sky; but all men knew in their hearts that the third Prussian

thrust had failed, and Christendom was delivered once more. The empire

of blood and iron rolled slowly back towards the darkness of the

northern forests; and the great nations of the West went forward; where

side by side as after a long lover's quarrel, went the ensigns of St.

Denys and St. George.

_NOTE ON THE WORD "ENGLISH"_

_The words "England" and "English" as used here require a word of

explanation, if only to anticipate the ire of the inevitable Scot. To

begin with, the word "British" involves a similar awkwardness. I have

tried to use it in the one or two cases that referred to such things as

military glory and unity: though I am sure I have failed of full

consistency in so complex a matter. The difficulty is that this sense of

glory and unity, which should certainly cover the Scotch, should also

cover the Irish. And while it is fairly safe to call a Scotsman a North

Briton (despite the just protest of Stevenson), it is very unsafe indeed

to call an Irishman a West Briton. But there is a deeper difficulty. I

can assure the Scot that I say "England," not because I deny Scottish

nationality, but because I affirm it. And I can say, further, that I

could not here include Scots in the thesis, simply because I could not

include them in the condemnation. This book is a study, not of a disease

but rather of a weakness, which has only been predominant in the

predominant partner. It would not be true, for instance, to say either

of Ireland or Scotland that the populace lacked a religion; but I do

think that British policy as a whole has suffered from the English lack

of one, with its inevitable result of plutocracy and class contempt_.

End of Project Gutenberg's The Crimes of England, by G.K. Chesterton