Returning now finally to our starting-point, the proposition that
"Germanism is Judaism," we are able to see its full grotesqueness. If
Germanism resembles Judaism, it is as a monkey resembles a man. Where
it does suggest Judaism is in the sense it gives the meanest of its
citizens that they form part of a great historic organism, which moves
to great purposes: a sense which the poorer Englishman has
unfortunately lacked, and which is only now awakening in the common
British breast. But even here the affinities of Germany are rather
with Japan than with Judæa. For in Japan, too, beneath all the
romance of Bushido and the Samurai, lies the asphyxiation of the
individual and his sacrifice to the State. It is the resurrection of
those ancient Pagan Constitutions for which individuality scarcely
existed, which could expose infants or kill off old men because the
State was the supreme ethical end; it is the revival on a greater
scale of the mediæval city commune, which sucked its vigorous life
from the veins of its citizens. Even so Prussia, by welding its
subservient citizens into one gigantic machine of aggression, has
given a new reading to the Gospel: "Blessed are the meek, for they
shall inherit the earth."
Nietzsche, who, though he strove to upset the old Hebrew values, saw
clearly through the real Prussian peril, defined such a State as that
"in which the slow suicide of all is called Life," and "a welcome
service unto all preachers of death"--a cold, ill-smelling, monstrous
idol. Nor is this the only affinity between Prussia and Japan. "We
are," boasts a Japanese writer, "a people of the present and the
Tangible, of the Broad Daylight and the Plainly Visible."
But Germany was not always thus. "High deeds, O Germans, are to come
from you," wrote Wordsworth in his "Sonnets dedicated to Liberty." And
it throws light upon the nature of Missions to recall that when she
lay at the feet of Napoleon after Jena, the mission proclaimed for her
by Fichte was one of peace and righteousness--to penetrate the life of
humanity by her religion--and he denounced the dreams of universal
monarchy which would destroy national individuality. Calling on his
people as "the consecrated and inspired ones of a Divine world-plan,"
"To you," he says, "out of all other modern nations the germs of human
perfection are especially committed. It is yours to found an empire of
mind and reason--to destroy the dominion of rude physical power as the
ruler of the world." And throwing this mission backwards, he sees in
what the outer world calls the invasion of the Roman Empire by the
Goths and Huns the proof that the Germans have always stemmed the tide
of tyrant domination. But Fichte belonged to the generation of Kant
and Beethoven. Hegel, coming a little later, though as non-nationalist
as Goethe, and a welcomer of the Napoleonic invasion, yet prophesied
that if the Germans were once forced to cast off their inertia, they,
"by preserving in their contact with outward things the intensity of
their inner life, will perchance surpass their teachers": and in
curiously prophetic language he called for a hero "to realize by blood
and iron the political regeneration of Germany."
If Treitschke, too, believed in force, he had a high moral ideal for
his nation. The other nations are feeble and decadent. Germany is to
hold the sceptre of the nations, so as to ensure the peace of the
world. It is only in Bernhardi that we find war in itself glorified as
the stimulus of nations. Even this ideal has a perverted nobility; as
Pol Arcas, a modern Greek writer, says: "If the devil knew he had
horns the cherubim would offer him their place." And though it was only
in the swelled head of the conqueror that the brutal philosophy of the
Will-to-Power germinated, it was not so much the "blood and iron" of
Junkerdom that perverted Prussia--Junkerdom still lives simply--as the
gross industrial prosperity that followed on the victory of 1870. A
modern German author describes his countrymen--it is true he has turned
Mohammedan, probably out of disgust--as tragically degenerated and
turned into a gold-greedy, pleasure-seeking, title-hungry pack. This
industrial transformation of the nobler soul of Germany is by
Verhaeren--attacking Judaism from another angle--ascribed to its Jews,
so it is comforting to remember that when England started the East
India Company there was scarcely a Jew in England. No, Germany is
clearly where England was in the seventeenth century, and in Prussia
England meets her past face to face. Her past, but infinitely more
conscious and consequent than her "Rule, Britannia" period, with a
ruthless logic that does not shrink from any conclusions. While
England's right hand hardly knew what her left was doing, Germany's
right hand is drawing up a philosophic justification of her sinister
activities. There is in Henry James's posthumous novel--"The Sense of
the Past"--a young man who gets locked up in the Past and cannot get
back to his own era. This is the fate that now menaces civilization.
Nor is the civilization that followed the struggle for America by the
scramble for Africa entirely blameless. Germany, federated too late for
the first mêlée and smarting under centuries of humiliation--did not
Louis XIV insolently seize Strassburg?--is avenging on our century the
sins of the seventeenth.
So far from Germanism being synonymous with Judaism, its analogies are
to be sought within the five maritime countries which preceded
Germany, albeit less efficiently, in the path of militarism. It is the
same alliance as prevailed everywhere between the traders and the
armies and navies, and the Kaiser's crime consists mainly in turning
back the movement of the world which through the Hague Conferences was
approaching brotherhood, or at least a mitigation of the horrors of
war. His blasphemies are no less archaic. He repeats Oliver Cromwell,
but with less simplicity, while his artistic aspiration complicates
the Puritan with the Cavalier. "From childhood," he is quoted as
saying, "I have been under the influence of five men--Alexander,
Julius Cæsar, Theodoric II, Frederick the Great, and Napoleon." No
great man moulds himself thus like others. It is but a theatrical
greatness. But anyhow none of these names are Jewish, and not thus
were "the Kings of Jerusalem" even "six thousand years ago." Our kings
had the dull duty of copying out and studying the Torah, and the
Rabbis reminded monarchy that the Torah demands forty-eight
qualifications, whereas royalty only thirty, and that the crown of a
good name is the best of all. Compare the German National Anthem
"Heil dir im Siegeskranz" with the noble prayer for the Jewish King in
the seventy-second psalm, if you wish to understand the difference
between Judaism and Germanism. This King, too, is to conquer his
enemies, but he is also to redeem the needy from oppression and
violence, "and precious will their blood be in his sight."