By Emile Verhaeren.
The Belgian poet whom Maurice Maeterlinck preferred should
rank among the Immortals of the French Academy when that
honor was bestowed upon himself, has contributed to Les
Annales the following account of Germany and the German
people. The translation is that appearing on June 11 in The
Suffragette of England.
Life is not a means; life is an end. That is what we must tell
ourselves in order really to live in this world. Hence the obligation
to perfect life, to make it high and beautiful, to make a masterpiece
of it. Hence too our contempt and hatred for those who wish to tarnish
life, either by their thoughts or by their deeds.
Germany behaves as though it were the most backward among nations. And
indeed it is in spite of appearances essentially feudal. There is
perhaps a German culture, but there is no German _civilization_.
One may be well informed and yet be hardly civilized. A sense of duty
to humanity, a sense of pride, a sense of liberty are independent,
certainly not of intelligence, but are independent of mere knowledge
of accumulated facts.
The German professor is a walking library. He collects, he arranges,
he comments. Arrangement and discipline with him take the place of
everything else, and they inculcate in him the spirit of dependence
and of servility. It is perhaps because he classifies so much that he
is so dully submissive. Everything according to his view is an
ascending or descending scale. Everything is in its compartment.
How, then, can we be surprised if everything becomes materialized and
the mind of each Teuton can lay claim to be nothing more than a sort
of stiff and dingy compartment, in a sort of social chessboard.
It has already been said: The German invents almost nothing. He works
upon the inventions of other people. In order to invent he would have
to possess the spirit of rebellion against that which is. He is
incapable of that spirit. He is a being who always accepts.
But as soon as a new discovery has been made by others the German gets
hold of it. He examines it patiently. He turns and returns it this
way, that way, and every way. He, as it were, criticises it. He thus
succeeds in augmenting its power. Moreover, he wishes that it shall
serve a practical purpose and be classified accordingly, just as he
himself serves and is classified in life.
Never have the Germans opened up a great road in science. They open up
only bypaths. Leibnitz and Kant joined their paths to the royal high
road of Descartes. Haeckel would hardly have existed if Darwin had not
existed. Koch and Behring are dependent upon the labors of Pasteur.
This second-hand science is excellent as a means of attracting
mediocre minds. To work, each in his little corner, at solving some
secondary question, and to believe one's self a somebody when one is
hardly anybody, flatters the universal vanity. All the little
provincial universities of Germany can live in the illusion that they
are full of learned men--thanks to the German conception of what is
learned and serious!
It is a system of regimenting in great barracks of laboratories. It is
the absolute negation of the spirit of initiative of spontaneity and
it is above all the negation of the spirit of protest and revolt.
If the German people had been truly civilized they would never have
maintained silence before the assassination of Belgium. Even among
those whose ideas are contrary to the existing political order in
Germany, none has risen up against this crime admitted and proclaimed
at the beginning of the war in full Parliament by the Chancellor
Bethmann-Hollweg himself. The universal astonishment at such a silence
was so great that even today the world has not recovered from it.
Apart from Liebknecht the whole of German Social Democracy is
dishonored: it is desired to expel the German Socialists from the
International Socialist Movement. They excuse themselves; they
aggravate their fault. They say:
"We should have been arrested and imprisoned." The world replies:
"Are they then afraid of dying?"
In the German Socialist Party everything has been reduced to method
and organized as in the German universities and the German Army.
There were I know not how many Socialist electors; German Socialism
was thought to be already triumphant and invincible. People said:
"They _are_ Germany!"
The German Socialists were held up as an example to all the
democracies of the earth.
Those who swore by the German Socialists affirmed that they would
devour Kaiserism when it should become necessary. But last August in
one hour in the Reichstag it was the German Socialist Party that was
devoured!
When recently certain German Socialists visited the _Maison du Peuple_
of Brussels they expressed astonishment that the Socialists of Belgium
should attach so much importance to the invasion of their country.
"When then binds you to your country?" they asked.
"Honor," was the reply.
"Honor! Honor! that is a very bourgeois ideal," interrupted the
Germans.
Yet a true civilization has as its framework precisely honor. Honor is
not a bourgeois ideal, but an aristocratic ideal. It was slowly
created by the flower of humanity throughout the centuries. When force
becomes educated, force opposes itself. It limits and incloses itself.
It becomes intelligent and tempered by reserve and by tact. Brutal
force thus changes into moral force, power becomes justice.
The more a nation lends itself to such a change, the more it rises
from the material plane toward the spiritual plane. The more it
enshrines in its institution respect for humanity as a whole, the
greater and more civilized it becomes. Such a nation remains faithful
to its pledged word; neither interest nor even necessity moves it to
commit felony. It loves to protect and not to oppress those who are
weaker than itself. It has at heart the work of propagating throughout
the world certain principles of social life which certainly are
utopian, but are yet beautiful to have before the eyes and in the
heart, in order to live not only for the present, but also for the
future.
These admirable principles which may never be put wholly into
practice, but toward which we must try to grow always nearer, are the
expression of the deepest human generosity. They are the radical
negation of brutal and primitive force; they incline the world toward
a unanimous and serene peace. They have based on faith the infinite
perfectibility of conscience. Only a nation of a high degree of
civilization can conceive of relations so perfect between human beings
and cherish dreams so great.
Germany was never capable of this. The individual German is the least
subtle and the least susceptible to education of any in the world.
It has been my lot to take part in certain European capitals in a
number of reunions where English, French, Italians, and Germans came
together and conversed. They were all, I was assured, distinguished
people, of whom their respective nations might be proud. Now, the
German was rarely to be seen in an excellent attitude. He was at once
embarrassed and arrogant. He lacked refinement. His politeness was
clumsy. He was as though afraid of seeming not to know everything. The
most eccentric taste seemed to him the best taste. To him to be up to
date was to be up to the minute. He would have been wretched if any
one in his presence had claimed to be up to the second.
As soon as he had the chance to speak and got a hearing, he
inaugurated, as it were, a course of lectures. Clearness was not at
all necessary to him. One rarely understood precisely what he meant.
The fastidiousness and subtlety which led others to seek perfection in
phrase and thought had little attraction for him. With what heaviness
the German diplomat discusses matters at the council table! With what
clumsiness the German conqueror plants himself in a conquered country!
While France, at the end of half a century, makes herself beloved in
Savoy, at Mentone, and at Nice, while in the space of two centuries
she assimilates Lille and Dunkirk and Strasburg and Alsace; while
England in a few decades unites to her Egypt and the Cape, Germany
remains detested in Poland, Schleswig, and in Alsace-Lorraine. Germany
is essentially the persona ingrata everywhere it presents itself. It
knows only the methods that divide, and not those which unite. Germany
makes proclamations that act upon the mind as the frost acts upon
plants. Germany knows neither how to attract nor how to charm nor how
to civilize, because she has no personal and profound moral force.
Europe under the successive spiritual hegemonies of Athens, Rome, and
Paris remained the most admirable centre of human development that has
ever been.
Under German hegemony Europe would move toward a sort of gloomy and
hard organization under which everything would be impeccable, arranged
only because everything would be tyrannized over from above.
For the true Germany--we have today the sad but immovable conviction
of this--was never that of Goethe, of Beethoven, nor of Heine. It was
that of implacable Landgraves and fierce soldiers.
For thousands of years Germany has let loose its hordes upon Europe;
Vandals, Visigoths, Alains, Franks, Herules. Germany continues to do
this at the present day. It is Germany's terrible and sinister
function.
Only let us not deceive ourselves as to this point in future, Germany
is the dangerous nation because it is the uncivilizable nation,
because its castles, its fields, and its barracks have remained the
inexhausted, and perhaps the inexhaustible, reservoirs of human
ferocity.