There is a fine theory of Hegel's that the universe exists in order
to realize freedom. In Oriental despotisms, he tells us, only one man
was free. In ancient republican cities a minority, the aristocracy
of citizens, obtained freedom. Now at last freedom has extended to
all; not, however, as we might fondly suppose, in free and casual
America, but under the perfect organization of the Prussian monarchy.
For freedom in the mouth of German philosophers has a very special
meaning. It does not refer to any possibility of choice nor to any
private initiative. It means rather that sense of freedom which we
acquire when we do gladly and well what we should have to do anyhow, as
when in passing from a close room into the open air we say we breathe
freely at last. German freedom is like the freedom of the angels in
heaven who see the face of God and cannot sin. It lies in such a deep
love and understanding of what is actually established that you would
not have it otherwise; you appropriate and bless it all and feel it to
be the providential expression of your own spirit. You are enlarged
by sympathy with your work, your country, and the universe, until you
are no longer conscious of the least distinction between the Creator,
the state, and yourself. Your compulsory service then becomes perfect
freedom.
For liberal freedom, for individualism, these philosophers have a
great contempt. They say a man is nothing but the sum of his relations
to other things, and if he should throw off one after another these
constitutive bonds, he would find his private residuum of a self to be
a mathematical point and a naked cipher, incapable of willing or of
choosing anything. And they further say that a dutiful soul is right in
feeling that the world it accepts and co-operates with is its own work;
for, according to their metaphysics, the world is only an idea which
each man makes after his own image, and even as you are, so is the
world you imagine you live in. Only a foolish recalcitrant person, who
does not recognize the handiwork of his own spirit about him, rebels
against it, and thereby cancels his natural freedom; for everywhere he
finds contradictions and closed doors and irksome necessities, being
divided against himself and constantly bidding his left hand undo what
his right hand is doing. So that, paradoxical as it may seem, it is
only when you conform that you are free, while if you rebel and secede
you become a slave. Your spiritual servitude in such a case would only
be manifesting itself in a phenomenal form if the government should put
you in prison.
The national expression of this kind of freedom is what the Germans
call _Kultur_, a word not well understood in other countries. Every
nation has certain characteristic institutions, certain representative
writers and statesmen, past and present, certain forms of art and
industry, a certain type of policy and moral inspiration. These are
its _Kultur_, its national tradition and equipment. When by education
the individual is brought to understand all these things, to share
their spirit and life, and to be able to carry them forward faithfully,
then he has absorbed the _Kultur_ in his own person. _Kultur_ is
transmitted by systematic education. It is not, like culture, a matter
of miscellaneous private attainments and refined tastes, but, rather,
participation in a national purpose and in the means of executing it.
The adept in this _Kultur_ can live freely the life of his country,
possessing its secret inspiration, valuing what it pursues and finding
his happiness in those successes which he can help it to attain.
_Kultur_ is a lay religion, which includes ecclesiastical religion and
assigns to it its due place.
German _Kultur_ resembles the polity of ancient cities and of the
Christian church in that it constitutes a definite, authoritative,
earnest discipline, a training which is practical and is thought
to be urgent and momentous. It is a system to be propagated and to
be imposed. It is all-inclusive and demands entire devotion from
everybody. At the same time it has this great advantage over the
classic systems, that it admits variations. At Sparta, in Plato's
Republic, and in the Catholic church the aims and constitution of
society were expected to remain always the same. The German ideal,
on the contrary, not only admits evolution, but insists upon it.
Like music, it is essentially a form of movement. According to the
philosophers, however, the form of this movement is fixed by the
absolute genius of the composer, and prescribes the way in which the
changes shall go on. Evolution thus introduces life into this ideal,
but does not admit ambiguities. In this sense the German law of
progression is as inexorable as the classic model of form.
The more reasonable theorists of German _Kultur_ introduce another
qualification, which, if admitted, is of the greatest importance,
namely, that German _Kultur_ is not to be extended to other nations.
Some make a special point of contrasting the universal claims of the
Roman and Napoleonic empires and of the Catholic church with the
aspirations of German genius, which, they say, is infinite inwardly,
being capable of endless growth and modification by men of Teutonic
blood, yet is limited externally or in space, in that it is not
communicable to other races. Non-Teutons should never be summoned,
therefore, to acquire the German spirit, which they would only pollute.
Their proper rôle is rather to stand by, no doubt overawed and filled
with admiration, but left without hope or fear of being assimilated.
Yet as the church could admit that there might be unconscious and
virtual Christians among the heathen, who might by exception be
saved, so there may be sporadic manifestations of Teutonic genius in
unforeseen quarters. Shakespeare, Dante, and Christ were virtual and
unconscious Germans.
There is, of course, a less indulgent Germanism, which has on its side
the authority of Fichte and Hegel, the enthusiasm of the pan-Germans
and that lust for boundless ascendancy which enterprise and war
naturally foster in anybody who has carried them on passionately and
successfully. According to this stricter view, the whole world is to
be subjugated and purified by the German nation, which alone inherits
the undefiled language and religion of Eden, and must assign to the
remaining creole races, descended from savages and ultimately perhaps
from monkeys or devils, such tasks as they are capable of. The masters,
being by nature generous and kind, will allow their slaves, after
their work is done, to bask in despicable happiness, since happiness
is all that slaves are capable of living for; but they will be proudly
commanded by a race of hard, righteous, unhappy, heroic German experts,
with blue eyes fixed on the eternal ideal.
The admission that German _Kultur_ is merely national, which might
seem to promise peace and goodwill, may be turned in this way into a
sinister claim to absolute dominion. The ancients and the church had
supposed that all men, though endowed with talent and goodness in the
most various degrees, had qualitatively the same nature. The same
passions, the same arts, and the same salvation were proper to them
all. The servant, in furthering the aims of his betters, served what
his own soul potentially loved and was capable of appropriating; there
could be religion and love in his subordination. Reciprocally the
master could feel respect and affection for his servants, who were his
wards and his god-children. The best things in classic life--religion,
poetry, comradeship, moral sagacity--were shared by the humblest
classes and expressed their genius. The temple, the church, the agora,
the theatre, Socrates, and the saints were of the people.
German _Kultur_, on the contrary, boasts that it is not the expression
of diffused human nature, but the product of a special and concentrated
free will. It is therefore incommunicable, unrepresentative. It is not
felt by any one else to realize his ideal, but seems foreign to him,
forced and unamiable. Every nation loves its idiosyncrasies and, until
it reflects, thinks its own balance of faculties, like its language,
more natural than other people's. But the prophets of Germanism have
turned this blameless love of home and its sanctities into a deliberate
dogma that everything German has a divine superiority. This dogma they
have foisted on a flattered and trustful nation, with the command to
foist it on the rest of the world. The fatuity of this is nothing new,
many nations and religions having shared it in their day, and we could
afford to laugh at it, if by direct and indirect coercion it did not
threaten to trespass upon our liberties.
What is universally acceptable in German _Kultur_ is what it contains
that is not German but human, what with praiseworthy docility it
has borrowed from the ancients, from Christianity, from the less
intentional culture of its modern neighbours. The Teutonic accent which
these elements have acquired is often very engaging; it adds to them a
Gothic charm for the lack of which mankind would be the poorer. But the
German manner, in art, in philosophy, in government, is no better--in
its broad appeal to human nature we may fairly say it is worse--than
the classic manner which it hopes to supersede. It is avowedly a
product of will, arbitrary, national, strained; it is not superior
to what other nations possess or may create but only different, not
advanced but eccentric. To study it and use it for a stimulus may be
profitable in times and places of spiritual famine or political chaos,
but to impose it as normal, not to say as supreme, would be a plain
invasion of human liberty.
42