Germany and the Germans Part 24

It is, after all, the little differences that count. If politically and socially Germany were a little more sure of herself, if she were not ever omnia tuta timens Dido; and if England were not as ever quite so sure of herself, I believe intercourse between them would be less strained.

"The little gnat-like buzzings shrill, The hurdy-gurdies of the street.

The common curses of the will?

These wrap the cerements round our feet."

The smothered voice, the tepid manner, the affected and hesitating under-statement, of a certain middlish cla.s.s of English men and women, and, alas, their American imitators, who are striving toward their comical interpretation of the Vere de Vere manner, are the promoters of guffaws in private, and uneasiness in public, between nations, to a far greater extent than the bold individualist, whose voice and manners, good or bad, are all his own. It is these small attritions that wear us down, and produce a sub-acid dislike between nations as between individuals. It is these that prepare the ground for a fine crop of misunderstandings.

But are we not to know our neighbors the English, the Germans, the French? I for one consider that not to know German and Germany, for example, is nowadays not to be fully educated. Most of us, however, have had our nerves unstrung by the speeding-up process that has gone on all over the world of late. We have lost somewhat the power to know people and to let them alone at the same time. Goethe, one of the coolest and wisest of men, maintains: "Certain defects are necessary for the existence of individuality. One would not be pleased if old friends were to lay aside certain peculiarities."

We should at least give every man as fair a chance to receive our good opinion as we give a picture. We should put him in a good light before we criticise him. We should take time enough to do that to other nations, as well as to individuals. I have always had much sympathy for a certain Roman general. He was blind, and a painter who painted him with two large eyes, he rebuked; another painter, who painted him in profile, he rewarded.

It is, after all, something of an art to know people, so that the knowledge is serviceable, so that you can depict them to yourself and to others, not as they are as opposed to you, but as they are as a complement and help to you.

"No human quality is so well wove In warp and woof, but there's some flaw in it; I've known a brave man fly a shepherd's cur, A wise man so demean himself, drivelling idiocy Had wellnigh been ashamed on't. For your crafty, Your worldly-wise man, he, above the rest, Weaves his own snares so fine, he's often caught in them."

He who does not make allowances for weaknesses and differences in his study of human affairs is still in the infant cla.s.s. It is a grave danger to every state that critics, smart or shallow, with their tu quoque weapons, their silly ridicule, their emphasis upon differences as though they were disasters, their constant failure to recognize the value of certain weaknesses, their stupidity in not painting great men who happen to be blind, in profile, and their harping upon the flaws, and their neglect of the fine texture of human qualities that are strange to them, that these critics are not muzzled, or, if that is impossible, disregarded.

They make it appear that amicable relations between nations are next to impossible. If you escape one danger of offending, you are sure to give offence in some other way, they seem to say. They are hysterical in their self-consciousness, "as if a man did flee from a lion and a bear met him, or went in the house and leaned his hand on the wall and a serpent bit him." Sir Edward Grey writes on this subject: "I sometimes think that half the difficulties of foreign policy arise from the exceeding ingenuity of different countries in attributing motives and intentions to the governments of each other. As far as I can observe, the press of various countries is much more fertile in inventing motives and intentions for the governments of the different countries than the foreign ministers of these countries are themselves. Foreign governments and our own government live from hand to mouth and have fewer deep plans than people might suppose. There is an old warning that you should not spend too much time in looking at the dark cupboard for the black cat that is not there, and I think if sometimes we were a little less suspicious of deep design or motive that the affairs of the world would progress more smoothly."

The trouble lies in our undertaking the impossible, to the neglect of the obvious and the possible. The basic fact of nationality is a preference for our own ways, customs, and habits over those of other people. If the Chinese and j.a.panese, the Servians and Albanians, the English and the Germans liked one another as well as they like their own, there would be no nationalism to protect or to preserve. Such racial and traditional liking of nation for nation is impossible of achievement. No journeyings, speechifyings, banquets, or compliments will bring it about. On the contrary, I am not sure that it is not these very differences which cheer us and give us a new flavor in our pleasure in living, when we cross the Atlantic, the Channel, or the Rhine. What we should strive for is not social and racial absorption, but social and racial difference and distinction, with that pride in our own which makes for patience in the understanding of others.

It is the petty, self-conscious American who hates the English, the provincial Englishman who hates the German, the socially insecure German who hates the Frenchman, the Englishman, and the American.

Those of us who are poised, secure, satisfied, and at bottom proud of our race, our breeding, and our country, are neither irritable nor irritating in the matter of international relations. We have enough to do, and let others alone. Let us dine one another, criticise one another in the effort to improve ourselves, praise one another where the praise serves to establish our own ideals; but let us give up this forced and awkward courting by banquets, deputations, and conferences.

Let us study the great art of leaving one another alone. This is a time-hallowed doctrine. The greatest of all satirists and critics of manners knew this secret of successful intercourse with one another.

One of the characters in the "Frogs" of Aristophanes is made to say: "Don't come trespa.s.sing upon my mind; you have a house of your own."

Propinquity does not necessarily entail intimacy; as the world grows smaller, more and more people think so, perhaps often enough only to escape from themselves, a favorite form of elopement these days. Some men are fed by solitude and starved by too much companions.h.i.+p, and the same is true of nations. You cannot control others till you have learned to control yourself, or save another till you yourself are saved, and most of us had better be about that business.

It is England's business to know just now, and to some extent ours, how many s.h.i.+ps Germany is building and how many men she has in training to man them; but it is not in the least anybody's business to question her motives or to attempt to dictate her policy. It is our business to shut up, and to build s.h.i.+ps and to train men according to our notions of what is necessary for safety in case of an explosion.

We should be about our father's business, not about our brother's business.

It is shallow thinking and lack of knowledge of the men and women of stranger countries, and above all that terrible itching to be doing something, which lead to these futile excursions and this silly talk.

Can anything be more maudlin than to suppose that international sensitiveness, that commercial rivalries, that tariff discriminations, that territorial misunderstandings, are to be soothed and smoothed away, by dissertations upon how much we owe to one another in matters of culture? Think what we owe to Goethe and Lessing, to Spinoza and Kant, to Heine and Mozart and Wagner and Beethoven, reiterates the Englishman; think what we owe to Shakespeare and Milton, to Byron and Sh.e.l.ley and Scott, to Lister and Newton, answers the German! Who can go to war with the countrymen of Racine and Moliere and Pascal and Montesquieu and Descartes? repeats the friend of France; and by others are trumpeted the fraternal relations that we ought to cultivate with the countrymen of Dante, or of Euripides, Aeschylus, and Sophocles.

This is phantom friends.h.i.+p, and we all know in our heart of hearts, that we would fight any or all of them at the drop of a handkerchief, if they hurt our feelings, ruffled our national pride, or maltreated in a foreign land the meanest of our racial brothers. Straining after such artificial bonds of union is as irritating as it is unreal.

Germany has few heartier admirers of Bismarck than am I; England has few franker friends of her great gentlemen in peace and war than am I; I have read and profited by French literature far more than from anything America has produced; if I can write so that here and there a brother has profited therefrom, I owe it to the Frenchmen I have studied; but these are all nothing as compared with my heart's real allegiances. There is a gulp in my throat when I dream of that weary, misunderstood, but patient and humble peace-maker, who held the scales between the millions of my own countrymen, shooting and stabbing one another to death fifty years ago. No other man can be quite like him to me; he remains my master of men, as is Lee my ideal of the Happy Warrior. I understand the grim humor in his sad eyes, I love that lined face, cut from the granite of self-control, that tamed volcano face, seamed and scarred by the lava of his trials and his tears; I can see how the illuminating and conciliatory anecdotes were his relief from the pain of an aching heart; my muscles harden and my nerves tingle as I recall the puppet politicians and fancy self-advertising warriors who crucified him slowly. The country and the people that Lincoln believed in, I must believe in and fight for too.

Was.h.i.+ngton was an Englishman and baptized us, but Lincoln was an American who officiated at our first communion as a united people.

I ask no Englishman, no German, no Frenchman to agree with me, but I ask them to leave me alone with my dead, to leave me in peace with my living problems, to force no artificial friends.h.i.+ps upon me, and thus to let our respect for one another increase naturally.

Has the Englishman, has the German, no sanctuaries to be left undisturbed; no heart-strings that are not to be fumbled at by busy fingers; no personal dignities to be shrouded from investigations; no sweet silences of sorrow that are barred to foreign mourners? If he have not, then all this clamor at the doors of national privacy is well enough; but let them remember that when nations lose their dignity and their racial pride, there is sure to follow the squabbling and the jealousy, the rough speech and vulgar manners, of the domestic circle, in the same plight of spiritual shamelessness. The best that any of us learn is to be a little more patient, a little more charitable, a little more careful of the dignity of others in our own homes, or abroad, and then the light goes out!

XI CONCLUSION

Criticism is temptingly easy when it consists, as it so often does, in merely noting what is different, or what is not there. Helpful criticism I take to be the discovery of what is there, and its revelation, with an examination of its history, its truth, and its value. That kind of criticism is close to creation itself, and few there are sufficiently self-sacrificing to endow and to train themselves to undertake it.

It makes life very complicated to think too much about it, but to take a step further, and to attempt to apply logic to life, that way madness lies. It is of the very essence of life that things are never as they ought to be, but only as they can be for the time being. We may be optimistic enough to believe that this is a good world, but it is none the less true that unbending virtue seldom receives the temporal rewards for which most of us are striving, and with which alone most of us are content. We are forced to doubt, therefore, the goodness which finds life easy and comfortable, and since we must still at all hazards be charitable in our judgments of one another, we become, most of us, opportunists in morals.

In dealing with the men, manners, affairs, and the soul of a stranger people, therefore, one must use what experience, knowledge, good-humor, and impartiality one has, without a.s.sumption of superiority, without making high demands, and without ceasing to be at least as opportunist as we are at home. Because things are different, they are not necessarily better or worse, and if certain things are not there, it is perhaps because they do not belong there. Above all, we should refrain from applying a stern logic to the life of another country which we never use in measuring our own.

The whole north of Germany is a flat, barren plain, with the Elbe, the Oder, the Weser flowing west and north. The north of Germany on a raised map looks like a vast sea-sh.o.r.e, and so it is. To the south a great river, the Rhine, pierces its way from Frankfort through a beautiful gorge in the mountains, and has its source near that of the Danube. Barbarossa called this river, "that royal street." This sea-sh.o.r.e is cultivated and populous; this river has been made a great commercial highway. Cologne, one hundred and fifty miles from the sea, is now a seaport; Strasburg, three hundred miles inland, can receive boats of six hundred tons; and the tributary river, the Main, has been deepened so that now Frankfort receives steamers from the Rhine. Three quarters of the through trade of Holland is German water-borne trade.

Now the Dortmund-Ems ca.n.a.l, which is one hundred and sixty-eight miles long, and can be used by s.h.i.+ps of a thousand tons, gives an outlet, via the Rhine, at Emden. All this is the work of a patient, persistent, and economical people working under great natural disadvantages.

As compared with America this is an unfruitful land, and, as I have noted, surrounded on all sides by powerful enemies. In 1902 Traugott Muller estimated the value of Germany's production of wheat, potatoes, vegetables?the products of the gardens and the fields, in short?at $605,000,000; the production of beef, mutton, pork at $669,500,000; of the dairies at $406,000,000; of cotton, sugar, alcohol, wine, and wood at $322,000,000; or a total of $2,002,000,000. The United States is seventeen times as large, but by no means seventeen times as productive.

Germany, again, is divided into a number of states, all, with the exception of Prussia, with its population of 40,000,000 out of the total of 65,000,000, comparatively small. These states are not merely divided by legal and geographical lines, but by traditions, different ruling families, religion, tastes, habits, and manners, and even geologically. Bernhard Cotta, writing of Germany, says: "Geologically there is a Spain, an England, a Sweden, a Russia, a France, but no Germany." They are different individuals, not different members of the same family. They have been cemented together by coercion.

Over this whole country for three hundred years have swept all the fighting men of Europe. Until 1870 it was a tournament ground for the Swedes, Russians, French, Dutch, Belgians, Italians, Hungarians, English, and the various German states. It was shot over, till it is a wonder that there are any young birds, not to speak of old c.o.c.ks and hens left, to begin with over again.

A feature of the political situation, which scarcely enters into political calculations in America, is the sharp division between Protestants and Catholics, with a political party of Catholics numbering one fourth of the total members, in the Reichstag. In 1905 there were 37,646,852 Protestants and 22,109,644 Catholics in Germany, the Roman Catholics being in a majority in Baden, Bavaria, and Alsace-Lorraine. In the past these religious differences have entailed all the most repulsive features of war, waged to the point of extermination. "Lieber Rom als Liberal," is still a punning war-cry marking the dislike of Rome and the fear of Socialism.

With us religion has become largely an organized attempt, using charity as patronage, to reconcile piety and plenty, with the result that with the exception of the Catholic Church dealing with the lately arrived immigrants, and the Methodists and Baptists dealing with the ignorant ma.s.ses, black and white, in the South, religion in the sense of an organized church has little hold upon the people, especially in the large cities.

In America the indifference to religion is the result of suspicion.

The congregations are too largely black-coated and white-collared, and the lay officers of the churches much too solemnly sleek and serenely solvent to attract the weak, the unfortunate, the sorrowing, and the sinner. The mere appearance of the congregation in a prosperous Protestant church in an American city is a mockery of Christianity.

Any man who preaches to men who can own a seat in G.o.d's house is a craven opportunist. Until the doors of the churches are open all the week, and the seats in the churches free, to claim that the Christ is there is little short of blasphemy. It is no wonder that those who need Him most, never dream of seeking for Him in these ecclesiastical clubs.

In Germany half-baked thinking, following upon, and as the result of, the barracks and corporal methods of education, have turned the Protestant population from the churches. The slovenly and patchy omniscience of the partly educated, leads them to believe that they know enough not to believe. Renan, though a doubter himself, saw the weakness of this form of disbelief when he wrote: "There are in reality but few people who have a right not to believe in Christianity."

The people living upon this ethnographical chess-board have been for centuries rather tribal than national, and are still rather philosophical than political, rather idealistic than practical, rather dreamy than adventurous. To organize this population for self-support and self-defence, to ignore differences, racial and religious, to stamp out the jealousies of small rulers, required severe measures, and we are all learning to-day that democracies are seldom severe with themselves. A tyrannical autocracy, led by the Great Elector, Frederick the Great, and Bismarck, produced from this welter of discord the astonis.h.i.+ng results of to-day.

We have to-day, in an area of 208,780 square miles, 5,604 square miles representing the lately conquered territory of Alsace-Lorraine, a population of 64,903,423, of whom 1,028,560 are subjects of foreign powers. To defend this area there are to be, according to figures estimated even as this volume goes to press, a million men under arms in the army and navy. Their enormous progress in trade, in industry, in s.h.i.+pbuilding, is set out in full in every year-book, for the curious to ponder. In so short a time, on so poor a soil, in such a restricted s.p.a.ce, with such a past of distress and disaster, and dealing with such conflicting interests, a like success in nation-building is unparalleled.

Industrial and martial beehive though it would seem to be, there are provided for the native and the foreigner feasts of music, of art, and of study that cost little. There are quiet streams, lovely, lonely walks, and quaint towns that are nests of archaeological interest. In Weimar, in Stuttgart, in Schwerin, in Dusseldorf, in Karlsruhe, not to mention Munich, Leipsic, Dresden, Berlin, Frankfort, Hamburg, there are centres of culture. The best that the mind of man creates is still spread out there as of yore for whomsoever will to partake, but ever in less abundance and with less enthusiasm. And these names are a mere fraction of the number of such places.

The rivalries between the states is now to a large extent an elevating rivalry of culture, dotting the map of Germany with resting-places for the curious, the scholarly, or the sentimental traveller. You may have plain living and high thinking in scores of the cities and towns of Germany, and you will be considered neither an outcast nor an eccentric; indeed, you will find no small part of the population your companions.

You may stroll for miles on the banks of that tiny stream the Zschopau, and expect to see sprites and nymphs, so hidden are its windings; and where in all the world will a handkerchief cover an Ulm, an Augsburg, a Rothenburg, Ansbach, Nuremberg, Wurzburg, with their wealth of a.s.sociations?

The Fugger family, of Augsburg, tell us again that there is nothing new in the world. Five hundred years ago they were millionaires. One of these Fuggers had a voice even in the election of Charles V, and we are still hard at it trying to keep our Fuggers from meddling in politics. Another Fugger, Marcus by name, wrote a capital book on the horse in the sixteenth century, and at the last horse-show at Olympia, in 1912, a Fugger came over from Germany and took away the first prize for officers' chargers. So far flung was their fame as money-lenders that usury was called "Fuggerei"!

Heirs of great houses got out of hand then as now, and Duke Albert III of Bavaria married Agnes Bernauer, the barber's daughter, and even the Archduke Ferdinand of Austria ran off with Fraulein Welser. One citizen of Augsburg fitted out a squadron to take possession of Venezuela, which had been given him by the Emperor Charles V. For some reason the squadron did not sail; Lord Salisbury and President Cleveland could have told this adventurous Augsburger that he was better off at home!

Bishop Boniface, of Wurzburg, was an Englishman, and his father was a wheelwright. He put cart-wheels in his coat-of-arms, and they have remained to this day in the arms of the town, a fine reminder to sn.o.bbery that ancestry only explains, it cannot exalt.

"Pigmies are pigmies still, though perch'd on Alps, And pyramids are pyramids in vales."

The atmosphere in these towns is one of repose. They are still wise enough to know that the miraculous improvements in speed brought about by steam and electricity have not shortened the journey of the soul to heaven by one second. They know that Socrates on a donkey really goes faster than Solly Goldberg in his sixty-horse-power motor-car. They are suspicious of the new cosmopolitan creed, that successful advertising endows a man with eternal life. Countless political quacks have been caricatured, advertised, and cinematographed into familiarity, but wise men still read Plato and Aristotle. The penny press has not convinced them that popularity is immortality; they recognize popularity as merely glory paid in pennies. They partake to some extent of the patience of the Oriental. They suspect, as most men of wide intellectual experience do, that the man who cannot wait must be a coward at bottom, afraid of himself, or of the world, or of G.o.d.

This is wholly true of many Germans, despite the clang of arms, the noise of steam-hammers, the shrieking locomotives, the puffing steamers, the clinking of their gold, and the shouting of their pedlers, now scattered all over the world. It is this combination, in the same small area, of noise and repose; of political subserviency at home and sabre-rattling abroad; of close organization at home and colonizing inefficiency abroad; of moral and intellectual freedom, one might almost call it moral and intellectual anarchy these days, and at the same time submission to a domestic and social tyranny unknown to us, that makes even a timid author feel that he is discovering the Germans to his countrymen, so little do they know of this side of German life.

They are not at all what the Americans and the English think they are. They want peace, and we think they want war. The huge armaments are intended to frighten us, just as were the grotesquely ugly masks of the Chinese warriors. They intend to frighten us all with their 850,000 soldiers, their great fleet, their air-s.h.i.+ps and aeroplanes, and when they go to Agadir again they hope to be able to stay there till their demands are granted. They are the last comers into the society of nations and they mean to insist upon recognition.

But this demand is an artificial one so far as the great ma.s.s of Germans is concerned. It is the Prussian conqueror, and the small cla.s.s, officer, official and royal, representing that conqueror, who are determined upon this course. They have unified Germany, they have made the laws and forced obedience to them; and the heavily taxed, hard-driven, politically powerless people are helpless.

Nowhere has socialistic legislation been so cunningly and skilfully used for the enslavement of the people. No small part of every man's wages is paid to him in insurance; insurance for unemployment, for accident, sickness, and old age. There is but faint hope of saving enough to buy one's freedom, and if the slave runs away he leaves, of course, all the premiums he has paid in the hands of his master. A general uprising is guarded against by a redoubtable force of officials, officers, and soldiers, whose very existence depends upon their defence of and upholding of the state under its present laws and rulers.