Germany and the Germans Part 25

Our grandfathers and fathers, some of them, talked and read of Saint-Simon, of Fourier, Robert Owen, Maurice Kingsley, and the Brook Farm experiment, and believed, no doubt, that the dawn of the twentieth century would have extracted at least some balm from these theories for the healing of our social woes. They would rub their eyes in amazement were they to awake in 1912 to find more armed men, more ships of war, more fighting, more strikes and trade disputes, than ever before. Above all, they would be puzzled to find the nation which is most advanced in the application of the theory of state socialism with the largest army, the heaviest taxation, and the second most formidable fleet.

The library in which, as a small boy, I was permitted to browse, where I read those wonderful Black Forest Stories and my first serious novel, On the Heights, contained a bust of Goethe, and on the shelves were Fichte, Freytag, Spielhagen, Strauss, and a miscellaneous collection of German authors grave and gay, or perhaps melancholy were a better word, for even now I should find it hard to point to a German author who is distinctively gay. No visitor to that library, and they numbered many distinguished visitors, American and foreign, from Emerson and Alcott and George Macdonald to others less well known, dreamed that the serene marble features of Goethe would be replaced by the granite fissures of the face of Bismarck; and that Auerbach's Black Forest Stories would be less known than Albert Ballin's fleet of mercantile ships. As I dream myself back to that big chair wherein I could curl up my whole person, and still leave room for at least two fair-sized dogs, I see as in no other way the almost unbelievable change that has come over Germany. The Black Forest Stories, Hammer and Anvil, The Lost Ma.n.u.script, Werther, Fichte, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Strauss, Heine were Germany then; Bismarck, Ballin, and Krupp are Germany now. Germany was Hamlet then; Germany is Shylock, Shylock armed to the teeth, now.

No nation can change in one generation, as has Germany, by the natural development of its innate characteristics; such a change must be forced and artificial to take place in so short a time. This is not only the internal danger to Germany itself, but the danger to all those superficial observers who point to Germany as having solved certain social and economic problems. She has not solved them by healthy growth into better ways; she has suppressed them, strangled them, suffocated them.

The heroes and heroines of my Black Forest Stories have been rudely stuffed into the uniforms of officials, soldiers, factory hands, and Red Cross nurses. The toy-shops have been developed, on borrowed capital, into ship-building yards and factories for guns and ammunition. The dreamer in dressing-gown and slippers has been forced into the cap and ap.r.o.n of the workman. The small sovereigns have been frightened into allegiance to the war lord, whose shadow falls upon every corner of Germany.

In this new scheme of things it soon became evident, that the individual was incompetent to take care of himself along lines best suited to the plans of his new conqueror, therefore part of his earnings were taken from all alike to provide against accident, sickness, unemployment, and old age, and thus bind him fast to the chariot of his warrior lord. Germany, having given up the belief that the salvation of her own soul was of prime importance, became suspiciously concerned about the souls and bodies of the people. We are all to some extent following her example. The wise among us are sad, the capitalist and his ally the demagogue are seen everywhere all smiles, rubbing their hands, for the more people are made to believe that they can be, and ought to be, taken care of, the more the machinery is put into their hands, the more plunder comes their way, the more indispensable they are.

The great majority of people who write or speak of Germany applaud this situation; let me frankly say, what everybody will be saying in twenty-five years, I deplore it. It is a purely artificial, incompetent, and dreary solution. Even Hamlet were better than Shylock.

Fortunately there is also a large and increasing cla.s.s in Germany who distrust the situation. They point to the fact that technical education is producing an army of dingy artisans, who turn out the cheap and nasty by the million, an education which chokes idealism and increases the growing flippancy in matters of faith and morals; they sneer, and well they may, at the manufactured art, the carpenter's Gothic architecture, the sickly literature, the decaying interest in scholarship; they find fewer and fewer candidates for exploration and colonization; they rankle under the series of diplomatic inept.i.tudes since Bismarck; they see France, Russia, and England antagonized and leagued against them, and their own allies, Austria-Hungary and Italy, in a confused state of squabble with their neighbors; they are nervous and disquieted by the financial and industrial conditions; they condemn whole-heartedly the political caste system by which much of the best material in Germany is barred from the councils and the diplomatic and executive activities of the nation; there are not a few who would welcome an inconclusive war that would, they think, put an end to this system, and make the ruler and the officials responsible to the people; they wish to open the doors of this governmental, legislative, educational, industrial hot-house, and give the nation a chance to grow naturally in the open air.

The policy of making other people afraid of you must have an end, the policy of making others respect and like you can have no end. There is no question which is the natural law of national development. Neither for the individual nor for a nation is it wholesome to increase antagonisms and to lessen the conciliatory points of contact with the world.

Many of the weaknesses, much of the strength of Germany are artificial. They have not grown, they have been forced. The very barrenness of the soil, the ring of enemies, the soft moral and social texture of the population, have, so their little knot of rulers think, made necessary these harsh, artificial forcing methods.

The outstanding proof of the artificiality of this civilization is its powerlessness to propagate. Germans transplanted from their hothouse civilization to other countries cease to be Germans; and nowhere in the world outside Germany is German civilization imitated, liked, or adopted. The German is nonplussed to find the Pole in the East, the Frenchman in the West, the Dane in the North, scoffing at his alte Kultur, as he calls it, and he is irritated beyond measure by the German from America, who returns to the Vaterland to criticise, to sneer, and to thank G.o.d that he is an American, not a German citizen.

Germans become English citizens, no Englishmen become Germans; millions of Germans have become Americans, no Americans become Germans. No other population would be amenable to the Prussian methods that have made Germany, nor is there anywhere in the world a people demanding Prussian methods, while there are millions under the Prussian yoke who hate it.

The German rhetoric to the effect that Germany is to save the world by Teutonizing the world, is laughable. Prussia is the ventriloquist behind this half-hearted boast.

Werther, and Faust, and Lohengrin, are far more real than those scarecrows autocracy, bureaucracy, and militarism, triplets of straw, premature births, not destined to live, of which Germany boasts to-day as the most precocious children in the world. They are just that, precocious children, teaching the pallid religion of dependence upon the state and enforcing the anarchical morality of man's despair of himself. Our descendants will have Werther and Faust and Lohengrin, as the companions of their dreams at least, when that autocracy shall have been blown to the winds, when that bureaucracy shall have dried up and wasted away, when that exaggerated militarism shall be but bleaching bones and dust.

Who has not lived in Germany as a house of dreams, seen the Valkyrie race by, heard the swan song, wept with Werther and with Marguerite, smiled cynically with Mephistopheles, languished with the Palm Tree and the Pine of Heine; who has not sat at the feet of Germany as a philosopher, and traced the very fissures of his own brain in following thinking into thought; but who in all the world longs for this new Germany of the barracks, the corporal and the pedler?

Germania as a malicious vestal clad in horrid armor and making mischief in the world is a very present danger; Germania with a torch lighting the world to salvation is a phantom, a ghost, seen by hasty and nervous observers, who rush out to proclaim an adventure that may excite a pa.s.sing interest in themselves. Her methods to-day are solution by suffocation; no wonder those of us who loved her in our youth see in her a ghost to-day. I am thankful that I was her pupil when she had other things to teach, when she wore other robes, when she was modest, and not s.n.a.t.c.hing at the trident of Neptune, nor clutching at the casque of Mars.

"Wir wissen zu viel, wir wollen zu wenig," became the national complaint, and Germany has attempted to transform herself. She has succeeded in the transformation, but the transformation is not a success. Even that learned English friend of Germany, Lord Haldane, does not see, or will not see, that a people thinking themselves into action, instead of developing into action naturally, through action, must suffer from the artificiality of the process. Lord Haldane applauds their thought-out organization in industrial, commercial, and military matters, but he fails to mention the squandering of individual capacity and energy that has resulted in Germany's growing dependence upon a wooden bureaucracy. Organization is only good as a means; it is stupefying as an end. Germany has organized herself into an organization, and is the most over-governed country in the world.

What every democracy of free men wants is not as much, but as little, organization as possible compatible with economical administration of industry, the army, the navy, and the affairs of the state. You can think out a game of chess, but you cannot think out life ahead of the living of it without cramping it and finally killing it. Life is to live, not to think, after all. Neither a nation nor an individual has ever thought out the way to power. This is where the metaphysician invariably fails when he mistakes thinking for living, when he mistakes organization, which can never be more than a mould for life, for life itself. To plan an army is not to produce one, however good the plan; even to plan a campaign, once you have an army, is to court disaster unless there is a living man to thrust the plan aside when the emergencies arise that make up the whole of life, but have nothing to do with organization.

If all men were tailors, or lawyers, or farmers, or miners, then we could think out an organization into which they would fit, but unfortunately for the metaphysician, all men are not categories; all men are men! In like manner, if all men were cases, then government by lawyers would be successful, but men and women are neither categories nor cases. It is purely fantastic, the mere reasoned confusion of the philosopher, to point to Spinoza, Kant, and Hegel and their successors as the originators of Germany's progress. If Germany had developed along those lines, she would be something quite different from what she is. The Great Elector, Frederick the Great, Napoleon, and Bismarck made Germany, and her philosophers and pedants are only responsible for the softness that made it possible. Metaphysicians and lawyers have their place, but they will inevitably ruin any people whom they are permitted to govern.

The reader will perhaps look back through these pages to discover a contradiction. He will seem to find evidence that Germany's position in the world called for just this present Germany, which is a factory town with a garden attached, surrounded by an armed camp. I deny the contradiction. I have tried to a.n.a.lyze and to give the reasons for Germany's development along these meretricious and disappointing lines, but I am the last to admit that the outcome is satisfactory, or that the rest of the world should look to Germany to point out the way of salvation. A steaming orchid-house is not the place to go to learn to grow the fruits of the earth in their due season for the nourishment of a free people. You will find some brilliantly colored flowers there, in the gay uniforms of the artificial tropics, but they shrink and shrivel in the open air. They have been trained to grow luxuriantly in this stifling atmosphere, but they feed no one, please no one, who will not consent to live in a gla.s.s house with them.

Because a people is blindfolded, its preachers and pedagogues gagged, its officials subservient, is all the more reason why they should be easily led, but no reason at all for supposing that they will lead anybody else.

I have said here and there that I have learned much, and that we all have much to learn from Germany. I permit myself to repeat it. She has shown us that the short-cut to the governing of a people by suppression and strangulation results in a dreary development of mediocrity. She has proved again that the only safety in the world for either an individual or a nation is to be loved and respected, and in these days no one respects slavery or loves threats.

From an American point of view, any sacrifice, any war, were better than the domination of the Prussian methods of nation-making. No nation should be by its traditions and its ideals more ready to arm itself, and to keep itself armed if necessary for years, against the possibility of the transference of such methods to the American continent than the United States of North America.

"Theuer ist mir der Freund, doch auch den Feind kann ich nutzen, Zeigt mir der Freund, was ich kann, lehrt mir der Feind was ich soll,"

writes Schiller.

We Americans have much to learn from both our friends and our enemies.

We have both in Germany, and we should cultivate the temper of mind which profits by the encouragement of our friends and the criticism of our foes.