THE BARBARISM OF BERLIN
BY
G.K. CHESTERTON
First Published 1914
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION: THE FACTS OF THE CASE.
II. THE REFUSAL OF RECIPROCITY
INTRODUCTION: THE FACTS OF THE CASE.
Unless we are all mad, there is at the back of the most bewildering
business a story: and if we are all mad, there is no such thing as
madness. If I set a house on fire, it is quite true that I may illuminate
many other people’s weaknesses as well as my own. It may be that the
master of the house was burned because he was drunk: it may be that the
mistress of the house was burned because she was stingy, and perished
arguing about the expense of a fire-escape. It is, nevertheless, broadly
true that they both were burned because I set fire to their house. That is
the story of the thing. The mere facts of the story about the present
European conflagration are quite as easy to tell.
Before we go on to the deeper things which make this war the most sincere
war of human history, it is as easy to answer the question of why England
came to be in it at all, as it is to ask how a man fell down a coal-hole,
or failed to keep an appointment. Facts are not the whole truth. But facts
are facts, and in this case the facts are few and simple. Prussia, France,
and England had all promised not to invade Belgium. Prussia proposed to
invade Belgium, because it was the safest way of invading France. But
Prussia promised that if she might break in, through her own broken
promise and ours, she would break in and not steal. In other words, we
were offered at the same instant a promise of faith in the future and a
proposal of perjury in the present. Those interested in human origins may
refer to an old Victorian writer of English, who, in the last and most
restrained of his historical essays, wrote of Frederick the Great, the
founder of this unchanging Prussian policy. After describing how Frederick
broke the guarantee he had signed on behalf of Maria Theresa, he then
describes how Frederick sought to put things straight by a promise that
was an insult. “If she would but let him have Silesia, he would, he said,
stand by her against any power which should try to deprive her of her
other dominions, as if he was not already bound to stand by her, or as if
his new promise could be of more value than the old one.” That passage was
written by Macaulay, but so far as the mere contemporary facts are
concerned it might have been written by me.
Upon the immediate logical and legal origin of the English interest there
can be no rational debate. There are some things so simple that one can
almost prove them with plans and diagrams, as in Euclid. One could make a
kind of comic calendar of what would have happened to the English
diplomatist, if he had been silenced every time by Prussian diplomacy.
Suppose we arrange it in the form of a kind of diary:
July 24: Germany invades Belgium.
July 25: England declares war.
July 26: Germany promises not to annex Belgium.
July 27: England withdraws from the war.
July 28: Germany annexes Belgium, England declares war.
July 29: Germany promises not to annex France, England withdraws from the
war.
July 30: Germany annexes France, England declares war.
July 31: Germany promises not to annex England.
Aug. 1: England withdraws from the war. Germany invades England.
How long is anybody expected to go on with that sort of game; or keep
peace at that illimitable price? How long must we pursue a road in which
promises are all fetishes in front of us; and all fragments behind us? No;
upon the cold facts of the final negotiations, as told by any of the
diplomatists in any of the documents, there is no doubt about the story.
And no doubt about the villain of the story.
These are the last facts; the facts which involved England. It is equally
easy to state the first facts; the facts which involved Europe. The prince
who practically ruled Austria was shot by certain persons whom the
Austrian Government believed to be conspirators from Servia. The Austrian
Government piled up arms and armies, but said not a word either to Servia
their suspect, or Italy their ally. From the documents it would seem that
Austria kept everybody in the dark, except Prussia. It is probably nearer
the truth to say that Prussia kept everybody in the dark, including
Austria. But all that is what is called opinion, belief, conviction, or
common sense: and we are not dealing with it here. The objective fact is
that Austria told Servia to permit Servian officers to be suspended by the
authority of Austrian officers; and told Servia to submit to this within
forty-eight hours. In other words, the Sovereign of Servia was practically
told to take off not only the laurels of two great campaigns, but his own
lawful and national crown, and to do it in a time in which no respectable
citizen is expected to discharge an hotel bill. Servia asked for time for
arbitration—in short, for peace. But Russia had already begun to
mobilise; and Prussia, presuming that Servia might thus be rescued,
declared war.
Between these two ends of fact, the ultimatum to Servia, the ultimatum to
Belgium, anyone so inclined can of course talk as if everything were
relative. If anyone asks why the Czar should rush to the support of
Servia, it is easy to ask why the Kaiser should rush to the support of
Austria. If anyone says that the French would attack the Germans, it is
sufficient to answer that the Germans did attack the French. There remain,
however, two attitudes to consider, even perhaps two arguments to counter,
which can best be considered and countered under this general head of
facts. First of all, there is a curious, cloudy sort of argument, much
affected by the professional rhetoricians of Prussia, who are sent out to
instruct and correct the minds of Americans or Scandinavians. It consists
of going into convulsions of incredulity and scorn at the mention of
Russia’s responsibility of Servia, or England’s responsibility of Belgium;
and suggesting that, treaty or no treaty, frontier or no frontier, Russia
would be out to slay Teutons or England to steal Colonies. Here, as
elsewhere, I think the professors dotted all over the Baltic plain fail in
lucidity and in the power of distinguishing ideas. Of course it is quite
true that England has material interests to defend, and will probably use
the opportunity to defend them; or, in other words, of course England,
like everybody else, would be more comfortable if Prussia were less
predominant.
The fact remains that we did not do what the Germans did. We did not
invade Holland to seize a naval and commercial advantage; and whether they
say that we wished to do it in our greed, or feared to do it in our
cowardice, the fact remains that we did not do it. Unless this commonsense
principle be kept in view, I cannot conceive how any quarrel can possibly
be judged. A contract may be made between two persons solely for material
advantage on each side: but the moral advantage is still generally
supposed to lie with the person who keeps the contract. Surely it cannot
be dishonest to be honest—even if honesty is the best policy.
Imagine the most complex maze of indirect motive; and still the man who
keeps faith for money cannot possibly be worse than the man who breaks
faith for money. It will be noted that this ultimate test applies in the
same way to Servia as to Belgium and Britain. The Servians may not be a
very peaceful people, but on the occasion under discussion it was
certainly they who wanted peace. You may choose to think the Serb a sort
of born robber: but on this occasion it was certainly the Austrian who was
trying to rob. Similarly, you may call England perfidious as a sort of
historical summary; and declare your private belief that Mr. Asquith was
vowed from infancy to the ruin of the German Empire, a Hannibal and hater
of the eagles. But, when all is said, it is nonsense to call a man
perfidious because he keeps his promise. It is absurd to complain of the
sudden treachery of a business man in turning up punctually to his
appointment: or the unfair shock given to a creditor by the debtor paying
his debts.
Lastly, there is an attitude, not unknown in the crisis, against which I
should particularly like to protest. I should address my protest
especially to those lovers and pursuers of peace who, very shortsightedly,
have occasionally adopted it. I mean the attitude which is impatient of
these preliminary details about who did this or that, and whether it was
right or wrong. They are satisfied with saying that an enormous calamity,
called war, has been begun by some or all of us and should be ended by
some or all of us. To these people, this preliminary chapter about the
precise happenings must appear not only dry (and it must of necessity be
the driest part of the task) but essentially needless and barren. I wish
to tell these people that they are wrong; that they are wrong upon all
principles of human justice and historic continuity; but that they are
specially and supremely wrong upon their own principles of arbitration and
international peace.
These sincere and high-minded peace-lovers are always telling us that
citizens no longer settle their quarrels by private violence; and that
nations should no longer settle theirs by public violence. They are always
telling us that we no longer fight duels; and need not wage wars. In
short, they perpetually base their peace proposals on the fact that an
ordinary citizen no longer avenges himself with an axe. But how is he
prevented from revenging himself with an axe? If he hits his neighbour on
the head with the kitchen chopper, what do we do? Do we all join hands,
like children playing Mulberry Bush, and say, “We are all responsible for
this; but let us hope it will not spread. Let us hope for the happy day
when we shall leave off chopping at the man’s head; and when nobody shall
ever chop anything for ever and ever.” Do we say, “Let bygones be bygones;
why go back to all the dull details with which the business began; who can
tell with what sinister motives the man was standing there, within reach
of the hatchet?” We do not. We keep the peace in private life by asking
for the facts of provocation, and the proper object of punishment. We do
go into the dull details; we do enquire into the origins; we do
emphatically enquire who it was that hit first. In short, we do what I
have done very briefly in this place.
Given this, it is indeed true that behind these facts there are truths;
truths of a terrible, of a spiritual sort. In mere fact, the Germanic
power has been wrong about Servia, wrong about Russia, wrong about
Belgium, wrong about England, wrong about Italy. But there was a reason
for its being wrong everywhere; and of that root reason, which has moved
half the world against it, I shall speak later in this series. For that is
something too omnipresent to be proved, too indisputable to be helped by
detail. It is nothing less than the locating, after more than a hundred
years of recriminations and wrong explanations, of the modern European
evil; the finding of the fountain from which poison has flowed upon all
the nations of the earth.
I. THE WAR ON THE WORD
It will hardly be denied that there is one lingering doubt in many, who
recognise unavoidable self-defence in the instant parry of the English
sword, and who have no great love for the sweeping sabre of Sadowa and
Sedan. That doubt is the doubt whether Russia, as compared with Prussia,
is sufficiently decent and democratic to be the ally of liberal and
civilised powers. I take first, therefore, this matter of civilisation.
It is vital in a discussion like this that we should make sure we are
going by meanings and not by mere words. It is not necessary in any
argument to settle what a word means or ought to mean. But it is necessary
in every argument to settle what we propose to mean by the word. So long
as our opponent understands what is the thing of which we are
talking, it does not matter to the argument whether the word is or is not
the one he would have chosen. A soldier does not say “We were ordered to
go to Mechlin; but I would rather go to Malines.” He may discuss the
etymology and archaeology of the difference on the march: but the point is
that he knows where to go. So long as we know what a given word is to mean
in a given discussion, it does not even matter if it means something else
in some other and quite distinct discussion. We have a perfect right to
say that the width of a window comes to four feet; even if we instantly
and cheerfully change the subject to the larger mammals, and say that an
elephant has four feet. The identity of the words does not matter, because
there is no doubt at all about the meanings; because nobody is likely to
think of an elephant as four feet long, or of a window as having tusks and
a curly trunk.
It is essential to emphasise this consciousness of the thing under
discussion in connection with two or three words that are, as it were, the
key-words of this war. One of them is the word “barbarian.” The Prussians
apply it to the Russians: the Russians apply it to the Prussians. Both, I
think, really mean something that really exists, name or no name. Both
mean different things. And if we ask what these different things are, we
shall understand why England and France prefer Russia; and consider
Prussia the really dangerous barbarian of the two. To begin with, it goes
so much deeper even than atrocities; of which, in the past at least, all
the three Empires of Central Europe have partaken pretty equally, as they
partook of Poland. An English writer, seeking to avert the war by warnings
against Russian influence, said that the flogged backs of Polish women
stood between us and the Alliance. But not long before, the flogging of
women by an Austrian general led to that officer being thrashed in the
streets of London by Barclay and Perkins’ draymen. And as for the third
power, the Prussians, it seems clear that they have treated Belgian women
in a style compared with which flogging might be called an official
formality. But, as I say, something much deeper than any such
recrimination lies behind the use of the word on either side. When the
German Emperor complains of our allying ourselves with a barbaric and
half-oriental power, he is not (I assure you) shedding tears over the
grave of Kosciusko. And when I say (as I do most heartily) that the German
Emperor is a barbarian, I am not merely expressing any prejudices I may
have against the profanation of churches or of children. My countrymen and
I mean a certain and intelligible thing when we call the Prussians
barbarians. It is quite different from the thing attributed to Russians;
and it could not possibly be attributed to Russians. It is very important
that the neutral world should understand what this thing is.
If the German calls the Russian barbarous, he presumably means imperfectly
civilised. There is a certain path along which Western nations have
proceeded in recent times, and it is tenable that Russia has not proceeded
so far as the others: that she has less of the special modern system in
science, commerce, machinery, travel, or political constitution. The Russ
ploughs with an old plough; he wears a wild beard; he adores relics; his
life is as rude and hard as that of a subject of Alfred the Great.
Therefore he is, in the German sense, a barbarian. Poor fellows like Gorky
and Dostoieffsky have to form their own reflections on the scenery without
the assistance of large quotations from Schiller on garden seats, or
inscriptions directing them to pause and thank the All-Father for the
finest view in Hesse-Pumpernickel. The Russians, having nothing but their
faith, their fields, their great courage, and their self-governing
communes, are quite cut off from what is called (in the fashionable street
in Frankfort) The True, The Beautiful and The Good. There is a real sense
in which one can call such backwardness barbaric, by comparison with the
Kaiserstrasse; and in that sense it is true of Russia.
Now we, the French and English, do not mean this when we call the
Prussians barbarians. If their cities soared higher than their flying
ships, if their trains travelled faster than their bullets, we should
still call them barbarians. We should know exactly what we meant by it;
and we should know that it is true. For we do not mean anything that is an
imperfect civilisation by accident. We mean something that is the enemy of
civilisation by design. We mean something that is wilfully at war with the
principles by which human society has been made possible hitherto. Of
course it must be partly civilised even to destroy civilisation. Such ruin
could not be wrought by the savages that are merely undeveloped or inert.
You could not have even Huns without horses; or horses without
horsemanship. You could not have even Danish pirates without ships, or
ships without seamanship. This person, whom I may call the Positive
Barbarian, must be rather more superficially up-to-date than what I may
call the Negative Barbarian. Alaric was an officer in the Roman legions:
but for all that he destroyed Rome. Nobody supposes that Eskimos could
have done it at all neatly. But (in our meaning) barbarism is not a matter
of methods, but of aims. We say that these veneered vandals have the
perfectly serious aim of destroying certain ideas, which, as they think,
the world has outgrown; without which, as we think, the world will die.
It is essential that this perilous peculiarity in the Pruss, or Positive
Barbarian, should be seized. He has what he fancies is a new idea; and he
is going to apply it to everybody. As a fact it is simply a false
generalisation; but he is really trying to make it general. This does not
apply to the Negative Barbarian: it does not apply to the Russian or the
Servian, even if they are barbarians. If a Russian peasant does beat his
wife, he does it because his fathers did it before him: he is likely to
beat less rather than more, as the past fades away. He does not think, as
the Prussian would, that he has made a new discovery in physiology in
finding that a woman is weaker than a man. If a Servian does knife his
rival without a word, he does it because other Servians have done it. He
may regard it even as piety, but certainly not as progress. He does not
think, as the Prussian does, that he founds a new school of horology by
starting before the word “Go.” He does not think he is in advance of the
world in militarism merely because he is behind it in morals. No; the
danger of the Pruss is that he is prepared to fight for old errors as if
they were new truths. He has somehow heard of certain shallow
simplifications, and imagines that we have never heard of them. And, as I
have said, his limited, but very sincere lunacy concentrates chiefly in a
desire to destroy two ideas, the twin root ideas of rational society. The
first is the idea of record and promise: the second is the idea of
reciprocity.
It is plain that the promise, or extension of responsibility through time,
is what chiefly distinguishes us, I will not say from savages, but from
brutes and reptiles. This was noted by the shrewdness of the Old
Testament, when it summed up the dark irresponsible enormity of Leviathan
in the words, “Will he make a pact with thee?” The promise, like the
wheel, is unknown in Nature: and is the first mark of man. Referring only
to human civilisation, it may be said with seriousness that in the
beginning was the Word. The vow is to the man what the song is to the
bird, or the bark to the dog; his voice, whereby he is known. Just as a
man who cannot keep an appointment is not fit even to fight a duel, so the
man who cannot keep an appointment with himself is not sane enough even
for suicide. It is not easy to mention anything on which the enormous
apparatus of human life can be said to depend. But if it depends on
anything, it is on this frail cord, flung from the forgotten hills of
yesterday to the invisible mountains of to-morrow. On that solitary string
hangs everything from Armageddon to an almanac, from a successful
revolution to a return ticket. On that solitary string the Barbarian is
hacking heavily, with a sabre which is fortunately blunt.
Anyone can see this well enough, merely by reading the last negotiations
between London and Berlin. The Prussians had made a new discovery in
international politics: that it may often be convenient to make a promise;
and yet curiously inconvenient to keep it. They were charmed, in their
simple way, with this scientific discovery, and desired to communicate it
to the world. They therefore promised England a promise, on condition that
she broke a promise, and on the implied condition that the new promise
might be broken as easily as the old one. To the profound astonishment of
Prussia, this reasonable offer was refused! I believe that the
astonishment of Prussia was quite sincere. That is what I mean when I say
that the Barbarian is trying to cut away that cord of honesty and clear
record on which hangs all that men have made.
The friends of the German cause have complained that Asiatics and Africans
upon the very verge of savagery have been brought against them from India
and Algiers. And in ordinary circumstances, I should sympathise with such
a complaint made by a European people. But the circumstances are not
ordinary. Here, again, the quiet unique barbarism of Prussia goes deeper
than what we call barbarities. About mere barbarities, it is true, the
Turco and the Sikh would have a very good reply to the superior Teuton.
The general and just reason for not using non-European tribes against
Europeans is that given by Chatham against the use of the Red Indian: that
such allies might do very diabolical things. But the poor Turco might not
unreasonably ask, after a week-end in Belgium, what more diabolical things
he could do than the highly cultured Germans were doing themselves.
Nevertheless, as I say, the justification of any extra-European aid goes
deeper than any such details. It rests upon the fact that even other
civilisations, even much lower civilisations, even remote and repulsive
civilisations, depend as much as our own on this primary principle, on
which the super-morality of Potsdam declares open War. Even savages
promise things; and respect those who keep their promises. Even Orientals
write things down: and though they write them from right to left, they
know the importance of a scrap of paper. Many merchants will tell you that
the word of the sinister and almost unhuman Chinaman is often as good as
his bond: and it was amid palm trees and Syrian pavilions that the great
utterance opened the tabernacle to him that sweareth to his hurt and
changeth not. There is doubtless a dense labyrinth of duplicity in the
East, and perhaps more guile in the individual Asiatic than in the
individual German. But we are not talking of the violations of human
morality in various parts of the world. We are talking about a new and
inhuman morality, which denies altogether the day of obligation. The
Prussians have been told by their literary men that everything depends
upon Mood: and by their politicians that all arrangements dissolve before
“necessity.” That is the importance of the German Chancellor’s phrase. He
did not allege some special excuse in the case of Belgium, which might
make it seem an exception that proved the rule. He distinctly argued, as
on a principle applicable to other cases, that victory was a necessity and
honour was a scrap of paper. And it is evident that the half-educated
Prussian imagination really cannot get any farther than this. It cannot
see that if everybody’s action were entirely incalculable from hour to
hour, it would not only be the end of all promises, but the end of all
projects. In not being able to see that, the Berlin philosopher is really
on a lower mental level than the Arab who respects the salt, or the
Brahmin who preserves the caste. And in this quarrel we have a right to
come with scimitars as well as sabres, with bows as well as rifles, with
assegai and tomahawk and boomerang, because there is in all these at least
a seed of civilisation that these intellectual anarchists would kill. And
if they should find us in our last stand girt with such strange swords and
following unfamiliar ensigns, and ask us for what we fight in so singular
a company, we shall know what to reply: “We fight for the trust and for
the tryst; for fixed memories and the possible meeting of men; for all
that makes life anything but an uncontrollable nightmare. We fight for the
long arm of honour and remembrance; for all that can lift a man above the
quicksands of his moods, and give him the mastery of time.”
II. THE REFUSAL OF RECIPROCITY
In the last summary I suggested that Barbarism, as we mean it, is not mere
ignorance or even mere cruelty. It has a more precise sense, and means
militant hostility to certain necessary human ideas. I took the case of
the vow or the contract, which Prussian intellectualism would destroy. I
urged that the Prussian is a spiritual Barbarian, because he is not bound
by his own past, any more than a man in a dream. He avows that when he
promised to respect a frontier on Monday, he did not foresee what he calls
“the necessity” of not respecting it on Tuesday. In short, he is like a
child, who at the end of all reasonable explanations and reminders of
admitted arrangements has no answer except “But I want to.”
There is another idea in human arrangements so fundamental as to be
forgotten; but now for the first time denied. It may be called the idea of
reciprocity; or, in better English, of give and take. The Prussian appears
to be quite intellectually incapable of this thought. He cannot, I think,
conceive the idea that is the foundation of all comedy; that, in the eyes
of the other man, he is only the other man. And if we carry this clue
through the institutions of Prussianised Germany, we shall find how
curiously his mind has been limited in the matter. The German differs from
other patriots in the inability to understand patriotism. Other European
peoples pity the Poles or the Welsh for their violated borders; but
Germans only pity themselves. They might take forcible possession of the
Severn or the Danube, of the Thames or the Tiber, of the Garry or the
Garonne—and they would still be singing sadly about how fast and
true stands the watch on Rhine; and what a shame it would be if anyone
took their own little river away from them. That is what I mean by not
being reciprocal: and you will find it in all that they do: as in all that
is done by savages.
Here, again, it is very necessary to avoid confusing this soul of the
savage with mere savagery in the sense of brutality or butchery; in which
the Greeks, the French and all the most civilised nations have indulged in
hours of abnormal panic or revenge. Accusations of cruelty are generally
mutual. But it is the point about the Prussian that with him nothing is
mutual. The definition of the true savage does not concern itself even
with how much more he hurts strangers or captives than do the other tribes
of men. The definition of the true savage is that he laughs when he hurts
you; and howls when you hurt him. This extraordinary inequality in the
mind is in every act and word that comes from Berlin. For instance, no man
of the world believes all he sees in the newspapers; and no journalist
believes a quarter of it. We should, therefore, be quite ready in the
ordinary way to take a great deal off the tales of German atrocities; to
doubt this story or deny that. But there is one thing that we cannot doubt
or deny: the seal and authority of the Emperor. In the Imperial
proclamation the fact that certain “frightful” things have been done is
admitted; and justified on the ground of their frightfulness. It was a
military necessity to terrify the peaceful populations with something that
was not civilised, something that was hardly human. Very well. That is an
intelligible policy: and in that sense an intelligible argument. An army
endangered by foreigners may do the most frightful things. But then we
turn the next page of the Kaiser’s public diary, and we find him writing
to the President of the United States, to complain that the English are
using dum-dum bullets and violating various regulations of the Hague
Conference. I pass for the present the question of whether there is a word
of truth in these charges. I am content to gaze rapturously at the
blinking eyes of the True, or Positive, Barbarian. I suppose he would be
quite puzzled if we said that violating the Hague Conference was “a
military necessity” to us; or that the rules of the Conference were only a
scrap of paper. He would be quite pained if we said that dum-dum bullets,
“by their very frightfulness,” would be very useful to keep conquered
Germans in order. Do what he will, he cannot get outside the idea that he,
because he is he and not you, is free to break the law; and also to appeal
to the law. It is said that the Prussian officers play at a game called
Kriegsspiel, or the War Game. But in truth they could not play at any
game; for the essence of every game is that the rules are the same on both
sides.
But taking every German institution in turn, the case is the same; and it
is not a case of mere bloodshed or military bravado. The duel, for
example, can legitimately be called a barbaric thing; but the word is here
used in another sense. There are duels in Germany; but so there are in
France, Italy, Belgium and Spain; indeed, there are duels wherever there
are dentists, newspapers, Turkish baths, time-tables, and all the curses
of civilisation; except in England and a corner of America. You may happen
to regard the duel as an historic relic of the more barbaric States on
which these modern States were built. It might equally well be maintained
that the duel is everywhere the sign of high civilisation; being the sign
of its more delicate sense of honour, its more vulnerable vanity, or its
greater dread of social disrepute. But whichever of the two views you
take, you must concede that the essence of the duel is an armed equality.
I should not, therefore, apply the word barbaric, as I am using it, to the
duels of German officers or even to the broadsword combats that are
conventional among the German students. I do not see why a young Prussian
should not have scars all over his face if he likes them; nay, they are
often the redeeming points of interest on an otherwise somewhat
unenlightening countenance. The duel may be defended; the sham duel may be
defended.
What cannot be defended is something really peculiar to Prussia, of which
we hear numberless stories, some of them certainly true. It might be
called the one-sided duel. I mean the idea that there is some sort of
dignity in drawing the sword upon a man who has not got a sword; a waiter,
or a shop assistant, or even a schoolboy. One of the officers of the
Kaiser in the affair at Saberne was found industriously hacking at a
cripple. In all these matters I would avoid sentiment. We must not lose
our tempers at the mere cruelty of the thing; but pursue the strict
psychological distinction. Others besides German soldiers have slain the
defenceless, for loot or lust or private malice, like any other murderer.
The point is that nowhere else but in Prussian Germany is any theory of
honour mixed up with such things; any more than with poisoning or picking
pockets. No French, English, Italian or American gentleman would think he
had in some way cleared his own character by sticking his sabre through
some ridiculous greengrocer who had nothing in his hand but a cucumber. It
would seem as if the word which is translated from the German as “honour,”
must really mean something quite different in German. It seems to mean
something more like what we should call “prestige.”
The fundamental fact, however, is the absence of the reciprocal idea. The
Prussian is not sufficiently civilised for the duel. Even when he crosses
swords with us his thoughts are not as our thoughts; when we both glorify
war, we are glorifying different things. Our medals are wrought like his,
but they do not mean the same thing; our regiments are cheered as his are,
but the thought in the heart is not the same; the Iron Cross is on the
bosom of his king, but it is not the sign of our God. For we, alas, follow
our God with many relapses and self-contradictions, but he follows his
very consistently. Through all the things that we have examined, the view
of national boundaries, the view of military methods, the view of personal
honour and self-defence, there runs in their case something of an
atrocious simplicity; something too simple for us to understand: the idea
that glory consists in holding the steel, and not in facing it.
If further examples were necessary, it would be easy to give hundreds of
them. Let us leave, for the moment, the relation between man and man in
the thing called the duel. Let us take the relation between man and woman,
in that immortal duel which we call a marriage. Here again we shall find
that other Christian civilisations aim at some kind of equality; even if
the balance be irrational or dangerous. Thus, the two extremes of the
treatment of women might be represented by what are called the respectable
classes in America and in France. In America they choose the risk of
comradeship; in France the compensation of courtesy. In America it is
practically possible for any young gentleman to take any young lady for
what he calls (I deeply regret to say) a joyride; but at least the man
goes with the woman as much as the woman with the man. In France the young
woman is protected like a nun while she is unmarried; but when she is a
mother she is really a holy woman; and when she is a grandmother she is a
holy terror. By both extremes the woman gets something back out of life.
There is only one place where she gets little or nothing back; and that is
the north of Germany. France and America aim alike at equality—America
by similarity; France by dissimilarity. But North Germany does definitely
aim at inequality. The woman stands up, with no more irritation than a
butler; the man sits down, with no more embarrassment than a guest. This
is the cool affirmation of inferiority, as in the case of the sabre and
the tradesman. “Thou goest with women; forget not thy whip,” said
Nietzsche. It will be observed that he does not say “poker”; which might
come more naturally to the mind of a more common or Christian wife-beater.
But then a poker is a part of domesticity; and might be used by the wife
as well as the husband. In fact, it often, is. The sword and the whip are
the weapons of a privileged caste.
Pass from the closest of all differences, that between husband and wife,
to the most distant of all differences, that of the remote and unrelated
races who have seldom seen each other’s faces, and never been tinged with
each other’s blood. Here we still find the same unvarying Prussian
principle. Any European might feel a genuine fear of the Yellow Peril; and
many Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Russians have felt and expressed it. Many
might say, and have said, that the Heathen Chinee is very heathen indeed;
that if he ever advances against us he will trample and torture and
utterly destroy, in a way that Eastern people do, but Western people do
not. Nor do I doubt the German Emperor’s sincerity when he sought to point
out to us how abnormal and abominable such a nightmare campaign would be,
supposing that it could ever come. But now comes the comic irony; which
never fails to follow on the attempt of the Prussian to be philosophic.
For the Kaiser, after explaining to his troops how important it was to
avoid Eastern Barbarism, instantly commanded them to become Eastern
Barbarians. He told them, in so many words, to be Huns: and leave nothing
living or standing behind them. In fact, he frankly offered a new army
corps of aboriginal Tartars to the Far East, within such time as it may
take a bewildered Hanoverian to turn into a Tartar. Anyone who has the
painful habit of personal thought will perceive here at once the
non-reciprocal principle again. Boiled down to its bones of logic, it
means simply this: “I am a German and you are a Chinaman. Therefore I,
being a German, have a right to be a Chinaman. But you have no right to be
a Chinaman; because you are only a Chinaman.” This is probably the highest
point to which German culture has risen.
The principle here neglected, which may be called Mutuality by those who
misunderstand and dislike the word Equality, does not offer so clear a
distinction between the Prussian and the other peoples as did the first
Prussian principle of an infinite and destructive opportunism; or, in
other words, the principle of being unprincipled. Nor upon this second can
one take up so obvious a position touching the other civilisations or
semi-civilisations of the world. Some idea of oath and bond there is in
the rudest tribes, in the darkest continents. But it might be maintained,
of the more delicate and imaginative element of reciprocity, that a
cannibal in Borneo understands it almost as little as a professor in
Berlin. A narrow and one-sided seriousness is the fault of barbarians all
over the world. This may have been the meaning, for aught I know, of the
one eye of the Cyclops: that the Barbarian cannot see round things or look
at them from two points of view; and thus becomes a blind beast and an
eater of men. Certainly there can be no better summary of the savage than
this, which, as we have seen, unfits him for the duel. He is the man who
cannot love—no, nor even hate—his neighbour as himself.
But this quality in Prussia does have one effect which has reference to
the same quest of the lower civilisations. It disposes once and for all at
least of the civilising mission of Germany. Evidently the Germans are the
last people in the world to be trusted with the task. They are as
shortsighted morally as physically. What is their sophism of “necessity”
but an inability to imagine to-morrow morning? What is their
non-reciprocity but an inability to imagine, not a god or devil, but
merely another man? Are these to judge mankind? Men of two tribes in
Africa not only know that they are all men, but can understand that they
are all black men. In this they are quite seriously in advance of the
intellectual Prussian; who cannot be got to see that we are all white men.
The ordinary eye is unable to perceive in the North-East Teuton, anything
that marks him out especially from the more colourless classes of the rest
of Aryan mankind. He is simply a white man, with a tendency to the grey or
the drab. Yet he will explain, in serious official documents, that the
difference between him and us is a difference between “the master-race and
the inferior-race.” The collapse of German philosophy always occurs at the
beginning, rather than the end of an argument; and the difficulty here is
that there is no way of testing which is a master-race except by asking
which is your own race. If you cannot find out (as is usually the case)
you fall back on the absurd occupation of writing history about
prehistoric times. But I suggest quite seriously that if the Germans can
give their philosophy to the Hottentots, there is no reason why they
should not give their sense of superiority to the Hottentots. If they can
see such fine shades between the Goth and the Gaul, there is no reason why
similar shades should not lift the savage above other savages; why any
Ojibway should not discover that he is one tint redder than the Dacotahs;
or any nigger in the Cameroons say he is not so black as he is painted.
For this principle of a quite unproved racial supremacy is the last and
worst of the refusals of reciprocity. The Prussian calls all men to admire
the beauty of his large blue eyes. If they do, it is because they have
inferior eyes: if they don’t, it is because they have no eyes.
Wherever the most miserable remnant of our race, astray and dried up in
deserts, or buried for ever under the fall of bad civilisations, has some
feeble memory that men are men, that bargains are bargains, that there are
two sides to a question, or even that it takes two to make a quarrel—that
remnant has the right to resist the New Culture, to the knife and club and
the splintered stone. For the Prussian begins all his culture by that act
which is the destruction of all creative thought and constructive action.
He breaks that mirror in the mind, in which a man can see the face of his
friend and foe.
III. THE APPETITE OF TYRANNY
The German Emperor has reproached this country with allying itself with
“barbaric and semi-oriental power.” We have already considered in what
sense we use the word barbaric: it is in the sense of one who is hostile
to civilisation, not one who is insufficient in it. But when we pass from
the idea of the barbaric to the idea of the oriental, the case is even
more curious. There is nothing particularly Tartar in Russian affairs,
except the fact that Russia expelled the Tartars. The eastern invader
occupied and crushed the country for many years; but that is equally true
of Greece, of Spain, and even of Austria. If Russia has suffered from the
East she has suffered in order to resist it: and it is rather hard that
the very miracle of her escape should make a mystery about her origin.
Jonah may or may not have been three days inside a fish, but that does not
make him a merman. And in all the other cases of European nations who
escaped the monstrous captivity, we do admit the purity and continuity of
the European type. We consider the old Eastern rule as a wound, but not as
a stain. Copper-coloured men out of Africa overruled for centuries the
religion and patriotism of Spaniards. Yet I have never heard that Don
Quixote was an African fable on the lines of Uncle Remus. I have never
heard that the heavy black in the pictures of Velasquez was due to a negro
ancestry. In the case of Spain, which is close to us, we can recognise the
resurrection of a Christian and cultured nation after its age of bondage.
But Russia is rather remote; and those to whom nations are but names in
newspapers can really fancy, like Mr. Baring’s friend, that all Russian
churches are “mosques.” Yet the land of Turgeniev is not a wilderness of
fakirs; and even the fanatical Russian is as proud of being different from
the Mongol, as the fanatical Spaniard was proud of being different from
the Moor.
The town of Reading, as it exists, offers few opportunities for piracy on
the high seas: yet it was the camp of the pirates in Alfred’s day. I
should think it hard to call the people of Berkshire half-Danish, merely
because they drove out the Danes. In short, some temporary submergence
under the savage flood was the fate of many of the most civilised states
of Christendom; and it is quite ridiculous to argue that Russia, which
wrestled hardest, must have recovered least. Everywhere, doubtless, the
East spread a sort of enamel over the conquered countries, but everywhere
the enamel cracked. Actual history, in fact, is exactly opposite to the
cheap proverb invented against the Muscovite. It is not true to say
“Scratch a Russian and you find a Tartar.” In the darkest hour of the
barbaric dominion it was truer to say, “Scratch a Tartar and you find a
Russian.” It was the civilisation that survived under all the barbarism.
This vital romance of Russia, this revolution against Asia, can be proved
in pure fact; not only from the almost superhuman activity of Russia
during the struggle, but also (which is much rarer as human history goes)
by her quite consistent conduct since. She is the only great nation which
has really expelled the Mongol from her country, and continued to protest
against the presence of the Mongol in her continent. Knowing what he had
been in Russia, she knew what he would be in Europe. In this she pursued a
logical line of thought, which was, if anything, too unsympathetic with
the energies and religions of the East. Every other country, one may say,
has been an ally of the Turk; that is, of the Mongol and the Moslem. The
French played them as pieces against Austria; the English warmly supported
them under the Palmerston regime; even the young Italians sent troops to
the Crimea; and of Prussia and her Austrian vassal it is nowadays needless
to speak. For good or evil, it is the fact of history that Russia is the
only Power in Europe that has never supported the Crescent against the
Cross.
That, doubtless, will appear an unimportant matter; but it may become
important under certain peculiar conditions. Suppose, for the sake of
argument, that there were a powerful prince in Europe who had gone
ostentatiously out of his way to pay reverence to the remains of the
Tartar, Mongol and Moslem, which are left as outposts in Europe. Suppose
there were a Christian Emperor who could not even go to the tomb of the
Crucified, without pausing to congratulate the last and living crucifier.
If there were an Emperor who gave guns and guides and maps and drill
instructors to defend the remains of the Mongol in Christendom, what
should we say to him? I think at least we might ask him what he meant by
his impudence, when he talked about supporting a semi-oriental power. That
we support a semi-oriental power we deny. That he has supported an
entirely oriental power cannot be denied—no, not even by the man who
did it.
But here is to be noted the essential difference between Russia and
Prussia; especially by those who use the ordinary Liberal arguments
against the latter. Russia has a policy which she pursues, if you will,
through evil and good; but at least so as to produce good as well as evil.
Let it be granted that the policy has made her oppressive to the Finns and
the Poles—though the Russian Poles feel far less oppressed than do
the Prussian Poles. But it is a mere historic fact, that if Russia has
been a despot to some small nations, she has been a deliverer to others.
She did, so far as in her lay, emancipate the Servians and the
Montenegrins. But whom did Prussia ever emancipate—even by accident?
It is indeed somewhat extraordinary that in the perpetual permutations of
international politics, the Hohenzollerns have never gone astray into the
path of enlightenment. They have been in alliance with almost everybody
off and on: with France, with England, with Austria, with Russia. Can
anyone candidly say that they have left on any one of these people the
faintest impress of progress or liberation? Prussia was the enemy of the
French Monarchy; but a worse enemy of the French Revolution. Prussia had
been an enemy of the Czar; but she was a worse enemy of the Duma. Prussia
totally disregarded Austrian rights: but she is to-day quite ready to
inflict Austrian wrongs. This is the strong particular difference between
the one empire and the other. Russia is pursuing certain intelligible and
sincere ends, which to her at least are ideals, and for which, therefore,
she will make sacrifices and will protect the weak. But the North German
soldier is a sort of abstract tyrant, everywhere and always on the side of
materialistic tyranny. This Teuton in uniform has been found in strange
places; shooting farmers before Saratoga and flogging soldiers in Surrey,
hanging niggers in Africa and raping girls in Wicklow; but never, by some
mysterious fatality, lending a hand to the freeing of a single city or the
independence of one solitary flag. Wherever scorn and prosperous
oppression are, there is the Prussian; unconsciously consistent,
instinctively restrictive, innocently evil; “following darkness like a
dream.”
Suppose we heard of a person (gifted with some longevity) who had helped
Alva to persecute Dutch Protestants, then helped Cromwell to persecute
Irish Catholics, and then helped Claverhouse to persecute Scotch Puritans,
we should find it rather easier to call him a persecutor than to call him
a Protestant or a Catholic. Curiously enough this is actually the position
in which the Prussian stands in Europe. No argument can alter the fact
that in three converging and conclusive cases, he has been on the side of
three distinct rulers of different religions, who had nothing whatever in
common except that they were ruling oppressively. In these three
Governments, taken separately, one can see something excusable or at least
human. When the Kaiser encouraged the Russian rulers to crush the
Revolution, the Russian rulers undoubtedly believed they were wrestling
with an inferno of atheism and anarchy. A Socialist of the ordinary
English kind cried out upon me when I spoke of Stolypin, and said he was
chiefly known by the halter called “Stolypin’s Necktie.” As a fact, there
were many other things interesting about Stolypin besides his necktie: his
policy of peasant proprietorship, his extraordinary personal courage, and
certainly none more interesting than that movement in his death agony,
when he made the sign of the cross towards the Czar, as the crown and
captain of his Christianity. But the Kaiser does not regard the Czar as
the captain of Christianity. Far from it. What he supported in Stolypin
was the necktie and nothing but the necktie: the gallows and not the
cross. The Russian ruler did believe that the Orthodox Church was
orthodox. The Austrian Archduke did really desire to make the Catholic
Church catholic. He did really believe that he was being Pro-Catholic in
being Pro-Austrian. But the Kaiser cannot be Pro-Catholic, and therefore
cannot have been really Pro-Austrian, he was simply and solely
Anti-Servian. Nay, even in the cruel and sterile strength of Turkey,
anyone with imagination can see something of the tragedy and therefore of
the tenderness of true belief. The worst that can be said of the Moslems
is, as the poet put it, they offered to man the choice of the Koran or the
sword. The best that can be said for the German is that he does not care
about the Koran, but is satisfied if he can have the sword. And for me, I
confess, even the sins of these three other striving empires take on, in
comparison, something that is sorrowful and dignified: and I feel they do
not deserve that this little Lutheran lounger should patronise all that is
evil in them, while ignoring all that is good. He is not Catholic, he is
not Orthodox, he is not Mahomedan. He is merely an old gentleman who
wishes to share the crime though he cannot share the creed. He desires to
be a persecutor by the pang without the palm. So strongly do all the
instincts of the Prussian drive against liberty, that he would rather
oppress other people’s subjects than think of anybody going without the
benefits of oppression. He is a sort of disinterested despot. He is as
disinterested as the devil who is ready to do anyone’s dirty work.
This would seem obviously fantastic were it not supported by solid facts
which cannot be explained otherwise. Indeed it would be inconceivable if
we were thinking of a whole people, consisting of free and varied
individuals. But in Prussia the governing class is really a governing
class: and a very few people are needed to think along these lines to make
all the other people act along them. And the paradox of Prussia is this:
that while its princes and nobles have no other aim on this earth but to
destroy democracy wherever it shows itself, they have contrived to get
themselves trusted, not as wardens of the past but as forerunners of the
future. Even they cannot believe that their theory is popular, but they do
believe that it is progressive. Here again we find the spiritual chasm
between the two monarchies in question. The Russian institutions are, in
many cases, really left in the rear of the Russian people, and many of the
Russian people know it. But the Prussian institutions are supposed to be
in advance of the Prussian people, and most of the Prussian people believe
it. It is thus much easier for the war-lords to go everywhere and impose a
hopeless slavery upon everyone, for they have already imposed a sort of
hopeful slavery on their own simple race.
And when men shall speak to us of the hoary iniquities of Russia and of
how antiquated is the Russian system, we shall answer “Yes; that is the
superiority of Russia.” Their institutions are part of their history,
whether as relics or fossils. Their abuses have really been uses: that is
to say, they have been used up. If they have old engines of terror or
torment, they may fall to pieces from mere rust, like an old coat of
armour. But in the case of the Prussian tyranny, if it be tyranny at all,
it is the whole point of its claim that it is not antiquated, but just
going to begin, like the showman. Prussia has a whole thriving factory of
thumbscrews, a whole humming workshop of wheels and racks, of the newest
and neatest pattern, with which to win back Europe to the Reaction … infandum
renovare dolorem And if we wish to test the truth of this, it can be
done by the same method which showed us that Russia, if her race or
religion could sometimes make her an invader and an oppressor, could also
be made an emancipator and a knight errant. In the same way, if the
Russian institutions are old-fashioned, they honestly exhibit the good as
well as the bad that can be found in old-fashioned things.
In their police system they have an inequality which is against our ideas
of law. But in their commune system they have an equality that is older
than law itself. Even when they flogged each other like barbarians, they
called upon each other by their Christian names like children. At their
worst they retained all the best of a rude society. At their best, they
are simply good, like good children or good nuns. But in Prussia, all that
is best in the civilised machinery is put at the service of all that is
worst in the barbaric mind. Here again the Prussian has no accidental
merits, none of those lucky survivals, none of those late repentances,
which make the patchwork glory of Russia. Here all is sharpened to a point
and pointed to a purpose, and that purpose, if words and acts have any
meaning at all, is the destruction of liberty throughout the world.
IV. THE ESCAPE OF FOLLY
In considering the Prussian point of view, we have been considering what
seems to be mainly a mental limitation: a kind of knot in the brain.
Towards the problem of Slav population, of English colonisation, of French
armies and reinforcements, it shows the same strange philosophic sulks. So
far as I can follow it, it seems to amount to saying “It is very wrong
that you should be superior to me, because I am superior to you.” The
spokesmen of this system seem to have a curious capacity for concentrating
this entanglement or contradiction, sometimes into a single paragraph, or
even a single sentence. I have already referred to the German Emperor’s
celebrated suggestion that in order to avert the peril of Hunnishness we
should all become Huns. A much stronger instance is his more recent order
to his troops touching the war in Northern France. As most people know,
his words ran “It is my Royal and Imperial command that you concentrate
your energies, for the immediate present, upon one single purpose, and
that is that you address all your skill and all the valour of my soldiers
to exterminate first the treacherous English and to walk over General
French’s contemptible little army.” The rudeness of the remark an
Englishman can afford to pass over; what I am interested in is the
mentality, the train of thought that can manage to entangle itself even in
so brief a space. If French’s little Army is contemptible, it would seem
clear that all the skill and valour of the German Army had better not be
concentrated on it, but on the larger and less contemptible allies. If all
the skill and valour of the German Army are concentrated on it, it is not
being treated as contemptible. But the Prussian rhetorician had two
incompatible sentiments in his mind; and he insisted on saying them both
at once. He wanted to think of an English Army as a small thing; but he
also wanted to think of an English defeat as a big thing. He wanted to
exult, at the same moment, in the utter weakness of the British in their
attack; and the supreme skill and valour of the Germans in repelling such
an attack. Somehow it must be made a common and obvious collapse for
England; and yet a daring and unexpected triumph for Germany. In trying to
express these contradictory conceptions simultaneously, he got rather
mixed. Therefore he bade Germania fill all her vales and mountains with
the dying agonies of this almost invisible earwig; and let the impure
blood of this cockroach redden the Rhine down to the sea.
But it would be unfair to base the criticism on the utterance of any
accidental and hereditary prince: and it is quite equally clear in the
case of the philosophers who have been held up to us, even in England, as
the very prophets of progress. And in nothing is it shown more sharply
than in the curious confused talk about Race and especially about the
Teutonic Race. Professor Harnack and similar people are reproaching us, I
understand, for having broken “the bond of Teutonism”: a bond which the
Prussians have strictly observed both in breach and observance. We note it
in their open annexation of lands wholly inhabited by negroes, such as
Denmark. We note it equally in their instant and joyful recognition of the
flaxen hair and light blue eyes of the Turks. But it is still the abstract
principle of Professor Harnack which interests me most; and in following
it I have the same complexity of inquiry, but the same simplicity of
result. Comparing the Professor’s concern about “Teutonism” with his
unconcern about Belgium, I can only reach the following result: “A man
need not keep a promise he has made. But a man must keep a promise he has
not made.” There certainly was a treaty binding Britain to Belgium; if it
was only a scrap of paper. If there was any treaty binding Britain to
Teutonism it is, to say the least of it, a lost scrap of paper; almost
what one would call a scrap of waste-paper. Here again the pedants under
consideration exhibit the illogical perversity that makes the brain reel.
There is obligation and there is no obligation: sometimes it appears that
Germany and England must keep faith with each other; sometimes that
Germany need not keep faith with anybody and anything; sometimes that we
alone among European peoples are almost entitled to be Germans; sometimes
that besides us, Russians and Frenchmen almost rise to a Germanic
loveliness of character. But through all there is, hazy but not
hypocritical, this sense of some common Teutonism.
Professor Haeckel, another of the witnesses raised up against us, attained
to some celebrity at one time through proving the remarkable resemblance
between two different things by printing duplicate pictures of the same
thing. Professor Haeckel’s contribution to biology, in this case, was
exactly like Professor Harnack’s contribution to ethnology. Professor
Harnack knows what a German is like. When he wants to imagine what an
Englishman is like, he simply photographs the same German over again. In
both cases there is probably sincerity as well as simplicity. Haeckel was
so certain that the species illustrated in embryo really are closely
related and linked up, that it seemed to him a small thing to simplify it
by mere repetition. Harnack is so certain that the German and Englishman
are almost alike, that he really risks the generalisation that they are
exactly alike. He photographs, so to speak, the same fair and foolish face
twice over; and calls it a remarkable resemblance between cousins. Thus,
he can prove the existence of Teutonism just about as conclusively as
Haeckel has proved the more tenable proposition of the non-existence of
God.
Now the German and the Englishman are not in the least alike—except
in the sense that neither of them are negroes. They are, in everything
good and evil, more unlike than any other two men we can take at random
from the great European family. They are opposite from the roots of their
history, nay of their geography. It is an understatement to call Britain
insular. Britain is not only an island, but an island slashed by the sea
till it nearly splits into three islands; and even the Midlands can almost
smell the salt. Germany is a powerful, beautiful and fertile inland
country, which can only find the sea by one or two twisted and narrow
paths, as people find a subterranean lake. Thus the British Navy is really
national because it is natural; it has cohered out of hundreds of
accidental adventures of ships and shipmen before Chaucer’s time and after
it. But the German Navy is an artificial thing; as artificial as a
constructed Alp would be in England. William II. has simply copied the
British Navy as Frederick II. copied the French Army: and this Japanese or
ant-like assiduity in imitation is one of the hundred qualities which the
Germans have and the English markedly have not. There are other German
superiorities which are very much superior.
The one or two really jolly things that the Germans have got are precisely
the things which the English haven’t got: notably a real habit of popular
music and of the ancient songs of the people, not merely spreading from
the towns or caught from the professionals. In this the Germans rather
resemble the Welsh; though heaven knows what becomes of Teutonism if they
do. But the difference between the Germans and the English goes deeper
than all these signs of it; they differ more than any other two Europeans
in the normal posture of the mind. Above all, they differ in what is the
most English of all English traits; that shame which the French may be
right in calling “the bad shame”; for it is certainly mixed up with pride
and suspicion, the upshot of which we called shyness. Even an Englishman’s
rudeness is often rooted in his being embarrassed. But a German’s rudeness
is rooted in his never being embarrassed. He eats and makes love noisily.
He never feels a speech or a song or a sermon or a large meal to be what
the English call “out of place” in particular circumstances. When Germans
are patriotic and religious, they have no reaction against patriotism and
religion as have the English and the French.
Nay, the mistake of Germany in the modern disaster largely arose from the
facts that she thought England was simple, when England is very subtle.
She thought that because our politics have become largely financial that
they had become wholly financial; that because our aristocrats had become
pretty cynical that they had become entirely corrupt. They could not seize
the subtlety by which a rather used-up English gentleman might sell a
coronet when he would not sell a fortress; might lower the public
standards and yet refuse to lower the flag.
In short, the Germans are quite sure that they understand us entirely,
because they do not understand us at all. Possibly if they began to
understand us they might hate us even more: but I would rather be hated
for some small but real reason, than pursued with love on account of all
kinds of qualities which I do not possess and which I do not desire. And
when the Germans get their first genuine glimpse of what modern England is
like, they will discover that England has a very broken, belated and
inadequate sense of having an obligation to Europe, but no sort of sense
whatever of having any obligation to Teutonism.
This is the last and strongest of the Prussian qualities we have here
considered. There is in stupidity of this sort a strange slippery
strength: because it can be not only outside rules but outside reason. The
man who really cannot see that he is contradicting himself has a great
advantage in controversy; though the advantage breaks down when he tries
to reduce it to simple addition, to chess, or to the game called war. It
is the same about the stupidity of the one-sided kinship. The drunkard who
is quite certain that a total stranger is his long-lost brother, has a
greater advantage until it comes to matters of detail. “We must have chaos
within,” said Nietzsche, “that we may give birth to a dancing star.”
In these slight notes I have suggested the principal strong points of the
Prussian character. A failure in honour which almost amounts to a failure
in memory: an egomania that is honestly blind to the fact that the other
party is an ego; and, above all, an actual itch for tyranny and
interference, the devil which everywhere torments the idle and the proud.
To these must be added a certain mental shapelessness which can expand or
contract without reference to reason or record; a potential infinity of
excuses. If the English had been on the German side, the German professors
would have noted what irresistible energies had evolved the Teutons. As
the English are on the other side, the German professors will say that
these Teutons were not sufficiently evolved. Or they will say that they
were just sufficiently evolved to show that they were not Teutons.
Probably they will say both. But the truth is that all that they call
evolution should rather be called evasion. They tell us they are opening
windows of enlightenment and doors of progress. The truth is that they are
breaking up the whole house of the human intellect, that they may abscond
in any direction. There is an ominous and almost monstrous parallel
between the position of their over-rated philosophers and of their
comparatively under-rated soldiers. For what their professors call roads
of progress are really routes of escape.