Part 19 (2/2)
It is silly and superficial to look upon the German army only as a menace, only as a cloud of provocations in glittering uniforms, only as a helmeted frown with a turned-up moustache. It is not, and I make no such claim for it, an army or an officers' corps of Puritans or of self-sacrificing saints, but it does partake of the dreamy, idealistic German nature, as does every other inst.i.tution in Germany. Though, as a whole, it is a fighting machine, the various parts of it are not imbued with that spirit alone. The uneasy pessimism of the dreamer, which distrusts the comfortable solutions of the business-like politicians, and leaders, in their own and in other countries, is as noticeable in the army as in all other departments of German life.
”And all through life I see a cross, Where sons of G.o.d yield up their breath; There is no gain except by loss, There is no life except by death, There is no vision but by faith; Nor glory but by bearing shame, Nor justice but by taking blame.”
There have been many, and there are still, soldiers who hold that creed. There are not a few of them in Germany.
IX GERMAN PROBLEMS
A great nation like Germany must have characteristics, anxieties, problems, and responsibilities, some of which are peculiar to itself.
The individual must be of small importance who has not problems and burdens of his own arising from his environment, position, work, and his personal relations with other men; as well as problems of temper, temperament, health, education, and traditions peculiar to himself.
Wise men recognize two things about every other man: that he has his own problems, and that no one else thoroughly understands either another man's handicaps or his advantages; and that the only way to judge him is not to go behind the returns, but to note how he lives with these same problems. They are there, there is no doubt about that; the question is, does he smile or scowl? does he work away toward a solution, or allow himself to be swamped by them? do they dominate him, or he them? has he that sun of life, vitality, sufficient to burn away the fog, or does he live and die in a moist, semi-impenetrable fog, in which he flounders timidly and rather aimlessly about, always rather discouraged, rather in the dark, and lamentably damp in person and in spirits? The only fair test of a man's life is his living of it, and the same is true of a nation.
Of Germany's history, traditions, and temperament I have written. No one can fail to note the chief characteristics: their gregariousness, their melancholic and subjective way of looking at life, their pa.s.sion for music. It is more what they think, than what they do or see, that gives them pleasure. They agree with Erasmus, that ”it is a foolish error to believe that happiness is dependent upon things; it is dependent entirely upon one's opinion of them.” The indefinite has no terrors for them, they delight indeed in the indefinable. They have done little in great sculpture and architecture, or the founding and ruling of colonies, as compared with their supreme achievements in music, in philosophy, in lyric poetry.
The art of music, which moves one greatly toward nothing in particular; which supplies sounds but not a language for the mysteries of feeling; which easily carries a sensitive soul away from its sorrows or drowns it in tears, and all without offering a semblance of a practical solution; which orchestrates a greater fury, a more poignant jealousy, a sweeter note of bird, a harsher clang of weapons, than any human energy can even imagine to exist; this art with which marching soldiers sing away their fatigue, but not really; with which disconsolate lovers wing their hopes, but not really; with which the pious pipe themselves to heaven, but not really; with which, by strings and beaten skins, organ-pipes and blowing bra.s.s, an anaesthesia of ecstasy is produced, leaving one only the weaker against the dourness and doggedness of the devil; with which men and women hymn themselves home to G.o.d, only to lose Him when they leave the threshold of His house; which choruses from a thousand throats patriotism, defiance, self-confidence, but arms none of them with any useful weapon; which with drums and bra.s.s can send any lout to heroism without his knowing why; this art which burns up the manhood of its devotees--who ever heard of a great tenor who was a great man, or even of a great musician for more than half of whose life one must needs not apologize?--this art flourishes in Germany not without reason, and not for nothing.
In a ragged school in the neighborhood of Posen where the children could hardly speak German they could sing; in a public school in Charlottenburg fifty boys, aged between eight and fifteen, sang the part-song known to every college man in America, ”On a Bank Two Roses Grew,” as well as a college glee club; those who know Bayreuth, or have attended a musical festival, or listened to one of the great clubs of male voices, or heard the orchestras and military bands, will not deny the delights of music in Germany. In Berlin there is not a hall suitable for a musical recital that is not engaged a year, sometimes more, in advance.
In the beautiful Golden Hall of the castle of the Grand Duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, at Schwerin, I have attended a concert given by the Grand Duke's own orchestra, where the selections were all compositions of former leaders or members of the orchestra, dating back over a period of two hundred years. For centuries in this particular grand duchy music and the theatre, supported and guided by the sovereign, have offered a school of entertainment and instruction to the people. At this present writing, special trains are run to Schwerin from the surrounding country districts, and the people for miles around subscribe for their seats for the whole winter, and attend the theatre and certain concerts as regularly as children go to school. It sounds oddly to the ears of an American to hear criticism to the effect, that there are more high-cla.s.s music and more cla.s.sical plays than the people have either time or money for. Here is a population which is actually overindulging in culture. We complain of too little; here they complain of too much. It makes one wonder whether any of the problems of social life are satisfactorily soluble; whether indeed it be not true that even the virtues carried to an extreme do not become vices. Philanthropy in more than one city in America is spending time, money, and energy to bring about this very enthusiasm for music and the more intellectual arts which, it is maintained, here in Schwerin at least, has gone too far.
These problems are not so easy of solution as the ignorant and the inexperienced think. Imagine the inhabitants of Hoboken, New Jersey; of Lynn, Ma.s.sachusetts; of Kalamazoo, Michigan; of b.l.o.o.d.y Gulch, Idaho, spending too much time and money listening to the music of Palestrina and Bach, or to the plays of Shakespeare; and yet what money and energy would not be spent by certain enthusiasts for the arts did they think such a result possible! And, after all, it might prove not a blessing, but a danger.
Whenever or wherever you are in the company of Germans you notice their pleasure and their keen interest in the subjective, rather than in the objective side of life. It is from within out that they are stirred, not as we are, by outside things working upon us. They are still the dreaming, drinking, singing, impulsive Germans of Tacitus.
t.i.tus Livius, Plutarch, and Machiavelli, all maintained that the successive invasions of the Germans into Italy were for the sake of the wine to be found there. Plutarch writes that ”the Gauls were introduced to the Italian wine by a Tuscan named Arron, and so excited were they by the desire for more that, taking their wives and children with them, they journeyed across the Alps to conquer the land of such good vintages, looking upon other countries as sterile and savage by comparison. Even if this be not history, it is an impression; and at any rate, from that day to this the Germans have agreed with the dictum of Aulus Gellius: ”Prandium autem abstemium, in quo nihil vini potatur, canium dicitur: quoniam canis vino caret.” When the Roman historian first came into contact with them he notes, that their bread was lighter than other bread, because ”they use the foam from their beer as yeast.”
Tacitus writes of them: ”The Germans abound with rude strains of verse, the reciters of which, in the language of the country, are called 'Bards.'”
I visited a private stable in Bavaria, as well ordered and as well kept as any private stable in America or in England, and the head coachman was a reader of poetry; and though he had received numerous offers of higher wages in the city, declined them, giving as one reason that the view from the window of his room could not be equalled elsewhere! Where can one find a stable-man in our country who reads Sh.e.l.ley or Edgar Allan Poe, or who ever heard of William James and Pragmatism? I may be doing an injustice to the stable-men of Boston, but I doubt it.
There are scores of pages of notes to my hand, recounting similar if not such startling examples of the German temperament among high and low. Musical, melancholic, gregarious, subjective, these are their true characteristics, but the superficial among us do not see these things because they are hidden behind the great army, the new navy and mercantile marine, the factories, the increased commercial values, the strenuous agricultural and industrial pus.h.i.+ng ahead of the last thirty years. But they are there, they represent the German temperament, they are the internal character of Germania, always to be taken into account in judging her, or in wondering why she does this or that, or why she does it in this or that way.
”As imagination bodies forth The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing A local habitation and a name.”
This is what the purely subjective mind is ever doing, and when it is carried too far it is insanity. The individual no longer sees things as they are, but he sees others and himself in strange, horrible, or ludicrous shapes.
Barring j.a.pan, I suppose Germany yields more easily to the temptation of the subjective malady of suicide than any other country. In Saxony, for example, the rate was lately 39.2 per 100,000 of the population, in England and Wales 7.5. During the five years ending with 1908 there were for every 100 suicides among males in the United States 136 in Germany, and for every 100 suicides of females 125 in Germany. In Vienna, and for racial purposes this is Germany, 1,558 persons killed themselves in 1912. Children committing suicide because they have failed in their examinations is not uncommon in Germany; in America and in England the teachers are more likely to succ.u.mb than the children. We do not commit suicide in America from any sense of shame at our intellectual shortcomings--what a decimating of the population there would be if we did!--it is more apt to be caused by ill health consequent upon a straining chase for dollars. In Prussia during the five years, 1902-1907, divorce increased from 17.7 to 20.8 per 100,000 inhabitants, and suicide from 20 to 30.7.
If the observer does not take this difference of temperament into account, he does not realize how new and strange it is to find Germany these days, making its first and strongest impression upon the outsider by its industrial progress. The more intelligent men in Germany are beginning to see the dangers to real progress in such feverish devotion to industry, and to recognize that the life of the population is absorbed too largely by science, finance, and commerce.
To see so much of the intelligence of the nation exercising itself in material researches, to see such undue fervor in calculations of self- interest, does not leave an enlivening impression. Such an ideal of life is paltry in itself and involves grave dangers in the future. It is a long stride in the wrong direction since Hegel wrote of Germany as ”the guardian of the sacred fire of intellect.”
Out of this temperament has grown the self-consciousness, the uneasy vanity, the ”touchiness” which has made Germany of late years the despair of the diplomats all over the world. She has become a chameleon-like menace to peace everywhere in the world. What she wants, what will offend her dignity, when she will feel hurt, what amount of consideration will suffice, when she will change color to match a changed situation, and in what color she will choose to hide her plans or to make manifest her demands, no man knows. She will not see things as they are, but always as an exhalation from her own mind.
As one of her own poets has written: ”Deutschland ist Hamlet.”
At this present moment she does not see either England or America as they are, quite peaceably disposed toward her but she sees them, and persists in seeing them, as they would be were Germany in their place.
She is forever looking into a mirror instead of through the open window. ”The mailed fist,” ”the rattling of the sabre,” ”the friend in s.h.i.+ning armor,” ”querelle allemande,” are all phrases born in Germany in the last thirty years.
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