Part 23 (1/2)
This struggle for recognition as a great nation, to be received on equal terms by the rest of us, has upset the nerves of certain cla.s.ses in Germany, and among them the untravelled and small-town-dwelling professor.
I am a craftsman in letters myself, in a small way, but I am no believer that books are the only key to life, or the only way to find a solution for its riddles and problems. Life is language, and books only the dictionaries; men are the text, books only the commentaries.
Books are only good as a filter for actual experiences. A man must have a rich and varied experience of men and women before he can use books to advantage. Life is varied, men and women many, while the individual life is short; wise men read books, therefore, to enrich their experience, not merely as the pedant does, to garner facts.
”J'etudie les livres en attendant que J'etudie les hommes,” writes Voltaire. ”Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a mighty bloodless subst.i.tute for life,” writes Stevenson.
Montgolfier sees a woman's skirt drying and notices that the hot air fills it and lifts it, and this gives him the idea for a balloon.
Denis Papin sees the cover lifted from a pot by the steam, and there follow the myriad inventions in which steam is the driving power.
Newton, dozing under an apple-tree, is. .h.i.t on the head by a falling apple, and there follows the law of gravitation.
Franklin flies a kite, and a shock of electricity starts him upon the road to his discoveries.
Archimedes in his bath notices that his body seems to grow lighter, and there follows the great law which bears his name.
These are the foundation-stones upon which the whole house of science is built, and no one of them was dug out of a book. Charlemagne could not read, and Napoleon, when he left school for Paris, carried the recommendation from his master that he might possibly become a fair officer of marines, but nothing more! A capital example of the ability of the man of books to measure the abilities of the man of the world.
Reading and writing are modern accomplishments, and we grossly exaggerate their importance as man-makers. That, it has always been my contention, is the fatal fallacy of modern education, and you may see it carried to its extreme in Germany, for men who have not lived broadly are merely hampered by books. It is as though one studied a primer with an etymological dictionary at his side. Germans are renowned writers of commentaries, but you cannot deal with men and with life by the aid of commentaries. Exegesis solves no international quarrels, and the mastery of men is not gained with dictionaries and grammars.
We are all p.r.o.ne to forget the end in the means, for the end is far away and the means right under our noses. We all recognize, when we are pulled up short and made to think, that, after all, the arts and letters, religion and philosophy and statecraft, are for one ultimate purpose, which is to develop the complete man. Everything must be measured by its man-making power. Ideas that do not grow men are sterile seed. Men who do not move other men to action and to growth are not to be excused because they stir men to the merely pleasant tickling of thinking lazily and feeling softly. Thus Lincoln was a greater man than Emerson; Bismarck a greater than Lessing; Cromwell a greater than Bunyan; Napoleon a greater than Corneille and Racine; Pericles greater than Plato; and Caesar greater than Virgil.
The man who only makes maps for the mind is only half a man, until his thinking, his influence, his dreams and enthusiasms take on the potency of a man and come into action. Even if men of action do evil, as some of those I mention have done, they have translated theories into palpable things that permit men to judge whether they be good or bad; and the really great artists, thinkers, and saints are as fertile as though they were female, and gave birth, to living things. Their thinking is a form of action. The real test of successful organization is the thoroughness of the thinking behind it; on the other hand, the only test of thinking is the success of the thought in actual execution, and the Germans often take this too much for granted. We really know and hold as an inalienable intellectual possession only what we have gained by our own effort, and with a certain degree of actual exertion. People who have never worked out their own salvation always join, at last, that large cla.s.s in the body politic who don't know what they want, and who will never be happy till they get it.
When it comes to dealing with inanimate things, books of rules are invaluable. Hence, in chemistry, physics, archaeology, philology, exegesis, the Germans have forged ahead; their intellectual street-cleaning is unsurpa.s.sed; but the s.h.i.+p of state needs not only men to take observations and to read charts, but men to trim the sails to the fitful breezes, the bl.u.s.tering winds, the tempests and the changing currents of life. They must know, too, the methods, the manners, the habits of other men who sail the seas of life. It is just here that the German fails; he lacks the confidence of experience, and bursts into bl.u.s.ter and bravado. He is a believer in vicarious experience, and is as little likely to be saved by it, in this world at least, as he is by vicarious sacrifice.
His imagination does not make allowances for either England or America. He does not see, for example, that the Monroe Doctrine is not open for discussion for the simple reason that America has announced it as American policy; just as Prussia took part three times in the dismemberment of Poland; just as Prussia pounced upon Silesia; just as Germany took Alsace-Lorraine, Schleswig-Holstein and Frankfort, and held the ring while Austria-Hungary bagged Bosnia and Herzegovina, and by the word of her Emperor, promised to do the same thing for Russia, when j.a.pan declared war against her. We have decided that we will have no European sovereignty in South America, and this side war, that is the end of the matter, call it the Monroe Doctrine or what you will.
It only makes for uneasiness and bad temper to discuss it. It is the national American policy. It may be right or wrong theoretically, but international law has nothing to do with it. The German professors who discuss it from that stand-point, are beating the air and raising a dust in the world's international drawing-room.
This German mania for translating facts back into philosophy and then dancing through a discussion of theories is not understood, much less appreciated, by the rest of the world. We can never get on if we are to introduce the discussion of the lines of every new battle-s.h.i.+p by arguments as to the sea-worthiness of the ark. Those of us who control a quarter of the habitable globe, and the inhabitants thereof, are much too busy to discuss the legal aspects of the land-grabbing of the Pharaohs. Geography is not metaphysics, but it is wofully hard for the professorial mind to grasp this.
”Given a mouse's tail, and he will guess With metaphysic quickness at the mouse.”
In much the same way German statesmen and the German press do not understand, or do not care to understand, that British statesmen when they speak in the House of Commons, or when they go to the country asking increased appropriations for the navy, must give some reason for their request. There is only one reason, and that is that there is a growing navy across the North Sea, which, whether now it is or is not a menace, may be a menace to their s.h.i.+p-fed island, and they must have s.h.i.+ps and men and guns enough to guard the sea-lanes which their food-laden s.h.i.+ps must sail through.
They may be awkward sometimes in their expression of this self-evident fact, they may call their own fleet a necessity and the other fleet a luxury, but that is a negligible question of verbal manners; the fact remains that their fleet is, and all the world knows it is, and it is laughable to discuss it, the prime necessity of their existence.
As long as we Christians have given up any shred of belief in Christian ethics, as applicable to international disputes, we must live by the law of the strongest. We do not bless the poor in spirit, but the self-confident; we do not bless the meek, but the proud; we do not bless the peace-makers, but those who urge us to prepare for war; we do not bless the reviled and the persecuted and the slandered, but those who revolt against injustice and tyranny; we do not approve the cutting off of the right hand, but admire the mailed fist; and it is only adding to the confusion to raise millions for war ourselves, and then to present a handsomely bound copy of the Beat.i.tudes to our rivals.
I shall be wantonly misunderstood if these reflections be taken as a criticism of Germany. This situation involves Germany in censure no more than other nations. It is only that Germany shows herself to be somewhat childish and peevishly provincial, in girding at an unchangeable situation, either in South America or in the North Sea.
This is not altogether Germany's fault. She is suffering from growing pains, and from grave internal unrest. She is only just of age as a nation, and her const.i.tution is so inflexible that it is a constant source of irritation. She is governed by an autocracy, and the two strongest parties numerically in her Reichstag are the party of the Catholics and the party of the Socialists. She has built up a tremendous trade on borrowed capital, and every gust of wind in the money market makes her fidgety. Her population increases at the rate of some 800,000 a year, but her educational system produces such a surplus of laborers who wish to work in uniforms, or in black coats and stiff collars, that there is a dearth of agricultural laborers, and she imports 700,000 Hungarians, Poles, Slays, and Italians every year to harvest her crops.
This same system of education has taught youths to think for themselves before either the mental or moral muscles are tough enough, with the result that she is the agnostic and materialistic nation of Europe, and her capital the most licentious and immoral in Europe.
This is the result of secular education everywhere. Freedom of thought, yes, but not freedom of thought any more than freedom of morals, or freedom of manners, or political freedom, in extreme youth; that only makes for anarchy political, mental, and moral.
There is much undigested, not to say indigestible, republicanism about just now in China and in Portugal, for example; just as there are materialism and agnosticism in Germany and in France, not due to super-intellectualism but to juvenile thinking. The Chinese are just as fit for a republic--an actual republic is still a long way off ?
as are callow German youths, and notoriety-loving French students, for freedom to disbelieve and to destroy. No country can long survive a majority of women teachers in the public schools, together with no Bible and no religious teaching there. I have no prejudices favoring orthodoxy, but I have a fairly wide experience which has given me one article of a creed that I would go to the stake for, and that is that it is of all crimes the worst to give freedom political, moral, or religious to those who are unprepared for it.
Germany's taste in literature, once so natural and healthy, has become morbid, and Sudermann and Gorky and Oscar Wilde, and the rest of the unhealthy crew who swarm about the morgues, the dissecting-rooms, and the houses of a.s.signation of life, the internuntiata libidinum, the leering conciliatrices of the dark streets, are her favorites now.