Part 25 (1/2)
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 s.h.i.+ps 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 s.h.i.+ps. 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 s.h.i.+p-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 scholars.h.i.+p; 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?