Part 8 (2/2)

This thought is shaping the New Society--the society of the spirit and the cultivation of the spirit, the only one which can hold its ground in the new epoch, and which fulfils it.

This is why we have been endowed with a character whose will is weak in external things and strong in inward responsibility; why depth and understanding, practicality and uprightness, many-sidedness and individuality, power of work and invention, imagination and aspiration have been bestowed upon us, in order that we may fulfil these things.

For what do these qualities, as a whole, betoken? Not the conqueror, not the statesman, not the worldling, and not the man of business; it is a narrow and trivial misuse of all faculty for us to pretend to represent these types among the nations. They betoken the labourers of the spirit; and far as we are from being a nation of thinkers and poets, it is nevertheless our right and our high calling to be a thinking nation among the nations.

But on what, you may ask with scorn, is this thinking nation to live?

With all its wisdom, will it not be reduced to beggary and starvation?

No--it will live. That people which amid a century of world-revolution is able to form for itself a stable, well-balanced, ordered and highly developed form of society will be one that works and produces. All around there will be quarrelling and conflict, there will be little work and little production. For the next decade the question will be, not where is the demand but where is the supply?

The countries are laid waste, as Germany was after the Thirty Years'

War; only we do not as yet recognize it, so long as the fever lasts we do not notice the decline.

Production, thought-out and penetrated with spirit, on the part of a highly developed society, and combined with labour-fellows.h.i.+p, is more than valuable production or cheap production; it is something exemplary and essential. And this applies not only to production itself but to the methods of production, to the technique, the schooling, the organization, the manner of thinking.

It is a petty thing to say that we were destroyed out of envy. Why did not envy destroy America and England? The world regarded us at once with admiration and with repulsion; with admiration for our systematic and laborious ways, with repulsion for our tradesman-like obtrusiveness, the brusque and dangerous character of our leaders.h.i.+p and the ostentatious servility with which we endured it. If it had been possible anywhere outside of our naked, mercantile and national egoism to discover a German idea, it would have been respected.

The German idea of cultivation of the spirit will win something for us which we have not known for a century, and the scope of which we cannot yet measure; people will freely appreciate us, they will further us and follow us on our way. We have no idea what it means for a people to have these sympathetic forces at its side, as France had in its creation of forms, England and America in civilization and democracy, Russia in Slavonic orthodoxy and the neutral States in their internationalism.

There is no fear: we shall live, and more than live. For the first time for centuries we shall again be conscious of a mission, and around all our internal oppositions will be twined a bond which will be something more than a bond of interest.

The goal of the world-revolution upon which we have now entered means in its material aspect the melting of all strata of society into one.

In its transcendental aspect it means redemption: redemption of the lower strata to freedom and to the spirit. No one can redeem himself but every one can redeem another. Cla.s.s for cla.s.s, man for man: thus is a people redeemed. Yet in each case there must be readiness and in each there must be good-will.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 34: 1918, when the revolution in Germany broke out at Kiel.]

THE END

THE EUROPEAN LIBRARY

Edited by J. E. SPINGARN

This series is intended to introduce foreign authors whose works are not accessible in English, and in general to keep Americans in touch with the intellectual and spiritual ferment of the continent of Europe. No attempt will be made to give what Americans miscall ”the best books,” if by this is meant conformity to some high and illusory standard of past greatness; any twentieth-century book which displays creative power or a new outlook or more than ordinary interest or charm will be eligible for inclusion. Nor will the attempt be made to select books that merely confirm American standards of taste or morals, since the series is intended to serve as a mirror of European culture and not as a gla.s.s through which it may be seen darkly.

Fiction will predominate, but belles lettres, poetry, philosophy, social and economic discussion, history, biography, and other fields will be represented.

”The first organized effort to bring into English a series of the really significant figures in contemporary European literature.... An undertaking as creditable and as ambitious as any of its kind on the other side of the Atlantic.”--_New York Evening Post._

THE WORLD'S ILLUSION. By J. Wa.s.sERMANN. Translated by Ludwig Lewisohn.

Two volumes. (Second printing.)

One of the most remarkable creative works of our time, revolving about the experiences of a man who sums up the wealth and culture of our age yet finds them wanting. The first volume depicts the life of the upper cla.s.ses of European society, the second is a very Inferno of the Slums; and the whole mirrors, with extraordinary insight, the beauty and sorrow, the power and weakness of our social and spiritual world.

”A human comedy in the great sense, which no modern can afford not to hear.”--H. W. Boynton, in the _Weekly Review_.

<script>