Part 18

Among the steppes of New Russia, or along the flat banks of the shallow Volga, the traveller will come upon more than one cluster of villages with high-pitched roofs, bearing the familiar names of Weimar, Strasburg, Mannheim, &c. which witness to the existence of a secret Heimweh, _æternum sub pectore volnus_. Considerable agricultural colonies have similarly grown up unnoticed in South America. In Rio Grande do Sul and the adjacent provinces, German settlers have rendered their territory the garden of Brazil; have given the landscape a new character with their Lutheran churches, and are wealthy and numerous enough to support five German newspapers.

Far away, also, under less clement skies, their perseverance has reclaimed a prosperous domain amid the swamps of the Dobrudscha. The Menonite settlement which lately passed under the Roumanian Government numbers 100,000 souls. The beginnings of smaller settlements, again, are noticeable in Syria and Thessaly, intent on bringing under cultivation long-desolate tracts.

In England and in other populous countries the position of the German settler is naturally different. The immigration into England began with the political refugees of 1848, and developed its present character and proportions much later. At this moment the German element in England is probably under-estimated at 250,000. It is concentrated in the large towns. The metropolis alone is credited with 100,000 German adults, and its German population suffices to support four newspapers, while a daily average importation of 12,500 journals keep it in touch with the Fatherland. Manchester and Liverpool can boast another 30,000 between them, engaged in commerce and finance. Indeed, according to a common saying, half the members of the Stock Exchange are now Germans, and this very exaggeration indicates the position they have acquired in the world of Capel Court. The majority, however, are rather to be found in the lower walks of commercial life.

The German clerk has become a conspicuous feature in the city, and tends to bring down still lower the scanty salaries of the class to which he belongs. There are eating-houses in the neighborhood of Mark Lane where the mid-day visitor might fancy himself transported into Hamburg, so general are the guttural interjections around him. Germans throng, again, into several industries, while in the East-end there is a large but by no means prosperous body of tailors, whom Professor Bryce found it prudent, for electoral purposes, to address in their own tongue.

Even into France the intruding German has found his way. He has engrossed several branches of trade into his hands, has come to be the principal maker of the elegant _articles du Paris_, and from time to time provokes an outburst of indignant chauvinism. According to consular reports, exclusive of citizens of German descent, the Republic shelters and maintains 80,000 subjects of the Hohenzollerns. His presence is also felt in Italy, Hungary, and the Austrian Slav States. The same qualities win him a foothold everywhere; he works harder, lives cheaper, and asks less than the native. He threatens, indeed, in these respects, to become to other Europeans what the Chinese have become to the American.

Not content with the necessarily rough estimates of the number of German-descended settlers abroad, the Imperial Government last year set on foot a careful statistical inquiry into the number of expatriated German-born subjects. The returns are as yet incomplete, and do not embrace Russia or Asia. But they are significant as showing the direction this vast emigration takes. Out of nearly two and a half millions of German-born subjects in other lands, America contains 1,900,000, France and Switzerland respectively about 80,000, and England 40,000.

It could hardly be expected that Germany, animated by a proud consciousness of her newly-won national existence, should look upon this expatriation of her children with equanimity. There are many things in the position of their brethren abroad which are only too galling to the pride of the arbiters of Europe. Hardest of all, perhaps, for the German patriot to bear is the spectacle of his countrymen easily surrendering their Deutschthum, putting on another nationality like a cloak, and becoming oblivious of the common home. According to Hartmann’s dismal lamentations, the German emigrant is distinguished above all others by the ease with which he effects this change.

Certainly in America and Australia his complaint holds good. The vulgar system of transforming German into English names has already been remarked, and in the second generation the immigrant is entirely American, ostentatiously affecting to “schbick de Inglisch only,” Elsewhere the process of transition does not go on so readily. In Russia the German settler exemplifies the fundamental antagonism of Slav and Teuton, and retains a sense of his origin and inherent superiority among his more indolent neighbors. But in Russia the Bauer is contributing to the wealth, not only of a rival, but perhaps of a hostile nationality. He labors again, even in Brazil, under religious and civil disabilities; in the Dobrudscha the German villages were harried by Circassians in the late war, and now the Roumanian Government seeks to plant its own husbandmen on the lands reclaimed by German industry. In other European countries the emigrant is forced to win a difficult footing by undertaking the most toilsome and unremunerative labor. He is, indeed, reduced into being a hewer of wood and drawer of water for alien peoples.

Apart from these sentimental motives there are urgent political and economical reasons why the demand for a greater Germany, for a German exit to carry off this surplus population, should now be made. A military empire depends upon its supply of recruits, and according to Bismarck’s somewhat paradoxical theory, the emigrants are drawn from among the most capable and energetic citizens. This continual drain of military strength can hardly be looked upon without apprehension.

Again the economical loss to Germany by this outgoing of productive labor is tremendous. It has been calculated at an annual sum of £15,000,000, and for the last fifty years to amount to a capital sum of £700,000,000. These figures are probably pitched too high, but the substantial fact remains the same.

III.

At the same time the vital necessity of relieving Germany by an annual Auswanderung is now fully recognized. The necessity becomes daily more urgent. In Germany the birth-rate per mille has advanced to 38; in Great Britain it stands at 35, giving a yearly increase in population for the two countries of 600,000 and 400,000 respectively. Hence every walk of life is congested in the Empire, and in the lower strata of society the struggle for existence has become almost internecine. The artizans have no accumulated resources to fall back upon as in England, and the pressure of the agricultural class upon the soil, for all its thrift and economy, is fearfully severe. The struggle tells chiefly, of course, upon life in its weaker stages, and the returns of infant mortality indicate how desperate it has become, how shrunken is the margin between production and consumption, and what the terrible remedy is which Nature is constrained to supply. In populous tracts in the heart of the Empire the rate of infant mortality reaches 40, and even 45, per mille. In corresponding English districts it does not rise above 20.

For the last twenty-five years individual thinkers have proclaimed the importance of organizing German colonies to carry off this surplus population regularly, of preventing its absorption into foreign peoples, and of utilizing it for the common weal. For years their exhortations remained like the voice of one crying in the wilderness. The country was engaged in consolidating its national existence; a superficial glance revealed the fact that the more desirable spaces of the earth’s surface were filled up, and the official classes looked upon the proposal askance. Proud of the great work its industry and intelligence had already achieved, the Beamtenstand was confident of its ability to solve the newer problems by re-adjusting the relations of labor and capital, and by modifying the social organization.

The task has proved more formidable than was anticipated, and the attitude of the Socialists has disabused the bureaucracy of its confidence. In opposition even to the enticing schemes of the Iron Chancellor they show themselves determined to insist on their own inadmissible scheme of social re-construction. Nor do they manifest more favor towards the colonial panacea; some of their leaders, indeed, have denounced it in the bitterest terms, both as impracticable and as an _ignis fatuus_ likely to lead the nation astray from the true path of salvation. On the other hand, the commercial classes are warm in its support, and German conservatism generally hopes for the effect which a Greater Germany may possibly exercise in diverting the imagination of the working classes from internal Utopias.

But the difficulties in the way of establishing transmarine agricultural colonies, and this is the central aim of German aspirations, are very great. Germany has to make up the lee-way of two centuries, to recover the start which England obtained while she was torn and exhausted by recurring war. The suitable zones of the world are apparently already occupied, and neither the acquisition of islands in the Pacific, nor placing barren coasts or fever-swamps in Africa under the Imperial ægis, will serve her purpose. Popular aspirations, indeed, point to a South African Empire, incorporating the Transvaal and Cape Colony at our expense, and influential papers do not hesitate to air these aspirations. But neither these suggestions nor the more practicable demand for a Germany in South America have yet received the _imprimatur_ of responsible politicians.

IV.

A like necessity for making up lost lee-way dominates the simultaneous movement towards commercial extension. Germany entered the commercial arena long after England had covered the globe with the network of her shipping routes and her credit system. To reduce the advantage gained, and to bring up their own lines to a level, a subvention is to be paid out of the national revenues. An examination of the four subsidized lines originally proposed, to China, Australia, Bombay, and South Africa, shows that they were meant to compete directly with existing English routes. In the same way the projected Transmarine Bank is to contend with the ubiquitous English banking and credit organization, of which the Germans are forced to avail themselves. Indeed, the _Cologne Gazette_ has lately computed that by the use of English carrying ships, and by the payment of bank commissions, &c., Germany contributes a tax of £25,000 a day to the wealth of this country.

Handicapped, however, as German commerce has been, it has lately made great strides over-seas, thanks to its distinguishing qualities of thrift and industry. German competition is felt severely in the Far East, and has cut down profits at Hongkong to a minimum. And though the bulk of the foreign trade of China remains with the English, the coasting trade is rapidly passing into German hands. In South America they have secured a still larger share of her trade; their agents are active in the Pacific; and, besides the new territory of Lüderitzland, more than sixty factories have recently been established along the African coast, from Sierra Leone to Ambriz, while German influence had apparently gained a temporary advantage in Zanzibar. The demand for new markets is the more urgent now in Germany because the largest of her previous markets, Russia, is being closed against her. Not content with having sheltered themselves already behind an almost prohibitive tariff, the Moscow manufacturers, alarmed at the success with which their German rivals have transferred their plant into Russian Poland, in spite of the difficulties and expense, now clamor for a Customs line to be drawn between the Polish provinces and inner Russia.

The loud demand for new markets is not, however, really so urgent, or sustained by such pressing causes, as the cry for colonial settlements. It may be doubted whether Germany’s penurious soil possesses in itself sufficient mineral and other resources ever to allow her to contend with this country as the great manufacturer of the raw products of the world.

It is rather England who must seek new outlets for her commerce, as her old markets are exhausted or shared among new competitors, while the amount of human energy she supplies, and its more than proportionate productiveness, steadily increase, owing to acquired skill and improved machinery. Germany’s first need, on the other hand, is for habitable and agricultural colonies, where her surplus population may be planted, and may not be lost to her. There is, therefore, no immediate cause of hostile rivalry; and German expansion, with its orderly and commercial instinct, may be regarded as a valuable influence in the spread of civilization.

V.

In discussing German movements, however, it is impossible, at the present time, to omit reckoning with the views of the great statesman who controls her destinies. Prince Bismarck has been variously represented as reluctantly putting himself at the head of a colonial agitation which he really deprecates, and as using it merely in order to discomfit domestic opponents, or to make foreign Governments feel his weight abroad. No doubt these last two reasons have had some effect in shaping the Chancellor’s actual policy. But Prince Bismarck appears to have needed no prompting for appreciating the necessity of colonial expansion, and to have given it his serious reflection long before the present Colonization Society met at Eisenach. In the days of the North German Confederacy, the rising Minister lent all his influence to the proposals of the firm of Godeffroys Bros. for the annexation of the Samoa group. A scheme was drawn up, dividing the land among military settlers, grants of arms were made from the Royal Arsenals, and the _Hertha_ the first continental iron-clad which steamed through the Suez Canal, was despatched to give a vigorous support. Before the last arrangements, however, were completed, the Franco-German war intervened, with the internal consolidation and the diplomatic struggles which succeeded it.

But Prince Bismarck had not abandoned his early ideas; he was waiting till the time was ripe. In 1875 he made a tentative effort, without success, to wring a guarantee from the Reichstag for a new South Sea Company. Next year he was pressed to give his support to a proposed railway from Pretoria to the sea. He refused, but in private made the following significant statement to the intermediate agent:—

“The colonial question is one I have studied for years. I am convinced Germany cannot go on for ever without colonies, but as yet I fail to perceive deep traces of such a movement in the country.” Those deep traces have now been revealed, and it remains to be seen whether the Iron Chancellor will not be able, in spite of the apparently insuperable objects in his way, to give practical effect to the aspirations of the German nation, and to his own earnest conviction.—_National Review._

GEORGE SAND.

On the 8th June, 1876, George Sand, the great French novelist, died at her château of Nohant in Berri. The strong right hand that for forty years had been used in the service of her countrymen, sometimes to delight, sometimes to admonish, had dropped the pen in death; the noble heart that, with all its faults and all its deviations from the strict line of social conventionality, had yet ever sided with the weak against the strong, the oppressed against the oppressor, had ceased to beat, and even in the frivolous, heartless capital where she had lived, men went about knowing they had sustained an irreparable loss and that a blank had been made in their lives that would never be filled.

She was the last of that illustrious fraternity of chosen spirits that flourished fifty years ago in France, of whom Victor Hugo is the sole survivor. Lamartine, Théophile Gautier, Michelet, Alfred de Musset, Balzac, George Sand, were the names that then resounded in the literary world of Paris, while now Emile Zola and Alexandre Dumas fils are its principal adornments. George Sand and Balzac’s novels form as it were the connecting link between the world of romance of the eighteenth century and our own. She has carried the idealism of Jean Jacques’ “Nouvelle Héloïse,” and the poetry of Chateaubriand’s “Renée” into our prosaic nineteenth century, while Balzac presented to his contemporaries as vivid reflections of life as any to be found in the pages of “Manon Lescaut” or “Gil Blas.” The authoress of “Indiana” is the high-priestess of the romantic school; the author of “Le Père Goriot” the exponent of the realistic.

“Love must be idealised in fiction,” she says in the “Histoire de ma Vie.” “We must give it all the force, and all the aspirations we have felt ourselves, besides all the pain we have seen and suffered. Under no circumstances must it ever be debased; it must triumph or die, and we must not be afraid to invest it with an importance in life, which lifts it altogether above ordinary sentiments.”

Balzac, her fellow-worker, used to say: “You seek men as they ought to be; I take them as they are. I idealise and exaggerate their vices; you their virtues.”

By further study of her life and correspondence, we shall know how true this observation is, and how this striving after ideal perfection not only influenced her literary work, but caused so much of that eccentricity and rebellion against social laws which shocked her contemporaries and has made her name a by-word in the mouths of those who could not appreciate her genius, or realise the tenderness and nobility of soul that were hidden under her unfeminine exterior.

The publication of her letters (looked forward to with so much impatience) has recently taken place, and the veil has been still further torn from those domestic relations well known to have been unhappy. Were they written by any one but the authoress of “Elle et Lui,” we should have regretted their appearance as indiscreet, and wanting in loyalty towards one no longer able to protest against the secrets of her life being dragged forth to amuse the crowd. A frequent charge however brought against George Sand is the want of delicacy she has shown in taking the world into her confidence. “Charity towards others, dignity towards myself, sincerity before God,” is the motto prefixed to the “Histoire de ma Vie.” She certainly is both charitable and sincere, but we must agree with her enemies in thinking it an open question whether, so far as concerns herself, she has observed a dignified reserve. Indeed, on various occasions she defiantly proclaimed, “That all hypocrisy was distasteful to her, and that it would have been the recognition of those acts as irregularities which were but the legitimate exercise of her liberty, had she been ashamed of them or endeavored to keep them secret.”

The autobiography was unfortunately revised and corrected in 1869, and considerably spoilt in the process. These letters are the more interesting, therefore, as throwing sudden lights on varying moods, and showing the rejection of many heterodox opinions at first, which were afterwards accepted without hesitation.

“La vie ressemble bien plutôt à un roman, qu’un roman à la vie,” she says, and certainly no heroine of one of her own romances could be more interesting as a study than she is, with her gentleness and “bavardages de mère” one moment, and her violent casting off of all domestic duties the next. Touching appeals are made to Jules Boucoiran, the tutor, to tell her whether her children ever mention her name, and directly after there is the following exultant declaration:

“Ainsi, à l’heure qu’il est, à une lieue d’ici, quatre mille bêtes me croient à genoux dans le sac, et dans la cendre, pleurant mes péchés comme Madeleine. Le réveil sera terrible. Le lendemain de ma victoire, je jette ma béquille, je passe au galop de mon cheval aux quatre coins de la ville.”

The first letter of the “Correspondence” is written in 1812, when Mademoiselle Aurore Dupin was a happy child of eight, living at her ancestral home, the old château of Nohant.

Already she is insubordinate and high-spirited, delighted at being able to deceive her grandmother by carrying on a secret correspondence with her mother, and hiding the letters behind the portrait of the old Dupin in the entrance-hall. “Que j’ai de regret de ne pouvoir te dire adieu. Tu vois combien j’ai de chagrin de te quitter. Adieu; pense à moi, et sois que je ne t’oublierai point.—TA FILLE. Tu mettras la réponse derrière le portrait du vieux Dupin.”

The last letter of the first volume is dated “La Châtre, 1836,” when what she herself called the crisis of the “sixth lustrum” was over. The celebrated voyage to Venice with Alfred de Musset had already been made, the romance of “Elle et Lui” had been lived through and written—the immortal passion which has been told and sung by both sides for the benefit of the world, and which has now become a part of the poetry of the nineteenth century, was already a thing of the past; and she had come to the point, as she writes to her friend Madame d’Agoult, of finding her greatest happiness in a state of being where she neither thinks nor feels. “You, perhaps, are too happy and too young to envy the lot of those shining white stones which lie so cold, so calm, so dead, under the light of the moon. I always salute them as I pass along the road in my solitary midnight ride.” This volume comprises, therefore, all the most eventful periods of her life, and whatever has since been published is only of secondary interest.

George Sand was born in Paris in 1804. She was descended on her father’s side from Maurice de Saxe, natural son of Augustus II., King of Poland. Her father died in 1808, and she was brought up at the château of Nohant close to La Châtre in Berri. She lived there until she was thirteen, passing her days in the open air, sometimes wandering through the woods and fields, with the peasant children of the neighboring village, or more often sitting alone, under some great tree, listening to the murmur of the river close by, and the whisper of the wind amidst the leaves. Here she learnt that kindness and simplicity of manner which always characterised her, and here she contracted that love for communion with Nature which in her wildest and most despairing moments never forsook her.

“Ah, that I could live amidst the calm of mountain solitudes,” she exclaims, “morally and materially above the region of storms! There to pass long hours in contemplation of the starry heavens, listening to the mysterious sounds of nature, possessing all that is grandest in creation united with the possession of myself.”

At twelve she began to write, composing long stories about a hero to whom, under the name of Corambe, she raised an altar of stones and moss in the corner of the garden. For years she remained faithful to Corambe and cherished the project of constructing a poem or romance to celebrate his illustrious exploits.

At thirteen, her mother and grandmother, unable to agree upon the subject of her education, determined to send her to a convent in Paris.

“Conceive,” one of her biographers says, “the sadness of this wild bird shut up in the cage of the English Augustines in the ‘Rue des Fossés-Saint-Victor.’ She wept tears of bitter regret for the cool depths of woods, the sunny mornings, and dim quiet evenings of her home.”