Chapter 31

This is no heated assault on German culture. It is a natural phase of development. Youthful candidates for worldliness all go through this pornocratic stage. "The impudence of the bawd is modesty, compared with that of the convert," writes the Marquis of Halifax. The German professor and the German bourgeois in their Rake's Progress are only a little more awkward, a little more heavy-handed, a little coarser in speech, than others, that is all. The period of twenty-five years during which I have known Germany has developed before my eyes the concomitants of vast and rapid industrial and commercial progress, and they are: a love of luxury, a great increase in gambling, a materialistic tone of mind, a wide-spread increase of immorality, and a tendency to send culture to the mint, and to the market-place to be stamped, so that it may be readily exchanged for the means of soft living. These internal changes account to some extent for her restless external policy. A man's digestion has a good deal to do with the color of the world when he looks at it. There is more yellow in life from biliousness, than from the state of the atmosphere.

Aside from these domestic causes there is no reason why Germany should take a sentimental or pious view of these questions of international amity. Her own history is development by war. "Any war is a good war when it is undertaken to increase the power of the state," said Frederick the Great. "Nur das Volk wird eine gesicherte Stellung in der Welt haben, das von kriegerischen Geiste erfuellt ist" ("Only that nation will hold a safe place in the world which is imbued with a warlike spirit") writes Germany's great military philosopher Clausewitz.

We took Cuba and the Philippines; England took India, Hong Kong, and Egypt; Japan took Korea and southern Manchuria; Italy took Tripoli; France took Fez; Russia took Finland and northern Manchuria; Austria-Hungary took Bosnia and Herzegovina; and Prussia and Germany have a long list, including Silesia, Poland, Hanover, and Alsace-Lorraine. Austria-Hungary tears up the Berlin treaty; France, Germany, and Spain tear up the Algeciras treaty; Italy tears up the treaty of Paris; and it is part of the game that we should all hold up our hands, avert our faces, and thank God that we are not as other men are, when these things are done. The justifications of these actions are all of the most pious and penitent description. We were forced to do so, we say, in order to hasten the bringing in of our own specially patented and exclusive style of the kingdom of heaven, but outside of perhaps India and Egypt, and the Philippines, it would be hard to find to-day any trace of the promised kingdom. Germany, for example, had nine per cent. of Moroccan trade, the total of Moroccan trade with all countries only amounted to $27,500,000 a year, and she was compelled to interfere for the protection of her traders, forsooth! The outcome of the business, after an exciting situation lasting for months, was that Germany got a slice of territory from France, mostly swamps, which reaches from the Congo to the Atlantic Ocean, and reported to be, by her own engineers, uninhabitable.

It is the pleasant formula of polite statesmen and politicians to say, that it is a pity that Germany came into the world competition a hundred years too late, when the best colonies had been parcelled out among the other powers. This is a superficial view of the case, and misses the real point of the present envy, hatred, malice, and uncharitableness. Germany does not want colonies, and has no ability of the proper kind, and no willing and adventurous population to settle them, if she had. Prussia's dealing with aborigines is a subject for comic opera.

Germany came into the modern world as a dreamer, as a maker of melodies, as a singer of songs, as a sort of post-graduate student in philosophy and in theoretical, and later applied science. She introduced us to classical philology, to modern methods of historical research, to the comparative study of ethnic religions, to daring and scholarly exegesis, to the study of the science of language. She discovered Shakespeare to the English; Eduard Maetzner and Eduard Mueller, and German scholars in the study of phonetics, have written our English grammars and etymological dictionaries for us, and helped to lay the foundations for knowledge of our own language. Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, one need not mention more, attempted to pass beyond the bounds of human experience and to formulate laws for the process; Schleiermacher, maintaining that Christian faith is a condition of devout feeling, a fact of inward experience, an object which may be observed and described, had an unbounded influence in America, and many are the ethical discourses I have listened to which owed more to Schleiermacher than to their authors. Humboldt, Liebig, Bunsen, Helmholtz, Johannes Mueller, Von Baer, Virchow, Koch, Diesel, even the British and American man in the street, with little interest in such matters, knows some of these names; while Schopenhauer and Nietzsche are symbols of revolt, whose names are flung into an argument by many who only know their names, but who fondly suppose that the one stands for despair and suicide, and the other for the joy and unbridled license of the strong man.

Reckoning by epochs, it was only yesterday that Germany said to the world: "No more of this!"

"Hang up philosophy! Unless philosophy can make a Juliet, Displant a town, reverse a prince's doom, It helps not, it prevails not: talk no more!"

Of a sudden our scholar threw off his gown and cap, and said: "I propose to play base-ball and foot-ball with you, I propose to have a hand in the material spoils of life, I propose to have a seat at the banquet and to propose toasts and to be toasted!" Faust of a sudden left his gloomy, cobwebby laboratory, flung a fine cloak over his shoulders, stuck a dandy feather in his cap, buckled on a rapier, and began roistering with the best of us. We sneered and smiled at first, let us be frank and admit it. We did not think much of this new buck. We had little fear that the professor, even if he took off his spectacles and slippers and dressing-gown, and exchanged his pipe for a cigarette, would cut much of a figure as a lover. He was new to the game, we were old hands at it, but the first thing we knew he had given the world's mistress, France, a scolding, and flung her into a corner, a cowering heap of outraged finery; and she has only been safe ever since in the role of a sort of mistress of England on board-wages.

A new cock in the barn-yard is never received with great cordiality. He must win his place and his power with his beak and his spurs. We all of us had enough to do before this fellow came along. We are a little jealous of him, we are all uneasier because he is about, and he has done so well at our games, now that he has indeed hung up philosophy, that we are not even sure that it is safe to take him on in a serious match. We have endeavored, therefore, to keep him occupied with his own neighbors, to whom we have extended our best wishes and our moral backing, which is known as keeping the balance of power in Europe.

But a new Germany has come into the world. Germany nowadays has a large class, as have the rest of us, who belong to that increasing number of extraordinary people who want money without even knowing how to get on without it. The only satisfactory test of the right to wealth is the ability to get on without it. One of modern civilization's most dangerous pitfalls is the subversive doctrine that all men shall have wealth, even before they have proved their ability to do without it. Germany is gradually arriving at this puny stage of culture, whose beginnings may be said to date from that ominous year for culture, 1492, when Lorenzo di Medici died and Columbus discovered America!

During all this time statesmen have insisted that there is no good reason why Germany and England should not be on good terms; gentlemen of various trades and professions from both countries, speaking halting English or embarrassed German, as the case may be, cross each other's boundaries, comment upon the beauties of the respective countries, and overeat themselves in ponderous endeavors to appear cordial and appreciative. Mayors and aldermen swap stories and compliments over turtle and sherry, or over sauerkraut and Johannisberger; bands of students visit Oxford or Heidelberg, and there is a chorus of praise of Goethe from one side, of Shakespeare from the other; and all the while there is an unceasing antiphonal of grimaces and abuse in the press. Not even when Germany exports her latest stage novelties to London, and pantomimic platitudes are dandled under colored lights, does the turmoil of martial talk cease. Not even Teutonic lechery, in the guise of Reinhartian art, dressed in nothing but silence, and making faces at the British censor on the boards of the music-halls, avails anything.

Of course all this is nuts to the irresponsible journalists, to the manufacturers of powder, guns, and ships, and to politicians and diplomats out of employment; but it is hard on the taxpayer, who has no dividends from manufacturers of lethal weapons and ships, nor from newspapers, and no notoriety from the self-imposed jobs of the unofficial diplomats.

Perhaps of all these factors the press, in its wild gamble to make money out of sensationalism, is most to blame. The press, for the sake of gain, has soiled and soured the milk of human kindness by exposing it, carelessly and unceasingly, to the pathogenic dangers of the dust of the street and the gutter. It is wholly unfitting and always demoralizing when the priest, the politician, and the journalist turn their attention to private gain. Any one of these three who makes a great fortune out of his profession is damned by that fact alone. The only payment, beyond a living, that these three should look to is, respect, consideration, and the honor of serving the state unselfishly and wisely. The world will be all the happier when there are no more Shylocks permitted in any of these professions.

Germany is autocratic, philosophical, and continental; England is democratic, political, and insular. It is hopeless to suppose that the great mass of the people of one country will understand the other, and, for this is the important point, it is wholly unnecessary.

We get on best and with least friction with people whom we do not understand in the least. A man may have known and liked people with whose aims, opinions, employment, creeds he has the smallest sympathy. One may mention such diverse personalities as John L. Sullivan, the prize-fighter, Cardinal Rampolla, Mr. Roosevelt, Doctor Jameson, the Kaiser, President Diaz of Mexico, numerous Jew financiers, Lord Haldane the scholar-statesman, and a long list of professors, pious priests, sportsmen, and idlers, not to speak of Hindus and Mohammedans, Japanese and Chinese, and half a dozen Sioux chiefs. With these gentlemen, a few of many with whom one may have been upon such pleasant terms that they have even confided in him and trusted him with their secrets, one may have passed many pleasant hours. It probably never entered such a man's head to wonder whether they liked him, and he never discussed with them the question of his liking for them. We get on by keeping our own personalities, prejudices, and creeds intact. There is no other way.

Other men will give even a more diverse list of friends and acquaintances, and never for a moment dream that there is any mystery in being friends with all. Nothing is ever gained by flattery. To the serious man flattery in the form of sincere praise makes him more responsible and only sadder, because he knows how much he falls below what is expected of him, and what he expects of himself. Lip-flattery makes a real man feel as though his sex had been mistaken, he feels as though he had been given curling-tongs instead of a razor for his morning toilet. These pompous flatteries that pass between Germany and England to-day, make both sides self-conscious and a little ashamed to write and to speak them, and to hear and applaud them.

America and England are shortly to celebrate the signing of the treaty of Ghent, which marks a hundred years of peace between the two nations. We have not been without opportunities to quarrel. We have whole classes of people in America who detest England, and in England there are not a few who do not conceal successfully their contempt for America, but we have had peace, and since England, at the time of our war with Spain, said "Hands off!" to the powers that wished to interfere, there has been a great increase of friendly feeling. But there has been little or no flattery passing back and forth. We have sent ambassador after ambassador to England who were almost more American than the Americans. Phelps and Lowell and Hay and Choate and Reid were all American in name, in tradition, in their successes, and in their way of looking at life. By their learning, their wit, and their criticisms, by their writing and speaking, by their presentation of the claims to greatness of our great men, by their unhesitating avowal in public and in private of their allegiance to the ideals of the republic they served, they have made clear the American point of view. Above all, they have shown their pride in their own country by acknowledging and praising the great qualities of England and the English. There has been no fulsome flattery, no bowing the knee to foreign idols, and what has been the result? The American ambassador for years has been the most popular diplomatic figure in Great Britain. An increasing number of Englishmen even, nowadays, know who Washington and Jefferson and Lincoln were, and our understanding of one another has grown rapidly out of this frank and manly attitude. We were jealous and suspicious a hundred years ago, as are England and Germany to-day, but we have changed all that by our attitude of good-humored independence, and by eliminating altogether from our intercourse the tainted delicacy of compliment, and the canting endearments of the diplomatic cocotte. We have emphasized our differences to the great benefit of the fine qualities that we have and cherish in common.

The individual Protestant does not dislike the individual Papist, half so much as he dislikes his neighbor in the next pew, who refuses Sunday after Sunday to repeat the service and the creed at the same pace as the others, and hence to "descend into Hell" with the rest of the congregation. The Sioux chief was far more annoyed by his neighbor of the same tribe in the next-door reservation than he was by me. The pugilist scorned "Tug" Wilson, a brother fisticuffs sovereign, but had no feeling against his parish priest. Theological protagonists are notoriously bitter against one another, but we have all found many of them amiable companions ourselves. It is the fellow next door, who wears purple socks, or who parts his hair in the middle, or who wears his coat-sleeves longer than our tailor cuts ours, or who eats his soup with a noise, or who has damp hands, or talks through his nose, who irritates us and makes us wish occasionally for the unlimited club-using freedom of the stone age. It is your first cousin with incurable catarrh, and a slender income who is too much with you, and who spoils your temper, not the anarchist orator who threatens your property and almost your life.

"What do these Germans want?" asked a distinguished cabinet minister of me. "They want consideration," I replied, "which is the most difficult thing in the world for the Englishman to offer anybody." "But, you don't mean to say," he continued, "that they really want to cut our throats on account of our bad manners?" I cannot phrase it better, nor can I give a more illuminating illustration of the misunderstanding. That is exactly the reason, and the paramount reason, why nations and why individuals attempt to cut one another's throats. Whatever the fundamental differences may have been that have led to war between nations, the tiny spark that started the explosion has always been some phase of rudeness or bad manners.

Counting my school-days, I can remember about a dozen personal conflicts in which I have engaged, with pardonable pleasure. Not one of them was a question of territory, or religious difference, or of racial hatred; indeed, the last one was due to being shouldered in the street when my equanimity was already disturbed by a lingering recovery from a feverish cold.

It is, after all, the little differences that count. If politically and socially Germany were a little more sure of herself, if she were not ever omnia tuta timens Dido; and if England were not as ever quite so sure of herself, I believe intercourse between them would be less strained.

"The little gnat-like buzzings shrill, The hurdy-gurdies of the street. The common curses of the will-- These wrap the cerements round our feet."

The smothered voice, the tepid manner, the affected and hesitating under-statement, of a certain middlish class of English men and women, and, alas, their American imitators, who are striving toward their comical interpretation of the Vere de Vere manner, are the promoters of guffaws in private, and uneasiness in public, between nations, to a far greater extent than the bold individualist, whose voice and manners, good or bad, are all his own. It is these small attritions that wear us down, and produce a sub-acid dislike between nations as between individuals. It is these that prepare the ground for a fine crop of misunderstandings.

But are we not to know our neighbors the English, the Germans, the French? I for one consider that not to know German and Germany, for example, is nowadays not to be fully educated. Most of us, however, have had our nerves unstrung by the speeding-up process that has gone on all over the world of late. We have lost somewhat the power to know people and to let them alone at the same time. Goethe, one of the coolest and wisest of men, maintains: "Certain defects are necessary for the existence of individuality. One would not be pleased if old friends were to lay aside certain peculiarities."

We should at least give every man as fair a chance to receive our good opinion as we give a picture. We should put him in a good light before we criticise him. We should take time enough to do that to other nations, as well as to individuals. I have always had much sympathy for a certain Roman general. He was blind, and a painter who painted him with two large eyes, he rebuked; another painter, who painted him in profile, he rewarded.

It is, after all, something of an art to know people, so that the knowledge is serviceable, so that you can depict them to yourself and to others, not as they are as opposed to you, but as they are as a complement and help to you.

"No human quality is so well wove In warp and woof, but there's some flaw in it; I've known a brave man fly a shepherd's cur, A wise man so demean himself, drivelling idiocy Had wellnigh been ashamed on't. For your crafty, Your worldly-wise man, he, above the rest, Weaves his own snares so fine, he's often caught in them."

He who does not make allowances for weaknesses and differences in his study of human affairs is still in the infant class. It is a grave danger to every state that critics, smart or shallow, with their tu quoque weapons, their silly ridicule, their emphasis upon differences as though they were disasters, their constant failure to recognize the value of certain weaknesses, their stupidity in not painting great men who happen to be blind, in profile, and their harping upon the flaws, and their neglect of the fine texture of human qualities that are strange to them, that these critics are not muzzled, or, if that is impossible, disregarded.

They make it appear that amicable relations between nations are next to impossible. If you escape one danger of offending, you are sure to give offence in some other way, they seem to say. They are hysterical in their self-consciousness, "as if a man did flee from a lion and a bear met him, or went in the house and leaned his hand on the wall and a serpent bit him." Sir Edward Grey writes on this subject: "I sometimes think that half the difficulties of foreign policy arise from the exceeding ingenuity of different countries in attributing motives and intentions to the governments of each other. As far as I can observe, the press of various countries is much more fertile in inventing motives and intentions for the governments of the different countries than the foreign ministers of these countries are themselves. Foreign governments and our own government live from hand to mouth and have fewer deep plans than people might suppose. There is an old warning that you should not spend too much time in looking at the dark cupboard for the black cat that is not there, and I think if sometimes we were a little less suspicious of deep design or motive that the affairs of the world would progress more smoothly."

The trouble lies in our undertaking the impossible, to the neglect of the obvious and the possible. The basic fact of nationality is a preference for our own ways, customs, and habits over those of other people. If the Chinese and Japanese, the Servians and Albanians, the English and the Germans liked one another as well as they like their own, there would be no nationalism to protect or to preserve. Such racial and traditional liking of nation for nation is impossible of achievement. No journeyings, speechifyings, banquets, or compliments will bring it about. On the contrary, I am not sure that it is not these very differences which cheer us and give us a new flavor in our pleasure in living, when we cross the Atlantic, the Channel, or the Rhine. What we should strive for is not social and racial absorption, but social and racial difference and distinction, with that pride in our own which makes for patience in the understanding of others.

It is the petty, self-conscious American who hates the English, the provincial Englishman who hates the German, the socially insecure German who hates the Frenchman, the Englishman, and the American. Those of us who are poised, secure, satisfied, and at bottom proud of our race, our breeding, and our country, are neither irritable nor irritating in the matter of international relations. We have enough to do, and let others alone. Let us dine one another, criticise one another in the effort to improve ourselves, praise one another where the praise serves to establish our own ideals; but let us give up this forced and awkward courting by banquets, deputations, and conferences. Let us study the great art of leaving one another alone. This is a time-hallowed doctrine. The greatest of all satirists and critics of manners knew this secret of successful intercourse with one another. One of the characters in the "Frogs" of Aristophanes is made to say: "Don't come trespassing upon my mind; you have a house of your own." Propinquity does not necessarily entail intimacy; as the world grows smaller, more and more people think so, perhaps often enough only to escape from themselves, a favorite form of elopement these days. Some men are fed by solitude and starved by too much companionship, and the same is true of nations. You cannot control others till you have learned to control yourself, or save another till you yourself are saved, and most of us had better be about that business.