Part 2

They differed little from those of M. Moritz von Bethmann. But on the lips of M. Baum they received an apostolic breadth. The young banker had not shown that he felt any insurmountable horror of war, which he regarded merely as a useless expense. M. Baum, on the other hand, whose entire mentality was under the influence of evangelical radicalism, detested war as barbarism and as a manifestation of antichrist.

At one o’clock, since I could not make up my mind to leave him, I persuaded him to dine with me at my hotel. Marcel Chabrières had spent the morning at the museum among the tinted marbles of Max Klinger. He was astonished to find that I was already on a friendly footing, almost intimate indeed, with this young German.

Enthusiasm is the bread of youth. Youth loves the impossible, and will accept life only through a passion which colours it with iridescent hues, invests it with a halo, and endows it with heroic lineaments. This meal was one of those moments of transfiguration when the world seems malleable and impregnated with divine fire. Our minds were filled with a vision, the vision of a new classic age, as harmonious as the age of Pericles in Greece or as the third Christian century, but vaster, richer, more humane, sparkling with youth—an age which was to integrate and beautify the conquests and discoveries, still uncoordinated, of the last three hundred years. German and French, in this dream, came to an understanding. It is true that he considered that his nation, turning back to the tradition of Weimar, was to be the master-craftsman, whereas I contended that France had never ceased to occupy that role, which was her vocation and fulfilled her nature. But this difficulty seemed trifling. We were not so much antagonists as friendly rivals.

Is this man, I asked myself when he had gone, is this man typical of young and literate Germany? In the classic land of militarism, is it only the old who are swashbucklers?

A few weeks later, in early spring, on one of those afternoons in which showers alternate with sunshine, and in which the buds, swelling with sap, open, I was walking in the beech forest to the south of Munich. My companion, about thirty years of age, was in fine fettle. Tall and thick-set, florid of face, hair blond and bristly, he walked like a conqueror, and seemed in his element among these sturdy trees. The man of the woods personified! I considered that this professor, already renowned, ought rightly in appearance to be rough-hewn, massive, dynamic, like a woodman at work. He was a hearty eater and a vigorous drinker, ruddy with health, absolutely innocent of the scepticism of drawing-rooms. I had several times before had the chance of admiring this man who reminded me of one of our Normandy horses. Above all, I had seen him at the Hofbrauerie in Munich, where we had washed down our political discussions with copious draughts of that dark beer, whose consumption in Bavaria is encouraged by old King Louis, chief brewer, and owner of the wealthiest tavern in the empire.

A country walk frequently encourages avowals which would never have been made during a thousand meetings in town, among sophisticated men. My companion had just confessed to me that he belonged to the “Social Democracy.” As yet in secret only, for it is not permissible in Germany to wear openly and simultaneously the livery of the professor and that of the socialist. But the socialist party, suffering from a dearth of intellectuals, desired him to become a deputy. At the first opportunity, he would exchange his professorial chair for a seat in the Reichstag. The ambition to revive Bebel in his own person, to become a new Wilhelm Liebknecht, made his nostrils dilate.

Somewhat mockingly, when with the impetuosity of primitive man he was speaking of the social mission of Germany, I said to him point-blank: “Admit that you think we are worn out, that in your eyes France is nothing more than an elderly beauty, with bald head, pallid lips, wrinkled skin, decayed teeth, enfeebled intelligence!”

“If I were a bourgeois,” he answered laughingly, “I should answer in the negative. You still have your stockings and your bankers, matters of considerable importance in the eyes of the bourgeoisie of every land. But I am a socialist and a democrat. The minimum programme of our party is to effect the overthrow of Prussian absolutism, and to apply throughout Germany that parliamentary regime which is the _conditio sine qua non_ of all social advance. But you French, for your part, hold this parliamentary regime in scorn. What would you have me think of a nation which repents of its virtues, which makes fun of its chief glory?

“Here in Germany we read your Maurras and similar writers.[3] We are told that in France these men have the ear of the younger generation. It astounds us. It seems to us insane, this cheerful renunciation of the tradition which has made you famous, and for which you are still idolized by all that is noblest in the world. Do you find this strange? When material force is failing you, you, the noble nation, become rabid apologists of the regime of force, of ‘the man with the big stick.’ You take Machiavel for master. You ask for a French Bismarck. You declare yourselves to be royalists, imperialists, absolutists. I can see no difference between your romano-positive young men and our own _echten Deutschen_, those energumens who deafen us in our public squares with their _hochs_ to the Kaiser, who shout their _Deutschland über alles_ at every _prosit_, and who pile monument upon monument in honour of the militarist Moloch, until the appearance of our towns becomes intolerable. Young Frenchmen converted to the Germany of the junkers, blood-brothers of our idiot of a crown prince! What a farce! But for us, the German socialists, this is merely an additional reason for the redoubling of our energies. Our watchword to-day is extremely simple: to raise in Europe and to carry onward to victory the standard of democracy which has fallen from the hand of France!”

“Such is really your idea of France, your own, and that of all the German left?”

“To speak frankly, it is with us a dogma that generous and humane France is dead, and that all that was best in her spirit has entered into us.”

We walked on for some time without saying a word. The idea never occurred to him that these wholesale judgments could possibly shock or pain me, for he was one of those happy men, common in Germany, endowed with a veritable talent for frankness. He continued his terrible strides, and after a while he exclaimed gaily: “Anyhow, you don’t bring enough children into the world to be socialists. Our ideas can germinate only in dense crowds, where there is hardly standing room, where people lack air and space, breed without restriction, and have nothing to lose! Your _Einzweikindersystem_[4] condemns you to be nothing but bourgeois, and poor bourgeois at that!”

I made no answer. What answer was possible? He knew my ideas. He had been one of those who introduced my _Ecoutes_ into Germany. Besides, it gave him so much pleasure to believe in our decadence, to be convinced that Germany, as far as democracy was concerned, was henceforward without peer in the world.

Indeed it is true, all these “young men of the left” were ardent believers in Germany’s mission. But to justify this mission they did not, like the cynical pangermanists, appeal to the _Faustrecht_, the right of the stronger; they did not speak of bloody conquests. Perhaps they thought of them, but such brutalities (which the German mind, even when finely tempered, accepts with little reluctance) remained hidden in the background, within the domain of possibilities, among the lesser evils and contingencies—profane delights which a platonic lover hardly dares to envisage even in his secret dreams. Idealists of the Michelet type, quaffing the austere wines of Kant and Fichte (recently unsealed and served round at the universities by the new masters), they made an exclusive claim to the moral heritage of ’89, of which we, they said, had ceased to be the heirs. Were not they the youthful neophytes of the democratic faith which the degenerate French had lost? Had they not passionately espoused the modern world, whose uncertain dawn had first ventured to shine on Paris, that slight and foolish city, but whose full noon was now to illumine the strong and loyal (_treu und fest_) town of Berlin, the guardian of the Rhine? Yes, _finis Galliæ_! It was theirs to lead the great caravan of the universe towards the new justice. It was their part, the part of these good Teutons, with their virgin spirit and their new blood, to direct in future the affairs of the human race. _Gesta Dei per Germanos!_

* * * * *

One of these young men was M. Wichert, director of the Mannheim museum. He was the favourite disciple of M. Lichtwark of Hamburg, and had also been a pupil of the late celebrated von Tschudi, grand master of the artistic life of Germany. Von Tschudi, it may be mentioned in passing, of course had a quarrel with William II, just like Bismarck, just like Haeseler, and Bülow, just like all the clever men in the empire who were unfortunate enough to possess a vigorous individuality. M. Wichert was a friend of our consul, M. Deschars,[5] who arranged a meeting between us.

Son of a poor officer, and orphaned while quite young, M. Wichert went through his course of studies as best he could. His life is a romance. Loneliness; poverty; chance encounter with a Mæcenas; sudden abandonment of science for art; renewed poverty; unexpected patronage by the great pontiffs of art, Tschudi and Lichtwark; appointment as sub-director of the picture gallery of Munich; appearance upon the scene of the Magian kings, a delegation of aldermen from the town of Mannheim, modernist before all, offering him carte blanche for the creation of a museum; for a start the young Messiah purchases in Paris Manet’s best work, “The Execution of Maximilian,” Daumier’s portrait of Michelet, and the “Man with the Pipe,” the most famous of Cézanne’s pictures; all Mannheim is terrified at its commissioner’s prodigality; he defends himself before the entire town council, silencing some by his boldness, winning over others by his disinterested violence, by the aspect of his threadbare coat, and the thinness of his slight but ardent figure; thus he arouses that municipal patriotism which is so keen in the fatherland, convincing the councillors that he will do nothing less than make of Mannheim the leading art centre of Germany, and at the point of the bayonet he wrests from them a vote of confidence; shortly afterwards, a wealthy Jew entrusts him with five million marks for the establishment of a museum; he founds an art school to enlighten the Mannheim bourgeoisie, which is upstart, elementary, but open-minded and full of goodwill; his lectures become fashionable in the town; he provides similar instruction for the common people; acting upon suggestions made by M. Osthaus, a rich bourgeois of Hagen, he establishes travelling exhibitions. In a word, Tschudi being dead and Lichtwark dying, M. Wichert allowed his own way at Mannheim, at twenty-five years of age figures in the role of co-ordinator, protector, inspirer of the artistic life of Germany. He has made up his mind to transform Mannheim—the Hanseatic city of traders and manufacturers, the mushroom town flaming red with its abundance of new bricks, an American city suddenly appearing in Europe—into a Jerusalem of the new art. He desires that the streets shall become beautiful, that their names shall have a poetic ring, that the squares shall be as harmonious as a house by Van de Velde or Niemeyer. He secures an order for the demolition of the theatre built ten years earlier in the “Jugend” style, and already an object of ridicule; a competition is opened for the design of the building which is to replace it. The whole town becomes crazy about art. A bourgeois is regarded as dishonoured if he has not given 40,000 marks to the museum to buy a Renoir or some Gauguins. If this apostolate continues, the people will checkmate the very Athenians.

M. Wichert talks to me in the following strain: “In the history of art nothing can rival the creative energy displayed by France. Romanesque, gothic, all the gothics, renaissance, baroque, rococo (the terms have no invidious meaning in Germany), directoire, empire—all these are French. Throughout ten centuries you continued to bring forth styles which were so elegant and so convenient, whose taste was so confident, that they instantly captured the world.

“But have you suddenly become sterile? Is France, pre-eminently the nation of innovators, no longer competent to do anything but to copy its own past? Like your new sociologists, your furniture makers supply Louis XVI, Louis XIV, empire; your builders furnish Louis XVI, renaissance, and again Louis XVI. Have you really ceased to produce architects since Gabriel and Louis, cabinet-makers since Boule, enchasers since Gouthière? Or is it that you no longer care for anything but the old, like those respectable and fatigued ladies who cannot endure a new face, and ask only to be allowed to die in peace, surrounded by the things of their youth? However this may be, we often tell one another that France no longer possesses enough energy to survive the titanic act of giving birth to the modern world, and that she is now nothing more than a beautiful corpse, embalmed and laid to rest in a splendid museum.

“Here in Germany, believe me, we worship your artistic tradition. For centuries we could find nothing better to do than attempt to assimilate it. You have visited Cassel, Pilnitz, Carlsruhe, Potsdam; I cannot doubt that you felt at home in these royal palaces, which are nothing but replicas of Versailles.

“But I sometimes incline to think that the creative force which formerly existed in France has emigrated to Germany. It is true that during the nineteenth century there occurred in France a splendid blossoming of sculptors and painters: Delacroix, Rude, Carpeaux, the landscape painters of Barbizon, the admirable school of Manet, and, coming down to to-day, Rodin, Degas, Maillol, Jouve, Vallette, the expressionists. Yes, unquestionably, even if your architecture (the master art which controls and co-ordinates all the rest) is decadent, your sculpture and your painting remain unrivalled.

“But are you not struck by the fact that during the last twenty years it has been in Germany, above all, that your innovators have gained appreciation; that many of them have had to secure their first celebrity in the foreign world, before they were enabled to harvest in France the fruits of a restricted glory, admired in their own homes solely by a group of cosmopolitan epicures? Are you not astonished that such a man as Van de Velde, who vegetated in Paris, should build palaces for our great manufacturers; and that Maillol, the sculptor, a most typical Frenchman, should find a place of honour in our museums while in France he is still almost unknown? Is this neglect deliberate? Is it because you are convinced that genius cannot flower to perfection until it has suffered, that you provide this chill atmosphere for your best artists? Or is it timidity, unwillingness to take risks, stupidity, provincialism? Whatever the reason, the air of France is to-day less favourable to creation than the air of Germany.

“In Germany there is an extensive public which lives upon the hope of a new ‘culture.’ This public has nothing in common with the pangermanists. It includes few generals and few leaders of the bureaucracy. But it contains our best men of letters and some of our principal bourgeois, in a word, the general staff of wealthy, liberal, and parliamentary young Germany. There are some, like Stephan Georg, Wolfskehl, and Madame Osthaus, in whom this hope assumes an ardent and mystical character, becoming a true religion. While it is the fashion in Paris, at least so we are assured, to be frankly reactionary,[6] here all the men and all the women who wield the empire of mind are animated by a quasi-messianic spirit. Is it possible that Nietzsche, with his idea of the revaluation of values, has contributed to the spread of this spirit? I do not know. We wait; we aspire; we hope. To us to-morrow is sacred. Every one is striving towards forms of life and art which shall be more ample, more truthful, more expressive, more beautiful. Every one is making ready to welcome the wonderful butterfly which is to spring from this larval age. It is with us a matter of faith that the men will come, that they are now on the way, who can provide the artillery and the watchwords of the new civilization.

“I frequently visit Paris to attend the great sales; I am well acquainted with the superior smiles with which many of your critics greet our attempts. They make fun of the curved outlines of our ‘Jugend’ buildings. For my part, I detest that style of architecture as much as they. Are we not now demolishing a theatre built after this design, although the mortar is hardly dry? But it is possible for us to destroy our architectural abortions. In Germany you can get money, all the money you require, for an artistic purpose. Can you do the same in France? Can you make sacrifices to an ideal incorporated in stone? No, you have too little faith. You believe in your bankers, not in your artists. You venture nothing in art; we hazard all, boldly running the risk of making a mistake. And, by building, we learn to build.

“Ten years ago we were making bad attempts; to-day we have discovered a system of architecture appropriate to modern requirements and at the same time beautiful. Go and look at the Weltheim in Berlin, M. Osthaus’s home at Hagen, the new station at Hamburg. When you are in Hamburg get M. Schumacher, chief architect of the republic, to show you the plans of the magnificent public garden he has just designed, which is to cost fifteen million marks.

“Here money is the ally of art, the living art of to-day, the ally of artistic creation, whereas in your country money, more prudent, devotes itself only to the purchase of antique and catalogued beauty. I believe, in fact, that France lacks Medicis, whilst Germany possesses them in abundance. The reason is obvious. The wealthier members of our bourgeoisie are uneasy and discontented; they desire a true parliament which will enable them to get the better of the junkers; it is their nature to be progressive. Your bourgeoisie, on the other hand, has triumphed, and, since it has nothing more to desire, it is natural that it should dread novelty in philosophy and art no less than in politics. I know that what I am saying runs counter to all your hopes. But you can do nothing to change your destiny in this matter. France has entered the conservative phase; we are now the creators; we, henceforward, shall be the true successors of your masters.”

* * * * *

Thus everywhere was to be heard the same refrain: the future lies in the hands of Germany! Germany is the Messiah of the new art; the Messiah of the socialist city; the Messiah of modern thought; the Messiah of the new classic age. She is the successor of aged France. It is she who will realize what the last of the great Frenchmen have dreamed.

In all these young men, the élite of the German nation, there was effervescing a strange force, there was surging an ardent and emotional nationalism, a veritable religion of German primacy. They considered that primacy inevitable. It originated spontaneously; its increase was dependent upon organic growth; and no accident, whether in war or peace, could either hasten or hinder it. They were all radiating hope; they all had faith in the present, a warm vintage yielding a thick and heady must, of intoxicating aroma, and whence will be derived a robust wine for the peoples to drink.

They were sincere when they spoke of peace. Doubtless their idealist ambition was transformed into a materialist and brutal ambition among men of business, officers, and bureaucrats. For these latter, German production was to ruin that of England, the German will was to control the foreign chancelleries. But such ends cannot be secured without war.

Or they could be secured without war, only if Europe made up her mind to submit! Only if the English merchants were good enough to go bankrupt! Only if the greater Slavs should offer no objection to the enslavement of their little brothers on the Drina! Thus while the young liberals were dreaming of a pacific hegemony, Krupp was making his 420 millimetre guns, sergeants were teaching recruits to fear their officers as they feared God, and Berlin was fashioning new military laws which even the socialists, after some formal resistance, voted integrally.

But during this journey, the fact which struck me most of all was the existence of a liberal youth. I had not expected to find anything of the kind. I had been so positive that from the Rhine to the Vistula I should hear nothing but the noise of military accoutrements.

* * * * *

I had seen the German army in Strasburg, at the _Parole Aufgabe_ in the Place de Broglie, when the general transmits to the officers’ corps the orders and the passwords. The whole of this assembly, in its light-grey uniform in which a simple sub-lieutenant was indistinguishable from a colonel, made salutes. The salute seemed to me the distinctive sign of this army, a fervent salute, involving the head and the entire spine, passing off in a smile at once triumphant and humble, martial and innocent, seeming to say, “How enviable I am in that I obey! How enviable I am in that I command!”

I looked down on this from the third story of the editorial offices of _Le Journal d’Alsace-Lorraine_. Suddenly I came to understand the feudal spirit, the cascade of absolute authority and of submission which formerly descended from the sovereign to the serf by way of the hierarchy of barons.

When I had crossed the Rhine, in the streets of the German towns the strength of this impression grew, until it became positively haunting. Everywhere I saw blind adoration of the uniform, overwhelming joy in wearing it; everywhere the intoxication of command, equalled only by the delight of obedience; everywhere complete ignorance of the essential equality of men, demonstrated first of all in the life of Christ, and which, once it is thoroughly understood, purifies politeness of servility, transforms obedience into affectionate collaboration, and transfigures power into service; everywhere, both in military and in civil life, I saw lords and servants, I saw the same man at once lord and servant, lord of those under him, servant of those over him—but nowhere did I see citizens. I saw servants, submissive, prepared for anything, obedient to every sign, mechanized and rejoicing thereat, convinced that it was to their interest to be so, proud of the shape and strength of the iron hand of which individually each man was one of the innumerable phalanges. I was tempted to see in this the dominant characteristic of the German nation. A powerful nation, but one estranged from the modern spirit: a medieval islet in the midst of liberal Europe; a redoubtable nation wherein absolutism, exorcised elsewhere in ’89, was patiently preparing its revenge, and whence some day, perhaps soon, would come the initiative of a combat to the death between feudalism and democracy.