WHEN BLOOD IS THEIR ARGUMENT.'
MR. FORD MAnox MIIEFFER has written here, we think, better than ever before in his life because his discursiveness is gathered up in a single earnest purpose, and his quips and paradoxes are bent to the same end. He knows Germany as only a man can who knew a country before be troubled to think that he was thinking about it. He tells us that he thinks indifferently in German, French, and English. He often frames a sentence in either French or German before translating it into English ; and he finds his brain working in German in particular when his fancy runs on homely scenes and cool wines such as he remembers in South Germany. He has no prejudices against—nothing but affection for— Germany as it used to be, and as it still might be but for the domination of Prussia. But, unfortunately, Germany has been changed from altruism to materialism—from the greatest national virtue in the world, according to Mr. Hueffer's view, to the greatest national evil—by the terrible steadfast ambi- tion of Prussia. And now we see a country claiming the leadership of the world in critical learning, in philosophy, and in science, although it does not" begin to know," as Americans say, what the true spirit of learning is. Mr. Hueffer's thesis, in short, is that under Prussia culture (in the sense of Bildung, not in the sense of Sulfur), so far from growing, has steadily declined, and that this deterioration has affected the whole world, because the whole world has taken the German claim too seriously, and has allowed its ideals to be shaped by false German ideals. Mr. Hueffer asserts that Germany has produced no art of a really capital kind since 1870, and that the rot of German learning and art is traceable as far back as 1848— that is to say, traceable to the time when the attempt at a Prussian hegemony began to make itself appreciably felt. This is, as one can see at a glance, a bold thesis; but Mr. Hueffer's entertaining pages maintain it with both wit and knowledge, and with a personal passion such as could be exhibited only by a man who felt that a country very dear to him bad been gratuitously rained by a malign spell. If we accept the thesis to the full, we shall be unable to abstain from laying on the world its due share of blame for mistaking German thoroughness for wiedom. We shall be compelled to say that Carlyle blundered in his preaching worse than most of us have hitherto admitted, and that Matthew Arnold was not only insufficiently informed about German methods, but that he Licked the foresight to grasp their tendency.
Mr. Hueffer distinguishes between critical writing which is impersonal in character and that which is personal. German critical writing is impersonal to the point of an arid inhumanity. "Therefore," Mr. Hueffer seems to say to himself, "my writing shall be just the reverse. I will be as personal, as little Prussian, as possible." He succeeds with a vengeance. We choose a few sentences at random as an example of the emphatic " personality "
" My tutor preached his first sermon at the little parish church in the neighbourhood of Soden. The text, I remember, was the ]iarmhorziger Samariter, the good Samaritan, and I remember that the reverend gentleman went as far as he could in the direction of ruling out compassion as a mainspring of human motive. I remember also that one of the village girls fell down in an epileptic fit in the middle of the sermon and that, owing to the delay, the service had to be out short because the Roman Catholics were waiting to come in and celebrate the sacrifice of • When Mod is Their Argument an Andlyets of Anemia* Culture.. By Peed hIndoz Littetter. London. ItoiLler mad Stoughton. [in tkl. net.] the Mass, for the church was used by both communions. After the service there was a ball at which there wore present the officers and Einjahriger of the Bonn Hussars—and the ball was cut short owing to the news reaching the place that the colonel of the regiment had been killed that afternoon by a fall from his horse on the tramlines in Frankfort. And the next day we went off on a reading-party to the Spessart and I spent many days in Hauff's own Wirtschaft, reading 'Also sprach Zarathustra' and Menschliches-Allsumenschliches: I ought by rights to have been reading Catullus, but my tutor was of opinion that the other would do me more good. It was, now I come to think of it, a curious and a symbolical experience."
Mr. Hueffer sees the beginnings of the modern German national idea in the French Revolution and the Napoleonic legend, for it was these things that united the Germania peceples in a kind of holy war. Frederick the Great and other Germans of course had made war di French Kings, but they had done so because they had jealous quarrels with them, not because they regarded the French as essentially different from themselves. Indeed, the more a German King succeeded against the French in arms, the more he shaped the life of his Court on French models and the more French pictures he hung in his galleries. But the Revolution and the Napoleonic period revealed the French as ravening wolves. I people who killed their King, dethroned their God, and obliterated States which stood in their path were something contrary to all experience, and must be resisted by a drawing together of all men who sought security. In this sense Ronsseaniam and Bonapartism made the German nation. It is characteristic of Mr. Hueffer, however, that he presses his point too far, and ridiculously asks us to believe that because Napoleon un- wittingly helped to establish German nationalism, therefore Pitt's war against Napoleon was not a war for liberty at all, but a mere "senseless opposition." As though Pitt could have foreseen the colossal scale of Germany's sinning against the light, or could have acted otherwise if he had foreseen it' Mr. Hueffer might as well tell us now that it is a senseless blunder to resist Germany because Germany in this war is creating a new Russian nationalism, which for all we know may conceivably be misused by Russian rulers in the dim future. It is a pity that Mr. Hueffer spoils his argument by some gross absurdities. All the same, his irresponsibilities do not disguise the fact that this is a responsible book, very well worth reading, and not like any other book that has been inspired by the war.
Mr. Hueffer will not allow that the Prussiane are Germans at all. They are largely of Wendish, or at least of Lithuanian, origin; and one of the author's most painful memories is of the excessive anger and resentment of his German relations one day in Westphalia when he took off his hat upon hearing the Prussian National Anthem. The Prussian moulding of Germany has become ever stricter and madder as the years have passed, and Mr. Hueffer writes of Bismarck as • scrupulous and honourable statesman who was not at all responsible for the German policy of to-day. We cannot accept this view of Bismarck. It is true that Bismarck tried to calls halt, to damp down pugnacity, and to exalt demo- cracy at the end of his life. But it was then too late to teach the German people to disbelieve in military aggression and in autocracy—the very weapons with which he himself had triumphed. Mr. Hueffer holds the present Emperor more responsible than any other man for what has happened. We need not defend the Emperor, but his political madness seems to us to be very distinctly the result of an evil tradition working in a superficial mind.
Mr. Hueffer is excellent on the intimidation of professors and teachers who do not think apart of their academic duty to exalt the Imperial idea :--
"It was under Falk in 1879 that the special laws, constitutions, and legislation of the German universities were abolished, and that they fell completely into the hands of the ministry. And although no professor in ordinary in a German university could, thenceforth or before, be deprived of his chair, except for flagrant immorality or dereliction of duty, he can be deprived of his right to examine pupils, of his seat on the academia board of his university, and of all chance of promotion in the academic, world. This is already a sufficiently powerful lever. Bat when to what is practically the silencing of the professor there is added the ministerial power to appoint to a university as many extra pro- fessors in any given subject as the Minister of Education may see fit, this power is enormously increased. The Minister has at his disposal for these purposes an annual income of 4313,000,000 sterling, and if, say, a Professor of Law should refuse to be a militarist or be reported by a spy to be in private conversation a Social Democrat, the Minister can practically shut his mouth by depriving him of his pupils and can then appoint as many ordinary or extraordinary Professors of Law to that university as he may please. And he can contract with these extra professors to insert as many patriotic or imperialistic digressions or to deliver as many extra and popular lectures upon the necessity for increasing the navy as it may seem good to the Minister to enact."
It is amazing, of course, that the intellectual flower of any nation should be capable of such distressing docility. But is not this docility in various forms the besetting vice of all Germans P Without assuming this docility on the widest scale we should find it absolutely impossible to explain the horrors committed in Belgium. The murder of innocent hostages, for instance, is ordered by the highest authorities, and the murders are duly and unquestioningly committed hymen who are pro- trebly in their own homes good husbands and affectionate fathers. Docility, again, practised by men who seem devoid of humour, explains the readiness with which German scholars accept ideals of learning that confuse the material with the design of great work. The German scholar amasses Quellen with enthusiasm; he counts the number of commas in a classic; or he contrasts the number of times which one author uses some insignificant word with the number of times another author uses the same insignificant word. Mr. Hneffer makes good fun of this side of German scholarship. He is specially scathing about the national plan for placing Goethe on a pinnacle of Parnassus. Germany had need of a great man for focussing national admiration. She lacked a Shakespeare, and accordingly Goethe was promoted to the part. Mr. Hueffer will not carry every one with him when he writes of Goethe as a mediocrity, but probably most of us will be willing to go part of the way with him, and all will agree that his strictures are both trenchant and extremely amusing.
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