German Problems and Personalities Part 9

III.

The conspiracy of European historians has thus attached greatness to the very name of the third Hohenzollern King. Great the Hohenzollern King certainly was, but his greatness is that of a Condottiere of the Italian Renascence, of a Catharine de' Medici. It is the greatness of a personality who is endowed, no doubt, with magnificent gifts, but who has prost.i.tuted all those gifts to the baser usages.

It is pa.s.sing strange how every writer remains silent about the ugly and repellent side of Frederick. The son of a mad father, he was subjected to a terrorism which would have predestined a less strong nature to the lunatic asylum. The terrorism only hardened Frederick into an incurable cynic. It only killed in him every finer feeling.

His upbringing must almost inevitably have brought out all the darker sides of human nature.

The first twenty years of his life were one uninterrupted schooling in hypocrisy, brutality, and depravity. A debauchee in his youth, a sodomite in later life, a hater of women and a despiser of men, a bully to his subordinates, a monster of ingrat.i.tude, revelling in filth so continuously in his written and spoken words that even a loyal Academy of Berlin has found it impossible to publish his unexpurgated correspondence, he appears an anachronism in a modern Europe leavened by two thousand years of Christianity. Ever scheming, ever plotting, ever seeking whom he might devour, deceiving even his intimate advisers, he has debased the currency of international morality. As a man Frederick has been compared with Napoleon. The comparison is an insult to the Corsican. Napoleon was human, he was capable of strong affections, of profound attachment and grat.i.tude.

But neither friends.h.i.+p nor love had any place in Frederick's scheme of the universe.

IV.

To-day we are holding the poor Prussian professor mainly accountable for the greatest and latest crime of Prussian militarism. But those dogmatic professors are only the abject disciples of the Hohenzollern King. There is not one aphorism which is not to be found in the thirty volumes of Frederick's writings. He has perfected the theory of the military State, and he has acted consistently on the theory. It is highly significant that his very first public act, almost never mentioned by his biographers, was his spoliation of the Prince-Bishop of Liege (an historical precedent tragically suggestive at the present day). The Prince-Bishop of Liege had committed the heinous crime of resisting the impressment of his subjects kidnapped by the recruiting sergeants of the Prussian King. On the strength of that theory, Frederick attacked the defenceless daughter of the Austrian Emperor who had saved his life at Custrin. On the strength of that theory he betrayed every one of his allies. On the strength of that theory he committed his most odious crime-he murdered the Polish nation.

V.

We are told that Frederick the Great was an incomparable political virtuoso. We are told that he showed heroic fort.i.tude in disaster, after Kollin and Kunersdorff. But so did Caesar Borgia after the sudden death of Alexander VI. We are told that he was tolerant of all creeds.

But that was only because he disbelieved all creeds, and he believed, with Gibbon, that "all creeds are equally useful to the statesman." We are reminded that he was an amazing economist, husbanding and developing the national finances. But his finances were only the sinews of war. We are told that he protected literature and art, but, like religion, he found literature an instrument useful for his political designs. We are reminded that he was himself the servant of the State. But in serving the State he only served his own interests, because the State was incarnated in himself, and in husbanding his resources he was only acting like a miser who is adding to his h.o.a.rd.

We are finally told that as the result of his life-work Frederick succeeded in creating the most marvellous military machine of modern times. We forget that, as is the way with most military machines, the Prussian machine ten years after Frederick's death had become a pitiful wreck in the hands of his immediate successor, and that it required the genius of Bismarck to manufacture another Prussian military machine to be used once more for the enslavement of Europe.

CHAPTER VI

THE APOTHEOSIS OF GOETHE

No less than three books on Goethe have been issued in the course of the last few months, and the fact is sufficient evidence that the cult of the Olympian Jupiter of Weimar, which was first inaugurated eighty years ago by Carlyle, is in no danger of dying out in England.

Professor Hume Brown has given us a penetrating and judicious study of Goethe's youth, such as one had a right to expect from the eminent Scottish historian.[17] Mr. Joseph McCabe has given us a comprehensive survey of Goethe's life, and an objective and critical appreciation of his personality.[18] Both are in profound sympathy with their subject, but neither is a blind hero-wors.h.i.+pper. In Mr. McCabe's life we are not only introduced to the scientist who is ever in quest of new worlds to conquer, we are also made acquainted with the pagan epicure ever engaged in amorous experiments! We are not only introduced to the sublime poet and prophet, we are also introduced to the incurable egotist, who could only find time to visit his old mother once every ten years, whilst, as boon companion of a petty German Prince, he always found time for his pleasures. We are not only admitted to contemplate the pomp and majesty of his world-wide fame, we are also admitted to the sordid circ.u.mstances of Goethe's "home." And our awe and reverence are turned into pity. We pity the miserable husband of a drunken and epileptic wife rescued from the gutter; we pity even more the unhappy father of a degraded son, who inherited all the vices of one parent without inheriting the genius of the other.

[17] "The Youth of Goethe." By P. Hume Brown. 8s. net (Murray.)

[18] "Goethe, the Man and his Character." By Joseph McCabe.

15s. net. (Eveleigh Nash.)

I.

The first quality which strikes us in Goethe, and which dazzled his contemporaries, and continues to dazzle posterity, is his universality. He appears to us as one of the most receptive, one of the most encyclopaedic intellects of modern times. A scientist and a biologist, a pioneer of the theory of evolution, a physicist and originator of a new theory of colour, a man of affairs, a man of the world and a courtier, a philosopher, a lyrical poet, a tragic, comic, satiric, epic, and didactic poet, a novelist and an historian, he has attempted every form of literature, he has touched upon every chord of the human soul.

It is true that, in considering this universality of Goethe, it behoves us to make some qualifications. His human sympathies are by no means as universal as his intellectual sympathies. He has no love for the common people. He has the aloofness of the aristocrat. He has a Nietzschean contempt for the herd. He takes little interest in the religious aspirations of mankind or in the struggles of human freedom. The French Revolution remains to him a sealed book, and his history of the campaign in France is almost ludicrously disappointing.

With regard to what has been called his "intellectual universality,"

the elements which compose it cannot be reduced to unity and harmony.

It would be difficult to co-ordinate them into a higher synthesis, for that _uni_versality is at the same time _di_versity and mutability.

Goethe is essentially changeable and elusive. In his works we find combined the antipodes of human thought. There is little in common between the poet of Goetz von Berlichingen and Werther on the one hand and the poet of Ta.s.so and Iphigenia on the other hand. The intellect of Goethe is like a crystal with a thousand facets reflecting all the colours of the rainbow.

And it may well be asked, therefore, whether this encyclopaedic diversity can aptly be called universality. Universality must ultimately result in unity and harmony, and it is impossible to a.s.sert that Goethe's mind ever achieved unity and harmony, that it was ever controlled by one dominant thought.

At any rate, whether a defect or a quality, there can be no doubt that this encyclopaedic diversity has turned to the great advantage of his glory. It is precisely because Goethe is an elusive Proteus that all doctrines may equally claim him. Romanticists turn with predilection to the creator of Werther or the first "Faust." Cla.s.sicists admire the plastic beauty of Ta.s.so and Iphigenia. The cosmopolitan sees in Goethe the _Weltburger_, the citizen of the world, the incarnation of _die Weltweisheit_. The patriot acclaims in him the poet who has sung the myths and legends dear to the German race. The sensuous and voluptuous libertine is enchanted by the eroticism of the "Roman Elegies." The domesticated reader is drawn by that chaste idyll, Herman and Dorothea. The Spinozist and Pantheist are attracted by the general tendencies of his philosophy. The Christian is at liberty to interpret "Faust" in a sense which is favourable to his religion. The Liberal politician can point to the author of Goetz and Egmont. The Conservative and Reactionary can claim all the works of Goethe's maturity, when the poet had become the perfect courtier.

II.

There is a second quality which Goethe possesses in a supreme degree, and by which he is distinguished from his contemporaries-namely, mental sanity and serenity. Most of his fellow-poets reveal some morbid characteristics, are afflicted with some _Weltschmerz_, with some internal spiritual malady. They live in an atmosphere of strife and discord. The marvellous vitality of Goethe has escaped from the contagion. Like his fellow-poets, he pa.s.sed through the crisis of the _Sturm und Drang_. But it seems as if he had only known it in order to give to his experiences a final artistic expression. He communicated the "Wertherian malady" to a whole generation, but he himself emerged triumphant and unscathed. The hurricane which wrecked so many powerful intellects spared his own. After the Italian journey he never ceased by example and precept to recommend harmony and balance, and he became so completely the perfect type of intellectual and artistic sanity that the world has forgotten the Bohemian days of Frankfurt and Leipzig, the merry days of Weimar, the repulsive vulgarity of his drunken mistress and wife, the degradation of his son, and has agreed only to contemplate the Olympian majesty of Weimar. Whether the repose and sanity of Goethe were unmixed virtues, or whether they were partly the result of indifference, of impa.s.sivity or selfishness, is another question. Certain it is that there is no other trait in Goethe's personality which has done more to raise him in the esteem of posterity. He has proved to the world that internal discord and distraction and morbid exaltation are not the necessary appanage of genius, and that, on the contrary, the most powerful genius is also the most sane, the most balanced, the most self-possessed, the most harmonious.

III.

Without going here into the purely formal and artistic qualities of Goethe's works, there is one fact which, perhaps more than any other, impressed itself on the imagination of the world, and that is the realization of his own personality, the achievement of his own destiny. Of all his poems, the rarest and most perfect is the poem of his life. Hitherto no such life had ever been allotted to a favourite of the Muses. He seemed to have received a bountiful abundance of all the gifts of the fairies-superb health, comfort, and wealth, the love of an adoring mother and sister, the loyalty of ill.u.s.trious friends, the favour of Princes, the homage of women, and the admiration of men. To him was opened every province of human activity. He exhausted every form of enjoyment. His life until the end was like the unfolding of a glorious version of a happy dream. At eighty years of age he remained the one surviving giant of the golden age of German literature. In his lifetime he was considered by Europe, as well as by Germany, as the most glorious exemplar of his race, and the city of his adoption had become a pilgrimage attracting wors.h.i.+ppers from all parts of Europe. Death was merciful to him. The last act of his life was as beautiful as the others. It was not preceded by the gradual dissolution of his physical and intellectual strength; rather was it like the burning out of a flame. He pa.s.sed away in an apotheosis, and the last words uttered by the dying poet, "_Mehr Licht, mehr Licht_"

(More light, more light), have become for all future generations the final expression of his philosophy and the symbol of his personality.

CHAPTER VII

THE SERVICE OF THE CITY IN GERMANY[19]

[19] Written in 1913.

I.

All English students interested in Germany owe a deep debt of grat.i.tude to the unremitting labours of Mr. William Harb.u.t.t Dawson in the fields of Teutonic scholars.h.i.+p. He is one of a gallant band of some half-dozen publicists who, amidst universal neglect, have done their utmost to popularize amongst us a knowledge of German life and German people. Mr. Dawson's last book is certain to take rank as a political cla.s.sic. It is a lucid exposition of "Munic.i.p.al Life and Government in Germany" (Longmans and Co., 12s. 6d. net). City administration and city regulations are a subject which no literary art can make very exciting, but, difficult and forbidding though it be, it is a subject which yields in importance and interest to no other. There is certainly no other subject which will reveal to us more of the secrets of German greatness.

II.

For the greatness of Germany is not to be explained by her unwieldy army, her red-tape bureaucracy, her impotent Reichstag, her effete Churches. Her army, Parliament, and Churches are symptoms of weakness and not of strength. The true greatness of Germany is largely due to a factor ignored by most writers, ignored even by Mr. Dawson in all his previous works-namely, the excellence of German munic.i.p.al inst.i.tutions, the intensity of her civic life. We have been too much accustomed to think of Germany only as a despotic empire. She might be far more fittingly described as a country of free inst.i.tutions, a federation of autonomous cities. We fondly imagine that ours is the only country where self-government prevails. Readers who might still entertain this prejudice will carry away from Mr. Dawson's book the novel political lesson that Germany, much more than Great Britain, deserves to be called a self-governing nation, and that, at least in her civic government, which, after all, affects 70 per cent. of her population, Germany enjoys a measure of political liberty which is absolutely unknown in our own country.

III.

The tradition of munic.i.p.al freedom in Germany is as old as German culture. It still lingers in the haunting charm of the German cities to-day. The Holy Roman Empire possessed only the trappings and the shadow of power; the reality belonged to the burghers of the towns.

The _Stadtewesen_ gives its original character to the German Middle Ages. The Hansa towns and the Hanseatic League recall some of the most stirring memories of German history. The League still survives in the three independent republics of Hamburg, Bremen, and Lubeck. The dominant fact that German medieval civilization was a civilization of free cities is driven home to the most superficial tourist. In every corner of the German Empire, in north and south, on the banks of the Rhine and the Elbe, in Rothenburg and Marienburg, in Frankfurt and Freiburg, the thousand monuments of the past prove to us the all-important truth that in Germany, as in Italy and in Flanders, it is the service of the city which has made for national greatness.

IV.

War and anarchy put an end to munic.i.p.al prosperity. Protestantism brought with it the confusion of spiritual and temporal power, which brought with it the despotism of the Princes, which meant the suppression of civic liberty. The Thirty Years' War completed the ruin of the cities. The end of the seventeenth century put in the place of city governance the tyranny of a hundred petty Princes. Everywhere we see the ancient town halls crumbling into ruin, and we see arising pretentious palaces built on the model of the Palace of Versailles.

Germany had to go through the bitter humiliation of Jena before she realized the necessity of reverting to her glorious civic traditions.

The statesmans.h.i.+p of Stein (see Seeley's "Life and Times of Stein") understood that such return was the prime condition of a German political renaissance. By his memorable Munic.i.p.al Law of 1808 Stein restored civic liberty. He made local self-government the corner-stone of German internal policy. The ordinance of Stein remains to this day the organic law and Great Charter of the German city. It has stood the test of one hundred years of change, and even the iron despotism of the Hohenzollern has not been able to challenge it. In every other political inst.i.tution Germany is lamentably behind. Only in her munic.i.p.al life is she in advance of most European countries.

V.