The Appetite of Tyranny

The Escape of Folly

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In considering the Prussian point of view we have been considering what

seems to be mainly a mental limitation: a kind of knot in the brain.

Towards the problem of Slav population, of English colonisation, of French

armies and reinforcements, it shows the same strange philosophic sulks. So

far as I can follow it, it seems to amount to saying "It is very wrong that

you should be superior to me, because I am superior to you." The spokesmen

of this system seem to have a curious capacity for concentrating this

entanglement or contradiction, sometimes into a single paragraph, or even a

single sentence. I have already referred to the German Emperor's celebrated

suggestion that in order to avert the peril of Hunnishness we should all

become Huns. A much stronger instance is his more recent order to his

troops touching the war in Northern France. As most people know, his words

ran "It is my Royal and Imperial command that you concentrate your

energies, for the immediate present, upon one single purpose, and that is

that you address all your skill and all the valour of my soldiers to

exterminate first the treacherous English and to walk over General French's

contemptible little Army." The rudeness of the remark an Englishman can

afford to pass over; what I am interested in is the mentality; the train of

thought that can manage to entangle itself even in so brief a space. If

French's little Army is contemptible, it would seem clear that all the

skill and valour of the German Army had better not be concentrated on it,

but on the larger and less contemptible allies. If all the skill and

valour of the German Army are concentrated on it, it is not being treated

as contemptible. But the Prussian rhetorician had two incompatible

sentiments in his mind; and he insisted on saying them both at once. He

wanted to think of an English Army as a small thing; but he also wanted to

think of an English defeat as a big thing. He wanted to exult, at the same

moment, in the utter weakness of the British in their attack; and the

supreme skill and valour of the Germans in repelling such an attack.

Somehow it must be made a common and obvious collapse for England; and yet

a daring and unexpected triumph for Germany. In trying to express these

contradictory conceptions simultaneously, he got rather mixed. Therefore he

bade Germania fill all her vales and mountains with the dying agonies of

this almost invisible earwig; and let the impure blood of this cockroach

redden the Rhine down to the sea.

But it would be unfair to base the criticism on the utterance of any

accidental and hereditary prince: and it is quite equally clear in the case

of the philosophers who have been held up to us, even in England, as the

very prophets of progress. And in nothing is it shown more sharply than in

the curious confused talk about Race and especially about the Teutonic

Race. Professor Harnack and similar people are reproaching us, I

understand, for having broken "the bond of Teutonism": a bond which the

Prussians have strictly observed both in breach and observance. We note it

in their open annexation of lands wholly inhabited by n*****s, such as

Denmark. We note it equally in their instant and joyful recognition of the

flaxen hair and light blue eyes of the Turks. But it is still the abstract

principle of Professor Harnack which interests me most; and in following it

I have the same complexity of enquiry, but the same simplicity of result.

Comparing the Professor's concern about "Teutonism" with his unconcern

about Belgium, I can only reach the following result: "A man need not keep

a promise he has made. But a man must keep a promise he has not made."

There certainly was a treaty binding Britain to Belgium; if it was only a

scrap of paper. If there was any treaty binding Britain to Teutonism it is,

to say the least of it, a lost scrap of paper: almost what one might call a

scrap of waste-paper. Here again the pendants under consideration exhibit

the illogical perversity that makes the brain reel. There is obligation and

there is no obligation: sometimes it appears that Germany and England must

keep faith with each other; sometimes that Germany need not keep faith with

anybody and anything; sometimes that we alone among European peoples are

almost entitled to be Germans; sometimes that beside us Russians and

Frenchmen almost rise to a Germanic loveliness of character. But through

all there is, hazy but not hypocritical, this sense of some common

Teutonism.

Professor Haeckel, another of the witnesses raised up against us, attained

to some celebrity at one time through proving the remarkable resemblance

between two different things by printing duplicate pictures of the same

thing. Professor Haeckel's contribution to biology, in this case, was

exactly like Professor Harnack's contribution to ethnology. Professor

Harnack knows what a German is like. When he wants to imagine what an

Englishman is like, he simply photographs the same German over again. In

both cases there is probably sincerity as well as simplicity. Haeckel was

so certain that the species illustrated in embryo really are closely

related and linked up, that it seemed to him a small thing to simplify it

by mere repetition. Harnack is so certain that the German and Englishman

are almost alike, that he really risks the generalisation that they are

exactly alike. He photographs, so to speak, the same fair and foolish face

twice over; and calls it a remarkable resemblance between cousins. Thus he

can prove the existence of Teutonism just about as conclusively as Haeckel

has proved the more tenable proposition of the non-existence of God. Now

the German and the Englishman are not in the least alike--except in the

sense that neither of them are n*****s. They are, in everything good and

evil, more unlike than any other two men we can take at random from the

great European family. They are opposite from the roots of their history,

nay, of their geography. It is an understatement to call Britain insular.

Britain is not only an island, but an island slashed by the sea till it

nearly splits into three islands; and even the Midlands can almost smell

the salt. Germany is a powerful, beautiful and fertile inland country,

which can only find the sea by one or two twisted and narrow paths, as

people find a subterranean lake. Thus the British Navy is really national

because it is natural; it has co-hered out of hundreds of accidental

adventures of ships and shipmen before Chaucer's time and after it. But the

German Navy is an artificial thing; as artificial as a constructed Alp

would be in England. William II has simply copied the British Navy as

Frederick II copied the French Army: and this Japanese or anti-like

assiduity in imitation is one of the hundred qualities which the Germans

have and the English markedly have not. There are other German

superiorities which are very much superior. The one or two really jolly

things that the Germans have got are precisely the things which the English

haven't got: notably a real habit of popular music and of the ancient songs

of the people, not merely spreading from the towns or caught from the

professionals. In this the Germans rather resemble the Welsh: though heaven

knows what becomes of Teutonism if they do. But the difference between the

Germans and the English goes deeper than all these signs of it; they differ

more than any other two Europeans in the normal posture of the mind. Above

all, they differ in what is the most English of all English traits; that

shame which the French may be right in calling "the bad shame"; for it is

certainly mixed up with pride and suspicion, the upshot of which we call

shyness. Even an Englishman's rudeness is often rooted in his being

embarrassed. But a German's rudeness is rooted in his never being

embarrassed. He eats and makes love noisily. He never feels a speech or a

song or a sermon or a large meal to be what the English call "out of place"

in particular circumstances. When Germans are patriotic and religious they

have no reactions against patriotism and religion as have the English and

the French. Nay, the mistake of Germany in the modern disaster largely

arose from the facts that she thought England was simple when England is

very subtle. She thought that because our politics have become largely

financial that they had become wholly financial; that because our

aristocrats had become pretty cynical that they had become entirely

corrupt. They could not seize the subtlety by which a rather used-up

English gentleman might sell a coronet when he would not sell a fortress;

might lower the public standards and yet refuse to lower the flag. In

short, the Germans are quite sure that they understand us entirely, because

they do not understand us at all. Possibly if they began to understand us

they might hate us even more: but I would rather be hated for some small

but real reason than pursued with love on account of all kinds of qualities

which I do not possess and which I do not desire. And when the Germans get

their first genuine glimpse of what modern England is like they will

discover that England has a very broken, belated and inadequate sense of

having an obligation to Europe, but no sort of sense whatever of having any

obligation to Teutonism.

This is the last and strongest of the Prussian qualities we have here

considered. There is in stupidity of this sort a strange slippery

strength: because it can be not only outside rules but outside reason. The

man who really cannot see that he is contradicting himself has a great

advantage in controversy; though the advantage breaks down when he tries to

reduce it to simple addition, to chess, or to the game called war. It is

the same about the stupidity of the one-sided kinship. The drunkard who is

quite certain that a total stranger is his long-lost brother, has a greater

advantage until it comes to matters of detail. "We must have chaos within"

said Nietzsche, "that we may give birth to a dancing star."

In these slight notes I have suggested the principal strong points of the

Prussian character. A failure in honour which almost amounts to a failure

in memory: an egomania that is honestly blind to the fact that the other

party is an ego; and, above all, an actual itch for tyranny and

interference, the devil which everywhere torments the idle and the proud.

To these must be added a certain mental shapelessness which can expand or

contract without reference to reason or record; a potential infinity of

excuses. If the English had been on the German side, the German professors

would have noted what irresistible energies had evolved the Teutons. As the

English are on the other side, the German professors will say that these

Teutons were not sufficiently evolved. Or they will say that they were

just sufficiently evolved to show that they were not Teutons. Probably they

will say both. But the truth is that all that they call evolution should

rather be called evasion. They tell us they are opening windows of

enlightenment and doors of progress. The truth is that they are breaking up

the whole house of the human intellect, that they may abscond in any

direction. There is an ominous and almost monstrous parallel between the

position of their over-rated philosophers and of their comparatively

under-rated soldiers. For what their professors call roads of progress are

really routes of escape.

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