III.—Treitschke and the Professors
I confess that I am weary of these German Professors. Having deposed God—by stern decree of their theological Press Bureau—they felt that a gap had been created, and volunteered to fill it. But as a substitute divinity the Herr Professor falls a little short of perfect accomplishment. I have sat under or come in contact with a few truly great men among them, like Windleband of Heidelberg, and Pastor of Innsbruck. But the Haeckels, the Harnacks, the Euckens, and the rest mistook their trade when they went in for omniscience. These drill-sergeants of metaphysics understand everything except reality. The “fog of war,” of which one had heard so much, was as nothing to the fog of peace into which they had plunged Germany and Europe.
You must remember the nature of the system of which they are the mature, show products. In a German university it is unusual for a student to take a degree. Our own institutions are appalling enough, in all conscience; but there is, at least, a sort of scheduled, educational mediocrity to which even athletic demigods must attain. And there is not the least doubt that, in the intervals of neglecting their work, our college men do, in the mass, enter by subtle ways into the mysterious and honourable art of being gentlemen. In a German university you do not find any uniform, general life on which everybody can draw. The caste system—on which all Prussia is founded—manifests itself very soon. Either you clip off your friends’ ears in duels, keep dogs, abjure learning, and absorb beer for two or three years, or else you set out to be a Herr Doktor. By steadily accumulating notes, and grimly avoiding fresh air, you arrive at the moment when you can order a visiting card with this wizard-title on it. Then, wearing a nimbus of adulation, you pass on to be a Privat Dozent, and ultimately a Herr Professor. Everybody’s hat is off to you; you meet with no real criticism or free thrust of thought.
Add to this the fact that German is a singularly difficult language in which to tell the truth plainly, even if you should desire to do so. Two or three writers, like Schiller, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche, have contrived the miracle; but the general impression inflicted on the Latin mind by German literature is that of inadequately cooked plum-duff. One understands a great Socialist like Otto Effertz turning in his third book from German to French with the observation: “Formerly I wrote in a provincial dialect. I now experiment in a European language.” A brilliant lady of my acquaintance, who suffered fools more or less gladly at Marburg and Bonn, is of opinion that the Prussian reaches his most exquisite moment of lyricism when, at Christmas or Easter, he ties a bow of blue ribbon on a sausage, and presents it to his beloved. This is a disputable view; but it does indicate certain inadequacies in the German apparatus of expression which really exist.
Imagine, then, your Herr Professor, thus fed on gross flattery, inducted into the most rigid caste system in Europe, mentally imprisoned in a language in which it is easier to say Yes! and No! together to any question than to say either separately: turn him loose on German history, give him a Kaiser and a Court audience who demand adulation, give him, further, a set of prosperous bandits like Frederick the Great and fruitful liars like Bismarck to work on, and you get Treitschke. I have looked more or less carefully through eight large volumes of his history and essays. In one sentence you find jingoism, in the next egotism. For my part, I have been unable to find much else. I gather from Dr. Max Lenz and other biographers that this renegade Saxon was at one time or other blind, deaf, and honest. Whether he was all three simultaneously, or in what permutations he worked, I do not know, and one is very far from gibing at human suffering. But when an invalid sets up as a Prophet of Bullydom, when a feeble creature, saved from collapse only by human affection, goes about to blaspheme all the intimate sanctities of civilisation, one feels justified in summoning him to the bar of his own Darwinism. Among modern nations Prussia has had the strange experience of having a Gospel of Relentless Force preached to her by invalids and degenerates. Her metaphysic has been dictated from a hospital ward.
The one thing you find in Treitschke, reverberating through page after page, is the doctrine of a Chosen People. He used his learning, which was not inconsiderable, his prestige, and his influence to keep hammering into Prussia the belief that she was the chosen race, the seed of the superman, the predestined ruler of Western civilisation. He preached the ruthless supremacy of the State, and the sacrifice to military power of all humane activities. He regarded Holland, Belgium, Denmark, Luxemburg as fragments of Germany that had been temporarily broken off, and must be recovered. He taught those whom he influenced to dream of a Vandal Empire, straddled across all Europe from Dunkirk to Belgrade. Domination, domination, and again domination: that is the message of Treitschke. Were he alive he would have rejoiced blatantly at the tearing up of the “scrap of paper” which stood for nothing except the conscience of Europe and the integrity of Belgium.
I understand that we are to have solemn and careful studies of his works issued in English. A great deal of his detailed historical research is probably of high value. But it would be just as well if critics realised that, for the future, when a German corrupter like Treitschke is translated, he comes not to judge, but to be judged. He preached the Gospel of the Devil, the gospel of domination, cruelty, and planned barbarism. Whatever intellectual prestige he came to acquire will no more save him than brilliancy will save Lucifer.