One of those learned Germans was making a tour in England five-and-twenty years ago; and I met him at Portsmouth, and went over the Victory with him. He showed much emotion at it all; and when we reached the place where Nelson died, he quite broke down and burst out into tears. And the quartermaster said, “I’m blowed.”
He may have pictured it more vividly than we did, for he was a veteran of 1870, and knew what warfare meant. A great-uncle of mine was on the Impregnable at the battle of Algiers in 1816, and I have heard him say that it was really nauseous to have two hundred killed and wounded all crowded up in such a narrow space.
Unless a naval battle has been fought close by the shore, no landsman can well picture to himself what it was like. Looking down upon the island and the straits of Salamis, I have seen the battle as vividly as Trasimene or Waterloo; but I have never been able to conjure up Trafalgar by thinking of the latitude and longitude that I was in. I have tried it several times and always failed.
There have been many naval battles in the Dardanelles, in ancient times and in the middle ages; but I did not think of these when I was there in 1880. Our fleet had gone up through the straits two years before; and that seemed much more real. People criticised some things that Hornby did, especially his sending ships right up the gulf of Xeros; but everybody seemed quite sure that the strategic point was in the throat of the peninsula, five miles north-east of Gallipoli, not in its toes at Suvla bay and cape Helles, more than twenty and thirty miles south-west. So, being out of date, I imagined that our Gallipoli expedition would try to land near Yenikli-liman.
When people say that the Thermopylæ epitaph would suit Gallipoli, I rather wonder if they see how very suitable it really is. It is not the namby-pamby thing they think, “Go, tell the Spartans, thou that passest by, that here, obedient to their laws, we lie.” It really is a stinging thing, and the sting is in the tail, the last word of the line. “Tell the Spartans it was here—in an untenable position, with a flank that could be turned—it was here that, in compliance with their orders, our lives were thrown away.”
In a list of the books here that were acquired before 1846, the German books are the collected works of Goethe, Schiller, Richter (Jean Paul) and Koerner, as well as separate works of theirs, a few things by Niemeyer, Tieck, Werner and Wilmsen, and some translations into German from the Danish and Swedish of Andersen and Bremer. All this, of course, is what is known as literature; and there is nothing at all utilitarian except a volume of travels in Surinam, published at Potsdam in 1782. The later acquisitions show how Germany has changed since 1846. These books are crammed with information, but devoid of literary merit.—No doubt, the recent books were chosen by myself, and the others by departed relatives whose tastes and interests were not the same as mine; but this will not explain the change. There was not the same scope for choice: there were few books then of such appalling industry as those that come out now, and there has not been another Goethe.
It is fifty years since I first travelled in Germany, 1868, and I have watched the later stages of the transformation that had been foretold. “But the Ideal is passing slowly away from the German mind ... and the memories that led their grandsires to contemplate, will urge the youth of the next generation to dare and to act.” Old Bulwer Lytton wrote that in 1834 in his Pilgrims of the Rhine. I remember my father reading it out to me in very early years.
He had a very dexterous way of giving me glowing accounts of places on the Continent, and making me long to go there. And then, whenever I said that I should like to go, he said to me, “Of course, you shall; but it’s no good your going till you can talk to people there.” I commend that dodge to parents whose children are disinclined to learn.
When my brother was at Harrow, my father was dissatisfied at his learning so little German there, but my grandfather took quite another view, 8 February 1863, “I should say, Let him be a proficient in the French language first, for that is spoken nearly all the world over, while German is more a flash thing than useful: all very well, if time permits after learning the more useful. So let him get on with Mathematics and the Classics, for that is what he will gain Honours on (if any) and not the German language: that is merely an accomplishment.”
Foreign languages ought to be begun in nurseries, and not left for schools: all good linguists have begun by learning words in different languages as soon as they could speak. If children are only told that a certain creature is a cat, they will afterwards learn the word ‘chat’ as a translation of the word ‘cat.’ But if they are told that the creature is called ‘cat’ by some people and ‘chat’ by others, they are prepared to find that other people call it ‘katze,’ others ‘gatto,’ and so on. And they connect the creature with its foreign names at once, instead of indirectly through the English name.—However, these nursery lessons are not always a success. I remember a Parisian who learnt her English from an Irish nurse, and always spoke it with a brogue.