Marlborough, and Other Poems

by Charles Hamilton Sorley

I made my pilgrimage on Saturday, when, though I had to get up with the lark to hear the energetic old Eucken lecture at 7 a.m., I had no lecture after 10, and went straight off to Weimar. I spent the rest of the morning (actually) in the museum, inspecting chiefly Preller’s wall-paintings of the Odyssey. They are the best criticism of the book I have seen and gave me a new and more pleasant idea of Odysseus. Weimar does not give the same impression of musty age as parts of Jena. It seems a flourishing well-watered town, and I should like very much to live there, chiefly for the sake of the park. The name “Park” puts one off, but it is really a beautiful place like a college garden on an extensive scale. After I had wandered about there very pleasantly for an hour or so, I noticed a statue in a prominent position above me. “Another Goethe,” thought I; but I looked at it again, and it had not that look of self-confident self-conscious greatness that all the Goethes have. So I went up to it and recognised a countryman—looking down from this height on Weimar, with one eye half-closed and an attitude of head expressing amused and tolerant but penetrating interest. It was certainly the first satisfactory representation of Shakespeare I have ever seen. It appears quite new, but I could not discover the sculptor’s name. The one-eye-half-closed trick was most effective; you thought “this is a very humorous kindly human gentleman”—then you went round to the other side and saw the open eye!

The blot in Weimar is the Schiller-Goethe statue in front of the theatre. They are both embracing rather stupidly—and O so fat! (8 May 1914.)

IV

GERMANY ([p. 56])

In the evening I am generally to be found avoiding a certain insincere type of German student, who hunts me down ostensibly to “tie a bond of good-comradeship,” but really to work up facts about what “England” thinks. Such people of undeveloped individuality tell me in return what “wir Deutschen” think, in a touching national spirit, which would have charmed Plato. But they don’t charm me. Indeed I see in them the very worst result of 1871. They have no idea beyond the “State,” and have put me off Socialism for the rest of my life. They are not the kind of people, as [the Irish R.M.] puts it, “you could borrow half-a-crown to get drunk with.” But such is only a small proportion and come from the north and west; they just show how Sedan has ruined one type of German, for I’m sure the German nature is the nicest in the world, as far as it is not warped by the German Empire. I like their lack of reserve and self-consciousness, our two national virtues. They all write poetry and recite it with gusto to any three hours’ old acquaintance. We all write poetry too in England, but we write it on the bedroom wash-stand and lock the bedroom door, and disclaim it vehemently in public. (2 June 1914.)

The two great sins people impute to Germany are that she says that might is right and bullies the little dogs. But I don’t think she means that might qua might is right, but that confidence of superiority is right, and by superiority she means spiritual superiority. She said to Belgium, “We enlightened thinkers see that it is necessary to the world that all opposition to Deutsche Kultur should be crushed. As citizens of the world you must assist us in our object and assert those higher ideas of world citizenship which are not bound by treaties. But if you oppose us, we have only one alternative.” That, at least, is what the best of them would have said; only the diplomats put it rather more brusquely, She was going on a missionary voyage with all the zest of Faust—

Er wandle so den Erdentag entlang;
Wenn Geister spuken, geh’ er seinen Gang;
Im Weiterschreiten find’ er Qual und Glück,
Er, unbefriedigt jeden Augenblick![4]

—and missionaries know no law....

So it seems to me that Germany’s only fault (and I think you often commented on it in those you met) is a lack of real insight and sympathy with those who differ from her. We are not fighting a bully, but a bigot. They are a young nation and don’t yet see that what they consider is being done for the good of the world may be really being done for self-gratification—like X. who, under pretence of informing the form, dropped into the habit of parading his own knowledge. X. incidentally did the form a service by creating great amusement for it, and so is Germany incidentally doing the world a service (though not in the way it meant) by giving them something to live and die for, which no country but Germany had before. If the bigot conquers he will learn in time his mistaken methods (for it is only of the methods and not of the goal of Germany that one can disapprove)—just as the early Christian bigots conquered by bigotry and grew larger in sympathy and tolerance after conquest. I regard the war as one between sisters, between Martha and Mary, the efficient and intolerant against the casual and sympathetic. Each side has a virtue for which it is fighting, and each that virtue’s supplementary vice. And I hope that whatever the material result of the conflict, it will purge these two virtues of their vices, and efficiency and tolerance will no longer be incompatible.

But I think that tolerance is the larger virtue of the two, and efficiency must be her servant. So I am quite glad to fight against this rebellious servant. In fact I look at it this way. Suppose my platoon were the world. Then my platoon sergeant would represent efficiency and I would represent tolerance. And I always take the sternest measures to keep my platoon sergeant in check! I fully appreciate the wisdom of the War Office when they put inefficient officers to rule sergeants. Adsit omen.