"I think your characterization is rather crude," Sylvia said.
"It is crude. But there is no bygone civilization with which Germanic Kultur can be compared. So as with any novelty one depends upon a sneer to hide one's own ignorance."
"The Italians interest me more," Sylvia said.
"The Italians seem to me rather to resemble the English, and naturally, because they are the most direct heirs of Rome. I'm bound to say that I don't believe in an imperial future for them now. It's surely impossible to revive Rome. They still preserve an immense capacity for political craft, but it is an egotism that lacks the sublime unconsciousness of English egotism. The Italians have never recovered from Il Principe of Machiavelli. It's an eclectic statecraft; like their painting from Raphael onward, it's too soigné. Moreover, Italy suffers from the perpetual sacrifice of the southern Italian to the northern. The real Italians belong to the south, and for me the risorgimento has always been a phenix rising from the ashes of the south; the bird is most efficient, but I distrust its aquiline appearance. One of the most remarkable surprises of this war has been the superior fighting quality—the more quickly beating heart—of the Neapolitans and Sicilians. I found the same surprising quality in the Greeks during the last Balkan war. To me, who regard the Mediterranean as still the civilized sea of the world, the triumph of Naples has been a delight."
"And the Russians?" Sylvia went on.
"Ah, the future of Russia is as much an unknown quantity as the future of womanhood. Personally I am convinced that the next great civilization will be Slavonic, and my chief grudge against mortality is that I must die long before it even begins to draw near, for it is still as far away as Johannine Christianity will be from the Petrine Christianity to which we have been too long devoted. But when it does come, I am sure that it will easily surpass all previous civilizations, because I believe it will resolve the eternal dualism in humanity that hitherto we have expressed roughly by Empire and Papacy or by Church and State. I envisage Russia as containing the civilization of the soul, though God knows through what agony of blood and tears it may have to pass before it can express what it contains. In Russia there still exists a genuine worship of the Czar as a superior being, and a nation that respects the divinity about a king is still as deep in the mire of fetichism as the most debased Melanesians. We worship kings in England, I admit, but only snobbishly; we significantly call the pound a sovereign. Not even our most exalted snobs dream of paying divine honors to kingship; we are too much heirs of Imperial Rome for that. I always attribute Magna Charta to an inherited consciousness of Cæsarian excesses."
"And now you've only Austria left," said Sylvia.
"Austria," Hazlewood exclaimed. "A battered cocotte who sustains herself by devoting to pietism the settlements of her numerous lovers—a cocotte with a love of finery, a profound cynicism, and an acquired deportment. Austria! rouged and raddled, plumped and corseted, a suitable mistress for that licentious but still tragic old buffoon who rules her."
"What a wonderful sermon on so slight a text as a friend's asking a Serbian waiter for salt," Sylvia said.
"Ah, you led me away from the main thread by asking me direct questions. I meant to confine myself to England."