We walked on for some time without saying a word. The idea never occurred to him that these wholesale judgments could possibly shock or pain me, for he was one of those happy men, common in Germany, endowed with a veritable talent for frankness. He continued his terrible strides, and after a while he exclaimed gaily: “Anyhow, you don’t bring enough children into the world to be socialists. Our ideas can germinate only in dense crowds, where there is hardly standing room, where people lack air and space, breed without restriction, and have nothing to lose! Your Einzweikindersystem[4] condemns you to be nothing but bourgeois, and poor bourgeois at that!”
I made no answer. What answer was possible? He knew my ideas. He had been one of those who introduced my Ecoutes into Germany. Besides, it gave him so much pleasure to believe in our decadence, to be convinced that Germany, as far as democracy was concerned, was henceforward without peer in the world.
Indeed it is true, all these “young men of the left” were ardent believers in Germany’s mission. But to justify this mission they did not, like the cynical pangermanists, appeal to the Faustrecht, the right of the stronger; they did not speak of bloody conquests. Perhaps they thought of them, but such brutalities (which the German mind, even when finely tempered, accepts with little reluctance) remained hidden in the background, within the domain of possibilities, among the lesser evils and contingencies—profane delights which a platonic lover hardly dares to envisage even in his secret dreams. Idealists of the Michelet type, quaffing the austere wines of Kant and Fichte (recently unsealed and served round at the universities by the new masters), they made an exclusive claim to the moral heritage of ’89, of which we, they said, had ceased to be the heirs. Were not they the youthful neophytes of the democratic faith which the degenerate French had lost? Had they not passionately espoused the modern world, whose uncertain dawn had first ventured to shine on Paris, that slight and foolish city, but whose full noon was now to illumine the strong and loyal (treu und fest) town of Berlin, the guardian of the Rhine? Yes, finis Galliæ! It was theirs to lead the great caravan of the universe towards the new justice. It was their part, the part of these good Teutons, with their virgin spirit and their new blood, to direct in future the affairs of the human race. Gesta Dei per Germanos!
One of these young men was M. Wichert, director of the Mannheim museum. He was the favourite disciple of M. Lichtwark of Hamburg, and had also been a pupil of the late celebrated von Tschudi, grand master of the artistic life of Germany. Von Tschudi, it may be mentioned in passing, of course had a quarrel with William II, just like Bismarck, just like Haeseler, and Bülow, just like all the clever men in the empire who were unfortunate enough to possess a vigorous individuality. M. Wichert was a friend of our consul, M. Deschars,[5] who arranged a meeting between us.
Son of a poor officer, and orphaned while quite young, M. Wichert went through his course of studies as best he could. His life is a romance. Loneliness; poverty; chance encounter with a Mæcenas; sudden abandonment of science for art; renewed poverty; unexpected patronage by the great pontiffs of art, Tschudi and Lichtwark; appointment as sub-director of the picture gallery of Munich; appearance upon the scene of the Magian kings, a delegation of aldermen from the town of Mannheim, modernist before all, offering him carte blanche for the creation of a museum; for a start the young Messiah purchases in Paris Manet’s best work, “The Execution of Maximilian,” Daumier’s portrait of Michelet, and the “Man with the Pipe,” the most famous of Cézanne’s pictures; all Mannheim is terrified at its commissioner’s prodigality; he defends himself before the entire town council, silencing some by his boldness, winning over others by his disinterested violence, by the aspect of his threadbare coat, and the thinness of his slight but ardent figure; thus he arouses that municipal patriotism which is so keen in the fatherland, convincing the councillors that he will do nothing less than make of Mannheim the leading art centre of Germany, and at the point of the bayonet he wrests from them a vote of confidence; shortly afterwards, a wealthy Jew entrusts him with five million marks for the establishment of a museum; he founds an art school to enlighten the Mannheim bourgeoisie, which is upstart, elementary, but open-minded and full of goodwill; his lectures become fashionable in the town; he provides similar instruction for the common people; acting upon suggestions made by M. Osthaus, a rich bourgeois of Hagen, he establishes travelling exhibitions. In a word, Tschudi being dead and Lichtwark dying, M. Wichert allowed his own way at Mannheim, at twenty-five years of age figures in the role of co-ordinator, protector, inspirer of the artistic life of Germany. He has made up his mind to transform Mannheim—the Hanseatic city of traders and manufacturers, the mushroom town flaming red with its abundance of new bricks, an American city suddenly appearing in Europe—into a Jerusalem of the new art. He desires that the streets shall become beautiful, that their names shall have a poetic ring, that the squares shall be as harmonious as a house by Van de Velde or Niemeyer. He secures an order for the demolition of the theatre built ten years earlier in the “Jugend” style, and already an object of ridicule; a competition is opened for the design of the building which is to replace it. The whole town becomes crazy about art. A bourgeois is regarded as dishonoured if he has not given 40,000 marks to the museum to buy a Renoir or some Gauguins. If this apostolate continues, the people will checkmate the very Athenians.
M. Wichert talks to me in the following strain: “In the history of art nothing can rival the creative energy displayed by France. Romanesque, gothic, all the gothics, renaissance, baroque, rococo (the terms have no invidious meaning in Germany), directoire, empire—all these are French. Throughout ten centuries you continued to bring forth styles which were so elegant and so convenient, whose taste was so confident, that they instantly captured the world.
“But have you suddenly become sterile? Is France, pre-eminently the nation of innovators, no longer competent to do anything but to copy its own past? Like your new sociologists, your furniture makers supply Louis XVI, Louis XIV, empire; your builders furnish Louis XVI, renaissance, and again Louis XVI. Have you really ceased to produce architects since Gabriel and Louis, cabinet-makers since Boule, enchasers since Gouthière? Or is it that you no longer care for anything but the old, like those respectable and fatigued ladies who cannot endure a new face, and ask only to be allowed to die in peace, surrounded by the things of their youth? However this may be, we often tell one another that France no longer possesses enough energy to survive the titanic act of giving birth to the modern world, and that she is now nothing more than a beautiful corpse, embalmed and laid to rest in a splendid museum.
“Here in Germany, believe me, we worship your artistic tradition. For centuries we could find nothing better to do than attempt to assimilate it. You have visited Cassel, Pilnitz, Carlsruhe, Potsdam; I cannot doubt that you felt at home in these royal palaces, which are nothing but replicas of Versailles.
“But I sometimes incline to think that the creative force which formerly existed in France has emigrated to Germany. It is true that during the nineteenth century there occurred in France a splendid blossoming of sculptors and painters: Delacroix, Rude, Carpeaux, the landscape painters of Barbizon, the admirable school of Manet, and, coming down to to-day, Rodin, Degas, Maillol, Jouve, Vallette, the expressionists. Yes, unquestionably, even if your architecture (the master art which controls and co-ordinates all the rest) is decadent, your sculpture and your painting remain unrivalled.