There is, of course, a less indulgent Germanism, which has on its side the authority of Fichte and Hegel, the enthusiasm of the pan-Germans and that lust for boundless ascendancy which enterprise and war naturally foster in anybody who has carried them on passionately and successfully. According to this stricter view, the whole world is to be subjugated and purified by the German nation, which alone inherits the undefiled language and religion of Eden, and must assign to the remaining creole races, descended from savages and ultimately perhaps from monkeys or devils, such tasks as they are capable of. The masters, being by nature generous and kind, will allow their slaves, after their work is done, to bask in despicable happiness, since happiness is all that slaves are capable of living for; but they will be proudly commanded by a race of hard, righteous, unhappy, heroic German experts, with blue eyes fixed on the eternal ideal.
The admission that German Kultur is merely national, which might seem to promise peace and goodwill, may be turned in this way into a sinister claim to absolute dominion. The ancients and the church had supposed that all men, though endowed with talent and goodness in the most various degrees, had qualitatively the same nature. The same passions, the same arts, and the same salvation were proper to them all. The servant, in furthering the aims of his betters, served what his own soul potentially loved and was capable of appropriating; there could be religion and love in his subordination. Reciprocally the master could feel respect and affection for his servants, who were his wards and his god-children. The best things in classic life—religion, poetry, comradeship, moral sagacity—were shared by the humblest classes and expressed their genius. The temple, the church, the agora, the theatre, Socrates, and the saints were of the people.
German Kultur, on the contrary, boasts that it is not the expression of diffused human nature, but the product of a special and concentrated free will. It is therefore incommunicable, unrepresentative. It is not felt by any one else to realize his ideal, but seems foreign to him, forced and unamiable. Every nation loves its idiosyncrasies and, until it reflects, thinks its own balance of faculties, like its language, more natural than other people's. But the prophets of Germanism have turned this blameless love of home and its sanctities into a deliberate dogma that everything German has a divine superiority. This dogma they have foisted on a flattered and trustful nation, with the command to foist it on the rest of the world. The fatuity of this is nothing new, many nations and religions having shared it in their day, and we could afford to laugh at it, if by direct and indirect coercion it did not threaten to trespass upon our liberties.
What is universally acceptable in German Kultur is what it contains that is not German but human, what with praiseworthy docility it has borrowed from the ancients, from Christianity, from the less intentional culture of its modern neighbours. The Teutonic accent which these elements have acquired is often very engaging; it adds to them a Gothic charm for the lack of which mankind would be the poorer. But the German manner, in art, in philosophy, in government, is no better—in its broad appeal to human nature we may fairly say it is worse—than the classic manner which it hopes to supersede. It is avowedly a product of will, arbitrary, national, strained; it is not superior to what other nations possess or may create but only different, not advanced but eccentric. To study it and use it for a stimulus may be profitable in times and places of spiritual famine or political chaos, but to impose it as normal, not to say as supreme, would be a plain invasion of human liberty.
[42]
LIBERALISM AND CULTURE
Modern reformers, religious and political, have usually retained the classic theory of orthodoxy, namely, that there is one right or true system—democracy and free thought, for instance—which it is the reformer's duty to establish in the place of prevalent abuses. Certainly Luther and Calvin and the doctrinaires of the French revolution only meant to substitute one orthodoxy for another, and what they set forth they regarded as valid for all men and forever. Nevertheless they had a greater success in discrediting the received system than in establishing their own, and the general effect of their reforms was to introduce the modern conception of liberty, the liberty of liberalism.
This consists in limiting the prescriptions of the law to a few points, for the most part negative, leaving it to the initiative and conscience of individuals to order their life and conversation as they like, provided only they do not interfere with the same freedom in others. In practice liberal countries have never reached this ideal of peaceful anarchy, but have continued to enforce state education, monogamy, the vested rights of property, and sometimes military service. But within whatever limits, liberty is understood to lie in the individual being left alone, so that he may express his personal impulses as he pleases in word and action.
A philosopher can readily see that this liberal ideal implies a certain view about the relations of man in the universe. It implies that the ultimate environment, divine or natural, is either chaotic in itself or undiscoverable by human science, and that human nature, too, is either radically various or only determinable in a few essentials, round which individual variations play ad libitum. For this reason no normal religion, science, art, or way of happiness can be prescribed. These remain always open, even in their foundations, for each man to arrange for himself. The more things are essentially unsettled and optional, the more liberty of this sort there may safely be in the world and the deeper it may run.