And to Sir Charles Bunbury:
I confess to you that were I a German I should feel it my duty to my country to send my last son, my last shilling, and after all my own self, to the war, to get that done which must be done, done so that it will never need doing again. I trust that I should be able to put vengeance out of my heart, to forget all that Germany has suffered for two hundred years past from that vain, greedy, restless nation, all even which she suffered, women as well as men, in the late French war.
The attraction of Germany is not only paramount in literature, in Walter Scott and Mill and Matthew Arnold; the superiority of German blood and constitution was an article of faith of the Victorians. The sins of Prussia were forgiven with amazing alacrity. The base attacks on Austria and Denmark evoked no moral indignation. German influence on English life was not only welcomed; historians went so far as to proclaim the identity of
England and Germany. Thus Freeman, in a lecture in 1872, stated that “what is Teutonic in us is not merely one element among others, but that it is the very life and essence of our national being....” Houston Chamberlain, in his reverent unravelling of the greatness of the Germanic peoples, is merely carrying on the tradition of the Victorian age. In the application of theories he is a disciple of Gobineau, a Frenchman, who after a profound study of the inequality of the human race became convinced of the superiority and high destiny of Germany. Gobineau and Chamberlain have told the Germans that they are mighty and unconquerable, and the Germans have listened with undisguised pleasure.
Gobineau may be set aside as a professor of a fixed idea. There are other Frenchmen who have paid glowing tribute to Germany. Taine excelled in praise of her intellectual vigour and productivity. Victor Hugo expressed his love and admiration for her people, and confessed to an almost filial feeling for the noble and holy fatherland of thinkers. If he had not been French he would have liked to have been German. Ernest Renan studied Germany, and found her like a temple—so
pure, so moral, so touching in her beauty. This reminds us of the many who during the present war, though ostensibly enemies of Germany, spend half their time in proclaiming her perfection and the necessity for immediate imitation of all her ways. Madame de Staël and Michelet expressed high regard for German character and institutions. There are degrees and qualities of attraction and absorption, varying from the amorous surrender with which Lafcadio Hearn took on Japanese form to the bootlicking flattery which Sven Hedin heaps on the Germans. (It is quite futile to seek for an explanation of Hedin's conduct in his Jewish-Prussian descent. He would lackey anywhere. Strindberg dealt faithfully with Hedin's pretensions. Strindberg, alas! is dead, but his exposure of Hedin has been strangely justified.)
Heine is an example of the curious and insistent fascination with which the mind may be drawn to one nationality whilst it is repelled by another. His judgment on England is painful in the extreme:
“It is eight years since I went to London,” he writes in the Memoirs, “to make the acquaintance of the language and the people. The
devil take the people and their language! They take a dozen words of one syllable into their mouth, chew them, gnaw them, spit them out again, and they call that talking. Fortunately they are by nature rather silent, and although they look at us with gaping mouths, yet they spare us long conversations.”
Can anything be more sweeping? Can anything be more untrue? “Fortunately they are by nature rather silent”—imagine the reversed verdict had Heine attended a general election campaign! The unattractiveness of England is softened by the women. “If I can leave England alive, it will not be the fault of the women; they do their best.” This is praise indeed, when placed side by side with his dismissal of the women of Hamburg. They are plump, we are told, “but the little god Cupid is to blame, who often sets the sharpest of love's darts to his bow, but from naughtiness or clumsiness shoots too low, and hits the women of Hamburg not in the heart but in the stomach.”