Germany and the Germans from an American Point of View

by Price Collier

I am a craftsman in letters myself, in a small way, but I am no believer that books are the only key to life, or the only way to find a solution for its riddles and problems. Life is language, and books only the dictionaries; men are the text, books only the commentaries. Books are only good as a filter for actual experiences. A man must have a rich and varied experience of men and women before he can use books to advantage. Life is varied, men and women many, while the individual life is short; wise men read books, therefore, to enrich their experience, not merely as the pedant does, to garner facts. “J’étudie les livres en attendant que J’étudie les hommes,” writes Voltaire. “Books are good enough in their own way, but they are a mighty bloodless substitute for life,” writes Stevenson.

Montgolfier sees a woman’s skirt drying and notices that the hot air fills it and lifts it, and this gives him the idea for a balloon.

Denis Papin sees the cover lifted from a pot by the steam, and there follow the myriad inventions in which steam is the driving power.

Newton, dozing under an apple-tree, is hit on the head by a falling apple, and there follows the law of gravitation.

Franklin flies a kite, and a shock of electricity starts him upon the road to his discoveries.

Archimedes in his bath notices that his body seems to grow lighter, and there follows the great law which bears his name.

These are the foundation-stones upon which the whole house of science is built, and no one of them was dug out of a book. Charlemagne could not read, and Napoleon, when he left school for Paris, carried the recommendation from his master that he might possibly become a fair officer of marines, but nothing more! A capital example of the ability of the man of books to measure the abilities of the man of the world.

Reading and writing are modern accomplishments, and we grossly exaggerate their importance as man-makers. That, it has always been my contention, is the fatal fallacy of modern education, and you may see it carried to its extreme in Germany, for men who have not lived broadly are merely hampered by books. It is as though one studied a primer with an etymological dictionary at his side. Germans are renowned writers of commentaries, but you cannot deal with men and with life by the aid of commentaries. Exegesis solves no international quarrels, and the mastery of men is not gained with dictionaries and grammars.

We are all prone to forget the end in the means, for the end is far away and the means right under our noses. We all recognize, when we are pulled up short and made to think, that, after all, the arts and letters, religion and philosophy and statecraft, are for one ultimate purpose, which is to develop the complete man. Everything must be measured by its man-making power. Ideas that do not grow men are sterile seed. Men who do not move other men to action and to growth are not to be excused because they stir men to the merely pleasant tickling of thinking lazily and feeling softly. Thus Lincoln was a greater man than Emerson; Bismarck a greater than Lessing; Cromwell a greater than Bunyan; Napoleon a greater than Corneille and Racine; Pericles greater than Plato; and Caesar greater than Virgil.

The man who only makes maps for the mind is only half a man, until his thinking, his influence, his dreams and enthusiasms take on the potency of a man and come into action. Even if men of action do evil, as some of those I mention have done, they have translated theories into palpable things that permit men to judge whether they be good or bad; and the really great artists, thinkers, and saints are as fertile as though they were female, and gave birth, to living things. Their thinking is a form of action. The real test of successful organization is the thoroughness of the thinking behind it; on the other hand, the only test of thinking is the success of the thought in actual execution, and the Germans often take this too much for granted. We really know and hold as an inalienable intellectual possession only what we have gained by our own effort, and with a certain degree of actual exertion. People who have never worked out their own salvation always join, at last, that large class in the body politic who don’t know what they want, and who will never be happy till they get it.