“As imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name.”
This is what the purely subjective mind is ever doing, and when it is carried too far it is insanity. The individual no longer sees things as they are, but he sees others and himself in strange, horrible, or ludicrous shapes.
Barring Japan, I suppose Germany yields more easily to the temptation of the subjective malady of suicide than any other country. In Saxony, for example, the rate was lately 39.2 per 100,000 of the population, in England and Wales 7.5. During the five years ending with 1908 there were for every 100 suicides among males in the United States 136 in Germany, and for every 100 suicides of females 125 in Germany. In Vienna, and for racial purposes this is Germany, 1,558 persons killed themselves in 1912. Children committing suicide because they have failed in their examinations is not uncommon in Germany; in America and in England the teachers are more likely to succumb than the children. We do not commit suicide in America from any sense of shame at our intellectual shortcomings - what a decimating of the population there would be if we did! - it is more apt to be caused by ill health consequent upon a straining chase for dollars. In Prussia during the five years, 1902-1907, divorce increased from 17.7 to 20.8 per 100,000 inhabitants, and suicide from 20 to 30.7.
If the observer does not take this difference of temperament into account, he does not realize how new and strange it is to find Germany these days, making its first and strongest impression upon the outsider by its industrial progress. The more intelligent men in Germany are beginning to see the dangers to real progress in such feverish devotion to industry, and to recognize that the life of the population is absorbed too largely by science, finance, and commerce. To see so much of the intelligence of the nation exercising itself in material researches, to see such undue fervor in calculations of self- interest, does not leave an enlivening impression. Such an ideal of life is paltry in itself and involves grave dangers in the future. It is a long stride in the wrong direction since Hegel wrote of Germany as “the guardian of the sacred fire of intellect.”
Out of this temperament has grown the self-consciousness, the uneasy vanity, the “touchiness” which has made Germany of late years the despair of the diplomats all over the world. She has become a chameleon-like menace to peace everywhere in the world. What she wants, what will offend her dignity, when she will feel hurt, what amount of consideration will suffice, when she will change color to match a changed situation, and in what color she will choose to hide her plans or to make manifest her demands, no man knows. She will not see things as they are, but always as an exhalation from her own mind. As one of her own poets has written: “Deutschland ist Hamlet.”
At this present moment she does not see either England or America as they are, quite peaceably disposed toward her but she sees them, and persists in seeing them, as they would be were Germany in their place. She is forever looking into a mirror instead of through the open window. “The mailed fist,” “the rattling of the sabre,” “the friend in shining armor,” “querelle allemande,” are all phrases born in Germany in the last thirty years.
She even sees herself a little out of focus, and though I admit her precarious position in the heart of Europe, she exaggerates the necessity for her autocratic military government to meet the situation. That philosophical and literary radical Lord Morley, now wearing a coronet, in the land where logic is a foundling and compromise a darling, writes: “A weak government throws power to something which usurps the name of public opinion, and public opinion as expressed by the ventriloquists of the newspapers is at once more capricious and more vociferous than it ever was.” This, strange to say, is exactly the opinion of the German autocrats, who maintain that no democracy can be a strong military power. It remains for England, and perhaps later America, to prove her wrong.
The sovereign lady Germania, being of this temper and disposition, of this psychological make-up, let us look at her dealings with certain embarrassing problems in her own household. The over-stimulation of ill-regulated mental activity as the result of regimental education is one of the minor problems. Some fourteen million dollars worth of cheap and nasty literature is peddled by the agents of certain publishing houses, and sold all over Germany to those recently taught to read but not trained to think; and this, it is to be remembered, is still a land of low wages, of strict economies, and of small expenditures on books. For Germany that is an enormous sum and represents a very wide-spread evil. I recognize that it is not only in Germany, but in France, England, and America, that the ethically hysterical have assumed that modesty and health and common-sense are characteristics of the intellectually mediocre. That the neglect of all, and the breaking of some, of the Ten Commandments is essential to the creation of art or literature, or necessary to a courageous freedom of living, is a contention with which I agree less and less the more I know of art, literature, and life. But, as I have remarked elsewhere in this volume, the Strindbergs and Wildes and Gorkis are having their day in Germany just now, and beneath this again is this large distribution of the lawless and sooty literature, frankly intended as a debauch for the gutter-snipe and his consort. Even the coarse, and in no line squeamish, Rabelais wrote that, “Science sans conscience n’est que ruine de l’âme.”
There is but a puny barrier against this, for the statistical year-book of German cities gives the number of public libraries in forty-two cities as 179. Twenty-seven of these cities gave an annual support to 114 of these libraries of only $64,847! According to the figures of Herr Ernest Schultze, in 1907 the forty largest German cities, with a population of 11,380,000, had public libraries containing a sum total of 807,000 volumes. In the year 1906-1907, 5,437,000 volumes were taken out and 1,607,476 persons frequented the public reading-rooms, and in these forty-two cities $280,095 were contributed from private sources for such library purposes. In 1910 Germany had in some 400 cities, each of more than 10,000 inhabitants, about 650 public libraries and reading-rooms, with together about 3,250,000 volumes. Berlin has thirty public libraries with 231,300 volumes; the number of books taken out in 1910 was 1,655,000. Hamburg has one public library with 100,000 volumes, of which 1,364,000 were taken out. Breslau has 7 libraries and 4 reading-rooms, with 75,578 volumes. Leipzig has 7 libraries and 3 reading-rooms, with 42,100 volumes. Munich has 6 libraries and 26,671 volumes. Cologne has 7 libraries and 6 reading- rooms, with 24,898 volumes.
The smallest library is in the village community of Dudweiler, in the Rhine province, which contains 132 volumes for the 22,000 inhabitants.