Great, therefore, as I see it is the responsibility of all who to-day throw their careless offerings on the altars of hatred, so that the flames of discord flare up anew. The men and women who talk and act thus must try to realise that the world is reaching its limit of endurance, and the situation calls not for any post-war fomenting of the terrible legacy of strife, but for a truce of God between victors and vanquished. No prejudices are harder to shift than those which ignorance has exalted into moral principles of the first order. Thought is apt to be an unpleasant and disturbing process; the clichés of hatred are easy to use—why alter them when they round off a sentence so well? But unless some movement can develop between nations, unless the forces of destruction can be checked, then civilisation in the form we know it would appear to be doomed.
Germany has still a whole volume of bitter truth to learn as to the part she has played in the world catastrophe provoked by her rulers. Until she recognises and admits the evil done she cannot regain her place in the fellowship of nations. But after the great bartering of ideals represented by the Treaty of Versailles, the Allies are hardly in a position to preach sermons to her day in and day out on moral failures. The practical fact which confronts us all is that the world is in ruin, and that where the politicians have failed hopelessly the decent people of all nations have to get together and make it habitable again. To dismiss the German nation as a gang of criminals unfit for human intercourse may be a magnificent gesture on the part of the thoughtless. But it is not business. There are good Germans and bad Germans, Germans animated by a quite detestable spirit, others who are conscientious and high-minded. The wholesale indictment of a nation is as absurd as the wholesale indictment of a class. Human nature falls into types of character far more than into social and racial divisions. In the ultimate issue society is divided into two sets of people: those who behave decently and those who do not. People of the first type have a common kinship whatever their race or colour, and the need for asserting that kinship was never more urgent than at present.
If the world is to survive, tolerable social, economic, and political relations must be resumed sooner or later between enemy countries. It is of the first importance that the better elements in Germany should be encouraged and strengthened, so that through their influence a new spirit should animate the general German outlook on life. When no effort is made to discriminate, when good and bad are branded alike in one sweeping condemnation, hope of improvement vanishes. A nation to whom all place for repentance is denied loses heart and ceases to try. Reasonable men cannot make their voices heard under such conditions. Anger and bitterness at what is considered unfair treatment surge upwards again, and from them the desire for revenge is born anew. It is foolish to kick a man repeatedly in the face and then to complain that he does not behave like a gentleman. If the spirit of hatred is to rule in Europe we are heading straight for another war. This eventuality should, I think, be recognised clearly by the hotheads of all nations.
Germany cannot continue indefinitely to fulfil the function of the whipping-boy of Europe. The Junkers and soldiers who made the war, and were responsible for all that was cruel and brutal in its conduct, have disappeared. Owing to gross mismanagement in connection with the war criminals, many Germans guilty of specific acts of cruelty who should have been dealt with severely have slipped through the net. But where statesmanship has blundered inexcusably, it is unjust to visit vicariously on a whole community the sins of a class or of individuals. To do so is to destroy any chance of the growth of a better spirit among the German people as a whole. I recall the words of farewell addressed to me by a saleswoman in a Cologne shop to whom I was saying good-bye: “When you go back to England, tell your countrymen that we are not such dreadful people as they think, and ask them also to remember that we too have our pride and our self-respect.”
Many Germans are as much blinded by hatred as to our actions and motives as we are about theirs. We recognise with angry exasperation the measure of their misconceptions about ourselves. Is it not possible that misconceptions may exist on our side as to the character and attitude of, anyway, some Germans? We are sore, and sad, and bitter. So are countless Germans who are convinced that their lives have been ruined by our jealousy and ambition. Is it humanly possible to carry on the business of life in a nightmare world, where millions of human beings view each other through glasses so distorted? The moral deadlock at the moment is complete. It can only be solved by the spread of a new spirit of truth and charity. That cannot arise till reasonable men and women of all nations, realising the perils which confront us one and all, try and form unbiassed judgments, not only of each other’s actions, but what is perhaps even more important, of each other’s motives and principles. In all this there is no question of slurring over evil where evil exists, or condoning wrong where wrong has been done. It is a question of seeing these things in their true scale and right proportion. Righteous anger may rouse a sense of repentance where hatred only hardens and embitters. The wrath of man has had its full play through years of strife and horror. Judged as a constructive force, its fruits up to the present have been meagre. Is it possible that, after all, Paul of Tarsus was right, and that the fruits of the spirit, joy, peace, and righteousness, do not lie along this particular path? In so far as the spirit of hatred is cultivated and encouraged, it perpetuates all that is worst in war, without any of the redeeming qualities of heroism and self-sacrifice which make war tolerable. Hatred breeds hatred, strife further strife, violence yet more violence. From this vicious circle, so long as we allow ourselves to turn in it, there is no escape. Faith, hope, and charity alone can break the wheel of torment in which at present we revolve, and bring about the necessary moral and spiritual détente without which the world must surely perish.
Peace is not a question of documents and treaties. The world is still in a condition of bitter strife, because the spiritual values which make peace in the real sense possible are at present wholly lacking in the relations of the respective nations. I am driven to the conclusion that in this, as in other respects, the instinct of the great mass of the people throughout Europe is sounder and better than that of their rulers. Whatever the schemes and intrigues of a tortuous diplomacy, it is already clear that the working-classes are determined not to be made pawns in any fresh war of aggression. The German working-man is saturated with the misery of war. He will have no more of it unless some policy of oppression, suicidal in its character, re-creates the temper and spirit of the post-Jena period. Among my memories of Germany I dwell on none with more hope than an incident which befell us one spring evening in the Eifel. We were spending Sunday at Nideggen, a village perched high on its red volcanic cliffs above the valley of a delectable trout stream. We stopped in the course of our walk to admire a cottage garden where peas and beans were growing with mathematical diligence and regularity. Care had obviously been lavished on every plant and flower of the little plot, which lay on a sunny slope facing south. The owner who was hard at work among the peas, seeing our interest, asked if we would like to go over his garden. We accepted the invitation willingly, and he conducted us with pride from one end to the other of his tiny kingdom. He was an admirable type of peasant, a tall grave man with honest eyes and courteous manners. He combined some market-gardening with his business of stone-mason. The conversation drifted as usual to the war. He had served in a pioneer corps but had come through, “Gott sei dank,” unscathed. Of war or the possible recurrence of war he spoke with that intense horror which marks all the German working-classes. Never must such a thing happen again, he said; never must there be another war. My mind fled across the seas to a corner of Kent where I was well assured on this fine spring evening, another friend of mine, one William Catt, a son of the soil, just as honest and simple, just as devoted to his home and family, was also attending to peas and runner beans. William Catt too had served in the war. What crazy system could send those two good men with rifles in their hands to shoot each other? The Nideggen peasant had reflected to some purpose on “Earth’s return for whole centuries of folly, noise, and sin.” Spade in hand he looked across the fair landscape at our feet, where the river lay like a silver streak winding among woods and meadows. Then he turned to me and said very seriously, “For a thousand years men have been mad; now we must all learn to be more reasonable.”
Would that the diplomatists of all countries could take to heart words so true and so wise! Here was the spirit which alone can create and sustain the League of Nations. While the political wire-pullers of Europe seek to make of the League the unhappy pushball of their own intrigues, this German working-man had the root of the matter in him. May his vision of a world in which men are learning to be “reasonable” wax from dim hope into full and perfect realisation.
CHAPTER XV
THE GERMAN VIEW OF ENGLAND
Personally I am under considerable obligations to August Lomberg, Rektor in Elberfeld. His Präparationen zu deutschen Gedichten for the purposes of instruction in schools has been a lantern to my way and a light unto my path on the somewhat rugged slopes of the German Parnassus. August Lomberg’s is the hand which has stayed my often stumbling feet when I first aspired to Goethe and Schiller, deities sitting enthroned aloft and remote. Guides to poetry are irritating books in one’s own language. What a poet has to say, and what he means, are strictly private matters between the reader and himself. The views of a third person may even be regarded as an intrusion, not to say an impertinence. But when you are struggling with the verbal intricacies of a new tongue, guides to knowledge assume a very different light. So, I repeat, I am under many obligations to August Lomberg, Rektor in Elberfeld. As so often happens with German authors, he has taught me more incidentally than the surface content of his works. The Rektor has clearly a complete and painstaking acquaintance with the whole range of German literature. But his observations concerning the poets were, to me at least, of less value than the revelation of his own type of mind and general outlook on life.
August Lomberg is a garrulous writer. His explanations are largely historical as well as literary. Every line breathes a narrow and aggressive patriotism of the type which has made the name of Germany detested. The great poets of the Liberation period have sung both of freedom and oppression on a note which rings clear and true to any lover of liberty. The Elberfeld Rektor, commenting on this verse long before 1914, can only do so in terms of abuse of France. To him a poet is really important, not for some immortal gift to the sum-total of the world’s truth and beauty, but for the degree to which he may have added new stops to the full-sounding organ swelling the note of German excellence. The ironical anti-patriotic strain in Heine fills the Rektor with undisguised horror. So great is his reprobation of Heine as a world citizen, that he can with difficulty begin to do justice to him as a poet. And though like Wordsworth’s Nun he is breathless with adoration before the genius of Goethe, I more than suspect that at heart Goethe’s indifference to patriotic questions is a sore trial to him.