so fantastic in its inhumanity, so raw in its aggressiveness, that it simply could not be reconciled with what one knew of this friendly, home-loving people, with their simple social life, their flourishing industries, their love for good music, good plays and good living. And now we begin to wonder whether we ought not to have known better. In its imaginative literature and in its plastic arts, a nation expresses most unconsciously and therefore most truly its general conceptions of life. What should these have told us about Germany? What have been the achievements of the Kultur' on which Germans pride themselves so highly?

In Kultur,' be it understood, I do not intend to include the applications of scientific discovery. A people might be essentially barbarians, and yet be equipped with every device for the attainment of physical comfort and convenience which the mastery of material forces can put into their hands. Again, a people can be highly cultured, and yet, as we see in many parts of India and until recently in Japan, remain almost entirely strangers to the scientific developments which have been so great a factor in the European type of civilisation for the past hundred years. The Germans are not so cultured a people as the Japanese, perhaps on the whole no nation ever has been; but in the application of science, intelligence and method to industry, commerce and social organisation, it is idle to deny that they lead the world. But these things are not in themselves culture. Culture is a sense of the relations, the proportions, the deeper and more permanent values of things; and that Germans, in the intense cultivation of science and method, have missed a great deal that true culture would have valued, is plain to everyone outside Germany, and indeed to many Germans also. One of these things is freedom. Every Englishman who has lived in Germany for any length of time feels a vague sense of uneasiness in his surroundings. He finds everything foreseen and arranged to a degree which produces in a people accustomed to shape life for themselves a reaction, which according to one's temperament may be humorous or indignant, or both. One cannot take a walk in the woods without being led by ingeniously contrived paths to a view-point with its little fenced platform, or to an

ness.

artificial pond presided over by an appropriate piece of sculpture. In a railway station one is carefully herded through appointed antechambers into a carriage which, it must be confessed, is a model of comfort and convenience, incomparably superior to anything which one will find in wealthy England. If one walks across a bridge, although there may be hardly another soul on it at the time, the injunction Rechts Gehen' forbids one to take which side one likes. The words 'Nach Vorschrift' confront one at every turn, in all the ways whether of business or of pleasure, and they are meant to be obeyed. At last the Englishman begins to understand that he is in presence of a system-ridden people, and he discovers, if he reflects at all on the subject, that this devotion to the idea of system is the source at once of Germany's immense strength and of her fatal weakThis national trait was noted long ago by Tolstoi, who wrote of one of the characters in his 'War and Peace': 'Pfuhl was evidently one of those men of one idea who would go to the stake on the assurance they derive from their faith in the infallibility of some principle. Such natures are found among the Germans, who alone are capable of such entire confidence in an abstract idea.' It is really a kind of Vaticanism in the sphere of secular life, and it works there to just the same effect. It is capable of making the kindliest people-and I venture to affirm that the Germans are naturally most kindly-inhumanly cruel, of making an honest people faithless and treacherous, and of rousing in all free peoples an instinctive horror of a sway which on the surface promises, if only you will submit to it, to make everything smooth and easy. Germans themselves did not accept it without a resistance which has never been wholly overcome.

The comparison with Vaticanism is curiously close and very instructive. Just as a Catholic, who may be one of the most estimable and upright of men, feels bound to defend the principle of coercion in matters of religious opinion-that is to say, a war upon the human conscience-because the Church has definitely committed itself to that principle, so we find German Professors, like Eucken, who are reckoned among the chief ethical teachers of the day, defending the flagrant iniquity of

the invasion of Belgium-a deed which ought to have revolted the conscience of every man in whom conscience had not been paralysed by the dogma of Prussian infallibility. But Eucken, like every other German Professor, is a State servant, and is bound more or less to the service of the official machine.

Let us see what goes on in the sphere of free creative literature. Here again we shall find our analogy still holding good. Nothing is more striking about the great literature of Catholicism-while it still produced a great literature-than the fact that it is nearly all a literature of revolt against ecclesiasticism. There is no trait which Dante-who was for a time on the Index-Boccaccio, the author of 'Piers Plowman,' Chaucer, Erasmus, Rabelais, have so much in common as this. It is hard to think of a really illustrious name in which the tendency is not distinctly to be observed. And similarly in Germany, with the rise of the hegemony of Prussia, which made the Germans the system-ridden people they now are, one may note the growing dominance of this note of revoltthe effort of literature, striking about it, often recklessly enough, to shape for itself a space in which it can breathe more freely. As I have remarked in an earlier study of this subject, it was the German poets quite as much as Bismarck who brought the German Reich into being.* But a survey of German literature since 1870 shows this class, in the main, to be profoundly discontented with its creation, and disposed to look on it much as Frankenstein did on the monster which made its creator's life a burden. Naturally, the war, with its terrible and imminent possibilities, has silenced for the time being all these voices of revolt, or has turned them, like Hauptmann's, into the chorus of 'Deutschland über Alles.' But nothing which has appeared in English papers and pamphlets for the past few months on the subject of the German Empire and its leading figures could exceed the severity, the drastic satire, of some of the attacks on German chauvinism and militarism which have come in recent years from strictly German sources.

*

A slight but amusing instance may be mentioned. We have all lately been laughing over Mr E. V. Lucas's

*The Quarterly Review,' July 1914.

capital adaptation of that children's classic, 'Struwelpeter,' to the history of the war. We have also read the remarkable Hymn of Hate' against England published in a recent number of the Munich illustrated paper, Jugend.' I have before me a copy of this paper for October 21, 1913, in which Mr Lucas's idea has been anticipated. There is a 'Struwelpeter' page representing the Crown Prince as Fidgety Phil' bringing down the German dinnertable with its contents, while the Kaiser and his Chancellor look on in helpless dismay. Another Munich paper, the well-known 'Simplicissimus,' which has been made by the genius of Olaf Gulbranson and his colleagues the ablest journal of social and political satire in the world, has been prosecuted again and again, and forbidden entrance into Prussia, on account of its incessant and unsparing attacks on precisely those characteristics of modern German policy against which we consider our. selves to be doing battle at the present moment with other weapons. To the literary editor of this journal I once ventured to hint that the scathing destructiveness of its criticisms of imperial Germany might usefully be modified by something not so wholly negative, some influence that might build towards a better ideal as well as destroying the false ones. 'We are not in sight of that yet,' he replied. There is still too much to pull down (herunterreissen) before we can begin to build.'

Of the more serious side of modern German literature, one must regret that so little has yet been made accessible to English readers. The special interest attaching just now to writers like Nietzsche, Treitschke and Bernhardi has so riveted attention on them that we are disposed to think that Germany produces nothing else. This is a great mistake. Apart from Carl Hauptmann, whose dramas are now appearing in an admirable English translation and are documents of great value for the social history of Germany, and leaving aside also writers of wide celebrity like Sudermann, Clara Viebig and Ricarda Huch, there are many contemporary German authors whose work is well worth knowing and who stand as far aloof from Prussian materialism and mechanical organisation as any English, French or Russian writers could possibly do. Books of which one never hears in

England, such as 'Der Erzketzer' by Wolzogen, or 'Es war ein Bischof' by Adam Müller-Guttenbrunn (one of an interesting group of Austrian writers), or Otto Reuling's 'Quellen im Sande,' or 'Der Thor,' an earlier and much better work by the now famous author of 'Der Tunnel,' are examples among many of a school of fiction which is treating modern life and its problems with courage, insight and sincerity, as well as with a mastery of style which is comparatively new in German prose.

There is, however, a quality which is wanting in a good deal, though by no means in all, of this literature. Delicacy is perhaps the best word to describe this missing element. The modern German writer has learned much, but he has not quite mastered the supreme lesson of the economy of force. He wishes to imponieren. Phrases and descriptions are deliberately used for their power to stun and shock. Thus writers so unlike each other as Carl Hauptmann and Arthur Schnitzler-both of them masters of language for whom no nuance is out of reach-sometimes express themselves with a crudity worthy of Swift or of Rabelais. But Swift was crude, like Hogarth, because that was his type of humour; he delighted in the racy vocabulary, the boisterous abandon of gutter badinage. With the German writers brutality is not sought for its own sake; it is merely an inverted form of finesse, and it strikes one on that account as being all the more disagreeable.

In the plastic arts the same trait is to be observed, and here indeed it is much more emphasised than in literature. Some thirty years ago, when I first made acquaintance with German sculpture and painting, those arts, taking the general run of what was shown at exhibitions, bought by the public, praised by the critics, were chiefly notable for a quality best exemplified perhaps by Schilling's colossal statue of Germania on the Niederwald. This kind of art was both academic and sentimental; it was stupendously complacent and selfsatisfied. It was not heroic, but it was bulky; it was not tender, but it was soft; one felt that, like wax before a flame, it would collapse into an amorphous mass in presence of any genuine artistic passion, any keen perception of life. And so indeed it has collapsed, but the