CHESTERTON-THE APPETITE OF TYRANY - THE REFUSAL OF RECIPROCITY
The German Emperor has reproached this country with allying itself with
"barbaric and semi-oriental power." We have already considered in what
sense we use the word barbaric: it is in the sense of one who is hostile to
civilisation, not one who is insufficient in it. But when we pass from the
idea of the barbaric to the idea of the oriental, the case is even more
curious. There is nothing particularly Tartar in Russian affairs, except
the fact that Russia expelled the Tartars. The Eastern invader occupied
and crushed the country for many years; but that is equally true of Greece,
of Spain and even of Austria. If Russia has suffered from the East she has
suffered in order to resist it: and it is rather hard that the very miracle
of her escape should make a mystery about her origin. Jonah may or may not
have been three days inside a fish, but that does not make him a merman.
And in all the other cases of European nations who escaped the monstrous
captivity, we do admit the purity and continuity of the European type. We
consider the old Eastern rule as a wound, but not as a stain.
Copper-coloured men out of Africa overruled for centuries the religion and
patriotism of Spaniards. Yet I have never heard that Don Quixote was an
African fable on the lines of Uncle Remus. I have never heard that the
heavy black in the pictures of Velasquez was due to a negro ancestry. In
the case of Spain, which is close to us, we can recognise the resurrection
of a Christian and cultured nation after its age of bondage. But Russia is
rather remote; and those to whom nations are but names in newspapers can
really fancy, like Mr. Baring's friend, that all Russian churches are
"mosques." Yet the land of Turgenev is not a wilderness of fakirs; and even
the fanatical Russian is as proud of being different from the Mongol, as
the fanatical Spaniard was proud of being different from the Moor.
The town of Reading, as it exists, offers few opportunities for piracy on
the high seas: yet it was the camp of the pirates in Alfred's day. I should
think it hard to call the people of Berkshire half-Danish, merely because
they drove out the Danes. In short, some temporary submergence under the
savage flood was the fate of many of the most civilised states of
Christendom; and it is quite ridiculous to argue that Russia, which
wrestled hardest, must have recovered least. Everywhere, doubtless, the
East spread a sort of enamel over the conquered countries, but everywhere
the enamel cracked. Actual history, in fact, is exactly opposite to the
cheap proverb invented against the Muscovite. It is not true to say
"Scratch a Russian and you find a Tartar." In the darkest hour of the
barbaric dominion it was truer to say, "Scratch a Tartar and you find a
Russian." It was the civilisation that survived under all the barbarism.
This vital romance of Russia, this revolution against Asia, can be proved
in pure fact: not only from the almost superhuman activity of Russia during
the struggle, but also (which is much rarer as human history goes) by her
quite consistent conduct since. She is the only great nation which has
really expelled the Mongol from her country, and continued to protest
against the presence of the Mongol in her continent. Knowing what he had
been in Russia, she knew what he would be in Europe. In this she pursued a
logical line of thought which was, if anything, too unsympathetic with the
energies and religions of the East. Every other country, one may say, has
been an ally of the Turk; that is, of the Mongol and the Moslem. The French
played them as pieces against Austria; the English warmly supported them
under the Palmerston regime; even the young Italians sent troops to the
Crimea; and of Prussia and her Austrian vassal it is nowadays needless to
speak. For good or evil, it is the fact of history that Russia is the only
Power in Europe that has never supported the Crescent against the Cross.
That, doubtless, will appear an unimportant matter; but it may become
important under certain peculiar conditions. Suppose, for the sake of
argument, that there were a powerful prince in Europe who had gone
ostentatiously out of his way to pay reverence to the remains of the
Tartar, Mongol and Moslem, left as an outpost in Europe. Suppose there were
a Christian Emperor who could not even go to the tomb of the Crucified,
without pausing to congratulate the last and living crucifier. If there
were an Emperor who gave guns and guides and maps and drill instructors to
defend the remains of the Mongol in Christendom, what should we say to him?
I think at least we might ask him what he meant by his impudence, when he
talked about supporting a semi-oriental power. That we support a
semi-oriental power, we deny. That he has supported an entirely oriental
power cannot be denied--no, not even by the man who did it.
But here is to be noted the essential difference between Russia and
Prussia; especially by those who use the ordinary Liberal arguments against
the latter. Russia has a policy which she pursues, if you will, through
evil and good; but at least so as to produce good as well as evil. Let it
be granted that the policy has made her oppressive to the Finns and the
Poles--though the Russian Poles feel far less oppressed than do the
Prussian Poles. But it is a mere historic fact, that if Russia has been a
despot to some small nations, she has been a deliverer to others. She did,
so far as in her lay, emancipate the Servians or the Montenegrins. But
whom did Prussia ever emancipate--even by accident? It is indeed somewhat
extraordinary that in the perpetual permutations of international politics
the Hohenzollerns have never gone astray into the path of enlightenment.
They have been in alliance with almost everybody off and on; with France,
with England, with Austria, with Russia. Can any one candidly say that they
have left on any one of these people the faintest impress of progress or
liberation? Prussia was the enemy of the French Monarchy; but a worse
enemy of the French Revolution. Prussia had been an enemy of the Czar; but
she was a worse enemy of the Duma. Prussia totally disregarded Austrian
rights; but she is to-day quite ready to inflict Austrian wrongs. This is
the strong particular difference between the one empire and the other.
Russia is pursuing certain intelligible and sincere ends, which to her at
least are ideals, and for which, therefore, she will make sacrifices and
will protect the weak. But the North German soldier is a sort of abstract
tyrant, everywhere and always on the side of materialistic tyranny. This
Teuton in uniform has been found in strange places; shooting farmers before
Saratoga and flogging soldiers in Surrey, hanging niggers in Africa and
raping girls in Wicklow; but never, by some mysterious fatality, lending a
hand to the freeing of a single city or the independence of one solitary
flag. Wherever scorn and prosperous oppression are, there is the Prussian;
unconsciously consistent, instinctively restrictive, innocently evil;
"following darkness like a dream."
Suppose we heard of a person (gifted with some longevity) who had helped
Alva to persecute Dutch Protestants, then helped Cromwell to persecute
Irish Catholics, and then helped Claverhouse to persecute Scotch Puritans,
we should find it rather easier to call him a persecutor than to call him a
Protestant or a Catholic. Curiously enough this is actually the position in
which the Prussian stands in Europe. No argument can alter the fact that in
three converging and conclusive cases he has been on the side of three
distinct rulers of different religions, who had nothing whatever in common
except that they were ruling oppressively. In these three Governments,
taken separately, one can see something excusable or at least human. When
the Kaiser encouraged the Russian rulers to crush the Revolution, the
Russian rulers undoubtedly believed they were wrestling with an inferno of
atheism and anarchy. A Socialist of the ordinary English kind cried out
upon me when I spoke of Stolypin, and said he was chiefly known by the
halter called "Stolypin's Necktie." As a fact, there were many other things
interesting about Stolypin besides his necktie: his policy of peasant
proprietorship, his extraordinary personal courage, and certainly none more
interesting than that movement in his death agony, when he made the sign of
the cross towards the Czar, as the crown and captain of his Christianity.
But the Kaiser does not regard the Czar as the captain of Christianity. Far
from it. What he supported in Stolypin was the necktie and nothing but the
necktie: the gallows and not the cross. The Russian ruler did believe that
the Orthodox Church was orthodox. The Austrian Archduke did really desire
to make the Catholic Church catholic. He did really believe that he was
being Pro-Catholic in being Pro-Austrian. But the Kaiser cannot be
Pro-Catholic, and therefore cannot have been really Pro-Austrian, he was
simply and solely Anti-Servian. Nay, even in the cruel and sterile strength
of Turkey, any one with imagination can see something of the tragedy and
therefore of the tenderness of true belief. The worst that can be said of
the Moslems is, as the poet put it, they offered to man the choice of the
Koran or the sword. The best that can be said for the German is that he
does not care about the Koran, but is satisfied if he can have the sword.
And for me, I confess, even the sins of these three other striving empires
take on, in comparison, something that is sorrowful and dignified: and I
feel they do not deserve that this little Lutheran lounger should patronise
all that is evil in them, while ignoring all that is good. He is not
Catholic, he is not Orthodox, he is not Mahomedan. He is merely an old
gentleman who wishes to share the crime though he cannot share the creed.
He desires to be a persecutor by the pang without the palm. So strongly do
all the instincts of the Prussian drive against liberty, that he would
rather oppress other people's subjects than think of anybody going without
the benefits of oppression. He is a sort of disinterested despot. He is as
disinterested as the devil who is ready to do any one's dirty work.
This would seem obviously fantastic were it not supported by solid facts
which cannot be explained otherwise. Indeed it would be inconceivable if we
were thinking of a whole people, consisting of free and varied individuals.
But in Prussia the governing class is really a governing class: and a very
few people are needed to think along these lines to make all the other
people act along them. And the paradox of Prussia is this: that while its
princes and nobles have no other aim on this earth but to destroy democracy
wherever it shows itself, they have contrived to get themselves trusted,
not as wardens of the past but as forerunners of the future. Even they
cannot believe that their theory is popular, but they do believe that it is
progressive. Here again we find the spiritual chasm between the two
monarchies in question. The Russian institutions are, in many cases,
really left in the rear of the Russian people, and many of the Russian
people know it. But the Prussian institutions are supposed to be in advance
of the Prussian people, and most of the Prussian people believe it. It is
thus much easier for the warlords to go everywhere and impose a hopeless
slavery upon every one, for they have already imposed a sort of hopeful
slavery on their own simple race.
And when men shall speak to us of the hoary iniquities of Russia and of how
antiquated is the Russian system, we shall answer "Yes; that is the
superiority of Russia." Their institutions are part of their history,
whether as relics or fossils. Their abuses have really been uses: that is
to say, they have been used up. If they have old engines of terror or
torment, they may fall to pieces from mere rust, like an old coat of
armour. But in the case of the Prussian tyranny, if it be tyranny at all,
it is the whole point of its claim that it is not antiquated, but just
going to begin, like the showman. Prussia has a whole thriving factory of
thumbscrews, a whole humming workshop of wheels and racks, of the newest
and neatest pattern, with which to win back Europe to the Reaction ...
infandum renovare dolorem. And if we wish to test the truth of this, it
can be done by the same method which showed us that Russia, if her race or
religion could sometimes make her an invader and an oppressor, could also
be made an emancipator and a knight errant. In the same way, if the Russian
institutions are old-fashioned, they honestly exhibit the good as well as
the bad that can be found in old-fashioned things. In their police system
they have an inequality which is against our ideas of law. But in their
commune system they have an equality that is older than law itself. Even
when they flogged each other like barbarians, they called upon each other
by their Christian names like children. At their worst they retained all
the best of a rude society. At their best, they are simply good, like good
children or good nuns. But in Prussia all that is best in the civilised
machinery is put at the service of all that is worst in the barbaric mind.
Here again the Prussian has no accidental merits, none of those lucky
survivals, none of those late repentances, which make the patchwork glory
of Russia. Here all is sharpened to a point and pointed to a purpose and
that purpose, if words and acts have any meaning at all, is the destruction
of liberty throughout the world.
In considering the Prussian point of view we have been considering what
seems to be mainly a mental limitation: a kind of knot in the brain.
Towards the problem of Slav population, of English colonisation, of French
armies and reinforcements, it shows the same strange philosophic sulks. So
far as I can follow it, it seems to amount to saying "It is very wrong that
you should be superior to me, because I am superior to you." The spokesmen
of this system seem to have a curious capacity for concentrating this
entanglement or contradiction, sometimes into a single paragraph, or even a
single sentence. I have already referred to the German Emperor's celebrated
suggestion that in order to avert the peril of Hunnishness we should all
become Huns. A much stronger instance is his more recent order to his
troops touching the war in Northern France. As most people know, his words
ran "It is my Royal and Imperial command that you concentrate your
energies, for the immediate present, upon one single purpose, and that is
that you address all your skill and all the valour of my soldiers to
exterminate first the treacherous English and to walk over General French's
contemptible little Army." The rudeness of the remark an Englishman can
afford to pass over; what I am interested in is the mentality; the train of
thought that can manage to entangle itself even in so brief a space. If
French's little Army is contemptible, it would seem clear that all the
skill and valour of the German Army had better not be concentrated on it,
but on the larger and less contemptible allies. If all the skill and
valour of the German Army are concentrated on it, it is not being treated
as contemptible. But the Prussian rhetorician had two incompatible
sentiments in his mind; and he insisted on saying them both at once. He
wanted to think of an English Army as a small thing; but he also wanted to
think of an English defeat as a big thing. He wanted to exult, at the same
moment, in the utter weakness of the British in their attack; and the
supreme skill and valour of the Germans in repelling such an attack.
Somehow it must be made a common and obvious collapse for England; and yet
a daring and unexpected triumph for Germany. In trying to express these
contradictory conceptions simultaneously, he got rather mixed. Therefore he
bade Germania fill all her vales and mountains with the dying agonies of
this almost invisible earwig; and let the impure blood of this cockroach
redden the Rhine down to the sea.
But it would be unfair to base the criticism on the utterance of any
accidental and hereditary prince: and it is quite equally clear in the case
of the philosophers who have been held up to us, even in England, as the
very prophets of progress. And in nothing is it shown more sharply than in
the curious confused talk about Race and especially about the Teutonic
Race. Professor Harnack and similar people are reproaching us, I
understand, for having broken "the bond of Teutonism": a bond which the
Prussians have strictly observed both in breach and observance. We note it
in their open annexation of lands wholly inhabited by negroes, such as
Denmark. We note it equally in their instant and joyful recognition of the
flaxen hair and light blue eyes of the Turks. But it is still the abstract
principle of Professor Harnack which interests me most; and in following it
I have the same complexity of enquiry, but the same simplicity of result.
Comparing the Professor's concern about "Teutonism" with his unconcern
about Belgium, I can only reach the following result: "A man need not keep
a promise he has made. But a man must keep a promise he has not made."
There certainly was a treaty binding Britain to Belgium; if it was only a
scrap of paper. If there was any treaty binding Britain to Teutonism it is,
to say the least of it, a lost scrap of paper: almost what one might call a
scrap of waste-paper. Here again the pendants under consideration exhibit
the illogical perversity that makes the brain reel. There is obligation and
there is no obligation: sometimes it appears that Germany and England must
keep faith with each other; sometimes that Germany need not keep faith with
anybody and anything; sometimes that we alone among European peoples are
almost entitled to be Germans; sometimes that beside us Russians and
Frenchmen almost rise to a Germanic loveliness of character. But through
all there is, hazy but not hypocritical, this sense of some common
Teutonism.
Professor Haeckel, another of the witnesses raised up against us, attained
to some celebrity at one time through proving the remarkable resemblance
between two different things by printing duplicate pictures of the same
thing. Professor Haeckel's contribution to biology, in this case, was
exactly like Professor Harnack's contribution to ethnology. Professor
Harnack knows what a German is like. When he wants to imagine what an
Englishman is like, he simply photographs the same German over again. In
both cases there is probably sincerity as well as simplicity. Haeckel was
so certain that the species illustrated in embryo really are closely
related and linked up, that it seemed to him a small thing to simplify it
by mere repetition. Harnack is so certain that the German and Englishman
are almost alike, that he really risks the generalisation that they are
exactly alike. He photographs, so to speak, the same fair and foolish face
twice over; and calls it a remarkable resemblance between cousins. Thus he
can prove the existence of Teutonism just about as conclusively as Haeckel
has proved the more tenable proposition of the non-existence of God. Now
the German and the Englishman are not in the least alike--except in the
sense that neither of them are negroes. They are, in everything good and
evil, more unlike than any other two men we can take at random from the
great European family. They are opposite from the roots of their history,
nay, of their geography. It is an understatement to call Britain insular.
Britain is not only an island, but an island slashed by the sea till it
nearly splits into three islands; and even the Midlands can almost smell
the salt. Germany is a powerful, beautiful and fertile inland country,
which can only find the sea by one or two twisted and narrow paths, as
people find a subterranean lake. Thus the British Navy is really national
because it is natural; it has co-hered out of hundreds of accidental
adventures of ships and shipmen before Chaucer's time and after it. But the
German Navy is an artificial thing; as artificial as a constructed Alp
would be in England. William II has simply copied the British Navy as
Frederick II copied the French Army: and this Japanese or anti-like
assiduity in imitation is one of the hundred qualities which the Germans
have and the English markedly have not. There are other German
superiorities which are very much superior. The one or two really jolly
things that the Germans have got are precisely the things which the English
haven't got: notably a real habit of popular music and of the ancient songs
of the people, not merely spreading from the towns or caught from the
professionals. In this the Germans rather resemble the Welsh: though heaven
knows what becomes of Teutonism if they do. But the difference between the
Germans and the English goes deeper than all these signs of it; they differ
more than any other two Europeans in the normal posture of the mind. Above
all, they differ in what is the most English of all English traits; that
shame which the French may be right in calling "the bad shame"; for it is
certainly mixed up with pride and suspicion, the upshot of which we call
shyness. Even an Englishman's rudeness is often rooted in his being
embarrassed. But a German's rudeness is rooted in his never being
embarrassed. He eats and makes love noisily. He never feels a speech or a
song or a sermon or a large meal to be what the English call "out of place"
in particular circumstances. When Germans are patriotic and religious they
have no reactions against patriotism and religion as have the English and
the French. Nay, the mistake of Germany in the modern disaster largely
arose from the facts that she thought England was simple when England is
very subtle. She thought that because our politics have become largely
financial that they had become wholly financial; that because our
aristocrats had become pretty cynical that they had become entirely
corrupt. They could not seize the subtlety by which a rather used-up
English gentleman might sell a coronet when he would not sell a fortress;
might lower the public standards and yet refuse to lower the flag. In
short, the Germans are quite sure that they understand us entirely, because
they do not understand us at all. Possibly if they began to understand us
they might hate us even more: but I would rather be hated for some small
but real reason than pursued with love on account of all kinds of qualities
which I do not possess and which I do not desire. And when the Germans get
their first genuine glimpse of what modern England is like they will
discover that England has a very broken, belated and inadequate sense of
having an obligation to Europe, but no sort of sense whatever of having any
obligation to Teutonism.
This is the last and strongest of the Prussian qualities we have here
considered. There is in stupidity of this sort a strange slippery
strength: because it can be not only outside rules but outside reason. The
man who really cannot see that he is contradicting himself has a great
advantage in controversy; though the advantage breaks down when he tries to
reduce it to simple addition, to chess, or to the game called war. It is
the same about the stupidity of the one-sided kinship. The drunkard who is
quite certain that a total stranger is his long-lost brother, has a greater
advantage until it comes to matters of detail. "We must have chaos within"
said Nietzsche, "that we may give birth to a dancing star."
In these slight notes I have suggested the principal strong points of the
Prussian character. A failure in honour which almost amounts to a failure
in memory: an egomania that is honestly blind to the fact that the other
party is an ego; and, above all, an actual itch for tyranny and
interference, the devil which everywhere torments the idle and the proud.
To these must be added a certain mental shapelessness which can expand or
contract without reference to reason or record; a potential infinity of
excuses. If the English had been on the German side, the German professors
would have noted what irresistible energies had evolved the Teutons. As the
English are on the other side, the German professors will say that these
Teutons were not sufficiently evolved. Or they will say that they were
just sufficiently evolved to show that they were not Teutons. Probably they
will say both. But the truth is that all that they call evolution should
rather be called evasion. They tell us they are opening windows of
enlightenment and doors of progress. The truth is that they are breaking up
the whole house of the human intellect, that they may abscond in any
direction. There is an ominous and almost monstrous parallel between the
position of their over-rated philosophers and of their comparatively
under-rated soldiers. For what their professors call roads of progress are
really routes of escape.
Italy, twice hast thou spoken; and time is athirst
for the third.
My Dear ------
It is a long time since we met; and I fear these letters may never reach
you. But in these violent times I remember with a curious vividness how you
brandished a paintbrush about your easel when I was a boy; and how it
thrilled me to think that you had so brandished a bayonet against the
Teutons--I hope with the same precision and happy results. Round about
that period, the very pigments seemed to have some sort of picturesque
connection with your national story. There seemed to be something gorgeous
and terrible about Venetian Red; and something quite catastrophic about
Burnt Sienna. But somehow or other, when I saw in the street yesterday the
colours on your flag, it reminded me of the colours on your palette.
You need not fear that I shall try to entangle you or your countrymen in
the matters which it is for Italians alone to decide. You know the perils
of either course much better than I do. Italy, most assuredly, has no need
to prove her courage. She has risked everything in standing out that she
could risk by coming in. The proclamations and press of Germany make it
plain that the Germans have risen to a height of sensibility hardly to be
distinguished from madness. Supposing the nightmare of a Prussian victory,
they will revenge themselves on things more remote than the Triple
Alliance. There was a promise of peace between them and Belgium; there was
none between them and England. The promise to Belgium they broke. The
promise of England they invented. It is called the Treaty of Teutonism. No
one ever heard of it in this country; but it seems well known in academic
circles in Germany. It seems to be something, connected with the colour of
one's hair. But I repeat that I am not concerned to interfere with your
decision, save in so far as I may provide some materials for it by
describing our own.
For I think the first, perhaps the only, fruitful work an Englishman can do
now for the formation of foreign opinion is to talk about what he really
understands, the condition of British opinion. It is as simple as it is
solid. For the first time, perhaps, what we call the United Kingdom
entirely deserves its name. There has been nothing like such unanimity
within an Englishman's recollection. The Irish and even the Welsh were
largely pro-Boers, so were some of the most English of the English. No one
could have been more English than Fox, yet he denounced the war with
Napoleon. No one could be more English than Cobden, but he denounced the
war in the Crimea. It is really extraordinary to find a united England.
Indeed, until lately, it was extraordinary to find a united Englishman.
Those of us who, like the present writer, repudiated the South African war
from its beginnings, had yet a divided heart in the matter, and felt
certain aspects of it as glorious as well as infamous. The first fact I can
offer you is the unquestionable fact that all these doubts and divisions
have ceased. Nor have they ceased by any compromise; but by a universal
flash of faith--or, if you will, of suspicion. Nor were our internal
conflicts lightly abandoned; nor our reconciliations an easy matter. I am,
as you are, a democrat and a citizen of Europe; and my friends and I had
grown to loathe the plutocracy and privilege which sat in the high places
of our country with a loathing which we thought no love could cast out. Of
these rich men I will not speak here; with your permission, I will not
think of them. War is a terrible business in any case; and to some
intellectual temperaments this is the most terrible part of it. That war
takes the young; that war sunders the lovers; that all over Europe brides
and bridegrooms are parting at the church door: all that is only a
commonplace to commonplace people. To give up one's love for one's country
is very great. But to give up one's hate for one's country, this may also
have in it something of pride and something of purification.
What is it that has made the British peoples thus defer not only their
artificial parade of party politics but their real social and moral
complaints and demands? What is it that has united all of us against the
Prussian, as against a mad dog? It is the presence of a certain spirit, as
unmistakable as a pungent smell, which we feel is capable of withering all
the good things in this world. The burglary of Belgium, the bribe to
betray France, these are not excuses; they are facts. But they are only
the facts by which we came to know of the presence of the spirit. They do
not suffice to define the whole spirit itself. A good rough summary is to
say that it is the spirit of barbarism; but indeed it is something worse.
It is the spirit of second-rate civilisation; and the distinction involves
the most important differences. Granted that it could exist, pure barbarism
could not last long; as pure babyhood cannot last long. Of his own nature
the baby is interested in the ticking of a watch; and the time will come
when you will have to tell him, if you only tell him the wrong time. And
that is exactly what the second-rate civilisation does.
But the vital point is here. The abstract barbarian would copy. The cockney
and incomplete civilisation always sets itself up to be copied. And in the
case here considered, the German thinks that it is not only his business to
spread education, but to spread compulsory education. "Science combined
with organisation," says Professor Ostwald of Berlin University, "makes us
terrible to our opponents and ensures a German future for Europe." That is,
as shortly as it can be put, what we are fighting about. We are fighting to
prevent a German future for Europe. We think it would be narrower, nastier,
less sane, less capable of liberty and of laughter, than any of the worst
parts of the European past. And when I cast about for a form in which to
explain shortly why we think so, I thought of you. For this is a matter so
large that I know not how to express it except in terms of artists like
you, in the service of beauty and the faith in freedom. Prussia, at least
cannot help me; Lord Palmerston, I believe, called it a country of damned
professors. Lord Palmerston, I fear, used the word "damned" more or less
flippantly. I use it reverently.
Rome, at her very weakest, has always been a river that wanders and widens
and that waters many fields. Berlin, at its strongest, will never be
anything but a whirlpool, which seeks its own centre, and is sucked down.
It would only narrow all the rest of Europe, as it has already narrowed all
the rest of Germany. There is a spirit of diseased egoism, which at last
makes all things spin upon one pin-point in the brain. It is a spirit
expressed more often in the slangs than in the tongues of men. The English
call it a fad. I do not know what the Italians call it; the Prussians call
it philosophy.
Here is the sort of instance that made me think of you. What would you feel
first, let us say, if I mentioned Michael Angelo? For the first moment,
perhaps, boredom: such as I feel when Americans ask me about
Stratford-on-Avon. But, supposing that just fear quieted, you would feel
what I and every one else can feel. It might be the sense of the majestic
hands of Man upon the locks of the last doors of life; large and terrible
hands, like those of that youth who poises the stone above Florence, and
looks out upon the circle of the hills. It might be that huge heave of
flank and chest and throat in "The Slave," which is like an earthquake
lifting a whole landscape; it might be that tremendous Madonna, whose
charity is more strong than death. Anyhow, your thoughts would be something
worthy of the man's terrible paganism and his more terrible Christianity.
Who but God could have graven Michael Angelo; who came so near to graving
the Mother of God?
German culture deals with the matter as follows:--"Michelangelo Buonarotti
(1475-1564).--(=Bernhard) ancestor of the family, lived in Florence about
1210. He had two sons, Berlinghieri and Buonarrota. By this name recurring
frequently in later generations, the family came to be called. It is a
German name, compounded of Bona (=Bohn) and Hrodo, Roto (=Rohde, Rothe)
Bona and Rotto are cited as Lombard names. Buonarotti is perhaps the old
Lombard Beonrad, corresponding to the word Bonroth. Corresponding names are
Mackrodt, Osterroth, Leonard." And so on, and so on, and so on. "In his
face he has always been well-coloured...the eyes might be called small
rather than large, of the colour of horn, but variable with 'flecks' of
yellow and blue. Hair and beard are black. These particulars are confirmed
by the portraits. First and foremost take the portrait of Bugiardini in
Museo Buonarotti. Here comes to view the 'flecked' appearance of the iris,
especially in the right eye. The left may be described as almost wholly
blue." And so on, and so on, and so on. "In the Museo Civico at Pavia, is a
fresco likeness by an unknown hand, in which this fresh red is distinctly
recognisable on the face. Taking all these bodily characteristics into
consideration, it must be said from an anthropological point of view that
though originally of German family he was a hybrid between the North and
West brunette race."
Would you take the trouble to prove that Michael Angelo was an Italian that
this man takes to prove that he was a German? Of course not. The only
impression this man (who recognised Prussian historian) produces on
your mind or mine is that he does not care about Michael Angelo. For you,
being an Italian, are therefore something more than an Italian; and I being
an Englishman, something more than an Englishman. But this poor fellow
really cannot be anything more than a Prussian. He digs and digs to find
dead Prussians, in the catacombs of Rome or under the ruins of Troy. If he
can find one blue eye lying about somewhere, he is satisfied. He has no
philosophy. He has a hobby, which is collecting Germans. It would probably
be vain for you and me to point out that we could prove anything by the
sort of ingenuity which finds the German "rothe" in Buonarotti. We could
have great fun depriving Germany of all her geniuses in that style. We
could say that Moltke must have been an Italian, from the old Latin root
mol--indicating the sweetness of that general's disposition. We might say
Bismarck was a Frenchman, since his name begins with the popular theatrical
cry of "Bis!" We might say Goethe was an Englishman, because his name
begins with the popular sporting cry "Go!" But the ultimate difference
between us and the Prussian professor is simply that we are not mad.
The father of Frederick the Great, the founder of the more modern
Hohenzollerns, was mad. His madness consisted of stealing giants; like an
unscrupulous travelling showman. Any man much over six foot high, whether
he were called the Russian Giant or the Irish Giant or the Chinese Giant or
the Hottentot Giant, was in danger of being kidnapped and imprisoned in a
Prussian uniform. It is the same mean sort of madness that is working in
Prussian professors such as the one I have quoted. They can get no further
than the notion of stealing giants. I will not bore you now with all the
other giants they have tried to steal; it is enough to say that St. Paul,
Leonardo da Vinci, and Shakespeare himself are among the monstrosities
exhibited at Frederick-William fair--on grounds as good as those quoted
above. But I have put this particular case before you, as an artist rather
than an Italian, to show what I mean when I object to a "German future for
Europe." I object to something which believes very much in itself, and in
which I do not in the least believe. I object to something which is
conceited and small-minded; but which also has that kind of pertinacity
which always belongs to lunatics. It wants to be able to congratulate
itself on Michael Angelo; never to congratulate the world. It is the spirit
that can be seen in those who go bald trying to trace a genealogy; or go
bankrupt trying to make out a claim to some remote estate. The Prussian has
the inconsistency of the parvenu; he will labour to prove that he is
related to some gentleman of the Renaissance, even while he boasts of being
able to "buy him up." If the Italians were really great, why--they were
really Germans; and if they weren't really Germans, well then, they weren't
really great. It is an occupation for an old maid.
Three or four hundred years ago, in the sad silence that had followed the
comparative failure of the noble effort of the Middle Ages, there came upon
all Europe a storm out of the south. Its tumult is of many tongues; one can
hear in it the laughter of Rabelais, or, for that matter, the lyrics of
Shakespeare; but the dark heart of the storm was indeed more austral and
volcanic; a noise of thunderous wings and the name of Michael the
Archangel. And when it had shocked and purified the world and passed, a
Prussian professor found a feather fallen to earth; and proved (in several
volumes) that it could only have come from a Prussian Eagle. He had seen
one--in a cage.
Yours ------,
CHESTERTON-THE APPETITE OF TYRANY - THE REFUSAL OF RECIPROCITY