The Uncivilizable Nation

By Emile Verhaeren.

The Belgian poet whom Maurice Maeterlinck preferred should rank among the Immortals of the French Academy when that honor was bestowed upon himself, has contributed to Les Annales the following account of Germany and the German people. The translation is that appearing on June 11 in The Suffragette of England.

LIFE is not a means; life is an end. That is what we must tell ourselves in order really to live in this world. Hence the obligation to perfect life, to make it high and beautiful, to make a masterpiece of it. Hence too our contempt and hatred for those who wish to tarnish life, either by their thoughts or by their deeds.

Germany behaves as though it were the most backward among nations. And indeed it is in spite of appearances essentially feudal. There is perhaps a German culture, but there is no German civilization.

One may be well informed and yet be hardly civilized. A sense of duty to humanity, a sense of pride, a sense of liberty are independent, certainly not of intelligence, but are independent of mere knowledge of accumulated facts.

The German professor is a walking library. He collects, he arranges, he comments. Arrangement and discipline with him take the place of everything else, and they inculcate in him the spirit of dependence and of servility. It is perhaps because he classifies so much that he is so dully submissive. Everything according to his view is an ascending or descending scale. Everything is in its compartment.

How, then, can we be surprised if everything becomes materialized and the mind of each Teuton can lay claim to be nothing more than a sort of stiff and dingy compartment, in a sort of social chessboard.

It has already been said: The German invents almost nothing. He works upon the inventions of other people. In order to invent he would have to possess the spirit of rebellion against that which is. He is incapable of that spirit. He is a being who always accepts.

But as soon as a new discovery has been made by others the German gets hold of it. He examines it patiently. He turns and returns it this way, that way, and every way. He, as it were, criticises it. He thus succeeds in augmenting its power. Moreover, he wishes that it shall serve a practical purpose and be classified accordingly, just as he himself serves and is classified in life.

Never have the Germans opened up a great road in science. They open up only bypaths. Leibnitz and Kant joined their paths to the royal high road of Descartes. Haeckel would hardly have existed if Darwin had not existed. Koch and Behring are dependent upon the labors of Pasteur.

This second-hand science is excellent as a means of attracting mediocre minds. To work, each in his little corner, at solving some secondary question, and to believe one's self a somebody when one is hardly anybody, flatters the universal vanity. All the little provincial universities of Germany can live in the illusion that they are full of learned men—thanks to the German conception of what is learned and serious!

It is a system of regimenting in great barracks of laboratories. It is the absolute negation of the spirit of initiative of spontaneity and it is above all the negation of the spirit of protest and revolt.

If the German people had been truly civilized they would never have maintained silence before the assassination of Belgium. Even among those whose ideas are contrary to the existing political order in Germany, none has risen up against this crime admitted and proclaimed at the beginning of the war in full Parliament by the Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg himself. The universal astonishment at such a silence was so great that even today the world has not recovered from it. Apart from Liebknecht the whole of German Social Democracy is dishonored: it is desired to expel the German Socialists from the International Socialist Movement. They excuse themselves; they aggravate their fault. They say:

"We should have been arrested and imprisoned." The world replies:

"Are they then afraid of dying?"

In the German Socialist Party everything has been reduced to method and organized as in the German universities and the German Army.

There were I know not how many Socialist electors; German Socialism was thought to be already triumphant and invincible. People said: "They are Germany!"

The German Socialists were held up as an example to all the democracies of the earth.

Those who swore by the German Socialists affirmed that they would devour Kaiserism when it should become necessary. But last August in one hour in the Reichstag it was the German Socialist Party that was devoured!

When recently certain German Socialists visited the Maison du Peuple of Brussels they expressed astonishment that the Socialists of Belgium should attach so much importance to the invasion of their country.

"When then binds you to your country?" they asked.

"Honor," was the reply.

"Honor! Honor! that is a very bourgeois ideal," interrupted the Germans.

Yet a true civilization has as its framework precisely honor. Honor is not a bourgeois ideal, but an aristocratic ideal. It was slowly created by the flower of humanity throughout the centuries. When force becomes educated, force opposes itself. It limits and incloses itself. It becomes intelligent and tempered by reserve and by tact. Brutal force thus changes into moral force, power becomes justice.

The more a nation lends itself to such a change, the more it rises from the material plane toward the spiritual plane. The more it enshrines in its institution respect for humanity as a whole, the greater and more civilized it becomes. Such a nation remains faithful to its pledged word; neither interest nor even necessity moves it to commit felony. It loves to protect and not to oppress those who are weaker than itself. It has at heart the work of propagating throughout the world certain principles of social life which certainly are utopian, but are yet beautiful to have before the eyes and in the heart, in order to live not only for the present, but also for the future.

These admirable principles which may never be put wholly into practice, but toward which we must try to grow always nearer, are the expression of the deepest human generosity. They are the radical negation of brutal and primitive force; they incline the world toward a unanimous and serene peace. They have based on faith the infinite perfectibility of conscience. Only a nation of a high degree of civilization can conceive of relations so perfect between human beings and cherish dreams so great.

Germany was never capable of this. The individual German is the least subtle and the least susceptible to education of any in the world.

It has been my lot to take part in certain European capitals in a number of reunions where English, French, Italians, and Germans came together and conversed. They were all, I was assured, distinguished people, of whom their respective nations might be proud. Now, the German was rarely to be seen in an excellent attitude. He was at once embarrassed and arrogant. He lacked refinement. His politeness was clumsy. He was as though afraid of seeming not to know everything. The most eccentric taste seemed to him the best taste. To him to be up to date was to be up to the minute. He would have been wretched if any one in his presence had claimed to be up to the second.

As soon as he had the chance to speak and got a hearing, he inaugurated, as it were, a course of lectures. Clearness was not at all necessary to him. One rarely understood precisely what he meant. The fastidiousness and subtlety which led others to seek perfection in phrase and thought had little attraction for him. With what heaviness the German diplomat discusses matters at the council table! With what clumsiness the German conqueror plants himself in a conquered country! While France, at the end of half a century, makes herself beloved in Savoy, at Mentone, and at Nice, while in the space of two centuries she assimilates Lille and Dunkirk and Strasburg and Alsace; while England in a few decades unites to her Egypt and the Cape, Germany remains detested in Poland, Schleswig, and in Alsace-Lorraine. Germany is essentially the persona ingrata everywhere it presents itself. It knows only the methods that divide, and not those which unite. Germany makes proclamations that act upon the mind as the frost acts upon plants. Germany knows neither how to attract nor how to charm nor how to civilize, because she has no personal and profound moral force.

Europe under the successive spiritual hegemonies of Athens, Rome, and Paris remained the most admirable centre of human development that has ever been.

Under German hegemony Europe would move toward a sort of gloomy and hard organization under which everything would be impeccable, arranged only because everything would be tyrannized over from above.

For the true Germany—we have today the sad but immovable conviction of this—was never that of Goethe, of Beethoven, nor of Heine. It was that of implacable Landgraves and fierce soldiers.

For thousands of years Germany has let loose its hordes upon Europe; Vandals, Visigoths, Alains, Franks, Herules. Germany continues to do this at the present day. It is Germany's terrible and sinister function.

Only let us not deceive ourselves as to this point in future, Germany is the dangerous nation because it is the uncivilizable nation, because its castles, its fields, and its barracks have remained the inexhausted, and perhaps the inexhaustible, reservoirs of human ferocity.

EMILE VERHAEREN.