The Arena. Volume 4, No. 21, August, 1891. Various
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this moment came, the truth of the narrative ceased. Henceforth, it told of only the things of another age, and told them in the dialect of a bygone tongue. It was the official report of what had taken place in Old Russia written involuntarily under the omnipotent but benumbing inspiration of the spirit of caste.
II
When the volume of M. Lévy Brühl appeared in September of last year, its name was instantaneously found for it by one of the leaders of historical criticism in France. Ere one week had passed, M. Albert Sorel had christened it “l’ Idée elle Fait,”4 and the public of Paris had ratified the title by all but universal acclaim.
In those words M. Sorel proclaimed the concrete sense of the book, and no doubt was left as to what was the meaning of the author who had so freely undertaken to investigate the “developments of the German national conscience.”
The pith of the whole lies in Professor Brühl’s own expression: “In German unity,” he says, “the idea precedes everything else, engenders the fact l’est l’Unité nationale d’abord; Unité l’etat ensuite,” and nowhere in any historical phenomenon has the idea had a larger part to claim. But here you have at once to get rid of what, in Sybel’s narrative, rests on mere documentary evidence! All anachronisms have to be set aside. As against the vigor of Lévy Brühl’s living men, the make-believe of the past, with its caste-governed puppets, stares you in the face. After the rout at Sédan, after the startling transmutation of long dormant but still live ideas into overwhelming facts, you realize how entirely the mere Prussian chronicle of events in their official garb deals with what is forever extinct. These dead players have lost their significancy; they but simulate humanity from the outside,—are simply “embroidered vestments stuffed like dolls with bran,” or like the moth-eaten uniforms of the great Frederick in the gallery at Potsdam.
When Lévy Brühl, alluding to Stein and his searching reforms after the disasters of later years, says: “Il voulait une nation vivante” he wanted a living nation! He unchains the great idea from the bondage where it had lain for centuries, and whence the men of 1813 set it loose; he reinstates the past even to its legendary sources, and evokes memories which were those of heroic ages, and which had still power to inspire the present, and re-create what had once so splendidly lived. This life is in truth the German idea in its utmost truth; it was life and power that these men wanted, the life born in them from their earliest hour and kept sacred through all time by their poetry, their song, their native tongue.
It is all this which is German and not Prussian. The Hohenzollerns have nothing to do with all this idealism,—and it is this which constitutes the peculiar and sovereign spirit of German unity to which the modern philosophy of Frederick II. was so long a stranger, and to which the Iron Chancellor became a hearty convert only at the close; the chivalrous element of the great elector is but a link between what had been the Holy Roman Empire and what is to be the national union after Leipsic and the War of Freedom—culminating in its supreme and inevitable consequence in 1871. The heroes (and they were heroes) of the distant North were as Brandenburgers, “electors,” component parts, be it not forgotten, of a Teutonic whole, “of one great heart,” (as Bunsen wrote long years ago to Lord Houghton),5 “though we did not know it.”
Perhaps the greatest superiority of Professor Lévy Brühl lies in the unity of description he employs in order to bring home to the reader the unity of the subject he treats. He sees the whole as a whole, as it really is, all being contained in all, and nothing in past or present omitted. This is the truth of the Germanic oneness of species, and the failure to conceive it of most writers of our day is the chief cause of confusion. It is a vast, coherent vision of things taken in by mind and eye from the Niebelungen Lied to the wholesale captivity of the French army, in the autumn of 1870, and when not thus conceived, incomplete. To those who lived in and through the period comprised between the war of the Danish Duchies and the re-conquest of Alsace-Lorraine, no item of even prehistoric times can remain absent; the spirit of German unity is everywhere, pervades everything, and those alone who thoroughly master this are capable of painting it to others’ senses.
It is very well to take a Leibniz or Frederick the Great for a starting-point, but it all goes immeasurably farther back than that. Luther and his Bible open one large historic gate. The Bible heads all! In 1813, writes General Clausewitz to the so-called Great Gascon, the prime impetus was a religious one, and his own words are: “If I could only hang a Bible to the equipments of my troopers I could do with them all that Cromwell did with his Ironsides!” Two centuries before, this had been the feeling of Gustavus Adolphus, who fought for Protestant Germany with his Bible at his saddle-bow.
Luther is the one predominant Teuton of the centuries, after the close of the middle ages, and though he ceases to be present in the flesh in 1516, he never dies. The inspiration of the German soul endures and lives in every variety of art or expression. Luther is perpetuated in Handel, and technically, even his “Feste Burg” is the first note of the “Inspirate” in “I Know That My Redeemer Liveth!”
It is only the most inattentive of historical students who can afford to ignore this. No modern æsthetician from the Rhine to the Spree affects to dispute the succession of Teutonic thought, in its various forms of passion, from Beethoven to Goethe, from Schiller, Jean Paul, or Weber, or Ravner, or Kleist, or Immermann, down to the latest high priest of the pre-historic cult—down to Richard Wagner himself! It was precisely this that the Emperor Frederick knew as crown prince, and that the chancellor had to learn. With the crown prince all was present. The farthest past was with him; the leaves of the uralte forests had whispered their dream lore in his ears as in those of the Siegfried of the Niebelungen; he had seen Otto von Wittelsbach strike dead his very Kaiser for breach of faith6 and stood by at the Donnersberg, when mighty Rudolph’s son slew Adolf of Napan for his base attempt at usurpation. He knew it all, legend or chronicle; no secret was hidden from him, and the national pulse beat in him with fiery throb from the first hour when the national conscience had been touched. The chancellor was chilled by his own statecraft, and the king, as he then was, had witnessed the Napoleonic wars.
Between the crown prince and Bismarck, however, there existed one point of contact. Each was a Deutsche Student, and there, later on, was to be found the true conversion of the chancellor to national ideas.
As in every genuine lover of his country (and that Prince Bismarck is), there lay latent in the famous “White Cuirassier” the same ideal capacity of warlike action and intellectuality that so distinguished Frederick II. No one understood better the complex son of Carlyle’s roystering barrack hero, no one knew in reality more deeply that the ideas planted by him in men’s minds were those of the majesty of intelligence, of the royalty of humanity’s brain power.
Count Bismarck proved his political foresight by the rapidity with which he seized on the Schleswig-Holstein question as being the axis on which turned the entire evolution (if ever it should be possible!) of the imperial German unity. About that he hesitated not one moment. He adopted the whole theory of Dahlmann, who alone spoke it out in words in 1848-9, but he feared to plunge at one leap into the vortex of his own threatening conclusions and tried for several years to stave off the “pay day.” He was somewhat slower to recognize the identity of feeling through all the Germanic races, to realize the equally strong vibration, the psychologic harmony quivering through heart and soul from North to South, through the mysteriously hidden dramas of fifteen hundred years. He believed himself a narrow Particularist Borussian, a “Pomeranian Giant,” and let a score of years go by before clearly making out by touch that the strange change of tonality, of sound, and significance that superposed the patriotism of the South to that of the North was a mere inharmonic change, and that according to the rotation of the two circles, each, in reality, underlay the other in turn.
It would be a fatal mistake to imagine that M. von Bismarck allowed himself to be led into the Danish campaign. He did nothing to bring it about, but the instant it showed itself on the cards he took advantage of it in the most predetermined, authoritative way, leaving his Austrian accomplice and victim no possibility of escape. From the hour when,
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Life of Monckton Milnes, first Lord Houghton, by Wemyss Reid. 2 vols. London, 1891.
The heroic founder of the Bavarian monarchy, Otho of Writtelsbach, was betrayed shamefully by his friend, the Emperor Philip, of Suabia, and slew him for his treachery. This is one of the oldest dramas on the German stage.