CHAPTER I

THE MODERN SPIRIT

Goethe on epochs of retrogression and progress—The intellectual transformation of Germany—The triumph of materialism—Fichte’s repudiation of world-ambitions—Effect of the French War—The modernising of the schools—Professors Paulsen and Rein quoted—Attractions of a commercial career—The cult of force—Evidence in political and economic movements and in architecture—The spirit of modern Germanism is the spirit of subdual—Romanism in German character—The German unapproachable in his command over matter—His failure in the government of spiritual forces—German worship of systems—National faults the faults of youth.

IN ONE OF HIS letters to Eckermann, Goethe strikes truth at a deep level when he says, “I will tell you something, and you will often find it confirmed in your later life. All epochs of retrogression and dissolution are subjective; on the contrary, all progressive epochs have an objective direction. Every resolute endeavour turns from within to the world without.”

No words could better characterise the change which has come over the land of Goethe in modern times or better describe the significance of that change. The last fifty years have witnessed the decay and end of the old “subjective” epoch of self-absorption, of concentrated, self-centred national life, and the opening and the triumph of a new “objective” era of external effort, beginning with foreign-trade ambitions and culminating in an ambitious foreign-politics. This more than anything else is the distinguishing mark of the Germany with which the world to-day has to do—the abandonment of the old national forms of life and the resolute pursuit of world-aims and a world-career, with the determination, if not to win absolute primacy amongst the nations and empires of modern civilisation, at least to dispute such primacy with any existing or potential claimant.

A consideration of the modern evolution of Germany, entirely practical though its aim must inevitably be, may then fitly begin with a brief survey of the intellectual and spiritual transformation which this evolution has meant and has necessitated for the Germany of old, the Germany which Europe and the civilised world knew before the economic struggle for existence became the greatest of international questions.

All progress, says Herbert Spencer, means change. It does not necessarily follow that all change means progress. The transformation which has made of disunited Germany, poor, undeveloped, stagnant, a world-empire rich in all the resources of material power, with commerce in every sea and territory in almost every continent, is regarded by the politician and the man of affairs as a triumph of sagacious statesmanship and racial tenacity, and such a claim may be made justly. It may be, however, that for power which has been gained without power has been lost within, and that the exchange of national values has not been an exchange of equivalents. Whether that be so or not, the future alone can decide, yet the issues involved are immensely important, first to Germany itself, but also to the rest of the world—to Germany, because the staying power of a nation depends infinitely more upon its moral than its material force, or there would have been no German Empire to-day; to the world at large, because, in taking the conspicuous place amongst the nations to which ambition and destiny alike seem to impel it, Germany will project into civilisation new and powerful influences which may be either helpful or retarding.

No one who knows Germany from its literature, and especially its poetry and its philosophy, and who has followed its career during the past generation, can have failed to recognise the immense change which has come over the national life and thought. A century ago idealism was supreme; half a century ago it had still not been dethroned; to-day its place has been taken by materialism. This is not to say that belief in ideas is extinct or that high thinking has passed out of fashion in Germany. Even to-day scholarship is nowhere held in greater regard, learning is nowhere cultivated more resolutely and for its own sake, than in that country. The universities train from year to year a larger number of students than ever before, and if “real” or practical studies have to some extent challenged the supremacy of the old classical discipline in the scheme of higher education, it may safely be said that study is followed with all the old devotion and disinterestedness no less by the student than the teacher. Nevertheless, the dominant note of German life to-day is not that of fifty, or forty, or even thirty years ago.

If one goes back a century in German history, four great intellectual figures will be seen to stand out unchallenged by their contemporaries. They were Kant and Fichte on the one hand, Goethe and Schiller on the other. The influence of these four men upon the national life in different directions has been incalculable. For a time it might have seemed as though they were destined to be the inspirers and guides of the nineteenth century—Goethe and Schiller its teachers in the art of life, Kant and Fichte its teachers in political thought and social duty. And, indeed, a German culture based upon the ideals represented by Weimar, Königsberg, and Berlin at that time would have been a force not more powerful than beneficent in moulding the nation and in leavening modern European thought. On the one hand Schiller, drawing his inspiration from classical antiquity, emphasised the aesthetic side of life, the claims of beauty, harmony, rhythm; while Goethe stood for largeness, fulness, and completeness of life. Viewing human life from the social side, Kant and Fichte instilled into their contemporaries the solemn ideas of duty and responsibility, applied them to civic relationships, and built them into the foundations upon which a new Prussia and a new Germany were soon to be built.

For a time the teaching of these four sages, whose lives and work bridged the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, exerted a controlling and overmastering influence upon the German race. It helped more than anything else to nerve and pull together the nation after the humiliations of the Napoleonic era; it created the spirit of self-sacrifice which not only brought Germany out of its troubles, but made the military triumphs of later years possible; it originated the enthusiasm for education which caused Germany to be known as a land of schools; and it is at the heart of everything that is good and wholesome in Germany to-day.

Nevertheless, the national shrines are no longer to be found in the “city of pure reason” in the far east of the Prussian monarchy or in the tranquil garden-house on the banks of the Ilm. A new spirit has entered into the national life. If the first half of the nineteenth century witnessed in Germany the reign of spirit, of ideas, the second half witnessed the reign of matter, of things, and it is this latter sovereignty which is supreme to-day. A century ago Germany was poor in substance but rich in ideals; to-day it is rich in substance, but the old ideals, or at least the old idealism, has gone.

If one would understand how far Germany has drifted from the old moorings, it is only necessary to recall some words of Fichte’s which are strangely unpopular to-day. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, just when Germany was preparing for the last great struggle which was to free it from the grasp of the Western python, no man so truly voiced the national mind and aspiration as Fichte in the eloquent addresses to his people which he uttered from his chair in the University of Berlin, and it is interesting to recall a striking passage in which he specially protested against the view that Germany, the land of thinkers and idealists, could ever indulge materialistic ambitions.

“Equally alien to the German,” he said, “is the ‘freedom of the sea ‘which is so often proclaimed in these days. For centuries during the rivalry of all other nations the German has shown little desire to share this freedom in any great measure, and he will never do so. Nor need he do it. His richly endowed land and his industry afford him all that the cultured man needs for his life; he has no lack of industrial skill; and in order to appropriate to himself the little real gain which international trade yields, viz., the expansion of the scientific knowledge of the earth and its inhabitants, his own scientific spirit will provide him with a means of exchange. Oh, if only happy fate might have preserved the Germans as much from the indirect participation in the booty of the other hemisphere as it did from the direct! If only credulity and the desire to live as finely and respectably as other nations had not made into needs the unnecessary commodities which foreign countries produce, if we by renouncing the less essential needs had created tolerable conditions for our free fellow-citizens, instead of desiring to extract gain from the sweat and blood of the poor slave across the ocean,—then we should not at least have given a pretext for our present fate, and we should not be warred against as buyers and ruined as a market.

“Nearly a decade before any one could foresee what has since happened the Germans were advised to make themselves independent of the world market and to close up their borders as a mercantile State. This proposal went counter to our habits, and especially to our reverence for the coined metals, and was hotly opposed and rejected. Since...