CHAPTER III ATAVISM "From these old-German gloomy times," said Goethe, "we can obtain as little as from the Servian songs, and similar barbaric popular poetry. We can read it and be interested about it for a while, but merely to cast it aside, and let it lie behind us. Generally speaking, a man is quite sufficiently saddened by his own passions and destiny, and need not make himself more so by the darkness of a barbaric past. He needs enlightening and cheering influences, and should therefore turn to those eras in art and literature during which remarkable men obtained perfect culture, so that they were satisfied with themselves, and able to impart to others the blessings of their culture." ECKERMANN, Conversations, October 3, 1828, p. 327. HAT of the German Cain who sud WHA denly arose at the opening of the twentieth century, gigantic, merciless, mad with the purpose of slaying the small and feeble, of subduing the powerful whose spoils he coveted, of shattering the civilization which embodies the cumulative ideals of three thousand years, and of setting up his own civilization in its stead? The Goths and Vandals and Huns who peopled Germany early in the Christian era, were as unqualified Barbarians as Apache Indians. They had an insatiable appetite for war; and this was whetted when they came into conflict with the Romans, because by war alone could they defend themselves and then make their inroads into the crumbling Roman Empire and secure its wealth. Even after they gained the mastery and had mixed their blood freely with that of the decadent peoples which Rome once swayed, they kept to an extraordinary degree the traits which dominated their ancestors when history first describes them. One of those traits, blood-thirstiness, crops out at intervals during all their subsequent annals, as surely as periodic dipsomania recurs to madden its victim. The beheading by Charlemagne of a multitude of Saxons at Verden was one manifestation of it; internecine war, accompanied by incredible horrors and prolonged during thirty years, was another; the devastation of Belgium and of Northeastern /France in 1914 was the latest. At the smell of blood, the Furor Teutonicus, proverbial for its wildness, has always been kindled. Among the German Barbarians a spirit of vassalage also appears in the earliest accounts we have of them. "The chief fights for victory," says Tacitus; "his vassals fight for their chief. If their native state sinks into the sloth of prolonged peace and repose, many of its noble youths voluntarily seek those tribes which are waging some war: both because inaction is odious to their race, and because they win renown more readily in the midst of peril, and cannot maintain a numerous following except by violence and war. . . . Nor are they as easily persuaded to plough the earth and to wait for a year's produce, as to challenge an enemy and earn the honor of wounds. Nay, they actually think it tame and stupid to acquire by the sweat of toil what they might win by their blood." 1 1 Tacitus, Germania, chap. xiv (Church and Brodribb's translation). Far from resenting vassalage, the Germans rejoiced in it: and in due time this spirit developed into Feudalism, the highest political conception which the Teutons have yet been able to devise. Elaborated a thousand years ago, it expressed so clearly, so frankly, so completely the Teutonic ideal, that in spite of changing outward conditions, it reappears today, under different name and outward disguise, as the utmost aim of the Germans. Feudalism classified society into layers as rigidly as the steps of a pyramid rise from the base to the apex: at the bottom, slaves and serfs; at the top, the monarch. Except at the two extremes, the occupants of each layer not only looked up to those above them, but looked down on those beneath; and the satisfaction of looking down more than compensated for the irksomeness of looking up. The only liberty the German really coveted was the liberty of being and doing on his social plane just what every other dweller on that plane was and did. The habit of looking up intensified his innate submissiveness a submissiveness expressed in Feudal terms by the loyalty of man to master, of vassal to lord. When he came to regard the monarch, it was with a reverence, unreasoning and absolute, which worshipers in other lands reserved for the Deity. As the control of the monarch slackened, until it became hardly more than a political theory, the power of his chief vassals increased and they in turn aspired to be absolute monarchs in their several spheres, - princes, dukes, marquises, counts, each holding tenaciously his independence, and each receiving from his subjects the worship they had once paid to the supreme sovereign. Germany was split up into many states, large and small, whose quarrels, whose striving for predominance, whose dynastic rivalries comprise an unedifying history for several centuries. We cannot understand the German Reformation itself if we look upon it simply as the effort of a new religion to supplant an old one: we must |