Here
under follows the transcription of chapter 6 of Houston Stewart Chamberlain's
The
Foundations of the 19th Century, 2nd ed., published by John Lane, The
Bodley Head, 1912.
CONTENTS
|
494
SIXTH CHAPTER
THE ENTRANCE OF THE GERMANIC PEOPLE INTO
THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD
Mon devoir est mon Dieu
suprême. — FREDERICK THE
GREAT. (Letter to Voltaire on
June 12, 1740.)
THE
TERM “GERMANIC“
THE entrance of
the Jew into European history had, as Herder said, signified the entrance
of an alien element — alien to that which Europe had already achieved,
alien to all it was still to accomplish; but it was the very reverse with
the Germanic peoples. This barbarian, who would rush naked to battle, this
savage, who suddenly sprang out of woods and marshes to inspire into a
civilised and cultivated world the terrors of a violent conquest won by
the strong hand alone, was nevertheless the lawful heir of the Hellene
and the Roman, blood of their blood and spirit of their spirit. It was
his own property which he, unwitting, snatched from the alien hand. But
for him the sun of the Indo-European must have set. The Asiatic and African
slave had by assassination wormed his way to the very throne of the Roman
Empire, the Syrian mongrel had made himself master of the law, the Jew
was using the library at Alexandria to adapt Hellenic philosophy to the
Mosaic law, the Egyptian to embalm and bury for boundless ages the fresh
bloom of natural science in the ostentatious pyramids of scientific systematisation;
soon, too, the beautiful flowers of old Aryan life — Indian thought, Indian
poetry — were to be trodden
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under foot by the savage bloodthirsty
Mongolian, and the Bedouin, with his mad delusions bred of the desert,
was to reduce to an everlasting wilderness that garden of Eden, Erania,
in which for centuries all the symbolism of the world had grown; art had
long since vanished; there were nothing but replicas for the rich, and
for the poor the circus: accordingly, to use that expression of Schiller
which I quoted at the beginning of the first chapter, there were no longer
men but only creatures. It was high time for the Saviour to appear. He
certainly did not enter into history in the form in which combining, constructive
reason, if consulted, would have chosen for the guardian angel, the harbinger
of a new day of humanity; but to-day, when a glance back over past centuries
teaches us wisdom, we have only one thing to regret, that the Teuton did
not destroy with more thoroughness, wherever his victorious arm penetrated,
and that as a consequence of his moderation the so-called “Latinising,“
that is, the fusion with the chaos of peoples, once more gradually robbed
wide districts of the one quickening influence of pure blood and unbroken
youthful vigour, and at the same time deprived them of the rule of those
who possessed the highest talents. At any rate it is only shameful indolence
of thought, or disgraceful historical falsehood, that can fail to see in
the entrance of the Germanic tribes into the history of the world the rescuing
of agonising humanity from the clutches of the everlastingly bestial.
If I here use the
word “Germanic,“ I do so, as I have already remarked in the introduction
to this division, for the sake of simplification — a simplification which
expresses the truth, which must otherwise remain veiled. But this expression,
whether taken in the wide or the narrow sense, seems somewhat elastic,
perhaps inadmissible, particularly so because it was late before any people,
at any rate we ourselves, became conscious of such
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a thing as the specifically “Germanic“
character. There never has been a people that called itself “Germanic,“
and never — from their first appearance on the stage of history to the
present day — have the whole of the Germanic peoples unitedly opposed themselves
to the non-Germanic; on the contrary, from the beginning we find them continually
at feud with one another, displaying towards no one such hostility as towards
their own blood. During Christ‘s lifetime Inguiomer betrays his nearest
relative, the great Hermann, to the Marcomanni, and thereby hinders the
process of union among the northern tribes and the total destruction of
the Roman; Tiberius already could recommend no safer policy to adopt with
the Germans than to “leave them to their own internal quarrels“; all the
great wars of the following age, with the exception of the Crusades, were
wars between Germanic princes; the same thing holds in the main for the
nineteenth century. But a foreigner had at once recognised the uniformity
of the various tribes, and instead of the indistinguishable babel of names,
Chatti, Chanki, Cheruski, Gambrivii, Suevi, Vendales, Goti, Marcomanni,
Lugii, Langobardi, Sachsi, Frisii, Hermunduri, &c., he had created
for the luxuriant offshoots of this strong race the uniform comprehensive
term “Germanic,“ and that because his eye had at the first glance discerned
their common stock. Tacitus, after growing tired of enumerating names,
says, “the physical characteristics of all these men are the same“; this
was the correct empiric basis for the second and correct judgment, “I am
convinced that the various tribes of Germania, unpolluted by marriages
with alien peoples, have from time immemorial been a special, unmixed people,
resembling itself alone“ (Germania 4). It is peculiar how much more
clearly the stranger, who is not biased by details, sees the great connection
of phenomena, than the man who is directly interested in them!
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But to-day it is
not merely bias which prevents us from using the word “Germanic“ in its
geographical and racial sense with the simplicity of Tacitus: those “various
Germanic stems“ which he regarded as an unmixed, comparatively uniform
people have, since his day, like their predecessors, the Hellenes, entered
into all kinds of unions among each other, and only a portion remains “unpolluted
by marriages with strange peoples“; moreover in consequence of the great
migrations, they have been subjected to particular cultural influences,
resulting from geographical position, climatic conditions, the standard
of civilisation among the nearest neighbours, and so forth. That alone
would have sufficed to break up any unity. But the state of things becomes
still more confused when we supplement the teaching of political history,
on the one hand by more minute, comparative researches in the department
of national psychology, philosophy and the history of art, and on the other
by the results of the prehistoric and anthropological investigations of
the last fifty years. For then we see that we may and must give a much
wider meaning to the word “Germanic“ than Tacitus did, but at the same
time we notice necessary limitations of which he, with the defective knowledge
of his time, could not have dreamt. To understand our past and our present,
we must follow the example of Tacitus, and like him, collect material and
sift it, but upon the broader basis of our modern knowledge. It is only
by the exact definition of a new term “Germanic“ that our study of the
entrance of these peoples into history acquires practical worth. It is
the object of this chapter to give such a descriptive definition as briefly
as may be. How far does the stem-relationship extend? Where do we meet
“Arya“ (i.e., those who belong to the friends)? Where do we first
find the alien element, which, according to Goethe, we “must not tolerate“?
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EXTENSION
OF THE IDEA
I have said that we
must give the expression “Germanic“ a wider and at the same time a narrower
signification than that of Tacitus. Both the extension and the narrowing
are the results of historical and anthropological considerations.
The expression is
widened by the knowledge that no clear distinction can be drawn physically
and mentally between the “German“ of Tacitus and his predecessor in history,
the “Celt,“ or his successor whom we are wont even more audaciously to
sum up as the “Slav.“ In view of their physical characteristics the scientist
would not hesitate to look upon these three races as varieties of a common
stock. The Gauls who in the year 389 B.C. conquered Rome answer exactly
to the description which Tacitus gives of the Germanic race: “bright blue
eyes, reddish hair, tall figures“; and, on the other hand, the skulls which
have been found in the graves of the oldest heroic Slavonic ages have shown
to the astonishment of the whole scientific world that the Slavs from the
time of the migrations were just as distinctly dolichocephalous (i.e.,
long-skulled) and as tall as the other Germanic tribes of that time and
those of pure race to-day. * Moreover, Virchow‘s comprehensive investigations
into the colour of hair and of eyes have revealed the fact that the Slavs
were originally and still are in certain districts just as fair as the
Germanic races. Quite apart, therefore, from the general conception “Indo-European,“
which is a mere theoretical and hypothetical term, it appears that we have
every reason for considerably extending the idea “Germanic“ which we
* Cf.
the summary in Ranke: Der Mensch, 2nd ed. ii. 297. It is not possible
that these excavations revealed facts limited to the Norman Waregians,
since the investigations embrace subjects from the most various places,
not only in Russia, but also in Germany.
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have got from Tacitus and which we have
hitherto for philological reasons been inclined to make narrower and narrower.
*
THE
CELT
Let us speak first
of the Celts.
Misled chiefly by
philological considerations, the Celtic languages being supposed to be
more nearly related to the Italian and Greek than to the Germanic, we have
been used to overlook the very decisive physical, and still more decisive
moral influence. † We group the Celt with the Graeco-Italians, with whom
he is manifestly only distantly connected, while he is intimately related
to the Germanic peoples. Though the completely Romanised Gaul may have
presented a direct contrast to his conqueror, the Burgundian or Frank,
yet that original conqueror of Rome, indeed even the later Gaul who had
been settled for centuries in Northern Italy,
* In
consequence the anthropologists of to-day use the expression homo europaeus
(see p. 373) in a much
more definite sense than Linnaeus had done; but such a nomenclature is
much too abstract for the historian, who has therefore hitherto taken no
notice of it. In order to awaken intelligent interest in wide circles,
one must employ the existing, well-known terminology and suit it to new
needs. This is here done by widening the idea “Germanic,“ a procedure which
will justify itself step by step in the course of this work; it is only
by this that the history of the last two thousand years and especially
of the nineteenth century becomes intelligible. That Celts, Slavs and Teutons
are descended from a single pure stock may to-day be regarded as certain
in the light of anthropology and ancient history. (Cf. the final
summary of Dr. G. Beck; Der Urmensch, Basel, 1899, p. 46 f.). In
addition we have historical evidence of the mutual mixing of these different
stems. Thus, for instance, H. d‘Arbois de Jubainville, Professor at the
Collège de France, arrives in his book Les Celtes, 1904,
at the conclusion: Il y a probablement en Allemagne plus de sang Gaulois
qu‘en France.
† Schleicher,
for instance, in his famous, universally copied genealogy of the Indo-Germanic
languages (cf. Die Deutsche Sprache, 1861, p. 82) makes one group
of the Italo-Celtic languages, which he thinks branched off in very early
times from the “North European mother tongue“; also such divergent views
as the well-known “wave-theory“ of Johannes Schmidt continue to represent
the Celt as if he were the furthest removed of all Indo-Europeans from
the Germanic peoples.
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and whom Florus still describes as “superhuman“
(corpora plus quam humana erant, ii. 4) clearly resembles the Teuton
physically; but not only physically, for his love of wandering, his delight
in war, which leads him (as the Goths at a later time) even to Asia in
the service of any master who gives him an opportunity of fighting, his
love of song... all these things are essential features of this same relationship,
whereas one would be at a loss to prove the points of connection with the
Graeco-Italians. The Germanic peoples in the narrower, Tacitean sense of
the word enter history for the first time * mixed with Celts and led by
Celts; the word “Germanic“ is Celtic. Do we not still meet those tall figures
with blue eyes and reddish hair in North-West Scotland, in Wales, &c.,
and are they not more like a Teuton than a Southern European? Do we not
yet see how the Bretons as daring mariners rival the feats of the old Norsemen?
But no less an authority than Julius Caesar has told us, in the first chapter
of the first book of his Gallic War, how this wild Celto-Germanic mind
becomes everywhere gradually effeminate through contact with Roman civilisation.
†
More striking and
more decisive for my theory is the relationship of Celt and Teuton in the
deeper mental qualities. History gives us ample proof of this, of the relationship
of those finer features that make up individuality. Are we to believe —
to dive deeply into the subject — that it is an accident that St. Paul‘s
epistle on redemption by faith, on the gospel of freedom (in contrast to
the
* At
the invasion of the Cimbri and Teutons, 114 B.C.
† Regarding
the physical identity of Celts and Germanic peoples Professor Gabriel de
Mortillet has lately collected such comprehensive material, anthropological
facts, as well as the testimonies of old Roman writers, that it is sufficient
if I refer to his Formation de la nation française, 1897
(p. 114 f.). His final words are “La caractéristique des deux
groupes est donc exactement la même et s‘applique aussi bien au groupe
qui a reçu le nom de Gaulois (synonymous with Celts, see
p. 92) qu‘au groupe qui depuis les invasions des Cimbres a pris le nom
de Germains“.
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“slavish yoke“ of the Church law), on
the importance of religion as not consisting in works but in regeneration
“to a new creature“ — was addressed to the Galatians, those “Gallic Greeks“
of Asia Minor who had remained almost pure Celts — an epistle in which
we seem to hear a Martin Luther speaking to Germans credulous indeed but
yet incomparably gifted for understanding the deepest mysteries? * I for
my part do not believe that there is any room for chance in such matters;
I believe it all the less in this case, because I notice in what a different
way the same man speaks, what endless roundabout paths he chooses when
teaching the same truths to a community of Jews and the children of the
chaos of peoples, as in the Epistle to the Romans. But our judgment
does not rest merely on such a hypothetical basis, nor does it rest solely
upon the relationship between old Celtic and old Germanic mythical religion,
but upon observation of the relationship between the mental qualities generally,
to which the whole cultured history of Europe up to the present day testifies
— wherever the Celt has kept his blood pure. Thus, for example, we find
in the genuinely Celtic parts of Ireland in former times — taking the five
hundred years from the Celt Scotus Erigena to the Celt Dons Scotus — splendid
theologians with high philosophical gifts, whose independence of thought
and keen desire to investigate brought upon them the persecution of the
Roman Church; in the heart of Bretagne was born that intellectual pioneer
Peter Abelard, and let it be carefully noted that what distinguishes him,
like those others, is not merely independent thought and striving after
freedom, but above all the holy earnestness of his life, a thoroughly “Germanic
quality.“ These Celtic minds of former centuries, teeming
* Mommsen
testifies that Galatia was “a Celtic island amidst the floods of the Eastern
peoples,“ in which even the Celtic language maintained itself for a long
time: Roman History, 3rd ed. v. 311 f.
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with strength, are not merely free,
and not merely pious, any more than the Breton seaman of to-day, but they
are both free and pious, and it is this very combination that expresses
what is specifically “Germanic,“ as we observe it from Charlemagne and
King Alfred to Cromwell and Queen Louise, from the daring anti-Roman troubadours
and the Minnesingers so politically independent, to Schiller and Richard
Wagner. And when we see, for example, Abelard contending from profound
religious conviction against the sale of indulgences (Theologia Christiana),
and at the same time putting the Hellenes in every respect far above the
Jews, declaring the morals of their philosophers to be superior to the
Jewish sanctity of law, Plato‘s view of life more sublime than that of
Moses — yes, when we actually find him in his Dialogus inter philosophum,
Judaeum et Christianum, making the recognition of the transcendental
ideality of the conception of space the basis of religious thought, so
that man stands directly before God‘s countenance not by entering into
an empirical heaven but solely by an inner conversion of mind: are we not
forced to recognise that this mind is characteristically Indo-European
in contrast to the Semitic and the late Roman, and that, moreover, an individuality
here reveals itself, which in every single one of those plis de la pensée
(of which I spoke in the previous
chapter) betrays the specifically Germanic character? I do not say
German but Germanic character, and I am not speaking of to-day, when differentiation
has led to the formation of very clearly defined national characters, but
of a man who lived almost a thousand years ago; and I assert that so far
as the whole tendency of his thought and feeling is concerned this Breton
might right well have been born in the heart of Germania. A typical Celt
in the gloomy passionateness of his nature, a new Tristan in his love,
he is flesh of our flesh and blood of our Teutonic blood; he is Germanic.
Just as Germanic
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as these so-called “pure German“ populations
of Swabia and the Black Forest, the home of Schiller, Mozart and many others
of the greatest of Germany‘s sons, who owe their peculiar character and
uncommon poetical gifts to the strong admixture of Celtic blood. * We recognise
this same spirit of Abelard at work wherever it can be proved that the
Celts were present in large numbers, as in the home of the unfortunate
Albigenses in the South of France, or as they still are in the homeland
of the Methodists, Wales. We recognise it also in the so-called typically
Catholic country Bretagne, for Catholicism and Protestantism are, after
all, mere words; the religiosity of the Breton is genuine, but in its colour
it is really “heathen“ rather than Christian; primeval popular religion
lived on here under the mask of Catholicism; moreover, who would not see
in the ineradicable loyalty of this people to the throne a Germanic characteristic
which is just as common as the love of war and loyalty to the flag among
the Irish, who in politics agitate against England, but at the same time
voluntarily furnish a large proportion of the English Army, and go abroad
to die for the same alien king, to whom they are so hostile at home? But
the close relationship between Celts and Germanic peoples (in the narrower
sense of the word) reveals itself most strikingly in their poetry. From
the first Frankish, German and English poetry were closely allied to genuine
Celtic, not that the former people did not possess motives of their own,
but they adopted the Celtic ones as being originally akin to them, and
in these there is a something strange, something not quite understood,
because half-forgotten, which lends them increased piquancy and charm.
Celtic poetry is incomparably profound, inexhaustibly rich in symbolical
meaning; it was manifestly in its far distant origin intimately connected
* Wilhelm
Henke: Der Typus des germanischen Menschen (Tübingen, 1895).
Similarly Treitschke: Politik i. 279.
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with music, the soul of our Germanic
poetry. If we examine the works which were written when the poetic impulse
once more awoke to life, about the turn of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries,
in all Germanic lands, but above all in the lands of the Franks — when
we on the one hand consider the Geste de Charlemagne, the Rolandslied,
the Berte aus grans piès, Ogier le Danois &c., all independent
efforts of Frankish imaginative power, and on the other hand see Celtic
poetry live again in the legends of the Queste du Graal, Artus‘ Tafelrunde,
Tristan und Isolde, Parzival, &c., we cannot for a moment doubt
where the deeper, richer, more genuine and poetically inexhaustible wealth
of imagination and thought is to be found. And this Celtic poetry of the
thirteenth century was at a disadvantage, since it appeared not in its
own form, but robbed of the wings of song, expanded to romance form, quickened
with knightly, Roman and Christian beliefs, its genuine poetical kernel
almost as much obscured by alien accrescences as the Norse myths in the
German Nibelungenlied. The further back we go, the more clearly
do we recognise — in spite of all individual differences — the intimate
relationship between old Celtic and old Germanic poetical tendency; from
stage to stage backwards something is lost, so that, for example, although
Gottfried‘s Tristan as a poem undoubtedly surpasses the French versions
of the same subject, yet several of the deepest and finest traits, upon
which this incomparable, poetical, mythical and symbolical legend is based,
are lacking in it, while the old French romance possesses them and Chrestien
de Troyes had at least given a suggestion of them; the same is true of
Wolfram‘s Parzival. * But this relationship reveals itself most
convincingly and impressively when we see that in reality it was only
* In
this place I have used the results of some of my own studies (cf.Notes
sur Parsifal and Notes sur Tristan in the Revue Wagnérienne,
1886 and 1887).
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German music that was able to awaken
to new life the old Celtic and old Germanic poetry in their original intention
and significance; this we have learnt from the artistic achievements of
the nineteenth century, which at the same time revealed the close relationship
between both these sources.
THE
GERMANIC SLAV
Of the genuine Slav
there is less to be said, since we are at a loss where to look for him,
and are sure of only one thing, that in his case there has been a transformation
of the type, so that the thick-set body, round head, high cheek-bones,
dark hair, which we to-day consider to be typically Slavonic, were certainly
not characteristics of the Slav at the time when he entered European history.
But even to-day the fair type predominates in the north and east of European
Russia, and the Pole, too, is distinguished from the southern Slav by the
colour of his skin (Virchow). In Bosnia one is struck with the tallness
of the men and the prevalence of fair hair. The so-called Slavonic type
which merges into the Mongolian I have not once met in a journey of several
months across that country, any more than the characteristic “potato-face“
of the Czech peasant; the same may be said of the splendid race of the
Montenegrins. * In spite, therefore, of the universal prejudice, there
are, as we see, enough physical indications that the Germanic man, when
he entered history, had, in addition to an elder brother in
* On
the other hand the shape of the skull has undergone a gradual change: among
the present inhabitants of Bosnia we find not quite 1½ per cent.
of long heads, while there are, on the other hand, 84 per cent. of distinctly
round heads; the oldest graves show 29 per cent. of long heads and 34 per
cent. of round ones, and graves from the time of the Middle Ages 21 per
cent. of long heads. (See Weisbach: Altbosnische Schädel,
in the Mitteilungen der anthropologischen Gesellschaft in Wien,
1897.) It is interesting to hear that the formation of the face, in spite
of the change of skull, has remained “leptoprosop,“ i.e., long in
shape.
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the west, a younger in the east who
was not so very unlike himself. But on the other hand it is exceedingly
difficult to unravel the confused skein of what was originally Slavonic,
owing to the manifest fact that this branch of the Germanic family was
at a very early time almost completely destroyed by other tribes, much
earlier and more thoroughly and more mysteriously than the Celts; but this
fact should not deter us from recognising and admitting the related features
and attempting to sift them out from the mass of what is alien.
But here again our
best help will lie in searching the depths of the soul. If I may judge
from the one Slavonic language of which I have a slight knowledge, the
Servian, I should be inclined to think that a strong family resemblance
in poetical gifts to the Celts and Germanic peoples could be proved. The
heroic cycle which celebrates the great battle of Kossovopolje (1383),
but which beyond doubt goes further back in its poetical motives, reminds
one of Celtic and Germanic lyric and epic poetry by the sentiments to which
it gives utterance — loyalty unto death, heroic courage, heroic women,
as well as the high respect which these enjoy, the contempt for all possessions
in comparison with personal honour. I read in histories of literature that
such poems, and heroic figures like Marco Kraljevich are common to all
popular poetry; but this is not true, and can only appear so to one whose
excess of learning has blinded him to the fine features of individuality.
Rama is an essentially different hero from Achilles, and he, again, quite
different from Siegfried; while on the other hand the Celtic Tristan betrays
in many features direct relationship to the German Siegfried, and that
not merely in the external ornaments of the knightly romance (fights with
dragons, &c.), which may to some extent be a later addition, but rather
in those old, popular creations where Tristan is still a shepherd and Siegfried
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not yet a hero at the Burgundian Court.
It is here that we see clearly that, apart from extraordinary strength
and the magic charm of invincibility and more such general attributes of
heroes, definite ideals form the basis of the poems; and it is in these,
not in the former, that the character of a people is reflected. So it is
in the case of Tristan and Siegfried: loyalty as the basis of the idea
of honour, the significance of maidenhood, victory in downfall (in other
words, the true heroism centred in the inner motive, not in the outward
success). Such features distinguish a Siegfried, a Tristan, a Parzival
not only from a Semitic Samson whose heroism lies in his hair, but equally
from the more closely related Achilles. Purity is strange to the Hellenes;
faith is not a principle of honour, but only of love (Patroclos); the hero
defies death; he does not overcome it, as we can say of the heroes of whom
we have spoken. These are just the traits of true relationship which, in
spite of all divergences of form, I find in Servian poetry. The fact alone
that their heroic cycle groups itself around, not a victory, but a greet
defeat, the fatal battle of Kossovo, is of great significance; for the
Servians have won victories enough and had been under Stephan Duschan a
powerful State. Here, then, beyond question we find a special tendency
of character, and we may with certainty conclude that the rich store of
such poetical motives — all referring to destruction, death, everlasting
separation of lovers — did not spring up only after that unfortunate battle
and under the brutalising rule of Mohammedanism, but is an old legacy,
exactly as the Fate of the Nibelungs, “aller Leid Ende,“ and not the Fortune
of the Nibelungs, was the German legacy, and exactly as Celtic and Frankish
poets neglected a hundred famous victors to sing of the obscure conquered
Roland, and to let primitive poetical inspiration once more live through
him, in a half-historical new youth. Such things tell their tale. And just
as decisive
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is the peculiar way in which woman is
represented among the Servians — so delicate, brave and chaste — also the
very great part which poetry assigns to her. On the other hand, only a
specialist can decide whether the two ravens that fly up over Kossovo at
the end of the battle, to proclaim to the Servian people its downfall,
are related to Wotan‘s ravens, or whether we have here a general Indo-Germanic
motive, a relic of the nature myths, a case of borrowing, a coincidence.
And so, too, in reference to a thousand details. But fortunately here,
as everywhere, the element that is really important is manifest to every
unbiased observer. In Russian poetry we seem to find little but legends,
fairy tales and songs of the olden time; but here too the melancholy on
the one hand and on the other the intimate relation to nature, particularly
to the animal world (Bodenstedt: Poetische Ukraine), are unmistakably
Germanic.
It is not my intention
to carry this investigation further; want of space as well as my plan forbids
me. Let criticism put to the test the truth of what unerring feeling will
reveal to every one who has the sense of poetry; that is the critic‘s duty.
I must, however, mention the second manifestation of the soul-life by which
the Germanic element in the Slav clearly reveals itself — Religion.
In whatever direction
we glance, we behold the Slav, especially in early times, distinguished
by earnestness and independence in religious matters. And one of the principal
features of this religiosity is the fact that it is saturated with patriotic
feelings. As early as the ninth century, even before the parting between
east and west had taken place for ever, we see the Bulgarians in the interest
of questions of dogma maintaining equally friendly relations with Rome
and with Constantinople. What they demand is solely the recognition of
the independence of their Church; Rome refuses it, Byzantium
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grants it. And thus in the first half
of the tenth century is founded the first Christian Church which has an
independent constitution. * The immense importance of such an event must
be immediately manifest to every one. With Michael of Bulgaria it was no
question of divergences of faith; he was a Christian, and ready to believe
everything that the priests proclaimed as Christian truth. In his case
it was solely a question of constitution; he wanted to see his Bulgarian
Church managed by a Bulgarian Patriarch with complete independence; no
Prince of the Church in Rome or Byzantium should interfere. This may seem
to many to be merely an administrative question, but in reality it is the
rising of the Germanic spirit of free individuality against the last incorporation
of the imperium which was born of the chaos, and represented the anti-national,
anti-individual and levelling principle. This is not the place to enter
more fully into this subject; that can be done only in the two following
chapters. But when we encounter the same process everywhere among the Slavs,
we cannot deny its significance as a symptom to aid our judgment of their
original character. No sooner had the Servians established their kingdom
than they made for themselves an autonomous Church; and the great Czar
Stephan Duschan defended his patriarch against the suzerain pretensions
of the Byzantine Church and forced the latter to recognise him legally.
There, too, it was not a matter of faith; for at that time (the middle
of the fourteenth century) the schism between Rome and Constantinople was
a fact of long standing and the Servians were already as they are to-day,
fanatically orthodox members of the Greek Church; but just as the Bulgarians
resisted the interference of Rome, so the Servians resisted that of Constantinople.
The principle is the same — the maintenance of nationality. The Russian
Church certainly took much
* Cf.
Hergenröther: Photius ii. 614.
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longer to free itself; indeed only long
after the destruction of the Byzantine Empire did it do so. But Russia
can only in a very qualified and un-Germanic sense be called a Slavonic
land, and yet it and England are the only pre-eminent nations of modern
Europe that possess an absolutely national Church with a national head.
It is, further, a specially striking fact that the Slavs are the only Christians
(with the exception of the Czechs, who are subject to German influence)
who have never tolerated divine service in any language but their own!
The great “Slavonic apostles“ Cyrillus and Methodius had trouble on this
account; though persecuted by the German prelates who clung to the “three
sacred languages“ (Greek, Latin, Hebrew), though denounced as heretics
by the Roman Pope, they yet succeeded in gaining this point as a special
right: the strictly Roman Catholic Slavs had also their Slavonic Mass,
and even in the last years of the nineteenth century Rome had not succeeded
in wresting this privilege from the Dalmatians. But all this forms only
one side of Slavonic religion, the external (though hardly external in
reality); the other side is still more striking. In Russia, in those parts
where we find the greatest percentage of genuine Slavs (that is in Little
Russia, the home of that beautiful poetry which I have alluded to above),
there manifests itself to-day by the never-ceasing formation of sects an
intensive inner religious life similar to that of Würtemberg and Scandinavia.
The relationship is striking. Of this in the so-called “Latin“ countries
there is no trace. It is in such matters that the inmost nature of the
soul is reflected. And here, too, it is a question of a lasting quality,
which asserted itself in every century despite all blood-mixtures. The
extreme trouble experienced in converting the Slavs to Christianity is
a testimony to their deeply religious nature: Italians and Gauls were the
easiest to convert, Saxons could be won only by the power of the sword,
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but it took long years and fearful cruelties
to make the Slavs give up the faith of their fathers. * The notorious persecutions
of the heathen lasted, in fact, to the century of Gutenberg. Very characteristic
is the attitude here also of those genuine, still almost pure Slavs in
Bosnia and Herzogovina. At an earlier period the influential part of the
nation adopted the doctrines of Bogumil (allied to those of the Catharists
or Patarenes); that is, they rejected everything Jewish in Christianity
and retained besides the New Testament only the Prophets and the Psalms,
they recognised no sacraments and above all no priesthood. Though unceasingly
opposed, oppressed and crushed from two sides simultaneously — by the orthodox
Servians and the Hungarians who obeyed every sign of the Roman Pope — though
they were thus the bloody victims of a double and continuous crusade, this
little people nevertheless clung to its faith for centuries; the graves
of the heroic followers of Bogumil still adorn the peaks of the hills,
to which the corpses were borne to avoid the danger of desecration. It
was the Mohammedans who, by forcible conversion, first did away with this
sect. The same spirit, which animated a brave but ignorant people in a
remote corner of the earth, in other places bore richer fruits, whereby
the Slavonic branch distinguished itself just as much as the other branches
of the Germanic family.
THE
REFORMATION
The most important
event in the nineteen centuries that have passed is undoubtedly the so-called
“Reformation“: at the bottom of it there is a double principle, a national
and a religious; common to both is the freeing
* The
first division of the sixth book of Neander‘s Allgemeine Geschichte
der Christlichen Religion und Kirche shows how difficult it was to
convert the Wends and Poles to Christianity.
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from the alien yoke, the shaking off
of that “dead hand“ of the extinct Roman Empire, which stretched not only
over the goods and money, but also over the thoughts and feelings and faith
and hope of humanity. Nowhere does the organic unity of Slavonic Germanicism
manifest itself more convincingly than in this revolt against Rome. To
understand this movement from the standpoint of national psychology, one
must, to begin with, pay no attention to any dogmatic disputes concerning
creed; it is not what people consider the truth in regard to the nature
of the Communion that is important, it is a question solely of two directly
contradictory principles, freedom and slavery. The greatest of the reformers
points out that so far as he is concerned he is not contending for political
rights, and he goes on to say, “but in spirit and conscience we are of
all men the most independent: here we believe no one, trust no one, fear
no one, but Christ alone.“ This signifies the freeing of the individual
as well as of the nation. And when we have thus learned that the “Reformation“
should be regarded not as a purely ecclesiastical affair but as a revolt
of our whole nature against alien rule, of the Germanic soul against un-Germanic
spiritual tyranny, we must at the same time admit that the “reform“ began
as soon as the Germanic peoples by culture and leisure had awakened to
consciousness, and that this revolt still goes on. * Scotus Erigena (in
the ninth century) is a reformer, since he refuses to obey the commands
of Rome, and prefers to die by the dagger of the assassin than give up
an iota of his “freedom of mind and conscience“; Abelard in the eleventh
century is a reformer, since with all his orthodoxy he refuses to be deprived
of the freedom of his religious conceptions and attacks in addition the
administration of the Roman Church, the
* The
anthropologist Lapouge says in his purely scientific definition of the
Homo
europaeus: „en religion il est protestant.“ See Dépopulation
de la France, p. 79.
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sale of indulgences, &c.; and in
exactly the same way such lights of the Catholic Church as Döllinger
and Reusch in the nineteenth century are reformers; not a single dogmatic
question separated them from Rome, except the one question, freedom. In
this momentous movement not only the Germanic peoples in the narrower sense
of the word, not only the Celts, but also the Slavs distinguished themselves.
What I said in the last paragraph about their refusing to permit alien
interference in their Church administration, and their regarding the mother
tongue as their most sacred legacy, should be repeated here; both signify
the denial of the essential principles of Rome. But these endeavours were
more deeply rooted; in the depth of their hearts it was a question of religion,
not merely of nation. And as soon as the Reformation had gained a strong
hold — which happened first in distant England — the Slavonic Catholics
crowded to Oxford, drawn thither by the affinity of the most sacred feelings.
It is quite certain that without the great Martin Luther the Reformation
would never have become what it did — our most modern historians may say
what they like, nature knows no greater power than that of one great strong
man — but the soil on which this German could develop his full strength,
the atmosphere in which alone his cause could prosper, were primarily the
creations of Bohemia and of England. * Even a hundred years before the
birth of Luther every third man in England was an anti-Papist, and Wyclif‘s
translation of the Bible was known throughout the whole land. Bohemia did
not lag behind; already in the thirteenth century the New Testament was
read in the Czech language, and at the beginning of the fifteenth century
Hus edited the complete Bible in the language of the people. But the most
quickening influence was
* Luther
writes to Spalatin, February 1520: „Vide monstra, quaeso, in quae venimus
sine duce et doctore Bohemico.“
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that of Wyclif; he was the first to
open the eyes of the Slavs to evangelic truth, so that Hieronymus of Prague
could say of him: “Hitherto we have had only the shell, Wyclif has revealed
the kernel.“ * We get an altogether false idea of the Slavonic reformation
if we direct attention principally to Hus and the Hussite wars; the predominance
of political combinations, as well as of the enmity between Czechs and
Germans from that time forth confused men‘s minds and obscured the pure
object of their endeavour which at first had been so clear. Even a hundred
years before Hus lived Milic, who, though an orthodox Catholic and disinclined
by his interest in practical ministry to all speculation concerning dogma,
invented the expression Antichrist for the Roman Church; in the prison
at Rome he wrote his treatise, De Antichristo, in which he shows
that the Antichrist will not come in the future, but is already there,
he is heaping up “clerical“ riches, buying prebends and selling sacraments.
Mathias von Janow then expands this thought and thus paves the way for
the real theological Reformation; he certainly champions the one sacred
Church, but it must be thoroughly purified and built up anew: “It remains
for us now only to wish that the Reformation may be made possible by the
destruction of the Antichrist; let us raise our heads, for salvation is
already near at hand!“ (1389). He is followed by Stanislaus von Znaim,
who defends before the University of Prague the forty-five theses of Wyclif;
Hus, who makes a clear distinction between the “Apostolic“ and the “Papal“
and declares that he will obey the former, but the latter only in as far
as it agrees with the Apostolic; Nikolaus von Welenowic, who denies the
position of the priests as privileged intercessors with God; Hieronymus,
that splendid knight and martyr, who moved even the indifferent Papal secretary
Poggio, who was more interested in Hellenic
* Neander,
ix. 314.
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literature than in Christianity and
chiefly known as a collector and editor of obscene anecdotes, to utter
the words, “O what a man, worthy of immortal fame!“ And many others. Clearly
we have not the achievement of a single, perhaps erratic mind in all this;
on the contrary it is the soul of a nation — at least everything that was
genuine and noble in that people — that expresses itself. lt is well known
what fate overcame this noble section, how it was wiped off the face of
the earth. The Pope and the Roman bishops had bribed the army of international
mercenaries, and from them it received its death-blow at the White Mountain.
* Nor is it a question of a Czech idiosyncrasy; the other Catholic Slavs
adopted exactly the same attitude. Thus, for example, the hymns of Wyclif
were printed in the first Polish printing-press; Poland sent to the Council
of Trent bishops whose sympathies were so distinctly Protestant that the
Pope accused them before the king of being rabid heretics. But the Polish
Parliament was not intimidated; it demanded from the King a complete reorganisation
of the Polish Church upon the one basis of the Holy Scriptures. At the
same time it demanded — mirabile dictu! — the “equal rights of all
sects.“ The nobility of Poland and all the intellectual aristocracy were
Protestant. But the Jesuits profited by the political confusion, which
soon arose, to gain a firm footing in the land, and they were supported
by France and Austria; the process was not “bloody and speedy,“ as Canisius
had demanded, but the Protestants were nevertheless persecuted more and
more cruelly and finally banished; with the downfall of its religion the
Polish nation also fell. †
* Döllinger:
Das
Haus Wittelsbach, Akad. Vorträge i. 38.
† Read
the exceedingly interesting work of Count Valerian Krasinski: Geschichte
des Ursprungs, Fortschritts und Verfalls der Reformation in Polen,
Leipzig, 1841. Nowhere else, perhaps, is to be found so complete, abundant,
convincing and perfectly treated material as in Poland, to see how religious
intolerance and especially the influence of the Jesuits completely ruined
a land which was advancing
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As these facts are
not universally known, I have had to emphasise them in some detail, sufficiently,
I hope, to pave the way for the conviction that the genuine Teuton, the
genuine Celt, and the genuine Slav are originally and intimately related.
At the moment when these races enter history, we do not find three ethnical
souls side by side, but one uniform soul. Though the Celts have in many
places, but not everywhere as I have shown above, undergone such physical
changes by assimilating Virchow‘s hypothetical “Pre-Celts“ and elements
from the Latin chaos of peoples, that the so-called Celt of to-day is the
very contrary of the original Celtic type; though a like fate may, to a
still more regrettable degree, have overtaken the tall fair Slavs, who
remind us of Norsemen, yet throughout the centuries we have seen the working
of that distinct and thoroughly individual spirit, which I unhesitatingly
call the Germanic, because the genuine Teuton, in the usual, limited sense
of the word,
towards a brilliant future
in every intellectual and industrial sphere. We can best see the attitude
of the Poles to Rome before the time of Luther in the speech delivered
by Johann Ostrorog in the assembly of the States in the year 1459, in which
he said, “We cannot object to the recommending of this land as a Catholic
one to the protection of the Pope, but it is unbecoming to promise him
unbounded obedience. The King of Poland is subject to no one, and only
God is over him; he is not the vassal of Rome... &c. &c.“; then
he inveighs against the shameless simony of the Papal stool, the sale of
indulgences, the greed of the priests and monks, &c. (see p.
36 ff.). This whole Polish movement is, like the Bohemian, distinguished
by a fresh breath of independence and national feeling and at the same
time indifference to and depreciation of dogmatic questions (the Poles
never were Utraquists); and (just as in Bohemia) it is born Germans who
contend for Rome and gain the victory over religious and political freedom.
Hosen (Cardinal Hosius) — the man who sends Cardinal de Guise a letter
of congratulation on the murder of Admiral Coligny and who “thanks God
for the great gift that France has received through the night of St. Bartholomew
and prays that God may look upon Poland with equal mercy“ — this same Hosen
is at the head of the anti-national reaction, he introduces the Jesuits
into the land, he forbids the reading of Holy Scripture, he teaches that
the subject has absolutely no rights in reference to his prince, &c.
If such a man is Germanic, and those champions of freedom are not, then
this name is purely and simply a term of reproach.
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in spite of all blood crossings, preserved
this spirit in its purest and therefore most powerful form. This is not
hair-splitting but a question of historical insight in the widest sense;
I have no intention of putting down to the Germanic races, or indeed to
the German, achievements which they did not accomplish, or of assigning
to them fame which belongs to others. On the contrary, I wish to call to
life again the feeling for the great northern brotherhood, and that, too,
without binding myself to any racial or prehistoric hypothesis whatever,
but solely by relying upon what is clear to every eye. I do not even postulate
the blood-relationship; indeed I believe in it, but I am too well aware
of the extreme complexity of this problem, I see too clearly that the true
progress of science has here chiefly consisted in the discovery of our
boundless ignorance and the inadequacy of all hypotheses hitherto formulated,
to have any desire on my own part to continue building new castles in the
air, when every genuine scientist is beginning to keep silence. “Everything
is simpler than we can think, and at the same time more complicated than
we can comprehend,“ as Goethe says. In the meantime we have met with relations
in spirit, in sentiment and physical form: that may satisfy us. We have
a definite something in hand, and since this something is not a definition,
but consists of living men, I refer the reader to the study of the real
Celts, Teutons and Slavs, that he may learn what is the true Germanic character.
LIMITATIONS
OF THE NOTION
I think I have now
shown what is to be understood by the necessary extension of the idea;
but in what does the limitation which I described as equally necessary
consist? Here, too, the answer will be twofold, referring to physical qualities
on the one hand, to intellectual
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on the other; but fundamentally these
two things are really manifestations of the same thing.
The physical consideration
must not be undervalued; indeed it would perhaps be difficult to over-estimate
it. I have tried to show the reason, in the discussion of the race question
in the previous chapter but one; besides this fact is one of those which
mere instinct — that thin silken thread of connection with the tissue of
nature — lets us directly feel, without learned proof. For just as the
dissimilarity of human individuals can be read in their physiognomy, so
the dissimilarity of human races can be read in the structure of their
bones, the colour of their skin, their muscular system and the formation
of their skull; there is perhaps not a single anatomical fact upon which
race has not impressed its special distinguishing stamp. As is well known,
even our nose, this organ of ours which has grown rigid and frostily motionless
and which, according to certain followers of Darwin, is on the way to even
greater monumentalisation by complete ossification — even our nose, which
in city life to-day is a dispenser of discomforts rather than of joys,
a mere burdensome appendage, stands from the cradle to the grave in the
centre of our countenance as a witness to our race! We must therefore,
in the first place, strongly emphasise the fact that these North Europeans
— the Celts, Teutons and Slavs — were physically different from the other
Indo-Europeans, distinguished from the Southern Europeans in stature, “and
like to themselves only,“ * but we must at once make the first limitation
here, namely, that whoever does not possess these physical characteristics,
no matter though he were born in the very heart of Germania
* During
the last years the conviction is growing among the learned that the Germanic
peoples did not emigrate from Asia to Europe, but were settled in Europe
from earliest times (see Wilser: Stammbaum der arischen Völker,
1889 (Naturw. Wochenschr.); Schrader: Sprachvergleichung und Urgeschichte,
2. Auflage, 1890; Taylor: The Origin of the Aryans, 1890. Beck:
Der
Urmensch, 1899, &c.).
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speaking a Germanic tongue from childhood,
cannot be regarded as genuinely Germanic. The importance of this physical
motive power is easier to prove in the case of great national phenomena
than in individuals, for it may happen that an especially gifted individual
assimilates an alien culture and then, just because of his different nature,
achieves something new and profitable; on the other hand, the particular
value of race becomes clear as soon as it is a question of collective achievements,
as I can impress at once upon the German reader when I tell him in the
words of a recognised authority that “the privileged great statesmen and
military leaders of the time of the founding of the new empire are mostly
of the purest Germanic descent,“ like the “storm-tried seamen of the North
Sea coast and the keen chamois-hunters of the Alps.“ * These are facts
which should be pondered long and carefully. In their presence the senselessness
of the well-known phrases of natural scientists, Parliamentarians, &c.,
concerning the equality of the human races † becomes so plain that one
is almost ashamed of having listened to them even with one ear. They let
us also see in what definitely conditional sense the well-known remark
of that thorough Teuton, Paul de Lagarde, may claim validity, namely, that
“Germanism does not lie in the blood, but in the mind.“ In the case of
the individual, the mind may indeed rule the blood, and the idea conquer,
but it is not so with the great mass. And in order to measure the importance
of the physical element, as well as its limitation, one should remember
further that that which may be called the Germanic idea is a very delicately
constructed, many-jointed organism. One requires only to look at the Jewish
idea by way of comparison, this infancy of art, the whole cunning of which
lies in binding the human
* Henke:
Der
Typus des germanischen Menschen, p. 33.
† See
pp. 259 ff., 392
note 2, 531.
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soul as tightly as Chinese ladies do
their feet, the only difference being that these ladies can no longer move
about, whereas a half-throttled soul is easier to carry and causes the
busied body less trouble than a fully developed one, laden with its dreams.
In consequence of this it is comparatively easy “to become a Jew,“ difficult,
on the contrary, almost to the verge of impossibility “to become Germanic“;
here as everywhere the power of the idea is supreme; but one should guard
against following a true principle so far as to overlook the connection
of natural phenomena. The richer the mind, the more closely and manifoldly
is it connected with the substructure of a definitely formed blood. It
is self-evident that in the unfolding of human qualities, the further their
development has advanced, the higher must the differentiation in the physical
substratum of our mental life have become, and the more and more delicate
its tissues. Thus we saw in the former chapter how the noble Amorite disappeared
from the world: by fusion with unrelated races his physiognomy was, as
it were, wiped away, his gigantic form shrunk together, his spirit fled:
the simple homo syriacus is, on the other hand, the same to-day
as he was a thousand years ago and the mongrel Semite has to his perpetual
contentment come out of the mixture in the crystallised form of the “Jew.“
The same has happened everywhere. What a magnificent people the Spaniards
were! For centuries the West Goths were strictly forbidden to marry “Romans“
(as the rest of the inhabitants were called), whereby a feeling of race
nobility was developed, which long prevented mixing even at a time when
such a fusion of the population was desired and enforced by the authorities;
but gradually ever deeper and deeper breaches were made in the dam, and
after mingling with Iberians, with the numerous remnants of the Roman chaos
of peoples, with Africans of the most various origin,
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with Arabs and Jews, they lost all that
the Germanic people had brought with them: their military superiority,
their unconditional loyalty (see Calderon!)‚ their high religious
ideal, their capacity for organising, their rich artistic creative power;
we see to-day what remained over, when the Germanic “blood,“ as the physical
substratum, was destroyed. * Let us therefore not be in too great a hurry
to assert that Germanicism does not lie in blood; it does lie in it; not
in the sense that this blood guarantees Germanic sentiment and capacity,
but that it makes these possible.
This limitation is
therefore a very clear one: as a rule that man only is Germanic who is
descended from Germanic ancestors.
I must, however,
immediately call attention to the necessity of the previous extension of
the idea, in order that this limitation may be intelligibly applied. Otherwise
we must arrive at such comical conclusions as even Henke is guilty of in
the pamphlet already quoted, when he says that Luther was not genuinely
Germanic or that the Swabians, who are rightly regarded in the whole world
as the finest representatives of pure Germanicism, are likewise not genuinely
Germanic! A man whose descent and countenance prove him to be the product
of a mixture
* Cf.
Savigny‘s Geschichte des römischen Rechtes im Mittelalter,
i., chaps. iii. v. This keeping of the Germanic race pure for centuries,
in the midst of an inferior population, is seen not only in Spain but also
in Northern Italy, where the Teutons lived under separate laws into the
fourteenth century. See details below and in vol. ii. chap. ix.
When criticising this book, Professor Dr. Paul Barth wrote in the Vierteljahrsschrift
für wissenschaftliche Philosophie, 1901, p. 75, “Chamberlain might
have gone further than he does into the influence of Semitic blood in Spain.
By the addition of Semitic blood the Spaniards have become fanatical, they
have carried every idea to its extreme, so that it loses all its reason
and sense: religious devotion even to “cadaver-obedience“ towards their
superiors, politeness which is painful, ceremonious etiquette, honour which
has become the most insane sensitiveness, pride which is ridiculous grandezza,
so that Spanish in popular speech among us has become almost equivalent
to absurd.“
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of genuine German and genuine Slavonic
blood, as Henke demonstrates in Luther‘s case, is genuinely Germanic, the
child of a fortunate union; the same can be said of the Swabians, in whose
case a close union of Celts and Germans has taken place and laid the foundation
of rich poetical powers and remarkable strength of character. I have already
spoken of the great advantages of crossing between nearly related peoples
(chap. iv., pp. 277-283); this
law proved its validity everywhere in the case of the Teutons: among the
French, where the most manifold crossings of Germanic types produced a
superabundance of rich talents, and where even to-day, in consequence of
the existence of many centres of the most diverse pure race cultures, rich
life manifests itself, among the English, the Saxons, the Prussians, &c.
Treitschke calls attention to the fact that the “State-building power of
Germany“ has never lain in the pure German stems. “The true pioneers and
promoters of culture in Germany were in the Middle Ages the South Germans,
who are mixed with Celtic elements; in modern history it is the North Germans
who are mixed with Slavs. * These results are at the same time a proof
of the close relationship of the North Europeans, that human type which
we can with Lapouge and Linnaeus call the homo europaeus, but better
and more simply the Teuton. Now and only now we learn how in reference
to ourselves we should distinguish between crossing and crossing. By crossing
with each other Germanic peoples suffer no harm — rather the reverse; but
when they cross with aliens they gradually deteriorate.
FAIR
HAIR
But this limitation,
which is so clear in the general definition, is unfortunately very difficult
to apply in individual cases. For it will be asked: By what physical
* Politik
i. 279.
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characteristics can one recognise the
Teuton? Is, for example, fairness really a characteristic feature of all
Germanic peoples? This seems to form a fundamental dogma, not only for
the old historians, but also for the most modern anthropologists, and yet
certain facts make me doubt it very much. In the first place there is the
fact, which naturally is ignored by Virchow and his colleagues, blinded
as they are by political prejudice; I mean the prevalence of dark colour
among the members of the most genuine old Germanic nobility. In England
this is quite striking. Tall, spare-built figures, long skulls, long countenances,
the well-known Moltke type with the large nose and the clean-cut profile
(which Henke too considers characteristically “pure Germanic“), genealogies
which go back to the Norman period, in short, beyond doubt genuine Teutons
in physique and history — but black hair. Eckermann was struck by the brown
eyes of Wellington. * In Germany I have noted the same in various families
of old hereditary nobility. Moreover it has appeared to me remarkable that
poets from the extreme north of Germany pretty frequently speak of dark
hair as a characteristic feature not only of the nobility but also of the
people; thus, for example, in Theodor Storm‘s story, Hans und Heinz
Kirch, those genuine defiant Germanic seamen have both “dark brown
hair,“ and of another daring figure, Hasselfritz, the poet says that he
has brown eyes and brown hair; those genuine Teutons therefore resemble
Achilles with his “brown hair.“ How often, too, in the folksongs do “dark
brown eyes“ occur! Burns, too, the Scottish peasant-poet, loves the “nut-brown
maidens“ of his home. † Once while on a voyage in Norway north of the 70th
degree I was driven out of my course to a group of islands rarely visited
by strangers, and to my astonishment
* Gespräche
mit Goethe, 16.2.1826.
† Goethe,
too, makes “black hair“ and “black eyes“ heroic attributes.
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I found among the fair fishing population
individuals who corresponded exactly to that type: remarkably finely built
men with noble, imposing Viking physiognomy, and in addition almost raven-black
hair. Later I met this type in the south-east of Europe, in the German
colonies of Slavonia, which, settled there for centuries, have kept their
German race stainlessly pure amid the Slavs: the figure, the Moltke type
(or, as the English say, the Wellington type), and the black hair distinguish
these people from their neighbours, who are chiefly fair and have more
or less expressionless countenances. However, we do not require to go so
far; we find this type almost the predominant one in German Tyrol, whose
inhabitants Henke says “represent the true type of the primeval Teuton.“
The same scholar explains their having, for the most part, dark and often
black hair by the fact that the “sun has burned them black,“ and is of
opinion that colour is “the quality which changes most easily with time.“
But Virchow‘s researches had long ago proved the opposite (see p.
385)
and we might answer this assertion with a question, Why was David fair?
Why did the Jews take from the Amorites a certain tendency to auburn hair
and nothing more? What sun has darkened the hair of the English nobility
and of the Norwegian in the far north, where the sun is not seen for months?
No, certainly we have here to deal with other conditions, which must first
be cleared up physiologically, for, so far as I am aware, it has not yet
been done. * Just as certain red flowers at certain places or under the
influence of conditions which are hidden from human observation grow up
blue in colour (sometimes red and blue on the same stem), and black animal
species sometimes produce white varieties, so it is not unthinkable that
the colour of the hair in a certain
* At
least I can find nothing on this point either in the text-books of physiology
or in such special works as Waldeyer‘s.
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human type is as a rule light, but may
under certain conditions incline to the opposite extreme of the colour
scale. What is decisive in this case is that we find this dark hair in
individuals whose genuine Germanic origin is established beyond doubt,
not only in the wider but also in the narrower Tacitean sense of the word,
and moreover confirmed by their whole outward and inner personality. However,
as soon as we look around, we see this very type — tall, spare-built, long-skulled,
with Moltke physiognomy, and a “Germanic nature“ — on the southern slopes
of the Maritime Alps, for example; we need only go from Cannes and Nice,
peopled with the descendants of the chaos, two hours northwards to more
remote parts of the mountains: here, too, one finds the black hair. Are
they Celts? Are they Goths? Are they Langobardians? I do not know: they
are at any rate brothers of the races just named. In the mountains of Northern
Italy one finds them also, alternating with the small, round-skulled un-Aryan
homo
alpinus. Regarding the Celts, Virchow has already said that he is “not
disinclined to suppose that the original Celtic population was not fair-Aryan
but brown-Aryan,“ and armed with this daring “inclination to suppose“ he
declares all dark hair to be a sign of an admixture of Celtic blood. But
the ancients describe the original Celts as strikingly fair and “red-haired,“
and we can still see them with our own eyes, in Scotland and Wales; this
hypothesis stands therefore on but one leg, that the Celts, besides being
fair, may also be brown — or rather dark-haired, which is not quite the
same thing — and among the pure Celts we can find proofs enough of this.
We have therefore here exactly the same phenomenon as in the case of the
Germanic peoples. Of the Slavs I can only say one thing, that Virchow declares
them to have been “originally fair.“ But not only were they fair, they
still are so; we only
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need to let a Bosnian regiment file
past to be convinced of it. The map showing the result of Virchow‘s investigations
in the case of school children proves that the whole of Posen, as well
as Silesia east of the Elbe, shows the same small percentage of dark people
(10-15 per cent.) as the countries that lie farther to the west; the greatest
percentage of brown people is found in districts which never a Slav entered,
namely, Switzerland, Alsace, and the old German Salzkammergut. Whether
or not there are genuine Slavs in whom black hair occurs, I do not know.
From these facts
one can draw the irrefutable conclusion that fair hair cannot be arbitrarily
assigned to the Teuton, as is so often done; the most genuine sons of this
race may be black-haired. The presence of fair hair will certainly always
allow us to conjecture Germanic blood (in the wide sense of the term),
even though it be a very distant admixture, but the absence of light colour
does not justify the opposite conclusion. One must therefore be careful
in the application of this limitation; the hair alone is not a sufficient
criterion, the other physical characteristics must also be taken into consideration.
THE
SHAPE OF THE SKULL
This brings us to
the further, equally difficult question: that of the form of skull. Here
it appears as if a boundary could and must be drawn. For, however complex
matters are to-day, in old times they were very simple: the old Germanic
peoples of Tacitus, as well as the Slavs, were for the most part distinctly
long-skulled; the long skull and the long face beneath it are such unmistakable
marks of race that one may well ask whether he who does not possess them
may be regarded as belonging to the race. In the Germanic graves of the
time of the Migrations one finds half of the skulls long, that is, with
a
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breadth which stands to the length in
the relation of 75 (or less) to 100, and with few exceptions the rest of
the skulls come near to this artificially chosen proportion; real round
skulls (see p. 374) hardly
occur at all. In the old Slavonic graves the proportion is still more in
favour of the extremely long skulls. Little is known regarding the old
Celts; but the tendency to long skulls among the Gaels of North Scotland
and the Cymbrians of Wales also lends support to the same supposition in
their case. * Since then this has changed very much, at least in many countries.
It is not so up in the north, in Scandinavia, in Northern Germany (excluding
the towns) and in England; on the contrary, the long skulls seem more prevalent
in Denmark than among the Germanic peoples of the time of the Migrations:
there there are 60 long skulls to the hundred, only six genuine and short
ones. But the Slavs of Russia show (according to Kollman) scarcely three
long skulls to the hundred, but 72 short skulls and the remainder incline
to be short. And the old Bavarians! Johannes Ranke found by measuring the
skulls of 1000 living individuals that only one in a hundred possessed
the old Germanic skull, while 95 had genuine short skulls! Measurements
of the Hellenic skulls of the Classical age and of to-day have produced
similar results, but even in the case of the former the middle form of
head was predominant; yet a third of them had long skulls, and in their
graves fewer genuine short skulls are found than in Germanic graves; to-day,
however, more than half are short skulls. That in these phenomena we see
the effects of the infiltration of an Un-Germanic race, a race which does
not belong at all to the Indo-European circle, but to the raceless chaos,
can scarcely be doubted. Much trouble has been taken to sweep aside this
conclusion. For instance, Kollmann (Professor in Basle) has sought to emphasise
the countenance rather than the skull and to
* Cf.
Ranke: Der Mensch ii. 298.
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ENTRANCE
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make the distinction one between long
faces and short ones; * Johannes Ranke took up the idea and constructed
as the specifically Germanic type a long face under a short skull; Henke
again would fain believe that there has here been a gradual development,
by which the length of the front of the head has increased rather than
decreased, while the back has become shorter and shorter; that in consequence
the long skull is still present in the case of the Germanic peoples with
short skulls, only that it is concealed, &c. But however worthy of
consideration all these views may be, the fact still remains that the Germanic
peoples, wherever they have not crossed with others or only to a small
extent, as in the north, are long-skulled and fair (or, it may be, dark)
while this character disappears, first, the nearer one comes to the Alps,
secondly, wherever it has been historically proved that there was much
crossing with races from the south or with degenerate Celto-Germanic or
Slavo-Germanic races.
Naturally the crossings
known to history had the quickest influence (Italy, Spain, Southern France,
&c., are well-known examples); but besides these mixtures — and where
they did not occur this was the sole influence — there was another factor
at work, namely, the existence of one or perhaps several prehistoric races,
who never (or only indefinitely) appeared in history as races, and who,
standing on a lower stage of civilisation, were at an early time conquered
and assimilated by the various branches of the Indo-Germanic peoples. This,
perhaps, contributes even at the present day to the process of ungermanising.
For example, Wilhelm von Humboldt supposed that formerly the Iberians were
spread over Europe, and this view has lately been championed by Hommel
and others. Even though only a small portion saved itself by fleeing to
the extreme west, the home of
* Correspondenzblatt
der deutschen anthropologischen Gesellschaft, 1883, No. II.
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the Basques to-day, and though the majority
of the men died perhaps by the sword of the enemy, yet one seldom finds
complete extinction of the poor and helpless; they are kept as slaves,
and the women become the property of the victors. In the Alps the same
or perhaps a different race, but at any rate an Un-Germanic and non-Indo-European
one had its abode, or at least fled thither as to a last place of security;
one is forced to this supposition by the fact that to-day the Alps are
the centre of the Un-Germanic, short-skulled, dark type, and that from
here they radiate to north and south; the Rhaetian race, which anthropology
has shown to be distinct, is perhaps a fairly genuine remnant of those
former lake-dwellers and perhaps identical with Virchow‘s pre-Celts. In
the wide districts of Eastern Europe we must also presuppose a special,
probably Mongoloid race, to account for the specific deformation which
so rapidly transforms the majority of the Germanic Slavs into inferior
“Slavonics.“ How could we then bring ourselves to regard those Europeans
who are descended from this altogether Un-Germanic type as “Germanic,“
simply because they speak an Indo-European language and have assimilated
Indo-European culture? I consider it, on the contrary, a most important
duty to make a clear distinction here, if we wish to understand past and
present history. It is by distinguishing between peoples that we come to
recognise the ideas in their special individuality. This is all the more
necessary, as we have among us men who are half, a quarter, or perhaps
a sixth Germanic, &c., and in consequence we have a mass of ideas and
ways of thinking which are Germanic to the extent of a half, a fourth,
a sixth, &c., or on the other hand are directly Anti-Germanic. And
only by practice in distinguishing between the pure Germanic and the absolutely
Un-Germanic can we find our way out of the confusion of this growing chaos.
Chaos is everywhere the most dangerous enemy. In
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facing it thought must develop into
action; towards this, clearness of conception is the first necessary step;
and in the sphere in which we are at present, clearness consists in the
recognition that Germanicism to-day contains a large number of Un-Germanic
elements, and in the endeavour to separate what is pure from that which
contains alien, and in no sense Germanic, ingredients.
Yet, justifiable
as it may be to emphasise anatomical research, I am afraid that anatomy
alone will not suffice here; on the contrary, it is just on this point
that science is at present like a helpless barque tossing to and fro on
a troubled sea; whoever is led away by its illusions is doomed sooner or
later to sink. For that which I have just demonstrated concerning the various
races who survived in Europe from pre-Aryan times, the Iberians, Rhaetians,
&c., although indeed essentially correct, represents only the most
elementary simplification of the innumerable hypotheses which, at the present
moment, are afloat in the air, and every day the matter becomes more complicated.
Thus — to give the layman only one example — long and careful researches
have led to the conclusion that in Scotland, in the earliest stone age,
there existed a long-skulled race, but that in the stone age there appeared
another exceedingly broad-headed race, which after fusion with the former
and with mixed forms was typical of the bronze age; all this took place
in the remote past, long before the arrival of the Celts; when these appeared
as the vanguard of the Germanic peoples, it can scarcely be doubted that
they underwent changes through contact with the race settled there before
them, since even to-day, after so many and so strong waves of immigration
have swept over that land, we find in many individuals characteristics
which, an authority tells us, point back directly and unmistakably to that
prehistoric race of the bronze age which sprang
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from the mixing of long skulls and short
ones! * Now how can we estimate anatomically the craniological influence
of such long-settled races upon the Germanic peoples, if they themselves
already possessed long skulls, short skulls, and skulls that are between
the two? And why is it that to-day only the short skulls tend to increase?
But here again come other men of science who sing a different song: some
authorities hold that we have no strong reason for believing in the immigration
of the Indo-European. It is their opinion that he was already there in
the stone age, was even then distinguished by his long skull from another
short-skulled race, and struggled with it for the mastery; that this Long-skull
of the stone age was no other than the Germanic individual! Virchow‘s view,
based upon anatomical material, is, that even the oldest Troglodytes of
Europe might have been of Aryan descent, at least that no one could prove
the contrary. † But with the younger school such cautious and hesitating
judgments find no favour; under the pretext of strictly scientific simplification
they wave aloft the standard of the chaos and degrade the whole history
of humanity as lies. These modern theories have been most clearly expressed
by Professor Kollmann. He reduces all the peoples living in Europe to four
types: long skulls with long faces, long skulls with short faces, short
skulls with short faces, and short skulls with long faces; these four races
he supposes to have lived with and beside each other for centuries and
to do so still. And now comes the devil‘s hoof: all that history teaches
us about the Migrations, nationalities, mental differences, great creative
works of art, which were executed solely by single national individualities
and at best merely taken over by others,
* Sir
William Turner: Early Man in Scotland. Speech delivered before the
Royal Institution in London on January 13, 1898.
† Ranke:
Der
Mensch ii. 578.
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and about the war still waged among
us between those elements that advance and those that retard culture...
all this is put aside as rubbish and we are called upon to believe the
following dogma: “The development of culture is manifestly the common achievement
of all these types. All European races, so far as we have penetrated into
the secret of the nature of race, are equally gifted for every task of
culture.“ * Equally gifted? One can scarcely believe one‘s eyes! “Equally
gifted“ for “every“ task! I shall have to return to this point soon; I
did not wish to leave the question of craniometry without having pointed
out, first, how difficult it is here, too, to separate the Germanic from
the non-Germanic by formulas, by the compass and the ruler; secondly, upon
what a dangerous path these worthies take us, when they suddenly interrupt
their discussion of “chameprosopic, platyrrhinous, mesoconchic, prognathic,
proophryocephalous, ooidic, brachyklitometopic, hypsistegobregmatic Dolichocephali“
in order to link on to it general remarks about history and culture. The
layman understands little or nothing of the remainder; he wades hopelessly
about in this barbaric jargon of neoscholastic natural science; only the
one point is printed in all the newspapers of Europe as the visible result
of such a congress: that the most learned gentlemen in Europe have solemnly
protocolled the fact that all the races bear an equal share in the development
of culture; there never have been Greeks, Romans, Germanic peoples, Jews,
but from time immemorial there have lived peacefully side by side or, it
may be, devouring each other, leptoprosopic Dolichocephali, chameprosopic
Dolichocephali, leptoprosopic Brachycephali and chameprosopic Brachycephali,
“all working unitedly at the furtherance of culture“ (sic!). It
provokes a smile! But crimes
* Allgemeine
Versammlung der deutschen anthropologischen Gesellschaft, 1892.
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against history are really too serious
to be punished merely by being laughed at; the sound common sense of all
intelligent men must step vigorously in and put a stop to this: we must
say to these worthies, “Cobbler, stick to your last!“ *
How utterly unscientific
such a proceeding as that of Kollmann must be is quite manifest. Far-reaching
simplification is a law of artistic creating, but not a law of nature;
the characteristic thing here is rather endless complexity. What should
we say of a botanist who wished to class plants in families according to
the length and breadth of their leaves, or according to any other one characteristic?
Kollmann‘s method is a retrograde step as compared with old Theophrastus.
As long as men attempted artificial classifications, the systematic knowledge
of the plant world did not advance one step; but then came men of genius
of the nature of Ray, Jussieu, De Candolle, who by observation united to
creative intuition established the chief families of plants and only then
discovered the characteristics — mostly very concealed ones — which enabled
us to demonstrate the relationship anatomically as well. The same is true
of the animal world. All other procedure is absolutely artificial and consequently
mere fooling. And hence in the case of man we cannot, as Kollmann does,
build up at the anatomist‘s bidding a system into which facts then have
to be fitted as well as may be; we must ascertain precisely what groups
actually exist as individualised, morally and intellectually distinguishable
races, and then see whether there are any anatomical characteristics which
will aid us in classification.
* Cf.
the splendid satire by M. Buchner on modern craniometry in the supplement
to the Munich Allgemeine Zeitung, 1899, No. 282-284. — In the meantime
J. Deniker has proposed a new division of all Europeans into six chief
and four subordinate races. Thus the picture changes every year!
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RATIONAL ANTHROPOLOGY
This digression into
the sphere of anatomical science has had the one good result of revealing
to us how little sure help and how little useful or practical instruction
we may expect from that source. We are either walking upon sandy and shifting
ground or in a quagmire, where we sink at the first step and stick fast,
or we must spring from point to point on the exceedingly sharp edges of
dogma and at any moment fall into the abyss. The digression has moreover
positive advantages: it enriches the material of our knowledge and teaches
us to see more clearly. Both history and daily observation teach us that
the races are not equally gifted, any more than individuals are; and anthropology
shows us further (in spite of Professor Kollmann) that in the case of races
which have achieved certain results, a definite physical conformation predominates.
The mistake lies in operating with haphazard numbers of objects of comparison
and in measuring according to arbitrarily chosen relations. Thus, for example,
it is considered a fixed rule that as soon as the breadth of a skull bears
the relation of 75:100 or less, then it is “dolichocephalous,“ with 76
or even 75¼ it is “mesocephalous“ and from 80 onwards “brachycephalous.“
Who is the authority? Why should there be a special magic in the number
75? Any other magic than that of my own convenience and laziness? I understand
quite well that we cannot get on in daily practice without termini technici
and limitations, but what I cannot understand is that they should be taken
for anything but arbitrary limits and arbitrary words. *
* Very
remarkable in this connection are the researches of Dr. G. Walcher, which
show that the position of the head of the new-born child exercises a definite
influence upon the shape of the skull. In the case of twins from one embryo
by this means the one was developed into a distinct dolichocephalous, the
other to a brachycephalous child. (See Zentralblatt für Gynäkologie,
1905, No. 7.)
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This applies to the high and low countenances
just as well as to the long and short skulls; everywhere it is a question
of relations which merge by degrees into each other. But it is the nature
of life to be plastically mutable; the living principle of creation is
fundamentally different from the crystalline principle in this, that it
does not shape according to unchangeable relations of numbers but that
it in a way freely creates, while observing the harmony of parts and retaining
the fundamental scheme which is given by the nature of the thing itself.
No two individuals are like each other. To survey the physical structure
of a race at any given moment, I should require to have before me all the
representatives of that race and seek out in this crowd the uniform and
uniting idea, the predominant specific tendency of physical conformation,
which is peculiar to this race as race; I should see it with my eyes. If
I had had, say at the time of Tacitus, all the Germanic peoples before
my eyes: the still unmixed Celts, the Teutons and the Germanic Slavs, I
should certainly have seen a harmonious whole, in which a certain law of
structure predominated, and round it the most manifold and varying conformations
would have grouped themselves. Probably there would not have been a single
individual who united in himself all the specific characteristics of this
plastic idea of race (in the way in which it would have appeared to my
thinking brain) in the highest potentiality and in perfect harmony: the
great radiant heavenly eyes, the golden hair, the gigantic stature, the
symmetrical muscular development, the lengthened skull (which an ever-active
brain, tortured by longing, had changed from the round lines of animal
contentedness and extended towards the front), the lofty countenance, required
by an elevated spiritual life as the seat of its expression — certainly
no single individual would have possessed all these features. Were one
feature perfect the other would be merely
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indicated. Here and there, too, nature,
which is ever experimenting and never repeating itself, would have broken
the law of harmony, an overgrown giant would swing his club over dull eyes,
under too long a skull would be seen a face proportionately too short,
glorious eyes would beam from beneath a fine lofty forehead, but in comparison,
the body would be strikingly small, &c. &c., ad infinitum.
In other groups again secret laws of the correlation of growth must have
manifested themselves; here, for example, families with black hair, but
at the same time with particularly large daring aquiline noses and more
slender build, there red hair with remarkably white freckled skin and countenance
somewhat broader in the upper part... for the slightest change in the conformation
causes other changes. Still more numerous must those figures have been
from which in their average commonplaceness no specific law of structure
could have been derived, if they had not appeared as portions of a large
whole, in which their place was definitely fixed, so that we could see
from the way in which they fitted in that organically they did belong to
it. Darwin himself, who worked all his life with compass, ruler and weighing
machine, is always in his studies on artificial breeding calling attention
to the fact that the eye of the born and experienced breeder discovers
things of which figures give not the slightest confirmation, and which
the breeder himself can hardly ever express in words; he notices that this
and that distinguishes the one organism from the other, and makes his selection
for breeding accordingly; this is an intuition born of ceaseless observation.
This power of observation we can acquire only by practice; the survey of
the Germanic peoples in the time of Tacitus would have served our purpose.
We should certainly not have found that in the case of all these men the
breadth of the head bore to the length the proportion of 75:100; nature
knows
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no such limitations; in the unlimited
complexity of all thinkable intermediate forms, as well as of forms of
greater development towards this or that extreme, we should probably here
and there have encountered distinct brachycephali; discoveries in graves
make it probable, and why should the plasticity of creative powers not
have brought it about? We should, moreover, not have seen nothing but “giants“
and be able to say that he who did not exceed six feet high was not Germanic:
on the other hand, we might quite well have made the seemingly paradoxical
statement, that the small men of this group are tall, for they belong to
a tall race, and for the same reason those short skulls are long; if we
look more closely we shall soon see that outwardly and inwardly they have
specific characteristics of the Germanic people. The hieroglyphs of nature‘s
language are in fact not so logically mathematical, so mechanically explicable
as many an investigator likes to fancy. Life is needed to understand life.
And here a fact occurs to me which I have received from various sources,
viz., that very small children, especially girls, frequently have quite
a marked instinct for race. It frequently happens that children who have
no conception of what “Jew“ means, or that there is any such thing in the
world, begin to cry as soon as a genuine Jew or Jewess comes near them!
The learned can frequently not tell a Jew from a non-Jew; the child that
scarcely knows how to speak notices the difference. Is not that something?
To me it seems worth as much as a whole anthropological congress or at
least a whole speech of Professor Kollmann. There is still something in
the world besides compass and yard-measure. Where the learned fails with
his artificial constructions, one single unbiased glance can illuminate
the truth like a sunbeam.
-
Und was kein Verstand der Verständigen
sieht,
-
Das übet in Einfalt ein kindlich Gemüt.
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We shall not interfere
with the craniologists any longer than is necessary; however, we shall
not despise the material collected by their diligence: it will be a valuable
addition to our knowledge of what is Germanic and an earnest warning in
regard to the intrusion amongst us of that which is non-Germanic.
The very necessary
limitation of the name “Germanic“ to those who are really Teutons or at
least have much Germanic blood in their veins can therefore never be carried
out with mathematical exactness, but will always require, as it were, the
eye of the breeder and the eye of the child. Much knowledge must, of course,
be useful, but seeing and feeling is still more indispensable. And with
this we transfer our investigation into the necessary limitation of the
word “Germanic“ to the mental element, in which history teaches us on every
hand to separate the Germanic from the non-Germanic, and at the same time
thereby to recognise the physical element and value it at its true worth.
SCIENCE
OF PHYSIOGNOMY
The science of physiognomy,
which is at once spirit and body, mirror of the soul and anatomical “factum,“
next claims our attention. Look, for example, at the countenance of Dante
Alighieri; we shall learn as much from it as from his poems. * That is
a characteristically
* That
Dante is Germanic and not a son of the chaos becomes in my opinion so clear
from his personality and his work that proof of it is absolutely superfluous.
But it is nevertheless interesting to know that the name Alighieri is Gothic,
a corruption of Aldiger; it belongs to those German proper names, at the
basis of which lies the word “ger“ = spear, as in Gerhard, Gertrude, &c.
(a fact which in reference to Shake-speare might have given the visionaries
much to think about!). This name came into the family through Dante‘s grandmother
on the father‘s side, a Goth from Ferrara, whose name was Aldigiero. With
regard to the origin of the paternal grandfather and of the poet‘s mother
only the one fact to-day is known, that the attempt to derive him from
Roman families is a pure invention of the Italian biographers who thought
it more illustrious to belong to Rome than to Germania;
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Germanic countenance! Not a feature
in it reminds us of any Hellenic or Roman type, much less of any of the
Asiatic or African physiognomies which the Pyramids have faithfully preserved.
A new being has entered into the history of the world! Nature in the fulness
of her power has produced a new soul: look at it, here she reflects herself
in a countenance such as never was seen before! “Above the mental hurricane
expressed in the countenance rose nobly the peaceful brow arching like
a marble dome.“ * Yes, yes, Balzac is right. Hurricane and marble dome!
If he had only told us that Dante was a leptoprosopic Dolichocephalous,
we should not have been much wiser. At
DANTE
any rate we shall never find a second
Dante, but a walk through the collection of busts in the Berlin Museum
will convince us how firmly established this type was in Northern Italy,
which had been thoroughly germanised by Goths, Langobards and Franks.
but since the grandfather
was a warrior, knighted by the Emperor Conrad, and Dante himself tells
us that he belongs to the petty nobility, then his descent from pure Germanic
parentage is as good as proven (cf. Franz Xaver Kraus: Dante,
Berlin, 1897, pp. 21-25). Even to the beginning of the fifteenth century
many Italians are described in old documents as Alemanni, Langobardi, &c.,
ex
alamanorum genere, egibus vivens Langobardorum, &c. (and that though
the majority of them had adopted Roman law, whereby the documentary evidence
of their descent usually disappeared); so thoroughly saturated with Germanic
blood (and that too its sole creative element) was that people which the
so-called “Roman Culture“ to-day wishes to regard as its source (see
Savigny: Geschichte des römischen Rechtes im Mittelalter, i.,
chap. iii.).
* Balzac:
Les
Proscrits.
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To this day we see the closest unmistakable
physiognomical relationship in the German Tyrolese mentioned above, as
also in Norway, and individual kindred features wherever genuine Teutons
are to be found. However, if we look at the greatest Germanic men, we shall
not find one but numerous physiognomic conformations; the dazing powerfully
curved nose predominates; we find,
LUTHER
however, all thinkable combinations,
even to that powerful head which in every particular is the very opposite
of Dante‘s and by this very fact betrays the intimate relationship: I mean
the head of Martin Luther. Here the hurricane, of which Balzac spoke, embraces
forehead, eyes and nose, no marble dome is arched above it; but this flaming
volcano of energy and thoughtfulness rests upon mouth and chin as upon
a rock of granite. Even the smallest feature of the powerful face testifies
to energy and thirst for achievement; when one looks at this countenance
the words of Dante rise to one‘s memory:
-
Colà dove si puote
-
Ciò che si vuole.
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This man can do what he wills and his
whole will is directed to great deeds: in this head there is no studying
for mere learning‘s sake, but to find out truth, truth for life; the man
does not sing to charm the ear, but because song elevates and strengthens
the heart; he could not, like Dante, have lived proudly apart and unknown,
trusting his fame to future generations — what does such a countenance
care for fame? “Love is the pulse-beat of our life,“ he said. And where
love is strong, there too there is strong hatred. It is absolutely false
to say, as Henke does, that such a countenance represents the North German
Slavonic type. * So mighty a personality towers high above such specifications;
it shows us the outward expression of one of the astonishingly rich possibilities
of development of the Germanic spirit in its highest and richest form.
Luther‘s countenance, like Dante‘s, belongs to all Germanic peoples. One
finds this type in England, where no Slav ever made his abode; one meets
it also among the most active politicians of France. One can picture to
oneself this man fifteen hundred years ago, on horseback, swinging his
battle-axe to protect his beloved northern home, and then again at his
own fireside with his children crowding round him, or at the banquet of
the men, draining the horn of mead to the last drop and singing heroic
songs in praise of his ancestors. Dante and Luther are the extremes of
the rich physiognomical scale of great Germanic men. As Tacitus said: they
resemble themselves alone. But every attempt to localise the type, to the
north or to the south, to the Celtic west or the Slavonic east, is manifestly
futile, futile at least when one looks especially at the more important
and therefore more characteristic men, and disregards the chance details
of habit, especially of the manner of wearing the beard.
* As
above, p. 20. What is here said about Luther has since been verified by
the strictly anthropological researches of Dr. Ludwig Woltmann; see
the Politisch-anthropologische Revue, 1905, p. 683 f.
542 ENTRANCE
OF THE GERMANIC PEOPLE
Goethe, for example, might be the child
of any Germanic stem judging by the cast of his face, as might also Johann
Sebastian Bach and Immanuel Kant.
FREEDOM
AND LOYALTY
Let us attempt a glance
into the depths of the soul. What are the specific intellectual and moral
characteristics of this Germanic race? Certain anthropologists would fain
teach us that all races are equally gifted; we point to history and answer:
that is a lie! The races of mankind are markedly different in the nature
and also in the extent of their gifts, and the Germanic races belong to
the most highly gifted group, the group usually termed Aryan. Is this human
family united and uniform by bonds of blood? Do these stems really all
spring from the same root? I do not know and I do not much care; no affinity
binds more closely than elective affinity, and in this sense the Indo-European
Aryans certainly form a family. In his Politics Aristotle writes
(i. 5): “If there were men who in physical stature alone were so pre-eminent
as the representatives of the Gods, then every one would admit that other
men by right must be subject unto them. If this, however, is true in reference
to the body, then there is still greater justification for distinguishing
between pre-eminent and commonplace souls.“ Physically and mentally the
Aryans are pre-eminent among all peoples; for that reason they are by right,
as the Stagirite expresses it, the lords of the world. Aristotle puts the
matter still more concisely when he says, “Some men are by nature free,
others slaves“; this perfectly expresses the moral aspect. For freedom
is by no means an abstract thing, to which every human being has fundamentally
a claim; a right to freedom must evidently depend upon capacity for it,
and this again presupposes
543
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OF THE GERMANIC PEOPLE
physical and intellectual power. One
may make the assertion, that even the mere conception of freedom is quite
unknown to most men. Do we not see the homo syriacus develop just
as well and as happily in the position of slave as of master? Do the Chinese
not show us another example of the same nature? Do not all historians tell
us that the Semites and half-Semites, in spite of their great intelligence,
never succeeded in founding a State that lasted, and that because every
one always endeavoured to grasp all power for himself, thus showing that
their capabilities were limited to despotism and anarchy, the two opposites
of freedom? * And here we see at once what great gifts a man must have
in order that one may say of him, he is “by nature free,“ for the first
condition of this is the power of creating. Only a State-building race
can be free; the gifts which make the individual an artist and philosopher
are essentially the same as those which, spread through the whole mass
as instinct, found States and give to the individual that which hitherto
had remained unknown to all nature: the idea of freedom. As soon as we
understand this, the near affinity of the Germanic peoples to the Greeks
and Romans strikes us, and at the same time we recognise what separates
them. In the case of the Greeks the individualistic creative character
predominates, even in the forming of constitutions; in the case of the
Romans it is communistic legislation and military authority that predominate;
the Germanic races, on the other hand, have individually and collectively
perhaps less creative power, but they possess a harmony of qualities, maintaining
the balance between the instinct of individual freedom, which finds its
highest expression in creative art, † and the instinct of public freedom
which creates the State; and in this way they prove themselves to be the
equals of their great predecessors. Art more perfect in its creations,
* Cf.
p. 404.
† See
pp. 14, 25,
33,
&c.
544 ENTRANCE
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THE GERMANIC PEOPLE
so far as form is concerned, there may
have been, but no art has ever been more powerful in its creations than
that which includes the whole range of things human between the winged
pen of Shakespeare and the etching-tool of Albrecht Dürer, and which
in its own special language — music — penetrates deeper into the heart
than any previous attempt to create immortality out of that which is mortal
— to transform matter into spirit. And in the meantime the European States,
founded by Germanic peoples, in spite of their, so to speak, improvised,
always provisional and changeable character — or rather perhaps thanks
to this character — proved themselves to be the most enduring as well as
the most powerful in the world. In spite of all storms of war, in spite
of the deceptions of that ancestral enemy, the chaos of peoples, which
carried its poison into the very heart of our nation, Freedom and its correlative,
the State, remained, through all the ages the creating and saving ideal,
even though the balance between the two often seemed to be upset: we recognise
that more clearly to-day than ever.
In order that this
might be so, that fundamental and common “Aryan“ capacity of free creative
power had to be supplemented by another quality, the incomparable and altogether
peculiar Germanic loyalty (Treue). If that intellectual and physical
development which leads to the idea of freedom and which produces on the
one hand art, philosophy, science, on the other constitutions (as well
as all the phenomena of culture which this word implies), is common to
the Hellen
