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.
 
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The original text in German: Die Grundlagen des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts
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CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION BY LORD REDESDALE i v
AUTHOR‘S INTRODUCTION i lix
DIVISION I: THE LEGACY OF THE ANCIENT WORLD
INTRODUCTORY i 3
FIRST CHAPTER: HELLENIC ART AND PHILOSOPHY i 14
SECOND CHAPTER: ROMAN LAW i 93
THIRD CHAPTER: THE REVELATION OF CHRIST i 174
DIVISION II: THE HEIRS
INTRODUCTORY i 251
FOURTH CHAPTER: THE CHAOS i 258
FIFTH CHAPTER: THE ENTRANCE OF THE JEWS INTO WESTERN HISTORY i 329
SIXTH CHAPTER: THE ENTRANCE OF THE GERMANIC PEOPLE INTO HISTORY i 494
DIVISION III: THE STRUGGLE
INTRODUCTORY ii 3
SEVENTH CHAPTER: RELIGION ii 13
EIGHTH CHAPTER: STATE ii 139
NINTH CHAPTER: FROM THE YEAR 1200 TO THE YEAR 1800
A. The Teutons as Creators of a New Culture
ii 187
B. Historical Survey ii 233
1. DISCOVERY ii 261
2. SCIENCE ii 293
3. INDUSTRY ii 329
4. POLITICAL ECONOMY ii 344
5. POLITICS AND CHURCH ii 365
6. PHILOSOPHY AND RELIGION ii 389
7. ART ii 495
INDEX ii 565

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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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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 Alighieri
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,

Martin Luther
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.

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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

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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.

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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