Chapter 37 (2)

The French newspapers greeted his death with a shower of abuse, claiming that it was the judgment of God on an infamous traitor to his country!...

When a man who has long been watching black curls and black eyes suddenly turns to a fair-haired woman with light-coloured eyebrows, pale and nervous, his eyes always receive a shock and cannot at once get over it. The difference of which he has not been thinking, which he has forgotten, produces an involuntary physical effect upon him.

Exactly the same thing happens when one turns quickly from the Italian circles to the German.

Undoubtedly the Germans are more developed on the theoretical side than any other people, but they have not gained much by it so far. From Catholic fanaticism they have passed to the Protestant pietism of transcendental philosophy and the romance of philology, and are now gradually making the transition to exact science; the German ‘studies diligently at all his stages,’ and his whole history is summed up in that, and he will get marks for it on the Day of Judgment. The common people of Germany, who have studied less, have suffered a great deal; they bought the right to Protestantism by the Thirty Years’ War, the right to an independent existence—that is, to a colourless existence under the supervision of Russia—by the struggle with Napoleon. The emancipation in 1814 and 1815 was the complete victory of the reaction; and when, in place of Jerome Buonaparte, _der Landesvater_ appeared in a powdered wig and an old-fashioned uniform long laid by, and announced that next day was fixed, let us say, for the forty-fifth parade (the one before, the forty-fourth, had taken place before the revolution), then all the emancipated people felt as though they had suddenly lost touch with the present and gone back to another age, and every one felt his head to see if he had grown a pigtail with a ribbon on it. The people accepted this with simple-hearted foolishness, and sang Körner’s songs. Science and learning advanced. Greek tragedies were performed in Berlin, there were dramatic triumphs for Goethe in Weimar.

The most radical men among the Germans remain philistines in their private life. Bold as they are in logic, they feel no obligation to be consistent in practice, and fall into glaring contradictions. The German mind, in matters revolutionary as well as in everything else, accepts the general idea in its unconditional—of course, that is, unreal—significance, and is satisfied with working it out intellectually, imagining that a thing is done when it is understood, and that the fact as easily follows the thought as the meaning of the fact is grasped by the consciousness.

The English and the French are full of prejudices, while a German is free from them; but both French and English are more consistent in their lives—the rule they follow is perhaps absurd, but it is what they have accepted. The German accepts nothing except reason and logic, but he is ruled in many things by _other considerations_—this is selling the soul for bribes.

The Frenchman is not morally free: though rich in initiative in practical life, he is poor in abstract thought. He thinks in received conceptions, in accepted forms; he gives a fashionable cut to commonplace ideas, and is satisfied with them. It is hard for him to take in anything new, although he does rush at it. The Frenchman oppresses his family and believes it is his duty to do so, just as he believes in the ‘Legion of Honour’ and the authority of the law-courts. The German believes in nothing, but takes advantage of public prejudices where it suits him. He is accustomed to trivial comfort, to _Wohlbehagen_, to peace and quiet, and, as he goes from his study to the _Prunkzimmer_ or his bedroom, sacrifices his free thought to his dressing-gown, to his peace and quiet, and to his kitchen. The German is a great Sybarite, though this characteristic is not noticed in him, because his poor and narrow luxury and petty mode of life are not very much to look at; but the Eskimo who is ready to sacrifice everything for fish-fat is as much an epicurean as Lucullus. Moreover, the German, lymphatic by temperament, soon grows heavy and sends down a thousand roots into his familiar mode of life; anything that might disturb him in his habits terrifies his philistine temper.

All the German revolutionaries are cosmopolitans, _sie haben überwunden den Standpunkt der Nationalität_, and are filled with the most touchy, most obstinate patriotism. They are ready to accept an all-world republic, to abolish the frontiers between states, but Trieste and Danzig must belong to Germany. The Vienna students were not above setting off for Lombardy under the command of Radetsky; they even, under the leadership of some professor, took a cannon, which they presented to Innsbrück. With this conceited and martial patriotism, Germany has, from the time of the first revolution and up to this day, looked with horror to the right and with horror to the left. On this side, France with standards unfurled is crossing the Rhine; on that side, Russia is crossing the Niemen, and the people numbering twenty-five millions finds itself utterly forlorn and deserted, is scolding with terror, full of hatred from terror, and to comfort itself proving theoretically from authentic sources that the existence of France is no longer existence, while the existence of Russia is not yet existence.

The ‘council of war’ assembled in St. Paul’s Church in Frankfort, and consisting of various worthy doctors, theologians, chemists, philologists, and professors, _sehr ausgezeichneten in ihrem Fache_, applauded the Austrian soldiers in Lombardy and oppressed the Poles in Posen. The very question of Schleswig-Holstein (_stammverwandt!_) was only a subject of interest to them from the point of view of ‘_Teutschtum_.’ The first free word, uttered after centuries of silence by the representatives of emancipated Germany, was in opposition to weak and depressed nationalities. This incapacity for freedom, these awkwardly revealed inclinations to retain what had been unjustly acquired, provoke irony: one forgives insolent pretensions only when accompanied by vigorous actions, and those were absent.

The revolution of 1848 had everywhere the character of hastiness and precipitate action, but there was scarcely anything absurd about it in France and in Italy; in Germany, however, everywhere except in Vienna, it had a farcical character, incomparably more comic than the humour of Goethe’s wretched farce, _Der Bürgergeneral_.

There was not a town, not a spot in Germany where at the time of the rising there was not an attempt at a ‘committee of public safety’ with all its principal characters: with a frigid youth as Saint-Just, with gloomy terrorists, and a military genius representing Carnot. I knew two or three Robespierres personally: they always put on clean shirts, washed their hands, and had clean nails. On the other hand, there were also dishevelled Collots d’Herbois; and if there happened to be a man in the club fonder of beer than the rest and more openly given to dangling after _Stubermädchen_—he was the Danton, _eine schweigende Natur_!

French weaknesses and defects are partly dissipated by their light and fugitive character. In the German the same defects assume a more solid and fundamental character, and hence are more striking. One must see for oneself these German efforts to play _so einen burschikosen Kamin de Paris_ in politics in order to do them justice. I was always reminded of the playfulness of a cow when that excellent and respectable animal, adorned with all the domestic virtues, takes to frisking and galloping in the meadow, and with a serious face kicks up her two hind legs or gallops sideways chasing her own tail.

After the Dresden affair, I met in Geneva one of the agitators who had taken part in it, and began at once questioning him about Bakunin. He lauded him up to the skies, and began describing how he had himself commanded a barricade under his instructions. Inflamed by his own narrative he went on: ‘A revolution is a thunderstorm; in it one must listen neither to the dictates of the heart nor to considerations of ordinary justice.... One must oneself have taken part in such events fully to understand the Montagne of 1794. Only imagine: we suddenly observe a vague movement in the royalist party, false reports were intentionally circulated, suspicious-looking men appeared. I reflected and reflected, and at last resolved to _terrorise_ my street. “_Männer!_” I said to my company, “under pain of court-martial, which may at once sentence you to death in case of disobedience, I command you to seize every one, regardless of sex, age, or calling, who attempts to cross the barricade, and to bring him under close guard to me.” This was kept up for more than twenty-four hours. If the _Bürger_ who was brought to me was a good patriot, I let him go; but if he was a suspicious character, then I gave the signal to the guard.’

‘And,’ I said with horror, ‘and they?’

‘And they accompanied him home,’ the terrorist replied with pride and satisfaction.

I will add another anecdote illustrating the character of the German champions of freedom.

The youth whom I mentioned, when describing my visit to Gustav Struve, as filling the post of minister of home affairs wrote me a note a few days later in which he asked me to find him work of some sort. I suggested that he should copy for the press the manuscript of my _Vom anderen Ufer_ from the handwriting of Kapp, to whom I had dictated it in German from the Russian original. The young man accepted the proposal. A few days later he told me that he was so uncomfortably lodged with several students that he had neither space nor quiet to work, and asked leave to copy it in Kapp’s room. Even there the work made little progress. The minister _per interim_ arrived at eleven o’clock in the morning, lay on the sofa, smoked cigars, drank beer ... and went off in the evenings to gatherings and consultations at Struve’s. Kapp, a man of the greatest delicacy, was ashamed of him. A week or more passed in this way. Kapp and I said nothing, but the ex-minister broke the silence: he wrote me a note asking me for _a hundred francs in advance_ for the work. I wrote him that he was working so slowly that I could not give him such a sum in advance, but that since he was in great need of money I was sending him twenty francs, although he had not yet done ten francs’ worth of copying.

In the evening the minister appeared at the gathering at Struve’s and reported on my anti-civic action and my misuse of my fortune. The worthy minister considered that socialism consisted not in a social organisation, but in a senseless partition of senselessly acquired property!

In spite of the amazing chaos prevailing in Struve’s brains, he did, being an honest man, consider that I was not altogether to blame, and that it might be better for the _Bürger und Bruder_ to copy more and ask less money in advance. He persuaded him not to make a great outcry over the story.

‘Well, then, I shall send him back the money—_mit Verachtung_,’ said the minister.

‘What nonsense!’ cried a student. ‘If the _Bruder und Bürger_ does not care to take the money, I suggest that we spend it on beer and send out for some at once to drink to the perdition _der Besitzenden_.’

‘Do you agree?’

‘Yes, yes, we all agree—bravo!’

‘We will drink,’ cried the orator, ‘and pledge ourselves not to bow to the Russian aristocrat who has insulted the _Bruder_.’

‘Yes, yes, we must not bow to him.’

And so they drank the beer and gave up bowing to me.

All these absurd failings, together with the peculiar _Plumpheit_ of the Germans, jar upon the southern nature of the Italians and excite a physical, racial hatred in them. The worst of it is that the good side of the Germans, that is, their philosophical culture, is either of no interest to the Italian or beyond his ken; while the vulgar, ponderous side is always conspicuous. The Italian often leads the most frivolous and idle life, but with a certain artistic, rhythmic grace about it, and that is why he can least put up with the bear-like joking and clumsy familiarity of the jovial German.

The Anglo-Germanic race is far coarser than the Franco-Roman. There is no help for that: it is its physical characteristic; it is absurd to be angry with it. The time has come to accept once for all that the different races of mankind, like different species of animals, have their different characteristics and are not to blame for them. No one is angry with the bull for not having the beauty of the horse or the swiftness of the stag; no one reproaches the horse because its flesh is not so good to eat as that of the ox: all that we can ask of them in the name of animal brotherhood is to graze peaceably in the same field without kicking or goring each other. In nature, everything attains to whatever it is capable of attaining to, is formed as chance determines, and so takes its generic _pli_: training goes some distance, corrects one thing and develops another; but to expect beef-steaks from horses, or horses’ paces from bulls, is nevertheless absurd.

To grasp concretely the difference between the two opposite traditions of the European races, one has but to glance at the street-boys in Paris and in London; I take them as an example because they are absolutely spontaneous in their rudeness.

Look how the Parisian _gamins_ jeer at any queer Englishman, and how the London street-boys mock at a Frenchman; in this little instance the two opposite types of two European races are sharply defined. The Parisian _gamin_ is insolent and persistent, he can be insufferable: but, in the first place, he is witty, his mischief is limited to jests, and he is as amusing as he is annoying; and, in the second, there are words at which he blushes and at once desists, there are words which he never uses; it is difficult to stop him by roughness, and if the victim lifts his stick I would not answer for the consequences. It must be noted, too, that the French boys need something to attract their attention: a red waistcoat with blue stripes, a brick-coloured coat, a strange-looking muffler, a flunkey carrying a parrot or a dog, things only done by Englishmen and, take note, only outside England. To be simply a foreigner is not enough to make them mock and run after you.

The wit of the London street-boys is simpler. It begins with guffawing at the sight of a foreigner,[54] if only he has a moustache, a beard, or a wide-brimmed hat; then they shout some twenty times: ‘_French pig! French dog!_’ If the foreigner turns to them with some reply, the neighings and bleatings are redoubled; if he walks away, the boys run after him—then all that is left is the _ultima ratio_ of lifting a stick, and sometimes bringing it down on one of them. After that the boys run away full speed, dropping oaths and sometimes throwing mud or a stone from a distance.

In France, a grown-up workman, shopman, or woman selling wares in the street never takes part with the _gamins_ in the pranks they play upon foreigners; in London, all the dirty women, all the grown-up shopmen grunt like pigs and abet the boys.

In France there is one shield which at once checks the most persistent boy—that is, poverty. In the country that knows no word more insulting than the word _beggar_, the foreigner is the more persecuted the poorer and more defenceless he is. One Italian refugee, who had once been an officer in the Austrian cavalry and had left his country after the war, completely destitute, when winter came, wore his greatcoat of a military officer. This excited such a sensation in the market-place through which he had to pass every day, that the shouts of ‘Who’s your tailor?’ roars of laughter, and finally tugging at his collar, forced the Italian at last to give up his greatcoat and, shivering to the marrow of his bones, to go about in his jacket.

This coarseness in street mockery, this lack of delicacy and tact in the common people, helps to explain how it is that women are nowhere beaten so often and so badly as in England,[55] how it is that an English father is ready to cast dishonour on his own daughter and a husband on his wife by taking legal proceedings against them.

The rude manners of the English streets are a great offence at first to the French and the Italians. The German, on the other hand, receives them with laughter and answers with similar rudeness; an interchange of abuse is kept up, end he is very well pleased with it. They both take it as a civility, a pleasant joke. ‘Bloody dog!’ the proud Briton shouts at him, grunting like a pig. ‘Beastly John Bull!’ answers the German, and each goes on his way.

This behaviour is not confined to the streets: one has but to look at the polemics of Marx, Heinzen, Ruge, _et consorts_, which were unceasing from 1849, have never ceased, and are still kept up on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean. We are unaccustomed to see in print such expressions, such accusations: nothing is spared, no respect is paid to personal honour, to the privacy of the family or the inviolability of a secret.

Among the English, coarseness disappears as we rise higher in the scale of intelligence or aristocratic breeding; among the Germans it never disappears. The greatest poets of Germany (with the exception of Schiller) fall into the most uncouth vulgarity.

One of the reasons of the _mauvais ton_ of Germans is that breeding in our sense of the word does not exist in Germany at all. Germans are taught, and taught a great deal, but they are not educated at all, even in the aristocracy, in which the manners of the barracks, of the _Junker_, are predominant. They are completely lacking in the æsthetic sense in daily life. The French have lost it, just as they have lost the elegance of their language; the Frenchman of to-day rarely knows how to write a letter free from legal or commercial expressions—the counter and the barrack-room have distorted their manners.

To conclude this comparison, I will describe an incident in which I saw with my own eyes and face to face the gulf which separates the Italians from the _Tedeschi_, and which there will be no bridging for years to come by any number of amnesties or manifestoes of the brotherhood of nations.

I was travelling with Tessier du Mothe, in 1852, from Genoa to Lugano. We reached Arona by night, and, inquiring when the steamer started, learned that it was at eight o’clock next morning, and went to bed. At half-past seven the porter came to take our trunks, and by the time we reached the landing-stage they were already on deck. But in spite of that we looked at each other with some perplexity instead of going on board.

A huge white flag with the two-headed eagle on it was fluttering over the hissing and swaying steamer, and on the stern was painted the name, _Fürst Radetsky_. We had forgotten to ask overnight what steamer was going, whether an Austrian or a Sardinian. Tessier had at the Versailles trial been condemned _in contumaciam_ to deportation. Though Austria had nothing to do with that, yet surely it would seize the opportunity to keep him in prison for six months, at any rate, while making inquiries. The example of Bakunin showed what they were capable of doing with me. By agreement with Piedmont, the Austrians had not the right to demand passports from those who without landing on the Lombard shore went to Mogadino, which belongs to Switzerland; but I imagine they would not, if opportunity arose, disdain so simple a means of seizing Mazzini or Kossuth.

‘Well,’ said Tessier, ‘to go back is absurd!’

‘Well, let’s go ahead, then!’ and we went on deck.

Just before starting, the passengers were surrounded by a detachment of soldiers armed with guns—what for? I do not know. Two small cannon, fastened in a special way, stood on the steamer. When the steamer set off the soldiers were dismissed. On the cabin walls hung regulations: among them was the statement that those passengers who were not going to Lombardy need not show their passports; but it was added that if any one of such persons were guilty of any offence against the K.K. (Kaiserlich Königlichen) police regulations he must be judged according to the laws of Austria. _Or donc_, wearing a Calabrian hat or a tricolor cockade was a crime against Austria. Only then I fully appreciated what clutches we were caught in. However, I am far from regretting my trip; nothing special happened during our journey, but I gathered a rich store of observations.

Several Italians were sitting on deck; they were smoking cigars in gloomy silence, looking with concealed hatred at the fair-haired officers dressed in white jackets who were bustling about on all sides without the slightest necessity. I must observe that among them were lads of twenty, and they were mostly young men; I can hear now the jarring, guttural, barrack-room voices, the insolent laughter that was like coughing, besides the loathsome Austrian accent in speaking German. I repeat that there was nothing dreadful about it, but I felt that for their manner of standing and turning their backs in our very faces, giving themselves airs and showing off, ‘We are the victors—our side has won,’ they ought to have been flung into the water; and even more, I felt that I should have been delighted to have seen it done, and would eagerly have helped.

Any one who had taken the trouble to look for five minutes at these two groups of men could not fail to understand that there can be no talk of reconciliation, that in the very blood of these people there lies a hatred for each other which it will take centuries to dissipate, to soften and to reduce to an inoffensive racial difference. After midday some of the passengers went down to the cabin, others asked to have lunch on deck. Here the racial difference was still more strikingly apparent. I looked at them with amazement—not a single gesture was the same. The Italians ate little, with the innate natural grace with which they do everything. The officers tore off pieces, chewed them loudly, threw down the bones, shoved their plates; some, bending right down to the table, with peculiar agility and extraordinary rapidity splashed the soup from the spoon into their mouths; others ate butter _from a knife_—without bread or salt. I looked at these performers and, glancing at an Italian, smiled—he understood me at once, and, responding with a sympathetic smile, betrayed his intense disgust. Another observation: while the Italians asked with a smile and gentle manner for a plate or for wine, every time thanking the waiter with a nod or a glance, the Austrians treated the attendants with revolting rudeness, just as retired Russian cornets and lieutenants treat their serfs in the presence of strangers.

By way of a finishing touch, a lanky young officer with pale yellowish hair called up a soldier, a man of fifty, who looked like a Pole or a Croat, and began abusing him for some negligence: The old man stood at attention and, when the officer had finished, tried to say something; but he had scarcely brought out ‘Your honour,’ when ‘Hold your tongue and be off!’ the pale yellow youth shouted at him in a husky voice. Then, turning to his comrades as though nothing had happened, he fell to drinking beer again. With what object was all this done before us? And was it not all done expressly for our benefit?

When we landed at Mogadino our long-suffering hearts could be restrained no longer, and, turning towards the steamer, which had not moved away, we shouted, ‘_Viva la Republica!_’—while one Italian, shaking his head, repeated, ‘_E brutissimi, brutissimi!_’

Is it not premature to talk so rashly of the solidarity and brotherhood of the nations, and will not any artificial covering up of their hostility be a mere hypocritical truce? I believe that national peculiarities will lose their offensive character just so far as they have lost it in cultivated society; but for such breeding to permeate the depths of the masses needs time. When I look at Folkestone and Boulogne, at Dover and Calais, then I feel full of dread and want to say—many centuries.