THE WAR AMONG THE INTELLECTUALS

Frederick lames Gregg

Is Nietzsche to Blame for the Chaos in Europe? or Treitschke? or Carlyle?

EDITOR'S Note:—Perhaps, in the future, another name for The Great War will be "The War of the Intellectuals." The geniuses, professors and cerebral specialists belonging to the nations at war, are ranged on the side of their various countries, and are quite as busy fighting with their pens and typewriters as the men in the trenches are with their rifles and siege guns. Dr. Dernburg pours hot shot into his former master, Lord Bryce. Romain Holland is keeping up a fierce duel with Gerhardt Hauptmann. Roentgen drops bombs into the Royal Society, and Lord Chancellor Haldane, us a metaphysician, takes to the air against him. Maeterlinck has abandoned romance for argument. In fact, all the poets, dramatists, novelists, historians, men of science and theologians of the Allies are on the dialectical firing line against those of Germany. This is the first occasion in history that there has ever been such national solidarity, in war time, among the world's intellectual guides. In our Revolution, Burke and Fox were for America. In the French Revolution Wordsworth and Coleridge were for the men who killed Louis XVI. Later on Byron and others of the British were for Napoleon. In the Boer War, Morley and many Liberals were for the South African enemy. These are only a handful of pertinent instances.

NOTHING is more interesting, to neutral American observers, than the attempt on the part of the scholars of Europe to saddle Friedrich Nietzsche with the responsibility for the present war. Thomas Hardy voiced this theory a little more loudly than anyone in Great Britain until the Oxford historians, in their pamphlet against Germany, proclaimed it in even mor intemperate tones. Indeed the name of Nietzsche is assuming to-day, all over the civilized world, a sinister and startling importance.

Let us look into this—very briefly.

The strongest intellectual figure in Germany at the present time is a soldier, Gen. Von Bernhardi, the philosopher of the General Staff, author of "Germany and the Next [the present] War," and "How Germany Makes War." These books form the Bible of Teutonic militarism, and the Kaiser's soldiers in the field are but putting into practise the theories laid down with cold precision by the retired cavalry officer whose views on colonial expansion and world politics have appealed as much to his fellow-countrymen in general, as his exposition of tentative campaigns and continent-wide strategy have done to military men. The most bitter anti-Teuton cannot close these volumes without feeling deep respect for the scientific grasp and prophetic imagination of their author. Here is a man who is all brain, with such a reverence for logic and reason that he cannot blind himself by any prejudice, as for instance when he points out that defeat for Germany would mean, of necessity, the loss of all her colonies.

HERE let us note that Bernhardi's intellectual forbear was the philosophical historian, Heinrich von Treitschke. The mantle of that college professor fell, in 1896, on the shoulders of the professional fighter. Treitschke, from his academic chair at Freiburg, had preached doctrines on the subject of a predominating Germany, headed by Prussia, which were not grateful to Saxony, the country of his birth. It is no wonder that Bismarck found the Doctor a man after his own heart, and when the Empire became a fact in 1871, von Treitschke grew bigger and bigger as an influence in official circles, though his name was known only to experts outside the borders of the Fatherland. Treitschke was for the utter elimination, as such, of Hanoverians, Saxons, Bavarians, Hessians and so on. He was for Germany over all, with Prussia in complete control of Germany and the Hohenzollerns at the top. Though a member of that body he hated the Reichstag as something that suggested free institutions. His "History of Germany in the 19th Century" was a glorification of absolutism, based on an ail powerful army. He hated England as a bar to Germanic expansion over seas, and America as a lure to those of his countrymen who had an unfortunate weakness for democratic ideals. As he put it, "Every German who is turned into a Yankee represents a blow to civilization." To him "culture" was "German culture," and "civilization" was the spread of Prussian thought and methods, in everything from government, to education and trade. "We need an Emperor," said he, before 1870. With the right sort of Kaiser everything would be all right for Germany— and for the world.

ACCORDING to Treitschke, there was nothing which could not be justified in waging a war which had for its object the spread of Germanic influences, all considerations of international law to the contrary notwithstanding. The main thing was. to win, at whatever cost to non-combatants, unfortified towns, art treasures, or venerable buildings. It virtually amounted to this, that there was, and could be, no sentiment in a European struggle. To be strong and drive the enemy to the wall, as decisively as possible, and as soon as possible, was the sole thing to be kept in mind, in spite of Hague conventions, protection of neutral states, small nations, and guarantees sealed, signed and delivered. Not a single notice posted up in a captured village in Belgium or France, since the war began, has been free from the cynical theories of this university Don, as to what ought to be done to the conquered in order to strike terror into the hearts of those who had any foolish notions regarding their right to defend their hearths and homes against an invader. He had even precise plans for levying huge fines on cities, by way of punishment for resisting the progress of the German horse, foot and artillery. These suggestions of his are now in every German officer's note book.

Curiosity about Treitschke has led people to ask who, in turn, was his intellectual ancestor. In England and France, many acute thinkers—lately the Oxford historians, and Thomas Hardy the novelist—have found that much sought for individual in Friedrich Nietzsche. They have failed to see that the mere fact that Nietzsche was born in 1844, whereas Treitschke came into the world in 1834, introduces a difficulty. Indeed Treitschke had been busily beating the Prussian drum long before the hermit philosopher of Leipsig and Weimar was even suspected by his acquaintances of being anything out of the common. But Thomas Hardy and the rest will insist that Nietzsche is morally and mortally responsible for Treitschke, Bernhardi and the spirit of the Great War as it has been displayed on the side opposed to the Allies; for all the havoc and destruction, the ruined Cathedrals and the rest of it. You might imagine that, just as the British mothers of a century ago used to frighten their children with the name of " Boney," so the matrons of France, England and Belgium, should now be telling their offspring that the ghost of Nietzsche would get them if they did not look out.

HOW surprised Nietzsche wculd be to find himself regarded as an inspirer of "Treitschkeism," or as an embodiment of the modern Germanic spirit, now represented by Bernhardi! Until the very last he was neglected at home, while the great war machine, and the policies behind it, were approaching perfection. As late as 1888, writing from Turin about his pamphlet "Against Wagner," he said: "This is an essay for psychologists, but not for Germans." He added that he had his readers in St. Petersburg, in Copenhagen, in Stockholm, in Paris, in New York, "but not in Europe's flatland, Germany." As an afterthought and as a solemn warning, he wished to whisper in the ear of Italians, whom he loved, and in the ear of Signor Crispi, in particular—"Triple Alliance with the Empire! An intelligent people will never make ought with it but a mesalliance." Nietzsche, the former artillery man, hated the brute force of the whole military system of which he had once been a part, as he hated the combination of "beer and intellect."

In spite of his biographers Nietzsche stood outside of the "Empire"—see La Gaya Scienza —and declared, again and again, that he preferred to regard himself as a "good European," rather than as a "good German." He also proclaimed himself "the last of the non-political Germans," indeed "a German but by accident."

TT is hard to see further how, leaving out dates, Treitschke could be a "disciple" of Nietzsche, since the latter in Ecce Homo, specifically condemned as "shameless," "the history written to please the court," by Treitschke. He laughed at Treitschke's "Germany-over-all" idea, and at the notion that the Teutons represented "moral order in history," or were the "custodians of European liberty." In "German nationality," he said, he found something which was "utterly, opposed to culture;" something which had helped to set Europe "far away from the spirit of the Renaissance." He went on: "My countrymen have on their conscience all the great crimes against culture in the last four centuries." He also gave vent to the remark that "Wherever Germany goes she corrupts civilization." In a letter to Georg Brandes, he boasted that he had been the first—in the Strauss controversy—to attack German culture, " the culture which was supposed to have conquered France," while a phrase of his, "culture-philistines" as applied to Germans, has stuck and taken root in the language. Nietzsche used "culture" always in the wide sense—in opposition to "barbarism" and never in the sense of "expertness," or "accomplishment" in a technical way. To Nietzsche the majority of German philosophers were but "makers of veils." In psychology the "German spirit" represented to him a "vitiated atmosphere." A "profound book," by a German, was simply a "botherheaded book." "I fear very much," he said, " that Dr. Von Trcitschke is regarded, at the palace in Potsdam, as a profound writer." He recalled maliciously how, on one occasion, when he spoke to some professors of the Berlin University of Stendhal (Henri Beyle) as a "great psychologist," they asked him how that author spelled his name. He declared that France was still the seat of " the most intellectual civilization in Europe," and the "high school of taste," though "one had to know how to find this France of taste." He pointed out that he, like Schopenhauer, was "more at home," as Heine had been, "with the French than with the Germans."

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THE present Emperor had said that he considered it his "duty as a Christian," to free the slaves in Africa, and the Norddculschc Zeitung had called the French "barbarians." To this Nietzsche retorted: "Where the slaves ought to be freed is in the neighborhood of the Norddculschc." Besides, as he put it, it was a trick of the Germans, due to their sentimental idealism, to be always wanting to "save" other people against their will, and to have no desire to save themselves. He found that the "higher schools" in the Empire aimed at producing in the shortest possible time, an immense number of young men for government officials, while military reasons had completed the work of destroying education.

Nietzsche held, in the Twilight of the Idols, that the Empire was expending all its means on "power, grand politics, international commerce, parliamentarism and military interests," at the cost of "true intellectual seriousness," and summed it all up thus: " Deutschland, Deutschland, über alles: I fear that that has been the end of German philosophy."

If, then, Nietzsche is not the intellectual progenitor of Trcitschke and Bemhardi, who is? Incredible as it may seem, the answer is—Thomas Carlyle! It was Carlyle who laid down the premises from which they all drew conclusions. It was Carlyle who practically introduced to the world German philosophy, German poetry, German sentimentalism and German military virtue. He glorified Frederick the Great as the ideal strong man, the Teutonic equivalent of Oliver Cromwell. Carlyle preached "hero worship," the sort of hero worship that Herbert Spencer contemptuously renamed "brute worship." It was Carlyle who, in a period of parliamentary reform denounced representative government as "government by talk," who described the voters of England as so many millions, "mostly fools"; who discovered that a benevolent despot was the only right sort of ruler. It was Carlyle who stood for purification by war at a time when every other philosopher in England hoped that war might come no more. He scorned the Manchester School of Economics and its peace doctrines. Nietzsche hated Thomas Carlyle and his hero worship but, at the time when Treitschke began to be noticed, his, Treitschke's, theories were so suggestive of the angry old man of Chelsea, that the German professor in his own country was called "the German Carlyle." Carlyle, the historian of Frederick, John Knox, and Cromwell, the man of iron and blood, stands to-day as the true patron saint of the barracks and trenches of the German Fatherland.