The Arena

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THE ARENA.

No. XXI.

AUGUST, 1891.

[Illustration: Elizabeth Cady Stanton (signed "Sincerely yours
Elizabeth Cady Stanton")]

THE UNITY OF GERMANY.

BY MME. BLAZE DE BURY.

"THE IDEA WHENCE SPRANG THE FACT."[1]

[1] "L'Allemagne lepnis, Leibniz. Essai sur le
Developpement de la Conscience Nationale en Allemagne."
By Prof. Levy Bruehl, Paris. 1 vol. Hachette, 1890.

Since the Great French Revolution of 1789 and its immediate
consequence in the military despotism of Bonaparte, nothing has
occurred that has so convulsed the Old World and so altered the
conditions of men and things, as the establishment of the United
German Empire in 1870. The men of our time are obliged to know how
this event came about, or remain in ignorance of all that has happened
during the twenty years following it--that is, to ignore their own
political status.

Now two records of this enormous change in all our destinies exist; as
yet there are but two, and modern men are bound in duty to take
cognizance of them. One is the famous "History," written in Germany by
Heinrich von Sybel; the other the work of Prof. Levy Bruehl, published
in France. Both must be read.[2]

[2] "History of the Creation of United Germany." 5 vols.
Heinrich v. Sybel, Berlin, 1890.

The remarkable book of M. Levy Bruehl on the reconstruction of the
German Empire cannot be read by itself or separated from the scarcely
less remarkable one of Heinrich von Sybel, the fifth and latest volume
of which has just appeared. The two require to be studied together,
for though starting from opposite standpoints, they explain each other
and distinctly show the impartial reader where to recognize the _real
raison d' etre_ of German unity. When Sybel speaks, as he constantly
does, of the creation of Germanic unity, after the war of 1870, he, as
a matter of fact, adopts the French theory, while the independent
French writer exposes from a far more German point of view, what have
been and what are the causes underlying the present formation of the
various component parts of Germany into a State. The title of either
tells sufficiently its own tale. Sybel proclaims at once the:--

"_Begruending des Deutschen Reiches durch Wilhelm!_" whilst Levy Bruehl
announces the progress of the "_National Conscience as Developed in a
Race._"

Sybel's is the narrative of a past that is doubly ended, the past of a
country and of a political system, the past of Prussia as personified
by the Hohenzollerns, and of a military and oligarchical absolutism as
represented by Prince Bismarck and Marshal Von Moltke. It is the
chronicle of an epoch whose glories, from 1700 to 1870, none can
dispute, but whose _real life_ was extinct, and whose capacity of
future expansion in its original sense was stopped at Sedan, or a few
months later, at Versailles. Sybel conceives his history as a
thoroughly well-trained functionary must conceive it; he is brought up
in traditional conventionalities, and is rather even an official than
a "public" servant.

The foreign author, on the contrary, feels what has lurked during long
ages in the soul of the innominate throng of the people, and been
expressed in the thoughts and impulses of such men as Hagern,
Scharnhorst, Gueiseman, and Stein, _Germans_, patriots who taught
Prussia to speak, think, act, and embody the inspirations, passions,
and instincts of a whole land; arousing the conscience and vindicating
the honor of seemingly divided communities whose hearts were already
_one_.

No sooner had M. Levy Bruehl's book appeared than the effect was
evident; it was felt that it told the _true truth_ (_"la verite
vraie"_) as the French say; that it set forth the real _"raison d'
etre"_ of the astounding achievement that had taken the world by
surprise, puzzling the patented politicians on one bank of the Rhine
almost as much as those upon the other.[3]

[3] Few events since the deceptions and catastrophes of
the war itself ever produced the sudden impression of
Levy Bruehl's boldly outspoken, utterly impartial book.
Published in the first days of last September (1890),
in one week it was famous throughout all France where
serious literature does not reap renown quickly. M. M.
Lairesse De Voguee, Bourdeau, Sorel, all welcomed it as
a revelation, in the _Debats, Revues des Deux Mondes_,
and elsewhere, and its real title was awarded it in the
_Temps_, by M. Albert Sorel, whose experience and
competence as an historical critic has never been
denied, and who unhesitatingly proclaimed it, _Le Fuit
et l'Idee_, namely, the announcement of the ruling
national idea whence the fact of German unity was
immediately derived.

The public of the whole universe will remember that at the time of the
Emperor Frederick's death the great question first arose as to who
was the initiator (or inventor) of the "United German Empire," and
from all sides poured forth the declarations of eye and ear witnesses;
this was the moment of the Gessellen-incident, and the outbreak of
hostility between Prince Bismarck and Baron de Rozzenbach and Gustav
Freitag, the novelist, and the celebrated jurisconsult for whose
illegal imprisonment the high-handed chancellor had later to atone.
But there apparently resulted from all these disputes that, as the
glory of "priority of invention" was so eagerly sought for, there must
have been an "inventor!" That was in reality the point on which Sybel
"spoke," and he therefore entitled his "history" that of the
"_Creation of the German United Empire, by William_ I."

This it was not; but this was at the same time the view it suited the
vanity of the French nation to take of it; accordingly, Sybel's theory
was rapidly accepted, and French public opinion did its utmost to
cause the unity of Germany, as recognized in 1871, to be regarded as
an accident, the creation of one man, promoted, for that matter
ungrudgingly, to the rank of the "greatest European statesman," but
whose work, being that of an individual, and therefore accidental,
might quite conceivably be eventually undone. Sybel's theory, being
official and Bismarckian, puts forth in truth the French conception,
and is, as a matter of fact, the very opposite of the national German
one.

The Germans who agreed with Sybel were the men of the old regime, with
far less, be it said, of the "cute" chancellor himself, than of
Marshal Moltke, the chancellor being far more distant from the
materialism of the "Grand Fritz" with his "big battalions" than were
the veterans (however glorious) of the drilled and disciplined
Prussian army. Bismarck was divided between two creeds: he knew too
much psychology to believe solely in the supremacy of pipeclay, but he
was at the same time not averse to the creation of a revived German
empire by his own genius.

Hence chiefly the confusion; for men's minds were confused,--in France
determinedly, and even in Germany, (owing to the still enduring force
of obsolete opinions and antiquated habits of thought and action)
uncertain.

When the war had once clearly shown what its end would be, they were
few who could appreciate it. In France where were they who had ever
heard the truth about "1806 and Jena"? or who, after the 4th
September, '70, were capable of realizing that the just retribution
for Jena was Sedan? All glory was given to one man--to Bismarck.
For the six long months, till March, '71, he was the
arch-destroyer--nothing else was taken into account; if _he_ chose to
establish a new holy Roman empire, of course he could do it; but it
would be the work of his Titanic will, and nothing on earth could
resist--_since France could not!_ Thus reasoned French vanity, and if
this curious condition of the public mind in France be not understood,
the reconstitution of united Germany into a great cohesive state will
never be rightly attained as a matter of fact.

France, therefore, continued (and did so until quite lately) to hold
to the individual or accidental theory of a military unity achieved by
fortuitous victories, to which the constant agitations of a whole
people for hundreds of years, were in no sense conducive. Another fact
that must also be acknowledged is, that this theory once firmly
established, any remorse for the mysterious crimes of Napoleon I. was
diminished if not erased. On the contrary, his conquests, his violent
despotism, his wonderful supremacy--unjust in every sense, immoral,
tyrannical, equally acquired and forfeited by the Corsican Invader,
was regarded as an example; when defeat had to be recognized as
undeniable, the national delusion soon came to take the form of
retrieval, and the notion gained ground that what _la chance_ or the
luck of a great statesman had put together, might, from the same
cause, be taken to pieces again!

Granted the principle of personal intervention, of the success of
either one man or of even a group of two or three leading spirits, who
was the original inventor, who the doer of the deed, the framer of the
fact that threatened the world with a new master?

This query was not started for eighteen long years; not until the
catastrophe that threatened the House of Hohenzollern with the loss of
its noblest son, served to recall to the mind of all Europe what a
thorough hero and citizen, what a perfect, undeviating German the
crown prince had always been.

The first emperor of United Germany, the agent of the illustrious
chancellor's will, had gone to his eternal rest when the German mind
began to reflect that only a dying man stood between the late ruler
and a boy emperor! But was not that dying man the creator (if creator
there had been) of the restored Teutonic state? Did not the revived
empire spring from the races in which Prussia was incarnate? was it
not in good earnest the Hohenzollern line, the descendant of the Great
Elector that answered for the regeneration? Thence the dispute between
the partisans of Bismarck and those of Frederick III. Supposing a
creation according to both Heinrich von Sybel and the chroniclers of
French vain-gloriousness, who was the creator? The answer of history
was, "No one." The German nation--or truer still, the thought of all
Germany, for long ages, was the genuine source, it was the very soul
of the entire people that from the ancient Germania of the Roman,
breathed anew in the remnants of its primeval entity and clamored for
its old integrity.

But we must not outstrip chronology; the first record of the events of
the war of 1870, and of the mighty changes brought on thereby, is that
of Sybel, not altogether wrongly entitled an "historical monument."
Professor Sybel's five volumes do, assuredly, constitute a _history
founded on documentary evidence_, if ever such a one existed, but for
that very reason they are, perhaps, somewhat wanting in actual life.
They are fashioned after the methods employed and approved of in
bygone days, and present rather the character of a register than a
record of deeds done by living men. As far as the testimony of hard,
dry acts went, it is probably impeachable; but we then come to the
question, Is documentary evidence in such a case sufficient to give
_all_ that is true? Is not truth, where human impulses and
irrationalities are concerned, derived from sources lying higher than
the regions sacred to "Blue Books"? Whereas it was to the certificates
vouchsafed by state papers, and instruments of such like order, that
Sybel's reliability was chiefly due. Once admit the value of these
vouchers (and their corroborative weight none can deny), and it
becomes difficult to overrate the importance of Sybel's still
unconcluded "_Begruendung des Deutschen Reiches_."

The reader who for the first time takes cognizance of the contents of
these formidable volumes, is overwhelmed by the amount of attestations
they present him with, by his own inability to refute them, or by
counter statements substitute a truer appreciation of what did really
occur. The dry narrative of mere fact is thus, but the impression it
should produce as of a fact lived through is wanting.

This history of Professor Sybel's is a Prussian one; for which it is
obvious that such extraordinary materials would not have been
furnished him had it not been tacitly understood that his final
verdict must be completely favorable to the Emperor Wilhelm I. and his
powerful minister.

In the curious and wide-spreading complications, whence eventually
resulted the Franco-German war of 1870, there are two distinct parts:
the part before hostilities broke out, and the part after the victory
of the Germans might be inevitably foreseen: the first period counts
in its _dramatis personae_ all the states and all the statesmen of
Europe. From the Crimean War to the cession of Venetia to Italy
through France, there is not an event that is not a connecting link in
a long serpentine chain. At the moment this may have escaped the eye,
but, once fixed in its one perspective of distance, the chain shows
unbroken and all is far less than has been supposed,--occasioned by
any arts, manoeuvres, or intrigues of the chief actors; the vulgar
notions of Prince Bismarck's incessant wiles, or of Louis Napoleon's
base designs against his neighbors may be discarded as relatively
subordinate. The incidents that marked the gigantic game of chess
played (not in Europe only) from the overthrow of the Orleans dynasty
to the death of Friedrich III. and the fall of Bismarck in the winter
of last year were neither the outcome of individual Machiavelianism
nor entirely attributable to chance; both were all but in equal degree
cause and effect. The actors personally in each case replied to the
suggestions of circumstances they had but indirectly helped to bring
about.

From 1848-50 to 1889-90, observe the rapid succession of so-called
"unexpected" events: The rise to the rule of Democracy in France; the
restoration to power of the despotic Bonapartist empire, whence issued
the revival of the nationalistic theory, leading on one side to
revolution, on the other to conservative resistance and the supremacy
of a warlike state like Prussia. We need go no further for the
determining cause of the two sovereign influences! Cavour and
Bismarck, the two men who predominate our half century, spring from a
common necessity, and in reality emerge from the conference of 1856,
misnamed the "Crimean Race!"

"I was the egg," the chancellor was wont to say, "whence my royal
master foresaw that unity might perhaps be hatched;" and on Orsini's
scaffold the Piedmontese seer knew full well that the Corsican
Carbonaro could not elude the fate lying in wait for him, disguised in
the freedom of Italy. You can dissever none of these facts one from
the other, and we now approach the "one man principle." The
protagonists stand face to face, rather than side by side, but both
are equally the unconscious promoters of that antagonism between
Germany and France which, in fact, has shaped, and still shapes, the
whole policy of Europe.

From this single grand outline, all the minor lines either start, or
towards it tend, indirectly, in convergent curves.

From the vast system formed by the monster-questions--United Germany,
the Latin races, the East, the future of catholicism and the papacy,
the strife of liberty against despotism--from all these parent
problems you can detach none of the smaller incidents of the age; you
are obliged to take count of the little Danish Campaign, which taught
Prussia those deficiencies, impelling her directly to the attainment
of her future military omnipotence, and which, under the abortive
attempts of the Saxon minister, M. de Beust,* gave a timid reminder to
Germany of what her unity had been and might once again be. Each
incident, however local or however remote, formed a feature of the
whole; between 1854 and 1870, you cannot ignore the would-be secession
of the Southern Confederates, which ended in making "all America" the
counterpoise to our older world--neither dare you neglect the Indian
meeting whence England issued, clad in moral as in political glory,
and gave the noblest sign of the Christian significancy of the
Victorian Era; all holds together, men and facts succeed each other in
quick alternation; the light that fades on one hand shines with
dazzling glare on the other. Cavour dies. Greatest of all, and genuine
creator, with his disappearance the equilibrium is endangered. Right
ceases to reign, force asserts itself, and Bismarck, ironhanded,
invincible, holds sway over a scared, unresisting, one may say a
_soulless_ world.

This is the turning-point. The one man theory apparently endures; but
physically and morally, the vision of disintegration rises,
threatening all; and whence the "New Order" is to come, above all
morally, none divine.

We reach here the close of the preliminary period. Up to the 4th of
September, 1870, and for a few years beyond, State policy is the
proper name for whatever occurs; we deal to a large extent with
mathematical quantities, with impersonal obstructions. Statesmen and
statecraft are in their place, and fill it; individuals, however
distinguished, are, as it were, sheathed in collective symbols and
represented by principles. Documentary evidence suffices now!
Treaties, minutes, diplomatic reports, instruments of all
descriptions, are really the requisite agents of this inanimate
diplomatic narration. State papers are the adequate expression, the
exclusive speech of mere states, and of this speech Heinrich v. Sybel
is one of the foremost living masters.

It would be next to impossible to find anywhere a loftier, clearer, or
more minutely correct record of what preceded and caused the war of
'70, than in the earlier volumes of Sybel's "History"; for up to the
reverses of France, and the substitution of German for French
predominance, we are still--in all connected with Germany,--in
presence of the Prussia of the past, of the Prussia whose social
conditions were fixed by Frederick the Great. Men are simply pawns
upon the board; their fate has no influence on others--the fate of
kings, queens, and high chivalric orders, is alone of any import to
the constituted realm. Nations obey and question not. They are
represented by mouldy, defunct formulae, and as yet no living popular
voice, save that of the revolution of 1789, has been raised to ask
where was the underlying life of the innominate crowd? But the
revolution spoke too loudly, and like the tragedy queen in Hamlet,
"protested too much."

In external Europe, and mostly in over-drilled Prussia, the _elite_
only spoke, and under strict military surveillance, exercised by
privilege of birth, the officer's uniform remained the sign of all
title to pre-eminence.

For these reasons this history must be accepted as the perfect
chronicle of the occurrences which marked the time before and
immediately after the fall of Sedan.

When later the dormant life that was underneath awoke, breathed, and
became manifest, Sybel's official tone no longer struck the true note;
the heart of peoples had begun to beat, and disturbed its vibrations.
Humanity was astir everywhere, and setting the barriers of etiquette
at defiance. Not only were dry registers based on blue books
insufficient, but the failure of the vital power that engenders other
and further life began to be felt. There was no pulse; the current was
stagnant, had no onward flow.

When this moment came, the truth of the narrative ceased. Henceforth,
it told of only the things of another age, and told them in the
dialect of a bygone tongue. It was the official report of what had
taken place in Old Russia written involuntarily under the omnipotent
but benumbing inspiration of the spirit of caste.

II.

When the volume of M. Levy Bruehl appeared in September of last year,
its name was instantaneously found for it by one of the leaders of
historical criticism in France. Ere one week had passed, M. Albert
Sorel had christened it "_l' Idee elle Fait_,"[4] and the public of
Paris had ratified the title by all but universal acclaim.

[4] "_Le Temps_," 9th September, 1890.

In those words M. Sorel proclaimed the concrete sense of the book, and
no doubt was left as to what was the meaning of the author who had so
freely undertaken to investigate the "developments of the German
national conscience."

The pith of the whole lies in Professor Bruehl's own expression: "In
German unity," he says, "the idea precedes everything else, engenders
the fact _l'est l'Unite nationale d'abord; Unite l'etat ensuite_," and
nowhere in any historical phenomenon has the idea had a larger part to
claim. But here you have at once to get rid of what, in Sybel's
narrative, rests on mere documentary evidence! All anachronisms have
to be set aside. As against the vigor of Levy Bruehl's living men, the
make-believe of the past, with its caste-governed puppets, stares you
in the face. After the rout at Sedan, after the startling
transmutation of long dormant but still live ideas into overwhelming
facts, you realize how entirely the mere Prussian chronicle of events
in their official garb deals with what is forever extinct. These dead
players have lost their significancy; they but simulate humanity from
the outside,--are simply "embroidered vestments stuffed like dolls
with bran," or like the moth-eaten uniforms of the great Frederick in
the gallery at Potsdam.

When Levy Bruehl, alluding to Stein and his searching reforms after the
disasters of later years, says: "_Il voulait une nation vivante_" he
wanted a living nation! He unchains the great idea from the bondage
where it had lain for centuries, and whence the men of 1813 set it
loose; he reinstates the past even to its legendary sources, and
evokes memories which were those of heroic ages, and which had still
power to inspire the present, and re-create what had once so
splendidly lived. This life is in truth the German idea in its utmost
truth; it was life and power that these men wanted, the life born in
them from their earliest hour and kept sacred through all time by
their poetry, their song, their native tongue.

It is all this which is German and not Prussian. The Hohenzollerns
have nothing to do with all this idealism,--and it is this which
constitutes the peculiar and sovereign spirit of German unity to which
the modern philosophy of Frederick II. was so long a stranger, and to
which the Iron Chancellor became a hearty convert only at the close;
the chivalrous element of the great elector is but a link between what
had been the Holy Roman Empire and what is to be the national union
after Leipsic and the War of Freedom--culminating in its supreme and
inevitable consequence in 1871. The heroes (and they were heroes) of
the distant North were as Brandenburgers, "electors," component parts,
be it not forgotten, of a Teutonic whole, "of one great heart," (as
Bunsen wrote long years ago to Lord Houghton),[5] "though we did not
know it."

[5] Life of Monckton Milnes, first Lord Houghton, by
Wemyss Reid. 2 vols. London, 1891.

Perhaps the greatest superiority of Professor Levy Bruehl lies in the
unity of description he employs in order to bring home to the reader
the unity of the subject he treats. He sees the whole as a whole, as
it really is, all being contained in all, and nothing in past or
present omitted. This is the truth of the Germanic oneness of species,
and the failure to conceive it of most writers of our day is the chief
cause of confusion. It is a vast, coherent vision of things taken in
by mind and eye from the _Niebelungen Lied_ to the wholesale captivity
of the French army, in the autumn of 1870, and when not thus
conceived, incomplete. To those who lived in and through the period
comprised between the war of the Danish Duchies and the re-conquest
of Alsace-Lorraine, no item of even prehistoric times can remain
absent; the spirit of German unity is everywhere, pervades everything,
and those alone who thoroughly master this are capable of painting it
to others' senses.

It is very well to take a Leibniz or Frederick the Great for a
starting-point, but it all goes immeasurably farther back than that.
Luther and his Bible open one large historic gate. The Bible heads
all! In 1813, writes General Clausewitz to the so-called Great Gascon,
the prime impetus was a religious one, and his own words are: "If I
could only hang a Bible to the equipments of my troopers I could do
with them all that Cromwell did with his Ironsides!" Two centuries
before, this had been the feeling of Gustavus Adolphus, who fought for
Protestant Germany with his Bible at his saddle-bow.

Luther is the one predominant Teuton of the centuries, after the close
of the middle ages, and though he ceases to be present in the flesh in
1516, he never dies. The inspiration of the German soul endures and
lives in every variety of art or expression. Luther is perpetuated in
Handel, and technically, even his "_Feste Burg_" is the first note of
the "_Inspirate_" in "_I Know That My Redeemer Liveth!_"

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