the invasion of Belgium-a deed which ought to have revolted the conscience of every man in whom conscience had not been paralysed by the dogma of Prussian infallibility. But Eucken, like every other German Professor, is a State servant, and is bound more or less to the service of the official machine.

Let us see what goes on in the sphere of free creative literature. Here again we shall find our analogy still holding good. Nothing is more striking about the great literature of Catholicism-while it still produced a great literature-than the fact that it is nearly all a literature of revolt against ecclesiasticism. There is no trait which Dante-who was for a time on the Index-Boccaccio, the author of 'Piers Plowman,' Chaucer, Erasmus, Rabelais, have so much in common as this. It is hard to think of a really illustrious name in which the tendency is not distinctly to be observed. And similarly in Germany, with the rise of the hegemony of Prussia, which made the Germans the system-ridden people they now are, one may note the growing dominance of this note of revoltthe effort of literature, striking about it, often recklessly enough, to shape for itself a space in which it can breathe more freely. As I have remarked in an earlier study of this subject, it was the German poets quite as much as Bismarck who brought the German Reich into being.* But a survey of German literature since 1870 shows this class, in the main, to be profoundly discontented with its creation, and disposed to look on it much as Frankenstein did on the monster which made its creator's life a burden. Naturally, the war, with its terrible and imminent possibilities, has silenced for the time being all these voices of revolt, or has turned them, like Hauptmann's, into the chorus of 'Deutschland über Alles.' But nothing which has appeared in English papers and pamphlets for the past few months on the subject of the German Empire and its leading figures could exceed the severity, the drastic satire, of some of the attacks on German chauvinism and militarism which have come in recent years from strictly German sources.

A slight but amusing instance may be mentioned. We have all lately been laughing over Mr E. V. Lucas's

*The Quarterly Review,' July 1914.

capital adaptation of that children's classic, 'Struwelpeter," to the history of the war. We have also read the remarkable Hymn of Hate' against England published in a recent number of the Munich illustrated paper, 'Jugend.' I have before me a copy of this paper for October 21, 1913, in which Mr Lucas's idea has been anticipated. There is a 'Struwelpeter' page representing the Crown Prince as Fidgety Phil' bringing down the German dinnertable with its contents, while the Kaiser and his Chancellor look on in helpless dismay. Another Munich paper, the well-known 'Simplicissimus,' which has been made by the genius of Olaf Gulbranson and his colleagues the ablest journal of social and political satire in the world, has been prosecuted again and again, and forbidden entrance into Prussia, on account of its incessant and unsparing attacks on precisely those characteristics of modern German policy against which we consider ourselves to be doing battle at the present moment with other weapons. To the literary editor of this journal I once ventured to hint that the scathing destructiveness of its criticisms of imperial Germany might usefully be modified by something not so wholly negative, some influence that might build towards a better ideal as well as destroying the false ones. 'We are not in sight of that yet,' he replied. There is still too much to pull down (herunterreissen) before we can begin to build.'

Of the more serious side of modern German literature, one must regret that so little has yet been made accessible to English readers. The special interest attaching just now to writers like Nietzsche, Treitschke and Bernhardi has so riveted attention on them that we are disposed to think that Germany produces nothing else. This is a great mistake. Apart from Carl Hauptmann, whose dramas are now appearing in an admirable English translation and are documents of great value for the social history of Germany, and leaving aside also writers of wide celebrity like Sudermann, Clara Viebig and Ricarda Huch, there are many contemporary German authors whose work is well worth knowing and who stand as far aloof from Prussian materialism and mechanical organisation as any English, French or Russian writers could possibly do. Books of which one never hears in

England, such as 'Der Erzketzer' by Wolzogen, or ‘Es war ein Bischof' by Adam Müller-Guttenbrunn (one of an interesting group of Austrian writers), or Otto Reuling's 'Quellen im Sande,' or 'Der Thor,' an earlier and much better work by the now famous author of 'Der Tunnel,' are examples among many of a school of fiction which is treating modern life and its problems with courage, insight and sincerity, as well as with a mastery of style which is comparatively new in German prose.

There is, however, a quality which is wanting in a good deal, though by no means in all, of this literature. Delicacy is perhaps the best word to describe this missing element. The modern German writer has learned much, but he has not quite mastered the supreme lesson of the economy of force. He wishes to imponieren. Phrases and descriptions are deliberately used for their power to stun and shock. Thus writers so unlike each other as Carl Hauptmann and Arthur Schnitzler-both of them masters of language for whom no nuance is out of reach-sometimes express themselves with a crudity worthy of Swift or of Rabelais. But Swift was crude, like Hogarth, because that was his type of humour; he delighted in the racy vocabulary, the boisterous abandon of gutter badinage. With the German writers brutality is not sought for its own sake; it is merely an inverted form of finesse, and it strikes one on that account as being all the more disagreeable.

In the plastic arts the same trait is to be observed, and here indeed it is much more emphasised than in literature. Some thirty years ago, when I first made acquaintance with German sculpture and painting, those arts, taking the general run of what was shown at exhibitions, bought by the public, praised by the critics, were chiefly notable for a quality best exemplified perhaps by Schilling's colossal statue of Germania on the Niederwald. This kind of art was both academic and sentimental; it was stupendously complacent and selfsatisfied. It was not heroic, but it was bulky; it was not tender, but it was soft; one felt that, like wax before a flame, it would collapse into an amorphous mass in presence of any genuine artistic passion, any keen perception of life. And so indeed it has collapsed, but the

art which has taken its place is far from being as strong and sincere as the literary art which has put Gustav Freytag, Felix Dahn and Georg Ebers out of fashion. And owing perhaps to the nature of the medium, it strikes a foreign observer as being decidedly more brutal. Thus in the Munich Kunstausstellung and other exhibitions of last year one might have noticed, as compared with the French Salon, a certain crude violence, an obvious tendency to imponieren, in the renderings of the nude, of which not a single example was to be found the same year in the Salon at Paris-a city not exactly noted for prudish restraint in these matters.

Curiously similar is the tale which is told by modern German architecture-the feature of the country which perhaps most impresses the traveller who is gathering surface impressions during a short tour. Every such traveller must have become aware of a new type of design which is showing itself in public buildings and monuments of all kinds, and of which I may name as salient examples the new University buildings at Freiburg im Breisgau, and the huge Leipzig memorial erected on the centenary of the national uprising of 1813. Here is something peculiar to Germany, widely diffused throughout the country, and recognisable at once as a consistent and expressive style. But what does it express? In the first place, the deliberate avoidance of any concession to the principles of grace and charm. All is bare, solid, and unfriendly; to impress at all it must make a massed attack; on a small scale this kind of building would be merely uninteresting. There is a tendency to avoid overhanging eaves and cornices with their suggestions of a protective and alluring shade-they would interfere with the designed impression. The best analogy for this new German style was furnished since the war broke out, when our newspapers began to publish illustrations of the enormous German siege guns with their muzzles pointing skyward. The German buildings I refer to give exactly the same impression of a blunt, truncated strength, aggressive and domineering-it is the howitzer style of architecture. The conception of physical force and mass are all that it seeks to convey. It is impossible not to see here the expression of a definite attitude of mind in modern Germany.

A nation's mind and character are always more faithfully expressed in its building than in any other art. But it must be remembered that the buildings here in question are mostly public works, and embody what one may call the public and official expression of national sentiment. It has, however, been the constant aim of German officialism to impress its sentiment upon the whole nation. But a study of contemporary German literature shows us that this has not been achieved with anything like the success that might at present be supposed. Hence the bitter complaints of writers like Treitschke, Bernhardi, Bülow and many others, of the 'defective patriotism' of the German people-complaints which must surprise those who do not know Germany from the inside, and who witness only the extraordinary unanimity and zeal produced by the sudden revelation of the hostile forces which German policy has called into action. These dangers have compelled the German people to put itself for the moment wholly in the hands of the autocracy. But it is impossible that it should not ultimately realise that the dangers against which the autocracy is endeavouring to shield the country are simply the creation of the autocracy itself. As Graf von Reventlow has pointed out in a recent important work ('Deutschlands auswärtige Politik, 1888-1913 '), it was only with the greatest difficulty that the German people could be got to sanction the preparations of the naval chiefs for a challenge to the maritime supremacy of England. According to Bernhardi's estimate of his countrymen, 'no people is so little qualified to direct its own destinies.' But which was the more prescient and truly patriotic policy-that of the people, or that of the military party by whom they were despised and overborne? The answer is being written in letters of blood; and, when Germany has read it to the end, it can hardly be doubted that there is in the country a sufficient store of freedom, courage and sanity to ensure that German destinies shall never again be decided by irresponsible directors over the heads of the German people. The mind of this better Germany must be sought for in the neglected imaginative literature of the country. Those who seek it there will be rewarded in every way; not least by the discovery of points of contact, possibilities Vol. 223.-No. 443.