New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 1, No. 1: From the Beginning to March, 1915, With IndexVarious
History
New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 1, No. 1: From the Beginning to March, 1915, With Index
Various
World War, 1914-1918
Prof. Haeckel, another of the witnesses raised up against us, attained
to some celebrity at one time through proving the remarkable resemblance
between two different things by printing duplicate pictures of the same
thing. Prof. Haeckel's contribution to biology, in this case, was
exactly like Prof. Harnack's contribution to ethnology. Prof. Harnack
knows what a German is like. When he wants to imagine what an Englishman
is like he simply photographs the same German over again. In both cases
there is probably sincerity, as well as simplicity. Haeckel was so
certain that the species illustrated in embryo really are closely
related and linked up that it seemed to him a small thing to simplify it
by mere repetition. Harnack is so certain that the German and Englishman
are almost alike that he really risks the generalization that they are
exactly alike. He photographs, so to speak, the same fair and foolish
face twice over, and calls it a remarkable resemblance between cousins.
Thus he can prove the existence of Teutonism just about as conclusively
as Haeckel has proved the more tenable proposition of the non-existence
of God.
*Germans and English.*
Now, the German and the Englishman are not in the least alike--except in
the sense that neither of them are negroes. They are, in everything good
and evil, more unlike than any other two men we can take at random from
the great European family. They are opposite from the roots of their
history--nay, of their geography. It is an understatement to call
Britain insular. Britain is not only an island, but an island slashed by
the sea till it nearly splits into three islands, and even the midlands
can almost smell the salt. Germany is a powerful, beautiful, and fertile
inland country, which can only find the sea by one or two twisted and
narrow paths, as people find a subterranean lake. Thus the British Navy
is really national because it is natural. It has cohered out of hundreds
of accidental adventures of ships and shipmen before Chaucer's time and
after it. But the German Navy is an artificial thing, as artificial as a
constructed Alp would be in England. William II. has simply copied the
British Navy, as Frederick II. copied the French Army, and this Japanese
or antlike assiduity in imitation is one of the hundred qualities which
the Germans have and the English markedly have not. There are other
German superiorities which are very much superior. The one or two really
jolly things that the Germans have got are precisely the things which
the English haven't got, notably a real habit of popular music and of
the ancient songs of the people; not merely spreading from the towns or
caught from the professionals. In this the Germans rather resemble the
Welsh, though heaven knows what becomes of Teutonism if they do. But the
difference between the Germans and the English goes deeper than all
these signs of it. They differ more than any other two Europeans in the
normal posture of the mind.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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