years men have been mad; now we must all learn to be more reasonable.” Would that the diplomatists of all countries could take to heart words so true and so wise! Here was the spirit which alone can create and sustain the League of Nations. While the political wire-pullers of Europe seek to make of the League the unhappy pushball of their own intrigues, this German working-man had the root of the matter in him. May his vision of a world in which men are learning to be “reasonable” wax from dim hope into full and perfect realisation. CHAPTER XV THE GERMAN VIEW OF ENGLAND Personally I am under considerable obligations to August Lomberg, Rektor in Elberfeld. His _Präparationen zu deutschen Gedichten_ for the purposes of instruction in schools has been a lantern to my way and a light unto my path on the somewhat rugged slopes of the German Parnassus. August Lomberg’s is the hand which has stayed my often stumbling feet when I first aspired to Goethe and Schiller, deities sitting enthroned aloft and remote. Guides to poetry are irritating books in one’s own language. What a poet has to say, and what he means, are strictly private matters between the reader and himself. The views of a third person may even be regarded as an intrusion, not to say an impertinence. But when you are struggling with the verbal intricacies of a new tongue, guides to knowledge assume a very different light. So, I repeat, I am under many obligations to August Lomberg, Rektor in Elberfeld. As so often happens with German authors, he has taught me more incidentally than the surface content of his works. The Rektor has clearly a complete and painstaking acquaintance with the whole range of German literature. But his observations concerning the poets were, to me at least, of less value than the revelation of his own type of mind and general outlook on life. August Lomberg is a garrulous writer. His explanations are largely historical as well as literary. Every line breathes a narrow and aggressive patriotism of the type which has made the name of Germany detested. The great poets of the Liberation period have sung both of freedom and oppression on a note which rings clear and true to any lover of liberty. The Elberfeld Rektor, commenting on this verse long before 1914, can only do so in terms of abuse of France. To him a poet is really important, not for some immortal gift to the sum-total of the world’s truth and beauty, but for the degree to which he may have added new stops to the full-sounding organ swelling the note of German excellence. The ironical anti-patriotic strain in Heine fills the Rektor with undisguised horror. So great is his reprobation of Heine as a world citizen, that he can with difficulty begin to do justice to him as a poet. And though like Wordsworth’s Nun he is breathless with adoration before the genius of Goethe, I more than suspect that at heart Goethe’s indifference to patriotic questions is a sore trial to him.