Yesterday, in Florence, in the flood of sunshine on the Arno at evening, I saw two German boys steering out of the Por Santa Maria, on to the Ponte Vecchio, passing for a moment in the bright sun, then gone again in shadow. The glimpse made a strong impression on me. They were dark-haired, not blond, but otherwise the true Wandervogel type: thick boots, heavy Rucksack, hatless, with shirt-sleeves rolled back above brown, muscular arms, and shirt-breast open from the scorched breast, and face and neck glowing sun-darkened as they strode into the flood of evening sunshine, out of the dark gulf of the street. They were talking loudly to one another in German, as if oblivious of their surroundings, in the thronged crossing of the Ponte Vecchio. And they leaned forward in the surge of travel, marching with long strides, heedless, past the Italians, as if the Italians were but shadows. Travelling so intently, bent a little forward from the Rucksacks in the plunge of determination to urge onwards, looking neither to right nor left, conversing in strong voices only with one another, as if the world around were unreal, where were they going, in the last golden sun-flood of evening, over the Arno? Were they leaving town, at this hour? Were they pressing on, to get out of the Porta Romana before nightfall, going south?
In spite of the fact that one is used to these German boys, in Florence especially, in summer, still the mind calls a halt, each time they appear and pass by. If swans, or wild geese flew low, honking over the Arno in the evening light, moving with that wedge-shaped, intent, unswerving progress that is so impressive, they would create something of the same impression on one. They would bring that sense of remote, northern lands, and the mystery of strange, blind, instinctive purpose in migration, which these Germans give.
Now no one knows better than I do that Munich and Frankfurt and Berlin are heavily civilized cities; they are not at all remote and lonely homes of the wild swan; and that these boys are not mysteriously migrating, they are only just wandering out of restlessness and need to move. Perhaps an instinct carries them south, once more to Rome, the old centre point. But in absolute fact, the Wandervogel is not very different from any other tourist.
Then why does he create such a strong and almost startling impression, here in the streets of Florence, or in Rome? There are Englishmen who go with knapsacks and sleeves rolled up; there are even Italians. But they look just what they are, men taking a walking tour. Whereas when I see the Wandervogel pushing at evening out of the Por Santa Maria, across the blaze of sun and into the Ponte Vecchio, then Germany becomes again to me what it was to the Romans: mysterious, half-dark land of the north, bristling with gloomy forests, resounding to the cry of the wild geese and swans, the land of the bear and the stork, the Drachen and the Greifen.
I know it is not so. I know Germany is the land of steel and of ordered civilization. Yet the old impression comes over me, as I see the youths pressing heedlessly past. And I know the Italians have something of the same feeling. They see again the Goths and the Vandals passing with loud and guttural speech, i barbari. That is the look in the eyes of the little policeman in his peaked cap and belt, as he watches the boys from the north go by: i barbari! Not a look of dislike or contempt; on the contrary. It is the old weird wonder. So he might look up at wild swans flying over the bridge: strangers!
There are English strangers too, of course, and American and Swedish and all sorts. They are all a bit fantastic to the Italian policeman. All nations find all other nations ridiculous. That is not the point. The point is, that though the English and American and Swede may be ridiculous to the Italian policeman, they are all, as it were, compatible, they are all part of the show, and we must expect them.
Whereas the Wandervogel is incompatible, you can’t expect him, he is strictly not in the game. He has got a game of his own up his sleeve, like a predative old Goth in the sixth century. And he brings with him such a strong feeling of somewhere else, somewhere outside our common circle. That was the impression the Russians used to give so vividly: the impression of another country, outside the group. The impression of a land still unknown and unencircled, large and outside. Now the Russians have disappeared, or have lost their dynamic vibration. And now it is the Wandervogel alone who trail with them the feeling of a far country, outside the group, a northland still unknown. The impression is there in spite of facts.
How wonderful it must have been, at the end of the Roman Empire, to see the big, bare-limbed Goths with their insolent-indifferent blue eyes, pass through the Roman market-place, or stand looking on, with the little Germanic laugh, part derision, part admiration and wonder, part uneasy, at the doings of the little, fussy natives! They were like a vision. Non angli sed angeli, we are told the first great Pope said of the British slave-children in the slave-market. Creatures from the beyond, presaging another world of men.
Coming home, I found books from Germany, and among them: Zeit und Stunde, by Karl Scheffler. The first essay, called Der Einsame Deutsche, at once brought back to me the Wandervogel, and reminded me of the problem: Where are they going? What are they making for? And there on the first page of Scheffler’s book, there is the answer: “Weil sie — eine Welt der reinen Idee brauchen.”
Was that why those boys were steering so intent out of town, in the evening? Was it that they were seeking for a world of the pure idea? Or, which amounts to the same thing, as Scheffler says, because they were steering impatiently away from all forms that have already been developed, all the ideas that have already been made explicit? Were they rushing towards what shall be, in their queer haste at nightfall? Or were they rushing away from all that is?
It looked much like the latter. They seemed to be rushing away from Germany, much more positively than rushing to Rome. Perhaps they want to touch the centre stone, there in the Roman Forum, to see if there is still virtue in it. Probably they’ll find it dead, like a dead heart. As the German boy said to me, in the tombs at Tarquinia, speaking of his travels in Italy and Tunis: It’s all mehr Schrei wie Wert. If not something much worse. One day, as Scheffler says, the German desire for a world of pure idea led the Germans to invent militarism; the next day, it was industrialism. If that isn’t enough to cure any man of wanting a world of pure idea, I don’t know what is.
Herr Scheffler advises the Germans to accept their race-destiny as the heaviest of all destinies. “Die Einsamkeit in der Welt und im eigenen Volk ertragen lernen: das ist der Sieg. Swindelfrei, wie die Gefliigelte Gottin auf der Kugel, das Ganze iiberschauen, den Graus der Geschichte mit derselben Gefasstheit und ehrfiirchtigen Neugier erleben, wie er in besseren Zeiten nur gedacht worden ist, an die Weltmission deutscher Problematik, an die hohere Sittlichkeit scheinbarer Charakterlosigkeit, an die Kraft in der Schwache glauben, und alles das tatig tun, jeden Tag fur verloren halten, an dem nicht irgend etwas getan worden ist: das ist, das sei das irdische Gliick des in der Welt und im eigenen Land einsamen Deutschen.”
That sounds fine and heroic, especially the Goddess on the globe, but to a mere outsider and Englishman, a little unnecessary. Those boys crossing the Ponte Vecchio, I am sure had no need to learn all those difficult things. It seemed to me, they had really learned intuitively what they had to learn, already. They had such a look of bolting away from Germany to escape any further coil of “pure ideas,” that it seemed to me they were all right.
What has ruined Europe, but especially northern Europe, is this very “pure idea.” Would to God the “Ideal” had never been invented. But now it’s got its claws in us, and we must struggle free. The beast we have to fight and to kill is the Ideal. It is the worm, the foul serpent of our epoch, in whose coils we are strangled.
But this very German unrest that seems so lamentable is just a healthy instinct fighting off the coils of the beast. The Germans are more frantically entangled up in the folds of the serpent of the Ideal than any people; except, perhaps, the Russian intelligents. But also, the Germans are much more lusty, fighting the beast. The German has a strong primitive nature still, unexploited by civilization. And this primitive nature has an intuitive wisdom of its own, an intuitive ethic also, much deeper than the ideal ethic. When the German learns to trust his own intuitive wisdom, and his own intuitive ethic, then he will have slain the ideal dragon, for the rest of Europe as well as for himself. But it needs a very high sense of responsibility and a deep courage, to depend on the intuitive wisdom and ethic, instead of on the ideal formula.
This is the point that Herr Scheffler makes in the very interesting essay: “Warum Wir den Krieg Verloren Haben.” He links together instinct, intuition, and imagination a little confusingly. But it certainly was for lack of these three things that Germany lost the war; and for lack of the same three things, in the other nations, there was a war at all. It is not only Germany, it is our whole civilization that is damned by the “Ideal,” and by the lack of trust in the intuitive, instinctive, imaginative consciousness in ourselves.
Herr Scheffler’s essay on the Englishman is also very amusing. And possibly, from the outside, it is quite true. That is obviously how the Englishman looks to any foreigner who only sees him from the outside But from the inside, the story is a different one.
The clue to the Englishman is the curious radical isolation, or instinct of isolation, which every born native of my country has at the core of him. We are little islands, each one of us is a tiny island to himself, and the immutable sea washes between us all. That is the clue to the Englishman. He is born alone. He is proud of the fact And he is proud of the fact that he belongs to a nation of isolated individuals. He is proud of being one island in the great archipelago of his nation.
But it is the fact of his own consciousness of isolation that makes the Englishman such a good citizen. He wants no one to touch him, and he wants not to touch anybody. Hence the endless little private houses of England, and the fierce preservation of the privacy.
The Englishman, however, is not bourgeois. Myself, I could never understand what bourgeois meant, till I went abroad, and saw Germans and Frenchmen and Italians. They have a bourgeoisie, because they have had bourgs for centuries. In England, there are no bourgs.
So the Englishman is not bourgeois. But he is hopelessly civilly disciplined, with a discipline he has imposed on himself. He is an islander, an individualist. What has carried the Englishman abroad, what has made him “imperial” — though the word means very little to an Englishman — is his fatal individualism. The Englishman, alone, is fatally and fantastically individualistic. That is, he is aware of his own isolation almost to excruciation. So he disciplines himself almost to extinction, and is the most perfect civilian on earth. But scratch one of these civilian, made-to-pattern Englishmen, and you will find him fantastic, almost a caricature. Hence his endless forbearing, and at the same time, his absolute resistance to tyranny. He is an island to himself.
Perhaps it was the mixture of Germanic with Celtic British blood that produced this Hamletish-Falstaffian sense of being distinct from the body of mankind, which is the glory and the torture of the Englishman. The Englishman cannot not be alone. He is essentially always apart. For this reason he seems a hypocrite. His nature is so private to him, that he leaves it out in most of his social dealings. He expects other people to do the same, and it seems to him a lack of breeding when the others don’t do it.
But nowadays, the Englishman has so disciplined himself to the social ideals, that he has almost killed himself. He is almost a walking pillar of society, as dead and stiff as a pillar. He has crucified himself on the social ideal most effectively, and has a terrible moment ahead of him, when he cries consummatum est, and the life goes out of him. There is something spectral about the British people.
Cut off! That is the inner tragedy of the English. They are cut off from the flow of life. Nowhere are the classes so absolutely cut off from touch, from living contact, as in England. It is inhuman, it is almost ghoulish.
As for the English not being revolutionary — they made the first great European revolution, and it is highly probable that among them is preparing the last. The English will bear anything, till the sense of injustice really enters into them. And then nothing will stop them. But it needs that fatal sense of injustice. Only that can make them see red, and blind them to that fetish of theirs, “the other fellow’s point of view”.
So it is. We all have our own Volkerschicksale. At the same time, we are all men, and we can all have some glimpse of realization of one another, if we use imagination and intuition and all our instincts, instead of just one or two. And the fate of all nations in Europe hangs together. We have our separate Volkerschicksale. But there is over and above a human destiny, and a European destiny.