The Soul of Europe: A Character-study of the Militant Nations

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Chapter I

Inflated German idea of the national loal and its world-misiion—Tbe tmth about the early and the medieval Germans — German admissions of recent degeneration— Kultur and Civilisation— The character ot Berlin— The cxmtraat of the Prussian and the South German— Evil effect of prosperity and over-population — The Imperialist tradition — ^The opportumty of the Kaiser — His aims and character — How the mition was prepared for aggressive war— How it was reconciled to outrages 94

Chapter II The Three Races Of Austria-hungary

Austria as a colony of aeed gentlefolk— The earlT peopling of the Danube plains and making of the £mpire— Character-studies of the Austrian, the Slav, the Magyar, and the Ruman — Pride and &11 of Austria — Career and character of Francis Joseph — His ambition in the Balkans— The struggle of the Slavs for national life— Corrupt repression by Austria and Hungary — Attempts at judicial murder of Scarbs and Croats— The Slavs combine and Franas Joseph joins the great adventure — ^Attitude of the people on the war— The future of the Empire 89

Chapter III

Popular estimate of The Unspeakable Turk— A libel on the Turkish people — Origin of the Osmanli Turks and dilution of their Asiatic bkxxl — Early civilisation and causes of degeneration — The Turk ' ' an honest, truthfill, self-respecting man " — ^The causes and authors of outrages — ^The Kurd, the Circassian, and the Albanian — ^Armenia and the Balkans — Palace-corruption in the nineteenth century— Abd ul Hamid— The Young Turks and the Revolution — Their character and failure — Helplessness of the real Turk — Evil influence of Austria and Germany — The Turk dragged into the war . 139

Chapter IV The Balkan Cauldron

Origin of the Balkan peoples— Early civilisations of the Serb and the Bulgar — ^Arrest of their development by the Turkish conquest — Their souls " trodden by herds of buffaloes " — Character-studies of the Serb, Montenegrin, Albomian, and Bulgar — Clocks stopped at the Middle Ages — ^The modern revival — ^The Serb advance — The assassination of Alenmder and Dcaga — Spirit of modem Serbia — ^Advance in Bulgaria and Rumania — Brightness of the Balkan capitals — ^The shadow of Austria and Russia — The Macedonian question, the ureek, and the Albanian 187 vi THE SOUL OF EUROPE

Chapter V

Russia the destiny of Europe — Not Pan-Slavism — ^Tbe vast number and growing organisation of the Russian Slavs — Early spread and character of the Slavs — The rule of the Norsemen — ^The effects of the domination of the Mongol — ^The Muscovite Empire founded— Peter and his corrupt successors — ^The Tsars of the nineteenth century^The Slav awakens and attacks despotism—- Chaxacter-study of a typical Russian village — Isolation, climate, and vast distances — Russians not &talistic and unprogressive — ^Absurdity of the Russophile theory — ^The fierce struggle for light and life — Character of Nicholas II— The Revolutionary, the Fmn, the Pole, and the Jew— Hope of a new era saB

Chapter VI

The supposed Celtic character of Ftanoe — ^The Gauls probably not Celts ->£arlv peopling of the countrv and mucture of races— Formation of the Frank kingdom— Character-stuoy of modem France — The key to its political and reUfious revolutions — France the reverse of decadent— Splendid record in reaudng crime and in social progress — The charge of vice and frivolity — The birth-rate — France leading the nations of Europe— Its bias for peace— Recovery of Alsace and Lorraine — Their nationality and sentiments— Danger of a plebiscite ......... 284

Chapter VII

The tragedy and the heroism of Belnum — Bravery of the ancient Belgians — Mixture of Celts and Teutons — I^vision of the Belgian people into Walloons and Flemings — Racial and historical origin of the division — Great progress in the early Middle Ages — Flemish art as relics of a splendid prosperity— The blight of Spanish rule — Religious massacr es Character of the modem Belgians — Infusion of the spirit of France — The creation of a nation — Recent struggles as signs of vitality — Union of the nation in fiaoe of Germany— Fight for honour and existence — Debt of Europe to the little nation 321

Chapter VIII

Reasons for the intervention of Itety— Creation of the Italian people— A nation, not a race — Early mixture of races — Unity under Rome — Chaos of the Middle Ages — Rise of the Papal Power, the Commtmes, and the Republics— Evil influence of foreign dominion — The progressive north and the unprogressive south — Political rather than climatic causes — The contrast of Milan, Rome, and Naples— Of Tuscany and the Abrusri — Gabriele d'Annunzio— Great variety of character— The unification of Italy— The final expulsion of the Austrian 354

Chapter IX Racial And National Character

Libd and mischief of racial efnthets — Need to determine the full character of nations — Racial strains not important — The character of nations made chiefly by environment — Origin of me civilisation of Europe— Isolation as a cause of backwardness — Russia, Spain, and Ireland — Economic influences on character — Political influences— Study of Italian character — Tendency to uniformity — Probable effects of the war — Partition of Germany and Austria- Faint prospect of lasting peace— Travail of the soul of Europe . 377

INTRODUCTION

THE SOUpL OF A PEOPLE

In the month of July of the year 1914 the sun smiled on the annual brotherhood of nations at play. The true master of passion is play, and year by year this growing international amity seemed to be softening the old asperities, the memories of defeat on the field of battle or the field of diplomacy. Men and women laughed as they sped beneath the grim forts which soil the Alpine frontier of France and Italy, or as they gazed on the secretive moimds which rose, like giant mushrooms, beyond the circles of liege and Metz and Antwerp, or as they passed through the wide-open gates of Germany. Britons reflected the smiles of brother Teutons, as they sat on the benches of the beergardens by the Spree. Austrians, sipping iced coffee on the Boulevard des Capucines, saluted the happy genius of France. Frenchmen protested that they breathed their native air in the Ring at Vienna. Grave, observant Germans muttered guttural admiration before the Hotel de Ville at Louvain or amidst the dim glories of Westminster Abbey. Clouds, it is true, gathered thickly over the mountains of a little southern land, and in secluded chambers our political meteorologists tapped their barometers with nervous finger. The genial riot of the summer holiday ran on. And suddenly the peal to arms rang out, and the honoured guests fled under a hail of insults, and the gates of the nations were slammed. Slav was Slav, it seemed, and Teuton was Teuton, and Latin was Latin once more : and they who unhappily remained, in cages of barbed wire, in alien lands saw anger or hate flame forth against them as if the battles of a thousand years had surged into living memory, and all the love-making of that summer's day had been a make-believe.

Are there souls of nations that can love and hate, live and die, as the souls of men do ? Did this ghastly outbreak mean that undying raceantagonisms had blazed out once more and scorched the thin mask of brotherhood ? The man of science had begun to tell us that these racial afiinities and antagonisms were, largely, an \mhappy fiction. He scoffed at '^ Aryans," and smiled indulgently when we talked of Saxon and Celt, of Slav and Latin and Teuton. He was beginning to study what he called '* the psychology of a crowd," even " the psychology of a people " ; he allowed that in each large family of men which gathered round a national flag there might be distinctive impulses, attitudes, and ideals — ^the things which we call, in a word, the soul of a people. But he frowned when one spoke, in the familiar way, of racial affinities and racial hostilities.

There was, assuredly, a time when masses of tall, blue-eyed, fresh-faced men came southward from the forests of northern Europe, where seons of isolated life among the summer oaks and the snow-laden pines of winter had put a peculiar stamp on dieir minds and ideals, no less than on their bodies. There was a time when a shorter, darker, pallid-faced race from the sunny shores of the Mediterranean, a race enriched and uplifted in mind by contact with the older civilisations, marched northward under its eagles, and gazed at the furdad barbarians with as vivid a feeling of human contrast as that with which we now confront the Arab or the Maori. Between them, moreover, a third race, not yet fully understood, variously known as the " Alpine " or the " Celtic " race, seems to have penetrated from the east ; and from the east also came, time after time, yellowish, slit-eyed races with ideals and impulses entirely imlike those of the three European races. The opinion is not yet wholly esctinct among scientific men that several human species were independently developed.

But what mighty confluences of the human streams there have been in Europe during the last two thousand years ! For four hundred years the northern and southern races battled, and the central race mingled with both on their battle-grounds. At length the Mediterranean men, or the Latins — already adulterated out of recognition by contingents from the north and east — ^yielded and retired, and the flood of northerners poured over them and blended with them. What a mixture of blood there must have been when Groths and Yandalsi breeding as they went, slowly descended as far as the tips of Spain and Italy, and even passed in mighty armies along the north of Africa to Carthage ! How much '^ Latin " blood was left in France when Goths and Vandals had eaten their way through it, and Franks and Normans had settled on it ? Is the Breton, with his Celtic tongue and roimd Celtic face, the blood-brodier of the peasant of the Ardennes and the artisan of Lille and the innkeeper of Carcassone ? Who will say what are the several proportions of Celt and Saxon and Danish and Latin blood in die veins of England ? or of Celt, Teuton, and Slav blood in the veins of Germany ? or of Roman, German, Slav, and Asiatic blood in the veins of Austria ?

On the other hand we have been somewhat hasty in assenting to pretty literary descriptions of races whose blood was comparatively pure. We still speak of the Greek's genius for culture and the sterner Roman's genius for administration. We forget that Athens — almost, by the way, the one Greek city with a high culture — did very well in its own administration and had no occasion to develop whatever faculty it posacBScd of imperial organisation^ because it had no opportunity to found an empire ; whereas Rome, unchecked in its growth and unstimulated in its life by rival cities, was compelled by its very expansion to cultivate the art of govemio^. A little time ago we admired the ancient Hebrew's '* genius for morality/' and now we find the same ideals stamped on brick or written on papyrus among the ruins of Babylon and Thd>es. Some spes^ stiU of the modem Hebrew's " genius for finance," overlooking the fact that for many centiuies Europe allowed him no other field for the exercise of his keen intelligence. We say picturesque things about the remote, inaccessible, mystic, imaginative soul of the Oriental ; and we are well aware that within a few years Japan absorbed our western ideals as a sponge absorbs water, and that the Chinaman is immeasurably less mystic and imaginative than the Irish peasant. We brood over the unalterable soul of the Hindu, and we frown when we observe that a western education almost invariably alters it. We rhapsodise on the weary soul of ten-thousand-yearold Egypt, and we dig up statues from which we recognise that the fellah is to-day as he was six thousand years ago: perhaps ready to enter the great stage of history once more.

Yet, in spite of all this misapplication of poetry to racial description, there is a verifiable truth in the bdief that nations have distinctive characters, or *' souls/' Photographers have a trick of superimposing on one plate the portraits of a dozen musicians, or a dozen members of a family, and one often recognises the faint outline of a common type amidst the blurred confusion of detail. So the mind often retains a fairly clear common image when niunbers of portraits, either of body or character, have been registered on it. Not only do scientific works confidently offer us " typical *' portraits of various races, but there is good reason for the substantial agreement of the world in recognising the portrait of Uncle Sam or John Bull, of the stolid (rerman and the mercurial Frenchman, and the impetuous yet grave and ceremonious Spaniard.

You realise the truth, and its limitations, in making a joiuney from Holland to the south of France. I wandered about Amsterdam one festive day, when country folk and town folk swarmed in the streets, and it was possible to see a common type, of body and character, imder all the infinite variations. In the north of Belgiiun, where I have lived intimately among the Flemings, you find the same type with certain modifications: just as you find a different dialect of a once common tongue. There is, of course, no psychological frontier where the white posts mark the beginning of Belgian soil ; but the Fleming, as you go southward, begins to be conscious of a difference and to be hostile to the Dutch. He is more impulsive, more boisterously hospitable^ more bliintly critical, than the Dutch : less even-tempered, less restrained in manners and speech, less methodical. He is more apt to offend and more apt to win sudden admiration. At Brussels you find the Fleming contrasted with the South Belgian, the Walloon. He is still more impulsive, warmer of blood, nimbler of wit, quicker of movement, nearer to refinement of nature, more receptive of new ideas : he is hostile to the Fleming, and claims to be very superior to him. He blends the French and the Netherlandish cjiaracter. The heavier features gradually disappear as you pass through the great industrial towns of northern France : and it is a commonplace of Parisian writers that if you will prolong your journey as far as — let us say — Gascony, you will meet yet another type of character.

You notice the same gradual passage £rom one fairly definite type to another in travelling from Germany to the south of Italy. In north Germany itself you have variety enough : the Wend peasant of the Spree Forest or the Polish peasant of Posen or the Teutonic peasant of the northern granaries, the comparatively jovial official of cosmopolitan Berlin and the dourer type of the northern cities. We shall see this later. But it is one of the most persistent and soundest observations of travellers in Germany that the northern character is, from influences which I will discuss later, more grave and austere and laborious than the southern.

About Geneva the south German character begins to fall under the distinctive influences of Switzerland. Along the valleys of Switzerland, the trenches dug by giant glaciers of long ago, streams of Germans, French, and Italians have made their way from their respective frontiers, and mingled with the old Alpine population, or streaked the little land with veins of different nationalities. But in the towns where they meet and mix, and even on the chalet-covered slopes and in the nestling villages, a peculiar conunon stamp has been set on their original characters by the features of their new home : by the massive grandeur of its mountains — ^whose inspiration was so vividly felt and described by Goethe — and by the long, tranquil possession of freedom and self-government. Under these influences the German character assumes again the gravity of the north, but it is a gravity which pays spontaneous honuige to the majesty of nature instead of reflecting a dark cloud of despotic authority. In Ticino you encoimter the north Italian character : the strenuous, alert, aspiring, rebellious, inflammable, yet generally disciplined, type of the artisans of Milan and Turin and (in the main) Genoa. I saw Genoa, one Simday evening, on the brink of civil war. Guns were trained on the square, and ten thousand regulars sullenly awaited the attack. Then there came a ripple over the wires from the workers* headquarters, and the tens of thousands of Genoese who at six in the evening had been ready to die for a principle were at 6.30 cracking jokes with the weary soldiers. At Rome you find a subtler, more ehisive character : a character moulded by traditions which go back two thousand five hundred years, but modified by the conversion of Rome into the hierarchic centre of the world, enfeebled by long periods of bad government, and complicated by a thousand years of cosmopolitan life. Further south are the elemental, spontaneous children of the earth and the sun.

You may to-day study this process of the making of the soul of a people in the United States or Australia, but there is no need to linger further. Few will require a patient demonstration of the fact that the Irishman differs in definite ways from the Englishman or the Scotchman, or that the Texan has not the same character as the citizen of Massachusetts. Sometimes, when you survey the stream of faces in the Strand or Broadway or Collins Street or the Boulevard St. Michel, you almost despair of seeing a common type in so bewildering a variety : you listen to the talk of men in a caf6 at Brussels or a beer-house at Basle or at the little tables on the Piazza Colonna, and the shades of character seem innumerable. Each national ** type " seems to be foxmd in each other nation. Yet there is something of a national type. There is a soul of a nation, and it differs from the souls of other nations.

This is no more surprising than that there are distinct languages and diverse physical types. Whatever mind or soul is, it reflects the changes and diversities of the body; and if the steaming forests of Africa beget the negro, the broad dry plains, with extremes of climate, of Asia b^et the yellow man, and the searching cold of the north begets the Scandinavian, this deep influence on muscle and nerve is bound to affect the mind. Into a general discussion of this, however, I do not propose to enter. Serious scientific inquiry into the matter is still in its infancy, and has as yet furnished only the general principles of social psychology, which do not concern me, or a few special studies of particular peoples such as I propose to make. In fact, contrary to a common belief, we have not yet settled the important question how far heredity is concerned in the making of a people. Two influences only need be noted here.

We may at least recognise that " inbreeding '* — ^that is to say, confining the choice of breeders within a group of more or less similar individuals — has had an important share in establishing and preserving race-characters. Hence the remarkable persistence of the Hebrew type in a hundred different environments: hence the greater distinctness — away from frontiers — of Slav features, or of Irish or Welsh features : hence the comparative fixity of types in our rural districts and small towns.

which have a limited range of intermarriage, in contrast to the diversity of large towns. Distinct types of body and character, which may have been created during some far-back period of isolation, are thus preserved by marriage within the group, and this preserving force of heredity is so tenacious that in a cosmopolitan city like Alexandria or Constantinople or New York a practised observer will recognise races at sight. But with the increase of the race, with the spread of great empires and their international armies over scores of subject peoples, and with the increasing facility of movement in modem times, the old hereditary streams have crossed and recrossed over the greater part of the globe. Basques may linger in the Pyrenees and Wends in the Spree Wald, but, as a rule, the higher a civilisation is, the less it can hope, and the less it should seek, to call itself by the names of its ancient fathers. In some of our chapters this consideration will prove of importance.

But far greater is the influence, direct or indirect, of what we call, in the broadest sense of the word, environment. I have already observed how, in the case of Switzerland, where few live out of sight of the snow-clad mountains, the physical surroundings and the political conditions combine to mould the character of a population which has largely been drawn from different sources. In Holland and Belgium quite different surroimdings have made their mark on the national character.

B

In many parts of Ireland the soft and melancholy hills and the enervating moisture have united with a long tradition of distress ; and the common religion, the burning memory of misfortune, and the coherence s^inst a more robust aggressor, have helped to make and preserve a type of character. The several elements of France have been knit together in the enthusiasm of three revolutions. Germany has succeeded in bringing about an extraordinary imity of its radically diverse peoples by persuading or compelling them to adopt a common aspiration. We shall trace this influence throughout. Historical accidents — ^the issue of war, for instance — will make one people stem, laborious, aspiring, and aggressive, and another people pacific, jovial, humane. Geographical accident — compare, for instance, the Devon men of Dartmoor, of the more fertile lands, and of the coast — may divide a group into still further types.

This direct observation of character and connection of it with the physical and moral environment may prove more useful to us than the distribution of peoples into the ancient stocks which no longer represent sharply distinct types, and therefore I dwell little on the features of skull and hair, and colour of eyes, which interest men of science and seduce less careful writers. On these latter tests, we shall find, recent German writers of great influence have concluded that Christ, Dante, and Joan of Arc owed their several excellences to an admixture of Germamc blood. In point of fact, the German of to-day has no title whatever to speak of a racial homogeneity and make it a basis for his overweening ambition. Even the Slav, more or less isolated in the Balkans or in the heart of Russia, has had notable historical adulterations. And to speak of " Latin '* peoples is one of the worst instances of taking the accident of language for a deep symptom of race. The character of France has almost no relation to the ancient Italian people who imposed their tongue on that part of Europe ; while the cry of blood-brotherhood on the lips of their neighbours is very largely based on a superficial thesis of the schools which has been pressed into the service of politicians. A million accidents, spread over more than a thousand years, have led at length to the grouping of the inhabitants of Europe roimd certain national flags, and we shall find that in some cases the most fiery patriotism — the kixid of patriotism which fancies that it springs from an immemorial tradition — ^is the outcome of quite recent influences, and has been artificially generated.

If we would understand aright the gigantic quarrel which has convulsed Europe, and appreciate the chances of a return to lasting tranquillity, we must look closely into this old idea of blood-brotherhood as the basis of national character. Most assuredly there has been some influence of racial afiSnity in this mustering of seven nations in two mighty antagonistic forces, but it is less important than is commonly believed, and, in cases where it plainly exists, its appeal has been superseded by cold and interested calculations. In proportion as race-afiinity has been slighted by scholars, it has become dear to diplomatists and statesmen. If we would truly understand the souls of the contending nations, we must attend to a hundred other things : the interests of conmierce and the accidents of history, the material of the national tradition and the sequels of an advancing technical science, the personality of rulers and the domestic life and political development of their subjects. In this sense I propose to study as closely and as fully as possible the character and mood and outlook of each of the nations involved in the great war : to depict them in their homes, before passion distorted their features, as well as in the field, and to trace the causes of their tragic differences.

I begin with Germany because it is of paramount importance, both for the understanding of the war and in order to make some reasonable conjecture as to what will follow, to study the mood and temper of that nation. The conflicting nations have now published the diplomatic correspondence which preceded the war. This correspondence is remarkable for an agreement and for an omission. The agreement, which no ingenuity on the part of Austria and Germany has succeeded in enfeebling, is to the effect that England, France, and Italy made devoted efforts to avert war, and Russia met their appeals satisfactorily. Austria and Germany have obviously published only a selection of their documents — ^the German " White Paper " is self-convicted of suppressing a material telegram from England — yet these suffice of themselves to belie the charge that England desired or provoked the war, and they strip the last shred of decency from the fierce attacks made on England by German savants and from the national cultivation of hatred.

Such is the outstanding affirmation of this diplomatic correspondence: the omission is not less instructive. The messages which passed between the Foreign Offices of London, Paris, and Petrograd, or went from those capitals to Vienna and Berlin, have been published with apparent fulness : the closest scrutiny does not detect any gap or inconsistency. But the correspondence between Berlin and Vienna has not been published. The German Chancellor affirmed throughout that he was cordially co-operating in the interest of peace and was urging Austria to be conciliatory. Where are his dispatches ? Where are the Austrian replies ? We need not wait until the historian of some future date discovers them in the archives ; and when, after noting the consistent peace-work of France and England and Russia, and the dark suppression of the Austro-German correspondence, we read the illuminating earlier dispatches of M. Jules Cambon from Berlin, when we study the development of aggressive Imperialism in German schools and literature, when we learn from Italian statesmen that Austria meditated war on Serbia in 19131 when we observe that Germany broke with its ultimatum upon the hopeful negotiations of Austria and Russia, and when we perceive that one nation only was in a state of extraordinary preparedness for war, we cannot hesitate to give a verdict. Germany desired and provoked the war.

This deliberate provocation of so mighty a calamity, and the appalling conduct of Germany during the course of the war, make the study of its psychology one of equal interest and importance. We had heard from time to time of conduct on the part of German officers which all civilians, and most military men, regard as brutal ; but very few people who knew Germany were prepared to hear the supreme representative of that nation, to the applause of his colleagues in the Reichstag, declare that they would hack their way through moral and international law to the realisation of their aim : or to find almost the entire German people applaud the ruthless transgression of the rules of civilised warfare : or to behold the spectacle, as childish as it is indecent, of a national cultivation of the barbaric passion of hatred.

At the commencement of the war one of our statesmen, who was convinced that he knew Germany, resigned his office because he would not believe her guilty. Presently we began to distinguish between the Emperor, with his military and commercial supporters, and the mass of the people. To-day we regretfully yield to the impeachment of an entire nation. The leading representatives of each section of it— of its scholars, its churches, and its workers — ^have approved the initial outrage, and hardly one of them has raised a protest against the general applause of successive outrages and against the increasing frenzy. There is an ancient, respectable maxim, *' No one becomes utterly base in a day '* ; and on that principle some are concluding that the soul of Germany is inherently malignant, cruel, and selfish. It is not so. We have the books of several generations of English travellers, and none has ever approached so hard a verdict on the German people. Let us patiently study that people as it was before the hot blasts of the war-passion seared and scorched it, and see if we can understand. Then we have to study what qualities brought Austria and Turkey to join in the great adventure : then to understand the blaze of heroism which has illumined Belgium, the vigour of what some writers had called frivolous and decadent France, the sturdy endurance of Servia, and the unexpected might and brilliance of Russia. If we know these peoples in peace, we shall understand them better in war.