er) remarks somewhere that
purebred races possess fidelity; he instances the negro and the dog--and, I
suppose, the German. Anyhow, it is true that there is a recognisable and
real thing which might be called fidelity (or perhaps monotony) which
exists in Germans in about the same style as in dogs and niggers. The North
Teuton really has in this respect the simplicities of the savage and the
lower animals; that he has no reactions. He does not laugh at himself. He
does not want to kick himself. He does not, like most of us, repent--or
occasionally even repent of repenting. He does not read his own works and
find them much worse or much better than he had expected. He does not feel
a faint irrational sense of debauch, after even divine pleasures of this
life. Watch him at a German restaurant, and you will satisfy yourself that
he does not. In short, both in the most scientific and in the most casual
sense of the word, he does not know what it is to have a _temper_. He does
not bend and fly back like steel; he sticks out, like wood. In this he
differs from any nation I have known, from your nation and mine, from the
French, the Spanish, the Scotch, the Welsh and the Irish. Bad luck never
braces him as it does us. Good luck never frightens him as it does us. It
can be seen in what the French call Chauvinism and we call Jingoism. For us
it is fireworks; for him it is daylight. On Mafeking Night, celebrating a
small but picturesque success against the Boers, nearly everybody in London
came out waving little flags. Nearly everybody in London is now heartily
ashamed of it. But it would never occur to the Prussians not to ride their
high horses with the freshest insolence for the far-off victory of Sedan;
though on that very anniversary the star of their fate had turned scornful
in the sky, and Von Kluck was in retreat from Paris. Above all, the
Prussian does not feel annoyed, as I do, when foreigners praise his country
for all the wrong reasons. The Prussian will allow you to praise him for
any reasons, for any length of time, for any eternity of folly; he is there
to be praised. Probably he is proud of this; probably he thinks he has a
good digestion, because the poison of praise does not make him sick. He
thinks the absence of such doubt, or self-knowledge, makes for composure,
grandeur, a colossal calm, a superior race--in short, the whole claim of
the Teutons to be the highest spiritual product of Nature and Evolution.
But as