n of theories he is a disciple of
Gobineau, a Frenchman, who after a profound study of the inequality of
the human race became convinced of the superiority and high destiny of
Germany. Gobineau and Chamberlain have told the Germans that they are
mighty and unconquerable, and the Germans have listened with undisguised
pleasure.

Gobineau may be set aside as a professor of a fixed idea. There are
other Frenchmen who have paid glowing tribute to Germany. Taine excelled
in praise of her intellectual vigour and productivity. Victor Hugo
expressed his love and admiration for her people, and confessed to an
almost filial feeling for the noble and holy fatherland of thinkers. If
he had not been French he would have liked to have been German. Ernest
Renan studied Germany, and found her like a temple--so pure, so moral,
so touching in her beauty. This reminds us of the many who during the
present war, though ostensibly enemies of Germany, spend half their time
in proclaiming her perfection and the necessity for immediate imitation
of all her ways. Madame de Stael and Michelet expressed high regard for
German character and institutions. There are degrees and qualities of
attraction and absorption, varying from the amorous surrender with which
Lafcadio Hearn took on Japanese form to the bootlicking flattery which
Sven Hedin heaps on the Germans. (It is quite futile to seek for an
explanation of Hedin's conduct in his Jewish-Prussian descent. He would
lackey anywhere. Strindberg dealt faithfully with Hedin's pretensions.
Strindberg, alas! is dead, but his exposure of Hedin has been strangely
justified.)

Heine is an example of the curious and insistent fascination with which
the mind may be drawn to one nationality whilst it is repelled by
another. His judgment on England is painful in the extreme:

"It is eight years since I went to London," he writes in the Memoirs,
"to make the acquaintance of the language and the people. The devil
take the people and their language! They take a dozen words of one
syllable into their mouth, chew them, gnaw them, spit them out again,
and they call that talking. Fortunately they are by nature rather
silent, and although they look at us with gaping mouths, yet they spare
us long conversations."

Can anything be more sweeping? Can anything be more untrue? "Fortunately
they are by nature rather silent"--imagine the reversed verdict had
Heine attended a general election campaign! The unattractivene