land, but an island slashed by
the sea till it nearly splits into three islands, and even the midlands
can almost smell the salt. Germany is a powerful, beautiful, and fertile
inland country, which can only find the sea by one or two twisted and
narrow paths, as people find a subterranean lake. Thus the British Navy
is really national because it is natural. It has cohered out of hundreds
of accidental adventures of ships and shipmen before Chaucer's time and
after it. But the German Navy is an artificial thing, as artificial as a
constructed Alp would be in England. William II. has simply copied the
British Navy, as Frederick II. copied the French Army, and this Japanese
or antlike assiduity in imitation is one of the hundred qualities which
the Germans have and the English markedly have not. There are other
German superiorities which are very much superior. The one or two really
jolly things that the Germans have got are precisely the things which
the English haven't got, notably a real habit of popular music and of
the ancient songs of the people; not merely spreading from the towns or
caught from the professionals. In this the Germans rather resemble the
Welsh, though heaven knows what becomes of Teutonism if they do. But the
difference between the Germans and the English goes deeper than all
these signs of it. They differ more than any other two Europeans in the
normal posture of the mind.

Above all, they differ in what is the most English of all English
traits--that shame which the French may be right in calling "the bad
shame," for it is certainly mixed up with pride and suspicion, the
upshot of which we call shyness. Even an Englishman's rudeness is often
rooted in his being embarrassed. But a German's rudeness is rooted in
his never being embarrassed. He eats and makes love noisily. He never
feels a speech or a song or a sermon or a large meal to be what the
English call "out of place" in particular circumstances. When Germans
are patriotic and religious they have no reactions against patriotism
and religion, as have the English and the French. Nay, the mistake of
Germany in the modern disaster largely arose from the facts that she
thought England was simple, when England is very subtle. She thought
that because our politics have become largely financial they had become
wholly financial; that because our aristocrats had become pretty cynical
they had become entirely corrupt. They could not seize the subtlety by