ounts to a weakness in them. They let France escape
with a paltry fine, next time France must be beaten to the dust. Always
with a pleasant outward courtesy, he passed on to England. England was
decadent and powerless, her rule must pass to the Germans. 'But we shall
treat England rather less severely than France,' said this bland apostle
of Prussian culture, 'for we wish to make it possible for ourselves to
remain in friendly relations with other English-speaking peoples.' And
so on--the whole of the Bernhardi doctrine, explained in quiet fashion
by a man whose very debility of mind made his talk the more impressive,
for he was simply parroting what he had often heard. No one criticized
his proposals, nor did we dislike him. It all seemed too mad; a rather
clumsy jest. His world of ideas did not touch our world at any point, so
that real talk between us was impossible. He came to see us several
times, and always gave the same kind of mesmerized recital of Germany's
policy. The grossness of the whole thing was in curious contrast with
the polite and quiet voice with which he uttered his insolences. When I
remember his talk I find it easy to believe that the German Emperor and
the German Chancellor have also talked in such a manner that they have
never had the smallest opportunity of learning what Englishmen think and
mean.

While the German doctrine was the plaything merely of hysterical and
supersensitive persons, like Carlyle and Nietzsche, it mattered little
to the world of politics. An excitable man, of vivid imagination and
invalid constitution, like Carlyle, feels a natural predilection for the
cult of the healthy brute. Carlyle's English style is itself a kind of
epilepsy. Nietzsche was so nervously sensitive that everyday life was an
anguish to him, and broke his strength. Both were poets, as Marlowe was
a poet, and both sang the song of Power. The brutes of the swamp and the
field, who gathered round them and listened, found nothing new or
unfamiliar in the message of the poets. 'This', they said, 'is what we
have always known, but we did not know that it is poetry. Now that great
poets teach it, we need no longer be ashamed of it.' So they went away
resolved to be twice the brutes that they were before, and they named
themselves Culture-brutes.

It is difficult to see how the world, or any considerable part of it,
can belong to Germany, till she changes her mind. If she can do that,
she might make a good rule