July. 31, 1915. 
LAND AND WATER. 
THE STORK AND THE EAGLE. 
By Desmond MacCarthy. 
PEOPLE sometimes ask each oUier, for tlie sake of 
starting talk, who among illustrious dead authors 
they would like most to have met. These conver- 
sational openings are all inept, but, as they go, this 
is not such a bad one. It is a corridor question, on 
to which many doors open. Until lately had I been asked who 
among them I was glad to have escaped meeting, the name 
of Madame de Stael would sooner or later have occurred to 
me, not because I had read and disliked her works, for her 
books I had always considered " excused," but because the 
idea of being taken up to that celebrated lady and presented 
by one's hostess in a few kind words, and then left, must 
strike terror into anyone who knows he can only show off 
when there is not the slightest occa.sion for doing so. 
I picture her seated on an ottoman in a turban, dressed 
in the detestable fashion of the Empire which made women 
look like milk-cans, and encouraged in them classical atti- 
tudes. I imagine her rather over-featured, and in spite of 
fine, vivacious eyes of an almost formidable plainness. But 
that is a trifle; she is an epicure in conversation and a 
tremendous converser herself. 
MADAME DE STAEL'S SALON. 
When the Revolution subsided, little islands of the old 
regime began to emerge again. People not only began going 
back to the churches, but starting salons again. Madame de 
Stael's salon was the most brilliant and influential. Indeed, 
it was so influential that Napoleon thought it worth wTiile to 
send her packing out of the country. So here she is on her 
trarels, as fastidious in expression as an eighteenth-century 
lady, yet most impatient of common sense and moderate 
feeling; with an eighteenth-century standard of manners, 
yet with a contempt for every sentiment which is not inti- 
mately natural; with a passion for ideas, and yet convinced 
that it is only " the heart " which counts. She is very con- 
scious of her own celebrity, but she is not happy in the in- 
tellectual life. She is always saying things like: " La gloire 
elle-merae ne saurait etre pour une femme qu'un deuil 
eclatant du bonheur." She must have society (she confesses 
that it is this which puts her at the mercy of life), and yet 
the only frame of mind which she admires is one which 
is produced by solitude. Not at all an unamiablo character, 
you see, but still, a lady whom one might well approach with 
misgivings. Since reading her book about Germany, however, 
I would risk it. Indeed, I feel inclined to write a sonnet to 
her beginning 
" De Stael, thou should 'st be living at this hour." 
By temperament she was a romantic individualist, and, 
tlianks to Napoleon, she came to understand herself so well 
that she became the first prophet of the romantic movement. 
Through her detestation of him she discovered what she liked 
herself. One has only to treat a detested enemy like a finger- 
post and then walk straight in the opposite direction to 
come into one's own country. He loathed and despised ideas ; 
ideas were her chief interest. In his eyee men were parts of 
a great social machine. To her there was nothing so sacred 
as the individual, and that country seemed to her the most 
civilis<.'d where he was most independent and least compelled 
to pool his energies and sentiments in the common stock. 
IN PRAISE OF GERMANY. 
Napoleon promptly suppressed the book, for it was all in 
praise of Germany, and behind it was a latent criticism of 
France. It may seem odd that such a book should be gratify- 
ing reading at this moment; but it is, and for a simple re£ison. 
Her praise of Grermany is bestowed on qualities which that 
country now conspicuously lacks, and this praise was enorm- 
ously heightened by finding there none of the characteristics 
which have since made Germany detested and feared. The first 
thing she has to say about the nation as a whole is that they 
are a loyal people, who " ne manquent presque jamais k leur 
parole et la tromperie leur est etrangfere." This noble charac- 
teristic, she says, must put them at a disadvantage in competi- 
tion with the Latin races, who are unscrupulously adroit. She 
remarks upon their lack of national egotism, and fears that 
since they have no pride of the aggressive kind, they will be 
again at a disadvantage. She regrets this probable result of 
this characteristic amiable enough in iteelf, because they have 
so much to give to the world at largo. They have more inde- 
pendence aind originality of mind than any other people. 
The French, she says, on the other hand, are strong only 
"en masse"; their men of genius always start upon th© 
assumption that received opinions are true; their social con- 
sciousness is too strong to permit them to be original; they ara 
too drilled. While in Germany the imitative impulse, hardly 
exists, and the fear of ridicule, which kills enthusiasm, not ht 
all. She attributes this independence of thought to the absence 
of centralisation, social and political. They are a nation of 
solitaries, devoted to philosophic speculations, to dreams and 
to sentiment. In France the public directs the authors, she 
wrote; the French writer is always conscious of the readers, 
and wishes to please them rather than himself. But in 
Germany she found an art and a manner of thinking which 
delighted her because it was romantic, personal, and 
independent. The Germany she saw was sentimental, dreamy, 
loyal, and sincere, a population of gentle philosophers, without 
patriotism or practicality, and her description of them fixed 
their type in the minds of foreigners for fifty years. Foreign 
caricature always lags years and years behind contemporary 
fact, and one can still see traces of Madame de Stael's typical 
German in comic pictures — a mild, vague, heavy man with a 
long pipe and a pot of beer, his pockets stuffed with books. 
The Germans themselves accepted her description of 
them. " The English rule the sea," wrote Jean Paul Richter, 
" the French the earth, but the Germans have the empire of 
the clouds." And when our fathers travelled, it was stiU 
this old, naif, unpractical Germany they still saw everywhere 
— the quaint, imaginative, ramshackle Germany of which the 
stork was a more fitting emblem than the eagle. It is curious 
to read her warning to Napoleonic France; it might be 
now addressed by some German to Germany herself: "O 
Frenchmen, if you let calculation decide everything, and 
reason alone inspires even contempt of danger; if practical 
intelligence and a calculating impetuosity should j'et mako 
you masters of the world, you will only leave behind you the 
desolation of a sand storm, terrible as the sea, barren as the 
desert." 
MODERN GERMAN CULTURE. 
Since the beginning of the war, Nietzsche has frequently 
been quoted in our books and newspapers. Extracts from his 
work have been chosen with a view to exciting our abhorrence. 
His voice is regarded as the very croak of the bird of prey. 
He, too, has his word on modern German culture, and though 
no f I'iend of romantic idealistic Germany, this is what he says : 
" When the Germans began to become interesting to other 
nations of Europe " (Madame de Stael's book did moro to 
interest them than any other) " it took place owing to a 
culture which they now no longer possess, which, in fact, they 
have shaken off with passionate eagerness, as if it had been a 
disease; and yet they have known of nothing better to 
exchange for it than political and national insanity. . ." 
It was the dim lustre, the milky-way light which shone round 
this culture which attracted. Foreigners therefore said to 
themselves, " That is very, very remote from us; our seeing, 
hearing, understanding, enjoying, and estimating are all at a 
loss there: still, it might be stars. Can it bo that the 
Germans have quietly discovered a corner of the heavens and 
located themselves there? One must endeavour to approach 
nearer to the Germans?" And they came nearer to the 
Germans; while a very little later the same Germans began 
to be anxious to divest themselves of the milky wny lustre; 
they knew so well they had not been in heaven; bat in cloud- 
land. 
Since the war broke out, some writers have sfxight to show 
that nothing was more inevitable than that moder.i Germany 
should proceed from the Germany which Madam!! dc Staol 
described; that the stork should hatch an eagle's egg. M. Leon 
Daudet has published a pamphlet which, he calls " From Kant 
to Krupp." It is not a particularly able work, and one views 
with some suspicions a psychological discourse pro;:iptod by 
the stress of the present moment. The argument is briefly 
this, that German idealism was a boundless extension of the 
individual "I," a form, of egotism which made tlie whole 
world centre in the individual, making him think his own 
experience the only reality. Well, from that defijiition, if 
you accept it as a description of German philosophy, the 
conclusion can be made to follow; only it is not one which 
those who have not ever metaphysical ability enougli to have 
been even temporarily taken in by idealistic philosophies hav« 
any right to hold. 
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