This is the turning-point. The one man theory apparently endures; but physically and morally, the vision of disintegration rises, threatening all; and whence the New Order is to come, above all morally, none divine.
We reach here the close of the preliminary period. Up to the 4th of September, 1870, and for a few years beyond, State policy is the proper name for whatever occurs; we deal to a large extent with mathematical quantities, with impersonal obstructions. Statesmen and statecraft are in their place, and fill it; individuals, however distinguished, are, as it were, sheathed in collective symbols and represented by principles. Documentary evidence suffices now! Treaties, minutes, diplomatic reports, instruments of all descriptions, are really the requisite agents of this inanimate diplomatic narration. State papers are the adequate expression, the exclusive speech of mere states, and of this speech Heinrich v. Sybel is one of the foremost living masters.
It would be next to impossible to find anywhere a loftier, clearer, or more minutely correct record of what preceded and caused the war of 70, than in the earlier volumes of Sybels History; for up to the reverses of France, and the substitution of German for French predominance, we are stillin all connected with Germany,in presence of the Prussia of the past, of the Prussia whose social conditions were fixed by Frederick the Great. Men are simply pawns upon the board; their fate has no influence on othersthe fate of kings, queens, and high chivalric orders, is alone of any import to the constituted realm. Nations obey and question not. They are represented by mouldy, defunct formulæ, and as yet no living popular voice, save that of the revolution of 1789, has been raised to ask where was the underlying life of the innominate crowd? But the revolution spoke too loudly, and like the tragedy queen in Hamlet, protested too much.
In external Europe, and mostly in over-drilled Prussia, the élite only spoke, and under strict military surveillance, exercised by privilege of birth, the officers uniform remained the sign of all title to pre-eminence.
For these reasons this history must be accepted as the perfect chronicle of the occurrences which marked the time before and immediately after the fall of Sédan.
When later the dormant life that was underneath awoke, breathed, and became manifest, Sybels official tone no longer struck the true note; the heart of peoples had begun to beat, and disturbed its vibrations. Humanity was astir everywhere, and setting the barriers of etiquette at defiance. Not only were dry registers based on blue books insufficient, but the failure of the vital power that engenders other and further life began to be felt. There was no pulse; the current was stagnant, had no onward flow.
When this moment came, the truth of the narrative ceased. Henceforth, it told of only the things of another age, and told them in the dialect of a bygone tongue. It was the official report of what had taken place in Old Russia written involuntarily under the omnipotent but benumbing inspiration of the spirit of caste.
II
When the volume of M. Lévy Brühl appeared in September of last year, its name was instantaneously found for it by one of the leaders of historical criticism in France. Ere one week had passed, M. Albert Sorel had christened it l Idée elle Fait,4 and the public of Paris had ratified the title by all but universal acclaim.
In those words M. Sorel proclaimed the concrete sense of the book, and no doubt was left as to what was the meaning of the author who had so freely undertaken to investigate the developments of the German national conscience.
The pith of the whole lies in Professor Brühls own expression: In German unity, he says, the idea precedes everything else, engenders the fact lest lUnité nationale dabord; Unité letat ensuite, and nowhere in any historical phenomenon has the idea had a larger part to claim. But here you have at once to get rid of what, in Sybels narrative, rests on mere documentary evidence! All anachronisms have to be set aside. As against the vigor of Lévy Brühls living men, the make-believe of the past, with its caste-governed puppets, stares you in the face. After the rout at Sédan, after the startling transmutation of long dormant but still live ideas into overwhelming facts, you realize how entirely the mere Prussian chronicle of events in their official garb deals with what is forever extinct. These dead players have lost their significancy; they but simulate humanity from the outside,are simply embroidered vestments stuffed like dolls with bran, or like the moth-eaten uniforms of the great Frederick in the gallery at Potsdam.
When Lévy Brühl, alluding to Stein and his searching reforms after the disasters of later years, says: Il voulait une nation vivante he wanted a living nation! He unchains the great idea from the bondage where it had lain for centuries, and whence the men of 1813 set it loose; he reinstates the past even to its legendary sources, and evokes memories which were those of heroic ages, and which had still power to inspire the present, and re-create what had once so splendidly lived. This life is in truth the German idea in its utmost truth; it was life and power that these men wanted, the life born in them from their earliest hour and kept sacred through all time by their poetry, their song, their native tongue.
It is all this which is German and not Prussian. The Hohenzollerns have nothing to do with all this idealism,and it is this which constitutes the peculiar and sovereign spirit of German unity to which the modern philosophy of Frederick II. was so long a stranger, and to which the Iron Chancellor became a hearty convert only at the close; the chivalrous element of the great elector is but a link between what had been the Holy Roman Empire and what is to be the national union after Leipsic and the War of Freedomculminating in its supreme and inevitable consequence in 1871. The heroes (and they were heroes) of the distant North were as Brandenburgers, electors, component parts, be it not forgotten, of a Teutonic whole, of one great heart, (as Bunsen wrote long years ago to Lord Houghton),5 though we did not know it.
Perhaps the greatest superiority of Professor Lévy Brühl lies in the unity of description he employs in order to bring home to the reader the unity of the subject he treats. He sees the whole as a whole, as it really is, all being contained in all, and nothing in past or present omitted. This is the truth of the Germanic oneness of species, and the failure to conceive it of most writers of our day is the chief cause of confusion. It is a vast, coherent vision of things taken in by mind and eye from the Niebelungen Lied to the wholesale captivity of the French army, in the autumn of 1870, and when not thus conceived, incomplete. To those who lived in and through the period comprised between the war of the Danish Duchies and the re-conquest of Alsace-Lorraine, no item of even prehistoric times can remain absent; the spirit of German unity is everywhere, pervades everything, and those alone who thoroughly master this are capable of painting it to others senses.
It is very well to take a Leibniz or Frederick the Great for a starting-point, but it all goes immeasurably farther back than that. Luther and his Bible open one large historic gate. The Bible heads all! In 1813, writes General Clausewitz to the so-called Great Gascon, the prime impetus was a religious one, and his own words are: If I could only hang a Bible to the equipments of my troopers I could do with them all that Cromwell did with his Ironsides! Two centuries before, this had been the feeling of Gustavus Adolphus, who fought for Protestant Germany with his Bible at his saddle-bow.