LETTER II.

ARMINIUS APPEARS AS HIS OWN INTERPRETER.

BERLIN, July 31, 1866.

SIR,AN English friend of mine, Mr. Matthew Arnold, seems to have rushed into print with an idea or two he picked up from me when I was in England, and to have made rather a mess of it; at least, he sends me some newspapers which have answered him, and writes me a helpless sort of a letter at the same time, asking me how he is to parry this, and what he is to say in reply to that. Now, I have a regard for this Mr. Matthew Arnold, but I have taken his measure, and know him to be, as a disputant, rather a poor creature. Again and again I have seen him anxiously ruminating over what his adversary has happened to say against his ideas; and when I tell him (if the ideas were mine) that his adversary is a dummkopf, and that he must stand up to him firm and square, he begins to smile, and tells me that what is probably passing through his adversary's mind is so and so.1

1 A very ill-natured and exaggerated description of my (1 hope) not unamiable candour.-ED.

I see your hideous truss manufactory in Trafalgar Square comes up in this controversy, and that very manufactory brings to my mind a ridiculous instance of my poor friend's weakness. I had been running over with him a few of the principal violations of æsthetic laws in London, illustrating the lesson by reference to the stucco palaces of my beautiful Berlin. After despatching the Duke of Wellington's statue and the black dome and gray pepper-boxes of your National Gallery, I came to Coles's manufactory. "Can anything be more atrocious?" I asked. "It is bad," answered my poor friend; "and yet," he went on, "and yet, Arminius, I have a tenderness for that manufactory. That manufactory, with other things in London like it, is one of my favourite arguments for the immortality of the soul." "What folly have you got in your head now?” said I. Remember," said he, "what is told us of the statue of the Olym pian Zeus by Phidias. It was life enough to have seen it; felicity had then reached its consummation; the spirit could grasp no more, and the man might end. And what therefore, I ask, must not be in store for the British ratepayer, who in his life has only seen the Duke of Wellington's statue and Coles's truss manufactory His felicity must surely be yet to come. Somewhere, beyond the grave"... for a good twenty minutes my simple friend went on with stuff like this, which I will not weary you with any more of.

I, Sir, as a true Prussian, have a passion for what is wissenschaftlich (I do not say "scientific," because

then you English will think I mean I have an interest in the sea-bear, or in the blue lights and smells of a chemical lecture). I am, I say, wissenschaftlich; I love to proceed with the stringency of a philosopher, and Mr. Matthew Arnold with his shillyshallying spoils the ideas I confide to him. Therefore I write to you myself, to tell you (since I like your nation for the sake of the great men it has formerly produced, and of its brave-hearted, industrious people) where the pinch of the matter for you really lies.

It lies here there is in you "kein Ernst, der ins Ganze geht." You peck at the mere outside of problems; you have not got your mind at work upon them; you fancy they will solve themselves without mind, if only you keep making bottles, and letting every one do what is right in his own eyes, and congratulating yourselves at the top of your voices on your own success. "Individualism and industrialism will in time replace Coles by a worthier edifice," says one of your prophets. Not without an "Ernst der ins Ganze geht," I answer. Not without "Geist " and

faith in "Geist ;" and this is just what your individualism and industrialism has not got. "A selfadministering community is surely an ideal."-That depends entirely on what the self-administering community is like. If it has "Geist," and faith in "Geist," yes; if it has not, no. Then another of your prophets asks: "Why should 'Geist' care about democracy? Democracy is government by the masses, by the light of their own vulgar tastes."-Your democracy perhaps, but this is just what makes

your weakness; you have no demos, no people, but masses with vulgar tastes." The top part of them are in training to be Philistines like your middle class; the lower part is a rabble. Your democracy has not yet reached even the idea of country; the friends of your northern workmen tell us they read American newspapers, and care more for America than for England. No wonder; they have never been quickened by an "Ernst der ins Ganze geht," the only baptism that makes masses into a people; they have never been in contact with "Geist," only with claptrap. To abate feudalism by providing that in one insignificant case out of one million land shall not follow the feudal law of descent; to abolish English church-rates because the English Dissenters are strong, and to spare the Irish Church Establishment because the Irish Catholics are weak ;1 to give a man leave to marry his deceased wife's sister; to give a man who lives in a particular kind of house a vote for members of Parliament—that is the pabulum by which the leaders of your people seek to develop "Geist" in it, and to awaken an "Ernst der ins Ganze geht." If this is not spiritual enough, as a final resource there is rioting in the parks, and a despotism of your penny newspapers tempered by the tears of your executive, to hasten the growth of English democracy in dignity and intelligence.

1 No doubt this remark of Arminius had some share in producing that great measure which has since abolished the Irish Church by the power of the English Dissenters' enmity to Church establishments.-ED.

The French are not solid enough for my taste; but, Gott in Himmel that people has had a fire baptism, and the democracy which is born of a fire baptism like theirs, "Geist " cannot help caring about. They were unripe for the task they in '89 set themselves to do; and yet, by the strength of "Geist " and their faith in "Geist," this "mere viper brood of canting egotists" did so much that they left their trace in half the beneficial reforms through Europe; and if you ask how, at Naples, a convent became a school, or in Ticino an intolerable oligarchy ceased to govern, or in Prussia Stein was able to carry his land-reforms, you get one answer: the French! Till modern society is finally formed, French democracy will still be a power in Europe, and it will manage to have effective leaders at the Tuileries, and not only in Cayenne. It will live, though the classes above it may rot; because it has faith in "Geist," and does not think that people can do without "Geist " by dint of holding monster meetings, and having their Star1 and Telegraph every morning, and paying no church-rates, and marrying their deceased wife's sister.

We Prussians, Sir, have, as a people, no great love for the French, because we were blown into the air by the explosion of their "Geist" some sixty years ago, and much quarrelling and ill-blood followed.

1 The Star, like Arminius himself, has passed from amongst us; but may we not say that its work was done when it had once laid the basis of that admirable and fruitful alliance be tween Mialism and Millism, which the course of our politics is now every day consolidating ?-ED.