Teutonism

“ Everything I had ever urged against my old enemy could be urged much more forcibly against me by my new enemy. And my position touching the great adipose theory would be exactly like England’s position touching the equally sensible Teutonic theory. If [106] Teutonism was creative culture, then on our own showing the German was better than the Englishman. If Teutonism was barbarism, then on our own showing the Englishman was more barbaric than the Irishman. The real answer, of course, is that we were not Teutons but only the dupes of Teutonism ”

“ Converting the Saxons,—a triumph of civilization, however barbarous were the methods employed,—subduing the rebellious329 Bavarians, keeping the Danes and the Sclavonic tribes on his eastern border in check, and utterly crushing the Avars, he gave the Teutonic race that position of supremacy in Central Europe which, whatever may have been the ebb and flow of Teutonism in later centuries, it has never been forced to surrender, and which, with all its faults, has been a blessing to Europe. ”

“ For the supreme joke was this: that the Englishman has not only boasted of being an Englishman; he has actually boasted of being a German. As the modern mind began to doubt the superiority of Calvinism to Catholicism, all English books, papers, and speeches were filled more and more with a Teutonism which substituted a racial for a religious [104] superiority. It was felt to be a more modern and even a more progressive principle of distinction, to insist on ethnology rather than theology; for ethnology was supposed to be a science. Unionism was simply founded on Teutonism. ”

“ Unionism was simply founded on Teutonism. Hence the ordinary honest, patriotic Unionist was in a highly humorous fix, when he had suddenly to begin denouncing Teutonism as mere terrorism. If all superiority belonged to the Teuton, the supreme superiority must clearly belong to the most Teutonic Teuton. If I claim the right to kick Mr. Bernard Shaw on the specific ground that I am fatter than he is, it is obvious that I look rather a fool if I am suddenly kicked by somebody who is fatter still. ”

“ It is but another hint of a suggestion, huge, yet hidden; that civilisation is older than barbarism; and that the further we go back into pagan origins, the nearer we come to the great Christian origin of the Fall. But whatever credit or sympathy be due to the cult of Celtic origins in its proper place, it is none of these things that really prevents Celticism from being a barbarous imperialism like Teutonism. The thing that prevents imperialism is nationalism. It was exactly because Germany was not a nation that it desired more and more to be an empire. ”

“ Conqueror of the Roman Empire, and the legitimate inheritor of its glory, the race of Teutons has sent its sons broadcast over the earth, and has its offshoots, as flourishing communities, on every continent. ”

“ How different it is when we come to consider the Teutons! When we have abstracted all the Latin words, the French words, the Celtic words, etc., from our vocabulary, the “English” words which remain are all Teutonic; for we, ourselves, are a branch of the Teutonic race. [8] Accordingly some of our older and most English words contain buried vestiges of the lives which our ancestors once lived in the continental forests. ”

“ Those old ancestors of ours knew what freedom was; but as they came against that Roman world, they themselves were in part conquered by it, and they lost something of that freedom. But God set apart one corner of the European world for them, and called over the English Channel in the fifth century those forefathers of ours, there to watch for a century and a half that tremendous conflict in which the very plow-share of the Teutons went through the roots of the Roman life in Britain and left nothing but Teutonic fields remaining. ”

“ The Teutons loved personal freedom. They never called any man master, but followed their chosen leader as companions and equals. They could not even bear to have the houses of their villages set close together. And again we see the same independent spirit expressed in their assemblies of freemen, in which meetings, all matters of public interest were debated and decided. In this trait of the Teutonic disposition lay the germ of representative government and of Protestant, or Teutonic Christianity. ”

“ Our first glimpse of the Teutons shows them in their central German land, already occupying both sides of the Rhine, though seemingly not very old settlers on its left bank. The long wanderings of the various Teutonic and Slavonic tribes over all parts of central Europe, their settlements in the southern and western lands, are all matters of history. So is the great Teutonic settlement in the British islands, which partly exterminated, partly assimilated, their Celtic inhabitants, so as to leave them as mere a remnant, though a greater remnant, as they themselves had made the Basques. ”

“ To follow the fortunes of Italy, we must follow those of these East Goths, and especially of one man among them, Theodoric, known in German song as Dietrich of Bern or Verona.
Interesting exceedingly to us should this great hero be. No man’s history better shows the strange relations between the Teutons and the dying Empire: but more; his life is the first instance of a Teuton attempting to found a civilized and ordered state, upon experience drawn from Roman sources; of the young world trying to build itself up some sort of dwelling out of the ruins of the old. ”

“ There is its Gothic script which offends the eye somewhat like outlandish runes. Its very language growls and snorts at you, sounds threatening as if angry—pardon me for these sentences! There are its mud-colored towns and architecture, its rude life, rough skinned, hairy, ferocious, with tastelessness prevailing.
The German imagination is never shot through with clear, happy sunshine. The German emotions are distinctively expressed by thumpings in some form. The Teuton's inability to see himself as another sees him—is this not, above all, the stamp of an under-civilized people?... ”

“ THE TEUTONIC RELIGION. WITCHES
The Teutons, that race of northern peoples called by the Romans,
"barbarians," comprised the Goths and Vandals who lived in
Scandinavia, and the Germans who dwelt north of Italy and east of
Gaul.
The nature of the northern country was such that the people could
not get a living by peaceful agriculture. ”

“ Race was not only never at any given moment a motive, but it was never even an excuse. The Teutons never had a creed; they never had a cause; and it was only a few years ago that they began even to have a cant.
The orthodox modern historian, notably Green, remarks on the singularity of Britain in being alone of all Roman provinces wholly cleared and repeopled by a Germanic race. He does not entertain, as an escape from the singularity of this event, the possibility that it never happened. In the same spirit he deals with the little that can be quoted of the Teutonic society. ”

“ But the Teutons, especially the Saxon Teutons, and, above all others, those in the Northern States of America, with their immense love of individual liberty, hate despotism, either political or ecclesiastical. They perpetually demand more Christianity and democracy; that each shall do his own work, and rejoice in its result; that each shall have his share in the government of all. ”

“ Ardarich raised the Teuton Gepids and Ostrogoths. The Teutons who had obeyed Attila, turned on their Tartar conquerors, the only people who had ever subdued German men, and then only by brute force of overpowering numbers. At Netad, upon the great plain between the Drave and the Danube, they fought the second Hunnenschlacht, and the Germans conquered. Thirty thousand Huns fell on that dreadful day, and the rest streamed away into the heart of Asia, into the infinite unknown deserts from whence the foul miscreants had streamed forth, and left the Teutons masters of the world. ”

“ But among the many good qualities of ourselves and our kinsmen, tender care for conquered foes has seldom been reckoned; Western Celt and Eastern Slavonian know this full well. Hard times were at hand; the old worn-out Empire of Rome was to receive fresh life-blood from the healthy Teutons. In the Fifth Century, our brethren overran Spain, Gaul, and Italy; becoming lords of the soil, and overlaying with their own words the old Latin dialects spoken in those provinces. To this time belongs the Beowulf, which is to us English (may I not say, to all Teutons?) ”

“ For each citizen read in his daily paper of successful and growing Teuton activities in the most distant parts of the earth—in ports, regions and among peoples whose names he had never heard before and could not pronounce. At breakfast his capacious paunch and his wife's fat, flowing bosom expanded with pride in hearing of some new far-off passenger route carrying the flag, of the Made in Germany brand sweeping the markets of the world, and perhaps of the Kaiser's safe return to his palace, bronzed with the cast of health and strength. Never had investments brought the German such high rates. ”

“ Man easily makes himself at home under any sky, and the national characteristic, far from being much changed by the place of abode, dominates and changes the latter after its own pattern. Moreover, the variety of natural influences in the region inhabitated by the Teutons is not very great. Just as little importance should be attached to the fact that the Teutonic race has intermingled with the former inhabitants of the countries it conquered ”

“ It is true that the Teutons are known to us as horsemen from their earliest appearance in history, but the evolution of the word reiten (compare Latin equo vehi) proves that the art is of recent origin. The Teutonic verbal stem rī̆d, for pre-Teutonic rī̆dh, reidh, corresponds to Old Irish ríad, ‘driving, riding’ (ríadaim, ‘I drive’) , Old Gallic rêda, ‘waggon’ (compare Greek ἔ-ριθος, ‘messenger, servant’?) . The general meaning is seen also in Anglo-Saxon râd, feminine, ‘journey, expedition,’ English road, as well as in the cognates under bereit. ”

“ Every Teuton must fall on his face before an inferior Teuton; until they all find, in the foul marshes towards the Baltic, the very lowest of all possible Teutons, and worship him--and find he is a Slav. ”

“ Among those whose Aryan descent is generally recognized as beyond dispute are the Teutons, to whom the Angles and Saxons belonged.
The Teutonic or Germanic people, after dwelling together in a body, appear to have scattered in various directions, their language gradually breaking up into three main groups, which can be already clearly distinguished in the 4th century A.D., North Germanic or Scandinavian, West Germanic or Low and High German, and East Germanic, of which the only important representative is Gothic. ”

“ And then there were the Bohemians who began the revolt, and the Swiss Calvinists, and the rebels of the Peasants' War in Würtemberg! None of these were ethnically Teutons. Let us beware of such ascriptions of a monopoly of virtue or intellect to any given race, however comforting they may be to us who are of Teutonic descent. Modern Germany, to be sure, is half Catholic and half Protestant, but the division was not of ethnic origin in any sense. ”

“ The asiaticizing tendency of Roman political life had become so powerful by the fourth century, and has since been so powerfully propagated through the Church, that we ought to be glad that the Teutons came into the empire as masters rather than as subjects. As the Germanic tribes got possession of the government in one part of Europe after another, they brought with them free institutions again. ”

“ In short, the Roman and Grecian races had become impotent and decrepit. The high destiny of man lay not with them, but with the younger race, for whom all earlier civilizations had but prepared the way.
Who were these Teutons? Rome knew them only vaguely as wild tribes dwelling in the gloom of the great forest wilderness. In reality they were but the vanguard of vast races of human beings who through ages had been slowly populating all Eastern Europe and Northern Asia. Beyond the Teutons were other Aryans, the Slavs. ”

“ Progress always demands as its price the best the age or generation has to give. The installation of the Goths and Teutons in Europe cost five centuries of woe and strife,—we can now see why; for it was destined to give the world a better civilization and a better leadership. But this leadership could not come from the Teuton alone: he is never prompted to enterprise in the world at large; he is never aggressive, he is strong only at home. Why then those six generations of viking conquest and mingling with the conquered, if not to supply this lack through the evolution of the British nation? ”

“ A people as yet uncultivated, with a very lively power of imagination, and at the same time childlike in mind and free from national vanity (the Teutons seem to have had all these qualities) is attracted by what is far away, and likes to make remote countries and distant islands the habitation for the objects of its desires and the glories of which it dreams. ”

“ THE ROMANCE NATIONS.—In some districts the barbarian invaders and the Roman provincials were kept apart for a long time by the bitter antagonism of race, and a sense of injury on the one hand and a feeling of disdainful superiority on the other. But for the most part the Teutonic intruders and the Latin-speaking inhabitants of Italy, Spain, and Gaul very soon began freely to mingle their blood by family alliances. It is quite impossible to say what proportion the Teutons bore to the Romans. ”