The Arena | Page 5

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, Sybel's 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.
[4] "Le Temps," 9th September, 1890.
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 Brühl's own expression: "In
German unity," he says, "the idea precedes everything else, engenders
the fact l'est l'Unité nationale d'abord; Unité l'etat 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 Sybel's narrative,
rests on mere documentary evidence! All anachronisms have to be set
aside. As against the vigor of Lévy Brühl's 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 Freedom--culminating 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."
[5] Life of Monckton Milnes, first Lord Houghton, by Wemyss Reid. 2
vols. London, 1891.
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