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The attempted murder did not succeed, but the original documents are in the possession of the German Foreign Office, so that all doubt is excluded as to the English Government's participation with their most honourable Grey at the head in this Machiavellian plan." This colossal Germanism concerning a plan to murder Sir Roger Casement has been assiduously spread throughout the German Press.
But now we have Germanism enough to make us Philistines, and Normanism enough to make us imperious, and Celtism enough to make us self-conscious and awkward; but German fidelity to Nature, and Latin precision and clear reason, and Celtic quick-wittedness and spirituality, we fall short of.
It is in the name of that race heresy, in the name of Germanism and Pan-Germanism, of Slavism and Pan-Slavism, of Saxonism and Pan-Saxonism, the war is being waged. What a tremendous figure! What can Latins, Slavs, Celts, Japs, Negroes, Hindus, Ghurkas, Turcos, and whatever they are called, do against such strapping giants of the true Germanic type?
Could I have hazarded such a Germanism as the use of the word afterworld for posterity, "Es spreche Welt und Nachwelt meinen Namen" might have been rendered with more literal fidelity: Let world and afterworld speak out my name, etc. I have not ventured to affront the fastidious delicacy of our age with a literal translation of this line, werth Die Eingeweide schaudernd aufzuregen.
Perhaps this delight in Germanism went too far in many respects; it fostered hatred and scorn of everything "foreign," and was the cause of the long hair and cap, pike and broad shirt collar worn by many a pupil. Yet their number was not very large, and Ludo, our most intimate friends, and I never joined them.
Germany, federated too late for the first mêlée and smarting under centuries of humiliation did not Louis XIV insolently seize Strassburg? is avenging on our century the sins of the seventeenth. So far from Germanism being synonymous with Judaism, its analogies are to be sought within the five maritime countries which preceded Germany, albeit less efficiently, in the path of militarism.
Luther was hardly a heresiarch for England, though a hobby for Henry VIII. But the negative Germanism of the Reformation, its drag towards the north, its quarantine against Latin culture, was in a sense the beginning of the business.
This anti-state tendency was the expression of the Germanic spirit and it therefore became predominant among the Germanic peoples and wherever Germanism had left a deep imprint even if afterward superficially covered by a veneer of Latin culture.
The Germanic part, indeed, triumphs in us, we are a Germanic people; but not so wholly as to exclude hauntings of Celtism, which clash with our Germanism, producing, as I believe, our HUMOUR, neither German nor Celtic, and so affect us that we strike people as odd and singular, not to be referred to any known type, and like nothing but ourselves.
These things, alas, were an allegory. When Prussia, finding her crimes unpunished, afterwards carried them into France as well as Denmark, Carlyle and his school made some effort to justify their Germanism, by pitting what they called the piety and simplicity of Germany against what they called the cynicism and ribaldry of France.
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