VIII—­The Wrong Horse

In another chapter I mentioned some of the late Lord Salisbury’s remarks with regret, but I trust with respect; for in certain matters he deserved all the respect that can be given to him.  His critics said that he “thought aloud”; which is perhaps the noblest thing that can be said of a man.  He was jeered at for it by journalists and politicians who had not the capacity to think or the courage to tell their thoughts.  And he had one yet finer quality which redeems a hundred lapses of anarchic cynicism.  He could change his mind upon the platform:  he could repent in public.  He could not only think aloud; he could “think better” aloud.  And one of the turning-points of Europe had come in the hour when he avowed his conversion from the un-Christian and un-European policy into which his dexterous Oriental master, Disraeli, had dragged him; and declared that England had “put her money on the wrong horse.”  When he said it, he referred to the backing we gave to the Turk under a fallacious fear of Russia.  But I cannot but think that if he had lived much longer, he would have come to feel the same disgust for his long diplomatic support of the Turk’s great ally in the North.  He did not live, as we have lived, to feel that horse run away with us, and rush on through wilder and wilder places, until we knew that we were riding on the nightmare.

What was this thing to which we trusted?  And how may we most quickly explain its development from a dream to a nightmare, and the hair’s-breadth escape by which it did not hurl us to destruction, as it seems to be hurling the Turk?  It is a certain spirit; and we must not ask for too logical a definition of it, for the people whom it possesses disown logic; and the whole thing is not so much a theory as a confusion of thought.  Its widest and most elementary character is adumbrated in the word Teutonism or Pan-Germanism; and with this (which was what appeared to win in 1870) we had better begin.  The nature of Pan-Germanism may be allegorised and abbreviated somewhat thus: 

The horse asserts that all other creatures are morally bound to sacrifice their interests to his, on the specific ground that he possesses all noble and necessary qualities, and is an end in himself.  It is pointed out in answer that when climbing a tree the horse is less graceful than the cat; that lovers and poets seldom urge the horse to make a noise all night like the nightingale; that when submerged for some long time under water, he is less happy than the haddock; and that when he is cut open pearls are less often found in him than in an oyster.  He is not content to answer (though, being a muddle-headed horse, he does use this answer also) that having an undivided hoof is more than pearls or oceans or all ascension or song.  He reflects for a few years on the subject of cats; and at last discovers in the cat “the characteristic equine quality of caudality, or a tail”; so that cats are horses, and wave on every tree-top the tail which is the equine banner.  Nightingales are found to have legs, which explains their power of song.  Haddocks are vertebrates; and therefore are sea-horses.  And though the oyster outwardly presents dissimilarities which seem to divide him from the horse, he is by the all-filling nature-might of the same horse-moving energy sustained.