Since Goethe, Who?

When we consider the art of letters we find a similar condition.  Germany has had philosophers and historians of high rank; but in pure literature, in what used to be called “belles-lettres,” from the death of Goethe in 1832 to the advent of the younger generation of dramatists, Sudermann and Hauptmann and the rest, in the final decade of the nineteenth century—­that is to say, for a period of nearly sixty years—­only one German author succeeded in winning a worldwide celebrity—­and Heine was a Hebrew, who died in Paris, out of favor with his countrymen, perhaps because he had been unceasing in calling attention to the deficiencies of German culture.  There were in Germany many writers who appealed strongly to their fellow-countrymen, but except only the solitary Heine no German writer attained to the international fame achieved by Cooper and by Poe, by Walt Whitman and by Mark Twain.  And it was during these threescore years of literary aridity in Germany that there was a superb literary fecundity in Great Britain and in France, and that each of these countries produced at least a score of authors whose names are known throughout the world.  Even sparsely settled Scandinavia brought forth a triumvirate, Bjoernsen, Ibsen, and Brandes, without compeers in Germany.  And from Russia the fame of Turgenef and of Tolstoy spread abroad a knowledge of the heart and mind of a great people who are denounced by Germans as barbarous.

It is probably in the field of science, pure and applied, that the defenders of the supremacy of German culture would take their last stand.  That the German contribution to science has been important is indisputable; yet it is equally indisputable that the two dominating scientific leaders of the second half of the nineteenth century are Darwin and Pasteur.  It is in chemistry that the Germans have been pioneers; yet the greatest of modern chemists is Mendeleef.  It was Hertz who made the discovery which is the foundation of Marconi’s invention; but although not a few valuable discoveries are to be credited to the Germans, perhaps almost as many as to either the French or the British, the German contribution in the field of invention, in the practical application of scientific discovery, has been less than that of France, less than that of Great Britain, and less than that of the United States.  The Germans contributed little or nothing to the development of the railroad, the steamboat, the automobile, the aeroplane, the telegraph, the telephone, the phonograph, the photograph, the moving picture, the electric light, the sewing machine, and the reaper and binder.  Even those dread instruments of war, the revolver and the machine gun, the turreted ship, the torpedo, and the submarine, are not due to the military ardor of the Germans.  It would seem as though the Germans had been lacking in the inventiveness which is so marked a feature of our modern civilization.