'But you and all the kind of Christ
Are ignorant and brave,
And you have wars you hardly win
And souls you hardly save.'
The ballad of the white horse

Saturday, December 17, 2011

Pan-Germanism

Chesterton allegorizes the nature of Pan-Germanism as follows:
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 an 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 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 of song. He reflects for a few years on the subject of cats;  and at last discovers in the cat "the characteristic equine equality of caudality, or a tail"; so that cats are horses, and wave on every tree-top the tale 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.
Now this horse is intellectually the wrong horse. It is not perhaps going too far to say that this horse is a donkey. For it is obviously within even the intellectual resources of a haddock to answer to answer, "But if a haddock is a horse, why should I yield to you any more than you to me? Why should that singing horse commonly called the nightingale, or that climbing horse hitherto known as the cat, fall down and worship you because of your horsehood? If all our native faculties are the accomplishments of a horse - why then are you only another horse without any accomplishments." When thus gently reasoned with, the horse flings up his heels, kicks the cat, crushes the oyster, eats the haddock and pursues the nightingale, and that is how the war began.
And Chesterton concludes: "if Teutonism is used for comprehension it cannot be used for conquest."
From 'The crimes of England', Chapter VIII
 

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