The Barbarism of Berlin | Page 4

feet.
The identity of the words does not matter, because there is no doubt at
all about the meanings; because nobody is likely to think of an elephant
as four feet long, or of a window as having tusks and a curly trunk.
It is essential to emphasise this consciousness of the thing under
discussion in connection with two or three words that are, as it were,
the key-words of this war. One of them is the word "barbarian." The
Prussians apply it to the Russians: the Russians apply it to the Prussians.
Both, I think, really mean something that really exists, name or no
name. Both mean different things. And if we ask what these different
things are, we shall understand why England and France prefer Russia;
and consider Prussia the really dangerous barbarian of the two. To
begin with, it goes so much deeper even than atrocities; of which, in the
past at least, all the three Empires of Central Europe have partaken
pretty equally, as they partook of Poland. An English writer, seeking to
avert the war by warnings against Russian influence, said that the
flogged backs of Polish women stood between us and the Alliance. But
not long before, the flogging of women by an Austrian general led to
that officer being thrashed in the streets of London by Barclay and
Perkins' draymen. And as for the third power, the Prussians, it seems
clear that they have treated Belgian women in a style compared with
which flogging might be called an official formality. But, as I say,
something much deeper than any such recrimination lies behind the use
of the word on either side. When the German Emperor complains of
our allying ourselves with a barbaric and half-oriental power, he is not
(I assure you) shedding tears over the grave of Kosciusko. And when I
say (as I do most heartily) that the German Emperor is a barbarian, I am
not merely expressing any prejudices I may have against the
profanation of churches or of children. My countrymen and I mean a
certain and intelligible thing when we call the Prussians barbarians. It is
quite different from the thing attributed to Russians; and it could not
possibly be attributed to Russians. It is very important that the neutral
world should understand what this thing is.

If the German calls the Russian barbarous, he presumably means
imperfectly civilised. There is a certain path along which Western
nations have proceeded in recent times, and it is tenable that Russia has
not proceeded so far as the others: that she has less of the special
modern system in science, commerce, machinery, travel, or political
constitution. The Russ ploughs with an old plough; he wears a wild
beard; he adores relics; his life is as rude and hard as that of a subject of
Alfred the Great. Therefore he is, in the German sense, a barbarian.
Poor fellows like Gorky and Dostoieffsky have to form their own
reflections on the scenery without the assistance of large quotations
from Schiller on garden seats, or inscriptions directing them to pause
and thank the All-Father for the finest view in Hesse-Pumpernickel.
The Russians, having nothing but their faith, their fields, their great
courage, and their self-governing communes, are quite cut off from
what is called (in the fashionable street in Frankfort) The True, The
Beautiful and The Good. There is a real sense in which one can call
such backwardness barbaric, by comparison with the Kaiserstrasse; and
in that sense it is true of Russia.
Now we, the French and English, do not mean this when we call the
Prussians barbarians. If their cities soared higher than their flying ships,
if their trains travelled faster than their bullets, we should still call them
barbarians. We should know exactly what we meant by it; and we
should know that it is true. For we do not mean anything that is an
imperfect civilisation by accident. We mean something that is the
enemy of civilisation by design. We mean something that is wilfully at
war with the principles by which human society has been made
possible hitherto. Of course it must be partly civilised even to destroy
civilisation. Such ruin could not be wrought by the savages that are
merely undeveloped or inert. You could not have even Huns without
horses; or horses without horsemanship. You could not have even
Danish pirates without ships, or ships without seamanship. This person,
whom I may call the Positive Barbarian, must be rather more
superficially up-to-date than what I may call the Negative Barbarian.
Alaric was an officer in the Roman legions: but for all that he destroyed
Rome. Nobody supposes that Eskimos could have done it at all neatly.
But (in our meaning) barbarism is not a matter