THE SACREDNESS OF PURE RACE.*

This great work has been already hailed as "unquestionably one of the rare books that really matter." When it appeared in Germany, in 1898, it at one arrested the attention of the literary world, and it was generally acknowledged that a new star had risen on the intellectual horizon. Mr. Chamberlain's learning, and his sympathy with knowledge in its most various forms, were displayed in a style "sometimes playful, sometimes ironical, always persuasive, always logical." When the occasion demands it, as for instance when he deals with, "the one great and incomparable event in the whole story of our planet," the short life on earth of the Galilean, or tho parallel between Christ and Buddha, between the love and life breathing doctrine of the One and the withering renunciation of tho other, his pages are steeped in a spirit of reverence so deep and sincere it is difficult to read them without emotion.
 "To few men," says Lord Redesdale, when pleading that the history of the "Foundations of the Nineteenth Century" may be followed by an equally fascinating analysis of the century itself from the same pen, "has been given in so bountiful a measure the power of seeing, of sifting the true from the false, the essential from the insignificant; comparison is the soul of observation, and the wide horizon of Chamberlain's outlook furnishes him with standards of comparison, which are denied to those of shorter sight; his peculiar and cosmopolitan education, his long researches in natural history, his sympathy and intimate relations with all that has been noblest in the world of art — especially in its most divine expression, poetry and music — point to him us the one man above all others worthy to tell tho further tale of a culture of which he has so well portrayed the nonage, and which, is still struggling heavenward."
 This is undoubtedly one of the books that will range men in camps of passionate agreement on the one side or passionate dissent on the other. If anything in literature can move men this book will stir the dead bones, leave its readers either "cold" or "hot," and lift them above 'that lukewarmness of tepid approval, or disapproval, which nauseates both God and man. In his hand the thing becomes a trumpet. His conception of history swings many of our old traditions off their hinges, and bids us focus all the forces of our being round a new centre in obedience to a new law, and with understanding and conviction help to shape the welter of modern political and social thought into conscious form, and reduce its complexity no simplicity, which means to possibility of life. The book in Germany has gone through eight editions, and in this masterly and refreshingly good translation of Mr. Lees it should have a still greater success in England, for in tho country of its origin the author has had, by reason of his British birth and sympathies, to contend against a certain amount of jealousy and even hostility, and in many respects its primary, and its strangest appeal will be to Englishmen.
 Mr. Chamberlain has already attracted considerable attention, and scholars and critics have long recognised in him a remarkable literary capacity and force. His first published work was in French, "Notes sur Lohengrin," as was also his second venture, a "Study in Botany," which is still a recognised authority among Continental scientists. Earlier essays in German on Wagnerian subjects were followed by two books written under that magician's spell. The second of these was his "Life of Wagner," which has been translated into English by Mr. Hight. Mr. Chamberlain himself believes his book on Immanuel Kant, the master who taught Christianity in all its beauty of simplicity, is the "most important" of his works. Many people will also remember to have heard some echoes of his controversy with Delitzsch over the latter's pamphlet, Babel und Bibel, in which Chamberlain in a spirit of delicate banter, through which the fierce indignation of the truth lover often pierces, tears the imposture to pieces, and proves that Delitzsch's whole fabric, "a very Tower of Babel, but built on paper, crumbles to pieces," as "lax philology and fanciful history mongering." But those who know all this will be glad of the additional biographical details which Lord Redesdale has given us in his very valuable and instructive introduction to the "Grundlagen."
 Houston Stewart Chamberlain was born at Southsea in 1855. the son of the British Admiral William Charles Chamberlain, and of a daughter of Captain Basil Hall. R. N., whose travels were a veritable treasure trove for the boyhood of a past generation, and whose science won for him a Fellowship of the Royal Society. His education was almost entirely foreign, and until ill health forced a change, which proved a blessing in disguise, largely scientific. He made his home in Germany and plunged heart and soul into the mysterious depths of the philosophy and music of Wagner, to a daughter of whom he is married, though he still believes that "no poet in the world is greater than Johann Sebastian Bach," whose music has given us the very tones of Christ's voice as Leonardo has given us His form. Poetry is to him the highest art, though, with Beethoven he believes that music is "the one incorporeal entrance into a higher world." and alone makes possible the natural religion of the soul.
 What then is the purpose and meaning of this new and notable book? Many quotations might be given, in which his main thesis is clearly and comprehensively stated. One of these must suffice, and we choose the one from the section on "The Sacredness of Pure Race," which is itself in part an amplification of Jean Paul's profound word:— "Only through man does man enter into the light of day." And here is Mr. Chamberlain's explanation of his own fundamental position:—

 Race, as it arises and maintains itself in space and time, might be compared to the so-called range of power of a magnet. If a magnet be brought near to a heap of iron filings they assume definite directions, so that a figure is formed with a clearly marked centre, from which lines radiate in all directions; the nearer we bring the magnet, the more distinct and more mathematical does the figure become; very few pieces have placed themselves in exactly the same direction, but all have united into a practical and at the same time ideal unity by the possession of a common centre, and by tho fact that tho relative position of each individual to all the others is not arbitrary, but obedient to a fixed law. It has ceased to be a heap; it has become a form. In the same way a human race, a genuine nation, is distinguished from a mere congeries of men. The character of the race, becoming more and more pronounced by pure breeding, is like the approach of the magnet. The individual members of the nation may have ever so many different qualities, the direction of their activities may be utterly divergent, yet together they form a moulded unity, and the power— or let us say rather the importance— of every individual, is multiplied a thousand fold by his organic connection with countless others. . . . . The consideration of these facts teaches us that whatever may be our opinion as to the causa finalis of existence, man cannot fulfil his highest destiny as an isolated individual, as a mere exchangeable pawn; but only as a portion of an organic whole, as a member of a specific race.

Individuals who have a strong personality, and races which have a strong race personality, are the only doers of great things in the world.
 Now, over against this idea, and in mortal conflict with it, Mr. Chamberlain sets another idea, or, rather, half an idea and half an historical concrete fact, which he calls "The Chaos." This "volker chaos is a hurly-burly of nationalities, in which Greeks and Romans, Syrians, African mongrels, Armenians, Gauls and Indo-Europeans, of many tribes were all jumbled up together, a seething, heterogeneous, conflicting mass of humanity, in which all character, individuality, beliefs and customs were lost. This witches' Sabbath, the raceless and nationless welter of the late Roman Empire goes back genealogically "to the countless millions of liberated slaves, from Africa and Asia, to the jumble of various Italic peoples, to the military colonies settled among them from all countries of the world"; the folk-chaos of peoples the empire so ingeniously manufactured. The fatal thing is that the priceless heritages of Greek art, of which Chamberlain writes with the passionate rapture of a lover; of Roman institutions whose purity was corrupted by this, and not by the intuitions of the Goths, and even of the Christian religion itself, which our author, like the German rationalist Lessing believes, after nineteen centuries, "still remains to be tried," have come down to us not in their pristine, unfallen simplicity and beauty, but stained and transmuted by tho dirty hands of this motley crew of raceless, nationless half breeds. This chaos is the unlovely mother of all superstitions, all intolerances, all vain dogmatisms and despotisms, and socialistic and imperialistic tyrannies — in short, of all absolutism, for absolutism, whether as menial priestism or autocratic government, is the heart's heart of the chaos. This is its "idea," the only cohesive and propagating force it can ever attain.
 All this analysis of the chaos here described in briefest outline, is in Mr. Chamberlain's book painted in warm, living colors, illustrated by a cosmopolitan culture that knows all the deeds and words of men best worth knowing. Of the sons of Belial, the typical children of the chaos, for instance, he selects the satirist Lucien, who, with all his exceptional talents, absolutely squandered his life— "he has no noble aim, no profound conviction, no thorough understanding." one of those monsters of learning who know everything and understand nothing; and the Christian St. Augustine, "helplessly swaying to and fro like a pendulum between the loftiest thoughts and the crassest and silliest superstitions" — both cut off from all racial belongings, mongrels among mongrels, in a position almost, as unnatural as helpless ants carried and set down ten miles from their own nest. We think Mr. Chamberlain will provoke some of that passionate dissent of which we have spoken in his treatment of these two figures, the more especially because of his utter injustice in branding Heine as the Lucian of the nineteenth, and Lucian as "the witty Heine of the second century."
 All the subsequent history of Europe is, in Mr. Chamberlain's conception, the age long struggle between the children of the pure race the children of light and life and order, and the children of the chaos, and the slow, often baffled on march and redemption of the spirit of man from the land of bondage, and the cramping, damning, chilling influence of his contact with it. This is Mr. Chamberlain's "gospel" of race. And the leadership of Europe in this progress and redemption is vested in a particular race, which he calls, filling to the old name with a new content, the "Teutonic. In fact, his terminology in all the leading words of his book— "Teutonic." "Aryan." "The Chaos, " "Germane"— needs a certain amount of preliminary definition. It strikes one, for instance, almost, as a paradox, until we understand his use of the word "Germane," to describe the dominant race of the nineteenth century, to find Louis XIV. claimed as a genuine "Germane" for resisting the encroachments of the Papacy and bearding the Pope as no Catholic ever did, and blamed as a false "Germane" for his shameless persecution of the Protestants ! just as it is at first glance startling to hear Christ described as "no Jew, but a pure Aryan," giving the a new conception of God, which is "not the perfecting of the Jewish religion," but its negation; though later we are told that "morally"—in the narrow sense of recognising the might of the insatiable, ever covetous, Jewish will, that is always stretching out both hands, and commanding it not to be silent, but to take a new direction—He belonged to the Jews.
 Mr. Chamberlain, in the following sentences, justifies his use of the word "Teutonic" to indicate the peoples who have kept alive and strong the great Aryan traditions of civil, liberty, free creative energy in all departments of life, intellectual tolerance, loyalty to chosen leaders, and all that we mean by spirituality and imagination and wonder and reverence, as it looks on a visible world veiled and rooted in mystery. He says:— "The Teuton. . . has proved himself so intellectually, morally and physically pre-eminent among his kinsmen we are entitled to make his name summarily represent the whole family. The Teuton is the soul of our culture. Europe of to-day, with its many branches over the whole world, represents the chequered result of an infinitely manifold mingling of races . . . what binds us all together and makes an organic unity of us is 'Teutonic' blood. If we look around we see that the importance of each nation as a living power to-day is dependent upon the proportion of genuinely Teutonic blood in its population. Only Teutons sit on the thrones of Europe."
 At first the Teuton, "a child among old experienced libertines," is subdued by the Chaos and has impressed upon his spirit its alien ways of thought, and its alien religious conceptions, which hindered the true development of his genius and his soul. Mr. Chamberlain calls on us with trumpet tongue to turn this initial defeat and the "half battle" we won at the Reformation, under Martin Luther, into a complete subdual of the Chaos. And this, he thinks, can only be done by deeper and clearer vision of the secret of the Christianity, not of the church or the churches, with whose dogmas he has scant sympathy, but of Christ himself, and by the study of philosophy of Kant, whose "morning has dawned," the master unsmothered by any cowl, who has taught Christianity in all its beauty of simplicity, and who has specially lit up and made real its secret word, "The Kingdom of God is within you!"
 But the children of the Chaos are not the only principalities and powers against which, in the modern world, the Teuton makes his lifelong war. There is tho Jew whose strength is as the strength of ten, because his is that mystery of strength that is born within a man whose race is pure— Mr. Chamberlain, though no panic-monger or violent anti-Semite, is unquestionably in dread of the Jew, and regards him as a most dangerous force in modern European life. A strong and unconquerable worker, "essentially the most irreligious people in the world," for "the Semites are probably the only people on the whole earth who ever were or could be genuine idolaters," but especially because he is the possessor of a tenacious will, and a pure race consciousness, he has been enabled by these means to triumph over the Aryan in money making, in the organisation of popular amusements, the popular press, commercial literature, commercial art and the drama, and to impress his un-Aryan physiognomy on the surface of Aryan life.
 Out of the midst of the chaos [under the later Roman Empire] towers, like a sharply defined rock amid the formless ocean, one single people, a numerically insignificant people— the Jews. This one race has established as its guiding principle the purity of the blood; it alone possesses, therefore, physiognomy and character. If we contemplate the southern and eastern centres of culture in the world empire in its downfall, and let no sympathies or antipathies pervert our judgment, we must confess that the Jews were at that time the only people deserving respect. We may well apply to them the words of Goethe, "the faith broad, narrow the thought."  . . . However poor the Jewish "law" may appear when compared with the religious creations of the various Indo-European peoples, it possessed a unique advantage in the fallen Roman Empire of that time; it was, in fact, a law; a law which men humbly obeyed, and this very obedience was bound to be of great ethical import in a world of such lawlessness. . . . The idea of physical race unity and race purity, which is the very essence of Judaism, signifies the recognition of a fundamental physiological fact of life; wherever we observe life, from the hyphomycetes to the noble horse, we see the importance of "race"; Judaism made this law of nature sacred. And this is the reason why it triumphantly prevailed at that critical moment, in the history of the world, when a rich legacy was waiting in vain for worthy heirs.
 This rich and most fascinating work is shot through with vital force. Of it, as a whole, well may Lord Redesdale write:— "How should it be defined? Is it history, a philosophical treatise, a metaphysical inquiry? I confess I know not; probably it is all three. I am neither an historian, alas! nor a philosopher, nor a metaphysician. To me the book has been a simple delight — the companion of months— fulfilling the highest functions of which a teacher is capable, that of awakening thought, and driving it into new channels."

*The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, by Houston Stewart Chamberlain, translated from the German by John Lees, M.A. D. Litt. (Edin.), with an introduction by Lord Redesdale, G.C.V.O., K.C.B., &c. 2 vols.

Age (Melbourne, Vic. : 1854 - 1954), Saturday 4 February 1911, page 6