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“It was incredible. They were giving him tea with hot, inadvisable scones – but their hotness, their close heaviness, he accepted with a ready devotion, would have accepted had they been ten times as hot and close and heavy, not heedlessly, indeed, but gratefully, willingly paying his price for these astonishing revelations that without an effort, serenely, calmly, dropped in between her gentle demands whether he would have milk and her mild inquiries as to the exact quantity of sugar his habits and hygienic outlook demanded, that his hostess so casually made. These generous, heedless people were talking of departures, of abandonments, of, so they put it, selling the dear old place, if indeed any one could be found to buy a place so old and so remote and – she pointed her intention with a laugh – so very, very dear. Repletion of scones were a small price to pay for such a glowing, such an incredible gift of opportunity, thrust thus straight into the willing, amazed hands…
“He gets the house. He has it done up. He furnishes it, and every article of furniture seems a stroke of luck too good to be true. And to crown it all I am going to write one of those long crescendo passages that James loves, a sentence, pages of it, of happy event linking to happy event until at last the incredible completion, a butler, unquestionably Early Georgian, respectability, competence equally unquestionable, a wife who could cook, and cook well, no children, no thought or possibility of children, and to crown all, the perfect name – Mutimer!
“All this you must understand is told retrospectively as Blandish installs himself in Samphire House. It is told to the refrain, ‘Still, fresh every morning, came the persuasion “This is too good to be true.”’ And as it is told, something else, by the most imperceptible degrees, by a gathering up of hints and allusions and pointing details, gets itself told too, and that is the growing realization in the mind of Blandish of a something extra, of something not quite bargained for, – the hoard and the haunting. About the house hangs a presence…
“He had taken it at first as a mere picturesque accessory to the whole picturesque and delightful wreathing of association and tradition about the place, that there should be this ancient flavour of the cutlass and the keg, this faint aroma of buried doubloons and Stevensonian experiences. He had assumed, etc… He had gathered, etc… And it was in the most imperceptible manner that beyond his sense of these takings and assumptions and gatherings there grew his perception that the delicate quiver of appreciation, at first his utmost tribute to these illegal and adventurous and sanguinary associations, was broadening and strengthening, was, one hardly knew whether to say developing or degenerating, into a nervous reaction, more spinal and less equivocally agreeable, into the question, sensed rather than actually thought or asked, whether in fact the place didn’t in certain lights and certain aspects and at certain unfavourable moments come near to evoking the ghost – if such sorites are permissible in the world of delicate shades – of the ghost, of the ghost of a shiver – of aversion…
“And so at page a hundred and fifty or thereabouts we begin to get into the story,” said Boon.
“You wade through endless marshes of subtle intimation, to a sense of a Presence in Samphire House. For a number of pages you are quite unable to tell whether this is a ghost or a legend or a foreboding or simply old-fashioned dreams that are being allusively placed before you. But there is an effect piled up very wonderfully, of Mr. Blandish, obsessed, uneasy, watching furtively and steadfastly his guests, his callers, his domestics, continually asking himself, ‘Do they note it? Are they feeling it?’
“We break at last into incidents. A young friend of the impossible name of Deshman helps evolve the story; he comes to stay; he seems to feel the influence from the outset, he cannot sleep, he wanders about the house… Do others know? Others?… The gardener takes to revisiting the gardens after nightfall. He is met in the shrubbery with an unaccountable spade in his hand and answers huskily. Why should a gardener carry a spade? Why should he answer huskily? Why should the presence, the doubt, the sense of something else elusively in the air about them, become intensified at the encounter? Oh! conceivably of course in many places, but just there! As some sort of protection, it may be… Then suddenly as Mr. Blandish sits at his lonely but beautifully served dinner he becomes aware for the first time of a change in Mutimer.
“Something told him in that instant that Mutimer also knew…
“Deshman comes again with a new and disconcerting habit of tapping the panelling and measuring the thickness of the walls when he thinks no one is looking, and then a sister of Mr. Blandish and a friend, a woman, yet not so much a woman as a disembodied intelligence in a feminine costume with one of those impalpable relationships with Deshman that people have with one another in the world of Henry James, an association of shadows, an atmospheric liaison. Follow some almost sentenceless conversations. Mr. Blandish walks about the shrubbery with the friend, elaborately getting at it – whatever it is – and in front of them, now hidden by the yew hedges, now fully in view, walks Deshman with the married and settled sister of Mr. Blandish…
“‘So,’ said Mr. Blandish, pressing the point down towards the newly discovered sensitiveness, ‘where we feel, he it seems knows.’
“She seemed to consider.
“‘He doesn’t know completely,’ was her qualification.
“‘But he has something – something tangible.’
“‘If he can make it tangible.’
“On that the mind of Mr. Blandish played for a time.
“‘Then it isn’t altogether tangible yet?’
“‘It isn’t tangible enough for him to go upon.’
“‘Definitely something.’
“Her assent was mutely concise.
“‘That we on our part – ?’
“The we seemed to trouble her.
“‘He knows more than you do,’ she yielded.
“The gesture, the half turn, the momentary halt in the paces of Mr. Blandish, plied her further.
“‘More, I think, than he has admitted – to any one.’
“‘Even to you?’
“He perceived an interesting wave of irritation. ‘Even to me,’ he had wrung from her, but at the price of all further discussion.
“Putting the thing crassly,” said Boon, “Deshman has got wind of a hoard, of a treasure, of something – Heaven as yet only knows what something – buried, imbedded, in some as yet unexplained way incorporated with Samphire House. On the whole the stress lies rather on treasure, the treasure of smuggling, of longshore practices, of illegality on the high seas. And still clearer is it that the amiable Deshman wants to get at it without the participation of Mr. Blandish. Until the very end you are never quite satisfied why Deshman wants to get at it in so private a fashion. As the plot thickens you are played about between the conviction that Deshman wants the stuff for himself and the firm belief of the lady that against the possible intervention of the Treasury, he wants to secure it for Mr. Blandish, to secure it at least generously if nefariously, lest perhaps it should fall under the accepted definition and all the consequent confiscations of treasure trove. And there are further beautiful subtleties as to whether she really believes in this more kindly interpretation of the refined but dubitable Deshman… A friend of Deshman’s, shameless under the incredible name of Mimbleton, becomes entangled in this thick, sweet flow of narrative – the James method of introducing a character always reminds me of going round with the lantern when one is treacling for moths. Mimbleton has energy. He presses. Under a summer dawn of delicious sweetness Mimbleton is found insensible on the croquet lawn by Mr. Blandish, who, like most of the characters in the narrative from first to last, has been unable to sleep. And at the near corner of the house, close to a never before remarked ventilator, is a hastily and inaccurately refilled excavation…
“Then events come hurrying in a sort of tangled haste – making sibyl-like gestures.
“At the doorway Mutimer appears – swaying with some profound emotion. He is still in his evening attire. He has not yet gone to bed. In spite of the dawn he carried a burning candle – obliquely. At the sight of his master he withdraws – backwards and with difficulty…
“Then,” said Boon, “I get my crowning chapter: the breakfast, a peculiar something, something almost palpable in the atmosphere – Deshman hoarse and a little talkative, Mimbleton with a possibly nervous headache, husky also and demanding tea in a thick voice, Mutimer waiting uneasily, and Mr. Blandish, outwardly calm, yet noting every particular, thinking meanings into every word and movement, and growing more and more clear in his conviction that Mutimer knows – knows everything…
“Book two opens with Mr. Blandish practically in possession of the facts. Putting the thing coarsely, the treasure is – 1813 brandy, in considerable quantities bricked up in a disused cellar of Samphire House. Samphire House, instead of being the fine claret of a refuge Mr. Blandish supposed, is a loaded port. But of course in the novel we shall not put things coarsely, and for a long time you will be by no means clear what the ‘spirit’ is that Mr. Blandish is now resolved to exorcise. He is, in fact, engaged in trying to get that brandy away, trying to de-alcoholize his existence, trying – if one must put the thing in all the concrete crudity of his fundamental intention – to sell the stuff…
“Now in real life you would just go and sell it. But people in the novels of Henry James do not do things in the inattentive, offhand, rather confused, and partial way of reality: they bring enormous brains to bear upon the minutest particulars of existence. Mr. Blandish, following the laws of that world, has not simply to sell his brandy: he has to sell it subtly, intricately, interminably, with a delicacy, with a dignity…
“He consults friends – impalpable, intricate, inexhaustible friends.
“There are misunderstandings. One old and trusted intimate concludes rather hastily that Mr. Blandish is confessing that he has written a poem, another that he is making a proposal of marriage, another that he wishes an introduction to the secretary of the Psychical Research Society… All this,” said Boon, “remains, perhaps indefinitely, to be worked out. Only the end, the end, comes with a rush. Deshman has found for him – one never gets nearer to it than the ‘real right people.’ The real right people send their agent down, a curious blend of gentleman and commercial person he is, to investigate, to verify, to estimate quantities. Ultimately he will – shall we say it? – make an offer. With a sense of immense culmination the reader at last approaches the hoard…
“You are never told the thing exactly. It is by indefinable suggestions, by exquisite approaches and startings back, by circumlocution the most delicate, that your mind at last shapes its realization, that – the last drop of the last barrel has gone and that Mutimer, the butler, lies dead or at least helpless – in the inner cellar. And a beautiful flavour, ripe and yet rare, rich without opulence, hangs – diminuendo morendo – in the air…”
CHAPTER THE FIFTH
Of the Assembling and Opening of the World Conference on the Mind of the Race
§ 1
It must be borne in mind that not even the opening chapter of this huge book, “The Mind of the Race,” was ever completely written. The discussion in the Garden by the Sea existed merely so far as the fragment of dialogue I have quoted took it. I do not know what Mr. Gosse contributed except that it was something bright, and that presently he again lost his temper and washed his hands of the whole affair and went off with Mr. Yeats to do a little Academy thing of their own round a corner, and I do not know what became of the emissaries of Lord Northcliffe and Mr. Hearst. One conversation drops out of mind and another begins; it is like the battle of the Aisne passing slowly into the battle of the Yser. The idea develops into the holding of a definite congress upon the Mind of the Race at some central place. I don’t think Boon was ever very clear whether that place was Chautauqua, or Grindelwald, or Stratford, or Oxford during the Long Vacation, or the Exhibition grounds at San Francisco. It was, at any rate, some such place, and it was a place that was speedily placarded with all sorts of bills and notices and counsels, such as, “To the Central Hall,” or “Section B: Criticism and Reviewing,” or “Section M: Prose Style,” or “Authors’ Society (British) Solicitors’ Department,” or “Exhibit of the Reading Room of the British Museum.”
Manifestly the model of a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science dominated his mind more and more, until at last he began to concoct a presidential address. And he invented a man called J. B. Pondlebury, very active and illiterate, but an excellent organizer, trained by Selfridge, that Marshal Field of London, who is very directive throughout. J. B. Pondlebury orders the special trains, contrives impossible excursions, organizes garden fêtes and water parties, keeps people together who would prefer to be separated, and breaks up people who have been getting together. Through all these things drifts Hallery, whose writings started the idea, and sometimes he is almost, as it were, leader and sometimes he is like a drowned body in the torrent below Niagara – Pondlebury being Niagara.
On the whole the atmosphere of the great conference was American, and yet I distinctly remember that it was the Special Train to Bâle of which he gave us an account one afternoon; it was a night journey of considerable eventfulness, with two adjacent carriages de luxe labelled respectively “Specially Reserved for Miss Marie Corelli,” and “Specially Reserved for Mr. and Mrs. George Bernard Shaw,” with conspicuous reiterations. The other compartments were less exclusive, and contained curious minglings of greatness, activity, and reputation. Sir J. M. Barrie had an upper berth in a wagon-lit, where he remained sympathetically silent above a crowd of younger reputations, a crowd too numerous to permit the making of the lower berth and overflowing into the corridor. I remember Boon kept jamming new people into that congestion. The whole train, indeed, was to be fearfully overcrowded. That was part of the joke. James Joyce I recall as a novelist strange to me that Boon insisted was a “first-rater.” He represented him as being of immense size but extreme bashfulness. And he talked about D. H. Lawrence, St. John Ervine, Reginald Wright Kauffman, Leonard Merrick, Viola Meynell, Rose Macaulay, Katherine Mansfield, Mary Austin, Clutton Brock, Robert Lynd, James Stephens, Philip Guedalla, H. M. Tomlinson, Denis Garstin, Dixon Scott, Rupert Brooke, Geoffrey Young, F. S. Flint, Marmaduke Pickthall, Randolph S. Bourne, James Milne —
“Through all the jam, I think we must have Ford Madox Hueffer, wandering to and fro up and down the corridor, with distraught blue eyes, laying his hands on heads and shoulders, the Only Uncle of the Gifted Young, talking in a languid, plangent tenor, now boasting about trivialities, and now making familiar criticisms (which are invariably ill-received), and occasionally quite absent-mindedly producing splendid poetry…”
Like most authors who have made their way to prominence and profit, Boon was keenly sympathetic with any new writer who promised to do interesting work, and very ready with his praise and recognition. That disposition in these writing, prolific times would alone have choked the corridor. And he liked young people even when their promises were not exactly convincing. He hated to see a good book neglected, and was for ever ramming “The Crystal Age” and “Said the Fisherman” and “Tony Drum” and “George’s Mother” and “A Hind Let Loose” and “Growing Pains” down the throats of his visitors. But there were very human and definite limits to his appreciations. Conspicuous success, and particularly conspicuous respectable success, chilled his generosity. Conrad he could not endure. I do him no wrong in mentioning that; it is the way with most of us; and a score of flourishing contemporaries who might have liked tickets for the Conference special would have found great difficulty in getting them.
There is a fascination in passing judgements and drawing up class lists. For a time the high intention of the Mind of the Race was forgotten while we talked the narrow “shop” of London literary journalism, and discovered and weighed and log-rolled and – in the case of the more established – blamed and condemned. That Bâle train became less and less like a train and more and more like a descriptive catalogue.
For the best part of an afternoon we talked of the young and the new, and then we fell into a discussion about such reputations as Pickthall’s and W. H. Hudson’s and the late Stephen Crane’s, reputations ridiculously less than they ought to be, so that these writers, who are certainly as securely classic as Beckford or Herrick, are still unknown to half the educated English reading public. Was it due to the haste of criticism or the illiteracy of publishers? That question led us so far away from the special Bâle train that we never returned to it. But I know that we decided that the real and significant writers were to be only a small portion of the crowd that congested the train; there were also to be endless impostors, imitators, editors, raiders of the world of print… At every important station there was to be a frightful row about all these people’s tickets, and violent attempts to remove doubtful cases… Then Mr. Clement K. Shorter was to come in to advise and help the conductor… Ultimately this led to trouble about Mr. Shorter’s own credentials…
Some of Boon’s jokes about this train were, to say the best of them, obvious. Mr. Compton Mackenzie was in trouble about his excess luggage, for example. Mr. Upton Sinclair, having carried out his ideal of an innocent frankness to a logical completeness in his travelling equipment, was forcibly wrapped in blankets by the train officials. Mr. Thomas Hardy had a first-class ticket but travelled by choice or mistake in a second-class compartment, his deserted place being subsequently occupied by that promising young novelist Mr. Hugh Walpole, provided with a beautiful fur rug, a fitted dressing-bag, a writing slope, a gold-nibbed fountain pen, innumerable introductions, and everything that a promising young novelist can need. The brothers Chesterton, Mr. Maurice Baring, and Mr. Belloc sat up all night in the wagon-restaurant consuming beer enormously and conversing upon immortality and whether it extends to Semitic and Oriental persons. At the end of the train, I remember, there was to have been a horse-van containing Mr. Maurice Hewlett’s charger – Mr. Hewlett himself, I believe, was left behind by accident at the Gare de Lyons – Mr. Cunninghame Graham’s Arab steed, and a large, quiet sheep, the inseparable pet of Mr. Arthur Christopher Benson…
There was also, I remember, a description of the whole party running for early coffee, which gave Boon ample and regrettable opportunities for speculations upon the déshabille of his contemporaries. Much of the detail of that invention I prefer to forget, but I remember Mr. Shaw was fully prepared for the emerging with hand-painted pyjamas, over which he was wearing a saffron dressing-gown decorated in green and purple scrolls by one of the bolder artists associated with Mr. Roger Fry, and as these special train allusions are all that I can ever remember Boon saying about Shaw, and as the drawing does in itself amount to a criticism, I give it here…
§ 2
Boon was greatly exercised over the problem of a president.
“Why have a president?” Dodd helped.
“There must be a Presidential Address,” said Boon, “and these things always do have a president.”
“Lord Rosebery,” suggested Wilkins.
“Lord Morley,” said Dodd.
“Lord Bryce.”
Then we looked at one another.
“For my own part,” said Boon, “if we are going in for that sort of thing, I favour Lord Reay.
“You see, Lord Reay has never done anything at all connected with literature. Morley and Bryce and Rosebery have at any rate written things – historical studies, addresses, things like that – but Reay has never written anything, and he let Gollancz make him president of the British Academy without a murmur. This seems to mark him out for this further distinction. He is just the sort of man who would be made – and who would let himself be made – president of a British affair of this sort, and they would hoist him up and he would talk for two or three hours without a blush. Just like that other confounded peer – what was his name? – who bored and bored and bored at the Anatole France dinner… In the natural course of things it would be one of these literary lords…”
“What would he say?” asked Dodd.
“Maunderings, of course. It will make the book rather dull. I doubt if I can report him at length… He will speak upon contemporary letters, the lack of current achievement… I doubt if a man like Lord Reay ever reads at all. One wonders sometimes what these British literary aristocrats do with all their time. Probably he left off reading somewhere in the eighties. He won’t have noted it, of course, and he will be under the impression that nothing has been written for the past thirty years.”
“Good Lord!” said Wilkins.
“And he’ll say that. Slowly. Steadily. Endlessly. Then he will thank God for the English classics, ask where now is our Thackeray? where now our Burns? our Charlotte Brontë? our Tennyson? say a good word for our immortal bard, and sit down amidst the loud applause of thousands of speechlessly furious British and American writers…”
“I don’t see that this will help your book forward,” said Dodd.
“No, but it’s a proper way of beginning. Like Family Prayers.”
“I suppose,” said Wilkins, “if you told a man of that sort that there were more and better poets writing in English beautifully in 1914 than ever before he wouldn’t believe it. I suppose if you said that Ford Madox Hueffer, for example, had produced sweeter and deeper poetry than Alfred, Lord Tennyson, he’d have a fit.”
“He’d have nothing of the kind. You could no more get such an idea into the head of one of these great vestiges of our Gladstonian days than you could get it into the seat of a Windsor chair… And people don’t have fits unless something has got into them… No, he’d reflect quite calmly that first of all he’d never heard of this Hueffer, then that probably he was a very young man. And, anyhow, one didn’t meet him in important places… And after inquiry he would find out he was a journalist… And then probably he’d cease to cerebrate upon the question…”
§ 3
“Besides,” said Boon, “we must have one of our literary peers because of America.”
“You’re unjust to America,” I said.
“No,” said Boon. “But Aunt Dove – I know her ways.”
That led to a long, rambling discussion about the American literary atmosphere. Nothing that I could say would make him relent from his emphatic assertion that it is a spinster atmosphere, an atmosphere in which you can’t say all sorts of things and where all sorts of things have to be specially phrased. “And she can’t stand young things and crude things – ”
“America!” said Wilkins.
“The America I mean. The sort of America that ought to supply young new writers with caresses and – nourishment…Instead of which you get the Nation… That bleak acidity, that refined appeal to take the child away.”
“But they don’t produce new young writers!” said Wilkins.
“But they do!” said Boon. “And they strangle them!”
It was extraordinary what a power metaphors and fancies had upon Boon. Only those who knew him intimately can understand how necessary Miss Bathwick was to him. He would touch a metaphor and then return and sip it, and then sip and drink and swill until it had intoxicated him hopelessly.
“America,” said Boon, “can produce such a supreme writer as Stephen Crane – the best writer of English for the last half-century – or Mary Austin, who used to write – What other woman could touch her? But America won’t own such children. It’s amazing. It’s a case of concealment of birth. She exposes them. Whether it’s Shame – or a Chinese trick… She’ll sit never knowing she’s had a Stephen Crane, adoring the European reputation, the florid mental gestures of a Conrad. You see, she can tell Conrad ‘writes.’ It shows. And she’ll let Mary Austin die of neglect, while she worships the ‘art’ of Mary Ward. It’s like turning from the feet of a goddess to a pair of goloshes. She firmly believes that old quack Bergson is a bigger man than her own unapproachable William James… She’s incredible. I tell you it’s only conceivable on one supposition… I’d never thought before about these disgraceful sidelights on Miss Dove’s career…
“We English do make foundlings of some of her little victims, anyhow… But why hasn’t she any natural instinct in the matter?
“Now, if one represented that peculiar Bostonian intellectual gentility, the Nation kind of thing, as a very wicked, sour lady’s-maid with a tremendous influence over the Spinster’s conduct…”
His mind was running on.
“I begin to see a melodramatic strain in this great novel, ‘Miss Dove.’… ‘Miss Dove’s Derelicts.’… Too broad, I am afraid. If one were to represent Sargent and Henry James as two children left out one cold night in a basket at a cottage in the village by a mysterious stranger, with nothing but a roll of dollars and a rough drawing of the Washington coat-of-arms to indicate their parentage…
“Then when they grow up they go back to the big house and she’s almost kind to them…
“Have you ever read the critical articles of Edgar Allan Poe? They’re very remarkable. He is always demanding an American Literature. It is like a deserted baby left to die in its cradle, weeping and wailing for its bottle… What he wanted, of course, was honest and intelligent criticism.
“To this day America kills her Poes…”
“But confound it!” said Wilkins, “America does make discoveries for herself. Hasn’t she discovered Lowes Dickinson?”
“But that merely helps my case. Lowes Dickinson has just the qualities that take the American judgement; he carries the shadow of King’s College Chapel about with him wherever he goes; he has an unobtrusive air of being doubly starred in Baedeker and not thinking anything of it. And also she took Noyes to her bosom. But when has American criticism ever had the intellectual pluck to proclaim an American?
“And so, you see,” he remarked, going off again at a tangent, “if we are going to bid for American adhesions there’s only one course open to us in the matter of this presidential address… Lord Morley…”
“You’re a little difficult to follow at times,” said Wilkins.
“Because he’s the man who’s safest not to say anything about babies or – anything alive… Obviously a literary congress in America must be a festival in honour of sterility.
“Aunt Dove demands it. Like celebrating the virginity of Queen Elizabeth…”
§ 4
I find among the fragments of my departed friend some notes that seem to me to be more or less relevant here. They are an incomplete report of the proceedings of a section S, devoted to Poiometry, apparently the scientific measurement of literary greatness. It seems to have been under the control of a special committee, including Mr. James Huneker, Mr. Slosson, Sir Thomas Seccombe, Mr. James Douglas, Mr. Clement K. Shorter, the acting editor of the Bookman, and the competition editress of the Westminster Gazette…
Apparently the notes refer to some paper read before the section. Its authorship is not stated, nor is there any account of its reception. But the title is “The Natural History of Greatness, with especial reference to Literary Reputations.”
The opening was evidently one of those rapid historical sketches frequent in such papers.
“Persuasion that human beings are sometimes of disproportionate size appears first in the Egyptian and Syrian wall paintings… Probably innate… The discouragement of the young a social necessity in all early societies. In all societies?.. Exaggerated stories about the departed… Golden ages. Heroic ages. Ancestor worship… Dead dogs better than living lions… Abraham. Moses. The Homeric reputation, the first great literary cant. Resentment against Homer’s exaggerated claims on the part of intelligent people. Zoilus. Caricature of the Homerists in the Satyricon. Other instances of unorthodox ancient criticism… Shakespeare as an intellectual nuisance… Extreme suffering caused to contemporary writers by the Shakespeare legend…
“Another form of opposition to these obsessions is the creation of countervailing reputations. Certain people in certain ages have resolved to set up Great Men of their own to put beside these Brocken spectres from the past. This marks a certain stage of social development, the beginning of self-consciousness in a civilized community. Self-criticism always begins in self-flattery. Virgil as an early instance of a Great Man of set intentions; deliberately put up as the Latin Homer…
“Evolution of the greatness of Aristotle during the Middle Ages.
“Little sense of contemporary Greatness among the Elizabethans.
“Comparison with the past the prelude to Great-Man-Making, begins with such a work as Swift’s ‘Battle of the Books.’ Concurrently the decline in religious feeling robs the past of its half-mystical prestige. The Western world ripe for Great Men in the early nineteenth century. The Germans as a highly competitive and envious people take the lead. The inflation of Schiller. The greatness of Goethe. Incredible dullness of “Elective Affinities,” of “Werther,” of “Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship.” The second part of “Faust” a tiresome muddle. Large pretentiousness of the man’s career. Resolve of the Germans to have a Great Fleet, a Great Empire, a Great Man. Difficulty in finding a suitable German for Greatening. Expansion of the Goethe legend. German efficiency brought to bear on the task. Lectures. Professors. Goethe compared to Shakespeare. Compared to Homer. Compared to Christ. Compared to God. Discovered to be incomparable…
