The Proud Tower (54 page)

Eight conventions on naval warfare were ultimately reached establishing rules, rights and restrictions for every possible means of injuring the enemy. It took thirteen articles to prohibit the use of underwater contact mines unless harmless one hour after being laid; another thirteen articles to regulate naval bombardment of shore establishments; fifty-seven articles to govern an international prize court. Other conventions dealt with the right of capture, the nature of contraband, the rights and duties of neutrals at sea but so unsatisfactorily that all these questions were resumed at a conference of naval powers in London in the following year.

On arbitration, the motive power, now that Pauncefote was gone, was chiefly American, with Secretary Root, a lawyer by profession, supplying the energy behind Choate. Root’s object was to transform the tribunal established in 1899 from an optional court for litigants who agreed to arbitration into a Permanent Court of International Justice with permanent judges deciding issues of international law by “judicial methods under a sense of judicial responsibility.” President Roosevelt supported the aim without strong conviction, confessing to Root midway through the Conference that “I have not followed things at The Hague.” To his friend Speck von Sternberg, the German Ambassador, he expressed himself more forcibly as, for some reason, he habitually did to Germans. He could not take a proper interest in the Hague proceedings, he told Speck, because he was so “utterly disgusted” with the nonsense chattered by professional peace advocates.

The American proposal for a Permanent Court ran into strong opposition, one obstacle being Brazil’s insistence that all forty-four nations be represented on it. The idea of having decisions made for them “by decayed Oriental states like Turkey or Persia … or a half-breed lawyer from Central or South America,” in the words of one commentator, disgusted the major European powers. The crux, however, was once more compulsory arbitration. On this, reported Marschall to Berlin, would depend the final answer, “Was it a Peace Conference or a War Conference that took place in 1907?” Since his own country utterly rejected the compulsory principle, presumably he faced the answer. He did, not, however, fall into the error made by his predecessors of strenuous isolation. Instead, as Choate said, he was devoted to the principle of arbitration while opposing every practical application of it. The Conference attempted to work out a list of innocuous subjects for compulsory submission on which everyone could agree, but it failed of adoption when eight nations voted against it. In the end a Convention on the Pacific Settlement of International Disputes was adopted containing ninety-six articles of which the compulsory principle was not one. Consequently, no Court of Justice could be established.

One last point of contention remained: a Third Conference. Believers in the Hague idea wished to see the principle of the interdependence of nations established in the form of a permanent organization and periodic meetings. The day of nations as separate sovereign units was past and before breaking up they wanted a commitment to meet again. Non-believers, chiefly the major European powers, wanted no further limitation of their freedom of action and no more invasions of sovereignty by insistence on compulsory peaceful settlement. They resisted commitment to a Third Conference, more particularly because pressure for it came from the Americans. Secretary Root, faithful to his precept that successive failures were necessary to success, and believing that each of the Conferences had accomplished something toward making possible the next, had instructed Choate to obtain a resolution for a Third Conference. By committing the nations now, he intended also to wrest initiative and control from Russia. Choate fought hard against the reluctance of the other delegates which remained unbending until he threatened Nelidov that if no agreement were reached he would move the resolution publicly in plenary session. Opposition gave way. The delegates adopted a resolution recommending that the next Conference be held “within a period analogous to that which had elapsed since the preceding Conference,” namely, eight years.

To have achieved this much, Root wrote to Roosevelt, was at least progress “toward making the practice of nations conform to their professed desire for peace.” The desire was real enough. Twice it had brought the nation to The Hague. Twice man’s inherent desire to police himself had wrestled against opposite tendencies. The goal of a new international order in which nations would be willing to give up their freedom to fight in exchange for the security of law was still ahead. The advance toward it taken at The Hague, as Choate said later, was necessarily “gradual, tentative and delicate.”

He hoped for further progress at the next Conference in 1915.

^*
Hay had died in July, 1905.

^*
Limitation of armaments rather than disarmament was the question at issue, but the single word, being less awkward, was generally used at the time and the usage has been followed here.

6
“Neroism
Is in the Air”
GERMANY : 1890–1914

6
“Neroism Is in the Air”

T
HE BOLD
bad man of music at the turn of the century, innovator in form, modern and audacious in concept, brilliant in execution, not immune to vulgarity, and a barometer of his native weather, was Richard Strauss. His every new work, usually conducted at its premiere by himself, crammed the concert halls with a public eager to be excited and music critics eager to whip their rapiers through the hot air of their profession. In the ten years from 1889 to 1899, when he was between twenty-five and thirty-five, Strauss produced six works,
Don Juan, Tod und Verklärung, Till Eulenspiegel, Also Sprach Zarathustra, Don Quixote
and
Ein Heldenleben
, which created a new form—or, as the critics said, “formlessness.” Called tone poems, the compositions were rather condensed operas without words. At the premiere of
Don Juan
the audience called the composer back five times in an effort to make him play the piece all over again. At the premiere of
Heldenleben
, the passage depicting battle enraged some listeners to the point of leaving the hall and caused others to “tremble as they listened while some stood up suddenly and made violent gestures quite unconsciously.” If to some Strauss was a sensationalist and corrupter of the pure art of music and to others the prophet of a new musical age, even the “inventor of a new art,” one thing was clear: he retained for Germany the supremacy of music which had culminated in Wagner. He was “Richard II.”

In one sense this made him the most important man in German cultural life, for music was the only sphere in which foreigners willingly acknowledged the superiority that Germans believed was self-evident. German Kultur in German eyes was the heir of Greece and Rome and they themselves the best educated and most cultivated of modern peoples, yet foreigners in their appreciation of this fact fell curiously short of perfect understanding. Apart from German professors and philosophers, only Wagner excited their homage, only Bayreuth, seat of the Wagner Festspielhaus, attracted their visits. Paris remained Europe’s center of the arts, pleasure and fashion, London of Society, Rome of antiquity and Italy the lure of travelers seeking sun and beauty. The new movements and impulses in literature—Naturalism, Symbolism, Social criticism; the towering figures—Tolstoy, Ibsen and Zola; the great novels from Dostoyevsky to Hardy: all originated outside Germany. England after its great Victorian age was again in the nineties pulsing with new talent—Stevenson, Wilde and Shaw, Conrad, Wells, Kipling and Yeats. Russia again produced in Chekhov a matchless interpreter of man. Painters bloomed in France. Germany in painting had little but Max Liebermann, leader of the Secessionists, whose secession, however, took him no further than the presidency of the Prussian Academy of Fine Arts. In literature her outstanding figures were the playwright Gerhart Hauptmann, an offshoot of Ibsen, and the poet Stefan George, an offshoot of Baudelaire and Mallarmé.

In music, however, Germany had produced the world’s masters and seen the procession crowned by Wagner whose dogma of a fusion of the arts became a cult in which foreigners eagerly joined. Wagner Societies from St. Petersburg to Chicago contributed funds to provide the Master’s music dramas with a fitting home, and the “Bayreuth Idea” created intellectual ferment beyond Germany’s borders. Germans believed their sovereignty of music would continue forever without serious challenge from any other country. While many of them, like the Kaiser, detested Strauss’s modernity, his pre-eminence appeared to them happy proof that German musical supremacy was maintained.

Not only the major cities but every German city or town of substantial size had its opera house, concert hall, music academy, orchestral society and musical
Verein
of one kind or another. Hardly a German did not belong to a choral society or instrumental ensemble and spend his evenings practicing Bach cantatas over several steins of beer. Frankfurt-am-Main, a town of under 200,000 in the nineties, about the size of The Hague, Nottingham or Minneapolis, boasted two colleges of music, with distinguished teaching staffs and pupils from many countries, a new opera house, “one of the handsomest in Europe,” which gave performances six nights a week, a Museum Society Orchestra of 120 players which gave concerts of symphonic and chamber music, two large choral societies also prolific in concerts, and in addition was host to numerous recitals by visiting artists. Besides activity of comparable kind in Berlin, Munich, Cologne, Dresden, Leipzig, Stuttgart and other cities, music festivals lasting as much as a week in honor of some composer or special occasion were held widely and often.

The season at Bayreuth since Wagner’s death had acquired an oppressive atmosphere of obligatory reverence. The cab taking a visitor to the Festspielhaus displayed a card pinned over the seat labeled “Historical!” indicating that the Master had sat there. Performances opened with a blast of trumpets as if commanding the audience to prepare for devotions. At intermission sausages and beer were consumed, followed by another trumpet blast; after the second act more sausages and beer and more trumpets and the same procedure after the third act. The faithful absorbed the Master’s works “as if they were receiving Holy Communion,” reported the young Sibelius, who came in 1894 eager for a great experience and could not leave soon enough. By 1899 when Thomas Beecham, aged twenty, arrived, he found there was a rift in the cult. Malcontents were proclaiming the decadence of the Festival, criticizing the reign of the widow, Frau Cosima, and clamoring for the removal of the son, Siegfried, as director. They said his management was feeble and uninspired, singers were poor and performances shoddy, while the group loyal to “Wahnfried,” the Wagners’ house, countered with charges of intrigue and jealousy.

By now Strauss was the new Hero, so acknowledged in his self-portrait in music,
A Hero’s Life.
Reared in and accustomed to comfort, clad in the correct clothes of a diplomat, slender and six foot three inches tall, with broad shoulders and well-cared-for hands, a soft unlined face, a mouth shaped like a child’s under a flaxen moustache and a cap of curly flaxen hair already receding from a high forehead, Strauss looked neither Promethean like Beethoven, nor poetic like Schumann, but simply like what he was: a successful prosperous artist. His works had been performed since he was twelve; as a conductor he was engaged by all the leading orchestras. He was self-possessed, conscious of superiority and comfortably rather than offensively arrogant, a consequence of being Bavarian rather than Prussian.

Bavaria’s last King, Ludwig II, who adored Wagner and died mad, had sided with Austria against Prussia in 1866, and Munich’s culture was oriented more toward Vienna than Berlin. Munich fostered the arts and considered itself the modern Athens, as opposed to the Sparta of Prussia, whose Junkers, like their ancient prototypes, despised culture as well as comfort. Bavarians, as Germany’s southerners—and largely Catholic—enjoyed the pleasures of life, physical as well as aesthetic. In Munich, Stefan George was high priest of a cult of
l’art pour l’art
and beginning in 1892 edited for his worshipful disciples the literary review
Blätter für die Kunst
, which sought the German answer to questions of art, soul and style. Humor found a corner in Munich, where the satiric journal
Simplicissimus
, founded in 1896, and the comic journal
Lustige Blätter
were published. In Munich the
Überbrettl
, a form of satiric café entertainment, flourished and mocked Berlin.

As a native of Munich, Strauss belonged to a culture antipathetic to Prussia, but as a German aged seven in 1871, he grew up parallel with the new nationalism of the German Empire. Born in 1864, five years younger than the Kaiser, Dreyfus and Theodore Roosevelt, he came of a family which combined beer and music, his native city’s leading occupations, in that order. His grandfather was a wealthy brewer whose musically inclined daughter married Franz Strauss, first horn of the Munich Court Orchestra and professor at the Royal Academy of Music. He was said to be the only man of whom Wagner was afraid. Although he played Wagner’s music “lusciously,” he hated it and his emphatic objections to its demands on his instrument accomplished on one occasion the unique feat of rendering the Master speechless. Before a rehearsal of
Die Meistersinger
Wagner begged the conductor, Hans Richter, to play over the horn solo himself for fear Franz Strauss would declare it unplayable. Although Franz Strauss never became reconciled to his son’s dissonances and departures from classical form, Richard Strauss used no instrument to more marvelous capacity than the horn, as if in tribute to the man who, when asked how he could prove the boast that he was the best horn player in the world, replied, “I don’t prove it, I admit it.”