Howard’s End – the dying German

I was blown away by this paragraph:  just let it roll over you…

It was his hope that the clouds of materialism obscuring the Fatherland would part in time, and the mild intellectual light re-emerge.  “Do you imply that we Germans are stupid, Uncle Ernst?” exclaimed a haughty and magnificent nephew.  Uncle Ernst replied, “To my mind.  You use the intellect, but you no longer care about it.  That I call stupidity.”  As the haughty nephew did not follow, he continued, “You only care about the’ things that you can use, and therefore arrange them in the following order: Money, supremely useful; intellect, rather useful; imagination, of no use at all.  No”–for the other had protested–“your Pan-Germanism is no more imaginative than is our Imperialism over here.  It is the vice of a vulgar mind to be thrilled by bigness, to think that a thousand square miles are a thousand times more wonderful than one square mile, and that a million square miles are almost the same as heaven.  That is not imagination.  No, it kills it.  When their poets over here try to celebrate bigness they are dead at once, and naturally.  Your poets too are dying, your philosophers, your musicians, to whom Europe has listened for two hundred years.  Gone.  Gone with the little courts that nurtured them–gone with Esterhaz and Weimar.  What?  What’s that?  Your Universities?  Oh, yes, you have learned men, who collect more facts than do the learned men of England.  They collect facts, and facts, and empires of facts.  But which of them will rekindle the light within?”