Germany and the Germans Part 14

"If one should dream that such a world began In some slow devil's heart that hated man, Who should deny it?"

Milton held that "a complete and generous education fits a man to perform justly, skilfully, and magnanimously all the offices, both private and public, of peace and war." It is my opinion that the Schlager has its part to play in this matter of education. A mind trained to the keenness of a razor's edge, but without a sound body controlled by a steel will, is of small account in the world. The whole aim of education is, after all, to make a man independent, to make the intelligence reach out in keen quest of its object, and at its own and not at another's bidding. An education is intended to make a man his own master, and so far as any man is not his own master, in just so far is he uneducated. What he knows, or does not know, of books does not alter the fact.

Much of the pharisaism and priggishness on the subject of education arises from the fact that the world is divided into two camps as regards knowledge: those who believe that the astronomer alone knows the stars, and those who believe that he knows them best who sleeps in the open beneath them. In reality, neither type of mind is complete without the other.

To turn from any theoretical discussion of the subject, it remains to be said that Germany has trained her whole population into the best working team in the world. Without the natural advantages of either England or America she has become the rival of both. Her superior mental training has enabled her to wrest wealth from by-products, and she saves and grows rich on what America wastes. Whether Germany has succeeded in giving the ply of character to her youth, as she folds them in her educational factories, I sometimes doubt. That she has not made them independent and ready to grapple with new situations, and strange peoples, and swift emergencies, their own past and present history shows.

It is a very strenuous and economical existence, however, for everybody, and it requires a politically tame population to be thus driven. The dangerous geographical situation of Germany, ringed round by enemies, has made submission to hard work, and to an iron autocratic government necessary. To be a nation at all it was necessary to obey and to submit, to sacrifice and to save. These things they have been taught as have no other European people. Greater wealth, increased power, a larger role in the world, are bringing new problems. Education thus far has been in the direction of fitting each one into his place in a great machine, and less attention has been paid to the development of that elasticity of mind which makes for independence; but men educate themselves into independence, and that time is coming swiftly for Germany.

"Also he hath set the world in their heart," and one wonders what this population, hitherto so amenable, so economical, and so little worldly, will do with this new world. The temptations of wealth, the sirens of luxury, the opportunities for amus.e.m.e.nt and dissipation, are all to the fore in the Germany of to-day as they were certainly not twenty-five years ago. Ulysses, alas, does not bind himself to the mast very tightly as he pa.s.ses these enchanted isles of modern luxury.

"The land of d.a.m.ned professors" has learned its lessons from those same professors so well, that it is now ready to take a postgraduate course in world politics; and as I said in the beginning, some of our friends are putting the word "d.a.m.ned" in other parts of this, and other sentences, when they describe the rival prowess and progress of the Germans.

VII THE DISTAFF SIDE

Madame Necker writes of women: "Les femmes tiennent la place de ces lagers duvets qu'on introduit dans les caisses de porcelaine; on n'y fait point d'attention, mais si on les retire, tout se brise."

When one sees women and dogs harnessed together dragging carts about the streets; when one sees women doing the lighter work of sweeping up leaves and collecting rubbish in the forests and on the larger estates; doing the gardening work in Saxony and other places; when one sees them by the hundreds working bare-legged in the beet-fields in Silesia and elsewhere throughout Germany; when one reads "Viele Weiber sind gut weil sie nicht wissen wie man es machen muss um bose zu sein," and "Der Mann nach Freiheit strebt, das Weib nach Sitte," two phrases from the German cla.s.sics, Lessing and Goethe; when one recalls the shameless carelessness of Goethe's treatment of all women; of how his love-poems were sometimes sent by the same mail to the lady and to the press; and the unrestrained worship of Goethe by the German women of his day; when one sees time and time again all over Germany the women shouldered into the street while the men keep to the sidewalk; when one sees in the streets, railway carriages, and other public conveyances, the insulting staring to which every woman is subjected if she have a trace of good looks, one realizes that at any rate Madame Necker was not writing of German women. Let me add that so far as the great Goethe is concerned, it is by no Puritan yard-stick that I am measuring him, but by the German's own high standard which despises any mating of true sentiment with commercialism. "Beatus ille qui procul negotiis," certainly applies to one's affairs of the heart.

In the gallery at Dresden, where the loveliest mother's face in all the world shines down upon you from Raphael's canvas like a benediction, there is a small picture by Rubens, "The Judgment of Paris." The three G.o.ddesses?induitur formosa est; exuitur ipsa forma est ?have taken literally the compliment paid to a certain beautiful customer by a renowned French dressmaker: "Un rien et madame est habillee!" They are coquettishly revealing their claims to the Eve-bitten fruit which Paris holds in his hand. Paris and his friend are in the most nonchalant of att.i.tudes. They could not be more indifferent, or more superior in appearance, were they dandies judging the cla.s.s for costermonger's donkeys at a provincial horse-show. The three most beautiful women in the world are squirming and posturing for praise, and a decision, before two as sophisticated and self-satisfied men as one will ever see on canvas or off it.

The same subject is treated by a man of the same breed, but of a later day, named Feuerbach, and his picture hangs, I think, in Breslau. Here again the supersuperiority of the male is portrayed.

In the Church of Saint Sebaldus at Nuremberg, there is a delightful mural painting which makes one merry even to recall it. The subject is the Garden of Eden. Adam and Eve are being lectured by an elderly man in flowing robes with a long white beard. His beard alone would more than supply Adam and Eve with the covering they lack. In an easy att.i.tude, with neither haste nor anxiety, he is pointing out to them the error of their ways. He is as detached in manner as though he were Professor Wundt, lecturing to us at Leipsic on the fourth dimension of s.p.a.ce. Adam is somewhat dejected and reclines upon the ground. Eve, unabashed, with nothing on but the apple which she is munching, is evidently in a reckless mood. She looks like a child of fifteen, with her hair down her back; the defiance of her att.i.tude is that of a naughty little girl. The world-old problem is under discussion, but with an air of good humor and cheerfulness on the part of the lecturer, as though there were still time in the world, as though hurry were an undiscovered human attribute, as though possibly the world would still go on even if the problem were left unsolved, and this first leafy parliament adjourned sine die.

They were so much wiser than are we! They knew then that there would be other sessions of congress, and that it was not necessary to decide everything on that spring day of the year One. But here again in this picture it is the male att.i.tude toward the woman that is of chief interest. Adam is plainly bored. What if the woman has broken into the sanctuary of knowledge, she will only be the bigger fool, he seems to say. As for the professor in the red robes, his easy, patronizing manner is indicative enough of his mental top-loftiness toward the woman question. You can almost hear him say as he strokes his beard: "Kuche, Kinder, Kirche!"

From the fields of Silesia, where the beet industry is possible only because there are hundreds of bare-legged girls and women to single the beets, a process not possible by machinery, at a wage of from twenty-five to thirty cents a day, to these German paintings with their ill.u.s.trations of the spiritual and moral att.i.tude of the German man toward the German woman, one sees everywhere and among practically all cla.s.ses an att.i.tude of condescension toward women among the polite and polished; an att.i.tude of carelessness bordering on contempt among the rude. Their att.i.tude is like that of the Jews who cry in their synagogues, "Thank G.o.d for not having made me a woman!"

One can judge, not incorrectly, of the status of women in a country by the manners and habits of the men, entirely dissociated from their relations to women. When one sees men equipped with small mirrors and small brushes and combs, which they use in all sorts of public places, even in the streets, in the street-cars, in omnibuses, and in the theatres; when one opens the door to a knock to find a gentleman, a small mirror in one hand and a tiny brush in the other, preparing himself for his entrance into your hotel sitting-room; you are bound to think that these persons are in the childhood days of personal hygiene, as it cannot be denied that they are, but also that their women folk must be still in the Eryops age of social sophistication, not to put a stop to such bucolic methods of grooming. Even though the Eryops is a gigantic tadpole, a hundred times older than the oldest remains of man, this is hardly an exaggeration.

In no other country in the cultured group of nations is the animal man so navely vain, so deliciously self-conscious, so untrained in the ways of the polite world, so serenely oblivious, not merely of the rights of women but of the simple courtesy of the strong to the weak. It is the only country I have visited where the hands of the men are better cared for than the hands of the women; and this is not a pleasant commentary upon the question of who does the rough work, and who has the vanity and who the leisure for a meticulous toilet. One must not forget that regular and systematic cleansing of the person is a very modern fashion. As late as the early part of the nineteenth century, tooth-brushes were not allowed in certain French convents, being looked upon as a luxury.

Cleanliness was not very common a century and a half ago in any country. In 1770 the publication of Monsieur Perrel's "Pogonotomie, ou 1'Art d'apprendre a se raser soi-meme," created a sensation among fashionable people, and enthusiasts studied self-shaving. The author of "Lois de la Galanterie" in 1640 writes: "Every day one should take pains to wash one's hands, and one should also wash one's face almost as often!"

The copious streams of hot and cold water, turned into a porcelain tub at any time of the day or night; the brushes, and soaps, and towels, and toilet waters, and powders of our day were quite unknown to our not far-off ancestors. The oft-repeated and minute ablutions of our day are almost as modern as bicycles, and not as ancient as the railways. The Germans are only a little behind the rest of us in this soap and water cult, that is all.

In the streets and public conveyances of the cities, in the beer-gardens and restaurants in the country, in the summer and winter resorts from the Baltic to the Black Forest, from the Rhine to Bohemia, it is ever the same. They seat themselves at table first, and have their napkins hanging below their Adam's apples before their women are in their chairs; hundreds of times have I seen their women arrive at table after they were seated, not a dozen times have I seen their masters rise to receive them; their preference for the inside of the sidewalk is practically universal; even officers in uniform, but this is of rare occurrence, will take their places in a railway carriage, all of them smoking, where two ladies are sitting, and wait till requested before throwing their cigars away, and what cigars! and then by smiles and innuendoes make the ladies so uncomfortable that they are driven from the carriage. Even eleven hundred years ago the German woman had rather a rough time of it. Charlemagne had nine wives, but he seems to have been unduly uxorious or unwearying in his infatuations. He made the wife travel with him, and all nine of them died, worn out by travel and hardship. There is a constancy of companionship which is deadly.

The inconveniences and discomfort of going about alone, for ladies in Germany, I have heard not from a dozen, but in a chorus from German ladies themselves. I am reciting no grievances of my compatriots, for I have seen next to nothing of Americans for a year or more, and I have no personal complaints, for these soft adventurers scent danger quickly, and give the masters of the world, whether male or female, a wide berth.

These gross manners are the result of two factors in German life that it is well to keep in mind. They are a poor people, only just emerging from poverty, slavery, and disaster; poor not only in possessions, but poor in the experience of how to use them. They do not know how to use their new freedom. They are as awkward in this new world of theirs, of greater wealth and opportunity, as unyoked oxen that have strayed into city streets. The abject deference of the women, who know nothing better than these parochial masters, adds to their sense of their own importance. It is largely the women themselves who make their men insupportable.

The other factor is the rigid caste system of their social habits.

There is no a.s.sociation between the officers, the n.o.bility, the officials, the cultured cla.s.ses, and the middle and lower cla.s.ses. The public schools and universities are learning shops; they do not train youths in character, manners, or in the ways of the world. They do not play together, or work together, or amuse themselves together. The creeds and codes, habits and manners of the better cla.s.ses are, therefore, not allowed to percolate and permeate those less experienced. There is no word for gentleman in German. The words gebildeter and anstandiger are used, and it is significant to notice that the stress is thus laid on mental development or upon obedience to formal rules. A man may be a very great gentleman and a true gentleman and not be a scholar. The late Duke of Devonshire cared more for horses than for books and pictures, and Abraham Lincoln was one of the greatest gentlemen of all time.

In Homburg one day I saw a tall, fine-looking, elderly man step aside and off the sidewalk to let two ladies pa.s.s. It was for Germany a noticeable act. He turned out to be a famous general then in waiting upon the Emperor. There are not a few such courtly gentlemen in Germany, not a few whose knightliness compares with that of any gentleman in the world. Alas for the great bulk of the Germans, they never come into contact with them, their example is lost, their leaven of high breeding and courtesy does not lighten the bourgeois loaf! In America and in England we are all threading our way in and out among all cla.s.ses. We are much more democratic. Men of every cla.s.s are in contact with men of every other, we play together and work together, and consequently the level of manners and habits is higher. This state of things is less marked in south Germany than in Prussia, but is more or less true everywhere.

But how can this be possible, I hear it replied, in that land where every officer clacks his heels together with a report like an exploding torpedo, ducks his head from his rigid vertebrae, and then bends to kiss the lady's hand; and where every civilian of any standing does the same? I am not writing of the n.o.bility and of the corps of officers in this connection. No doubt there are black sheep among them, though I have not met them. Of the many scores of them whom I have met, whom I have ridden with, dined with, romped with, drunk with, travelled with, I have only to say that they are as courteous, as unwilling to offend or to take advantage, as are brave men in other countries I know. I am writing of the average man and woman, of those who make up the bulk of every population, of those upon whom it depends whether a national life is healthy or otherwise.

The very stiffness of these mannerisms, the clacking of heels, the ducking of heads, the kissing of hands, the countless grave formalities among the men themselves, are all indicative of social weakness. They are afraid to walk without the crutches of certain formulae, of certain hard-and-fast rules, of certain laws that they worship and fall down before. Slavery is still upon them. Escaped from a bodily master they fly to the refuge of a moral and spiritual one.

These formalities are prescribed forms which they wear as they wear uniforms; they are not the result of innate consideration.

Uniform-wearing is a pa.s.sion among the Germans, and may be included as still another indication of the universal desire to take refuge behind forms, and laws, and fixed customs, the universal desire to shrink from depending upon their own judgment and initiative. They will not even bow or kiss a lady's hand, without a prescription from a social physician whom they trust.

The German officials are always officials, always addressed and addressing others punctiliously by their t.i.tles. They do not throw off officialdom outside their duties and their offices as we do, but they glory in it. We throw off our uniforms as soon as may be; we feel hampered by them. This leads to a feeling on the part of the Germans that we are too free and easy, and not respectful enough toward our own dignity or toward theirs. We feel, on the other hand, that it is a farce to go to the every-day markets of life, whether for daily food or for daily social intercourse, with the bullion and certified checks of our official dignity; we go rather with the small change that jingles in all pockets alike, and is ready to be handed out for the frequent and unimportant buying and selling of the day and hour. We look upon this grallatory att.i.tude toward life as artificial and hampering, and prefer to walk among our neighbors as much as possible upon our own feet.

I am not pretending to fix standards of etiquette. I can quite understand that when we grab the hand of the German's wife and shake it like a pump-handle instead of bowing over it; that when we nod cheerfully to him in the street with a wave of the hand or a lifting of a cane or umbrella instead of taking off our hat; that when we fail to address both him and his lady with the t.i.tle belonging to them, no matter how commonplace that t.i.tle, we shock his prejudices and his code of good manners.

If there is a stranger, a lady, in the drawing-room before dinner the German men line up in single file and ask to be presented to her. If the lady is tall and handsome and the party a large one, it looks almost like an ovation. If you go to dine at an officers' mess the men think it their duty to come up and ask to be presented to you. They wear their mourning bands on the forearm instead of the upperarm; they wear their wedding-rings on the fourth finger of the right hand; many of them wear rather more conspicuous jewelry than we consider to be in good taste.

The sofa, too, plays a role in German households and offices for which I have sought in vain for an explanation. Not even German archaeology supplies a historical ancestry for this sofa cult. It is the place of honor. If you go to tea you are enthroned on the sofa. Even if you go to an office, say of the police, or of the manager of the city slaughter-house, or of the hospital superintendent, you are manoeuvred about till they get you on the sofa, generally behind a table. I soon discovered that this was the seat of honor. Sofas have their place in life, I admit. There are sofas that we all remember with tears, with tenderness, with reverence. They have been the boards upon which we first appeared in the role of lover perhaps; or where we have fondled and comforted a discouraged child; or where we have pumped new ambitions and larger life into a weaker brother; or where we have tossed in the agony of grief or disappointment; or where we have waited drearily and alone the result of a consultation of moral or physical life and death in the next room. Indeed, this all reminds me that I could write an essay on sofas that would be poignant, touching, autobiographical, luminous, as could most other men, but this would not explain the position of the sofa in Germany in the least. "Travels on a Sofa"--I must do it one day, and perhaps, with more serious study of the subject, light may be thrown upon this question of the sofa in Germany.

Even at large and rather formal dinner-parties the host bows and drinks to his guests, first one and then another. At the end of the meal, in many households, it is the custom to bow and kiss your hostess's hand and say "Mahlzeit," a shortened form of "May the meal be blessed to you." You also shake hands with the other guests and say "Mahlzeit." In some smarter houses this is looked upon as old- fashioned and is not done. I look upon it as a charming custom, and think it a pity that it should be done away with.

Young unmarried girls and women courtesy to the elder women and kiss their hands, also a custom I approve. On the other hand, where a stalwart officer appears in a small drawing-room and seats himself at the slender tea-table for a cup of afternoon tea, holding his sword by his side or between his legs, that seems to me an unnecessary precaution, even when Americans are present, for many of us nowadays go about unarmed.

Except on official or formal occasions it seems a matter of questionable good taste to appear, say in a hotel restaurant, with one's breast hung with medals or with orders on one's coat or in the b.u.t.ton-hole. Let 'em find out what a big boy am I without help from self-imposed placards seems to me to be perhaps the more modest way.

The method in vogue in j.a.panese temples, where the worshippers jangle a bell to call the attention of the G.o.ds to their prayers or offerings, seems out of place where the G.o.d is merely the casual man in the street, in a Berlin restaurant.

At more than one dinner the soup is followed by a meat course, after which comes the fish. This does not mean that the dinners are not good. I fondly recall a dish of sauerkraut boiled in white wine and served in a pineapple. I may not give names, but the dinners of Mr.

and Mrs. Fourth of December, of Mrs. Twenty-first of January, of Mr.

and Mrs. Thirtieth of January, and of Mr. and Mrs. February First, and others rank very high in my gastronomic calendar. Do not imagine from what I have written that Lucullus has left no disciples in Germany. I could easily add a page to the list I have mentioned, and because we look upon some of these customs of the German as absurd is no reason for forgetting that he often, and from his stand-point rightly, looks upon us as boors. I like the Germans and I pretend to have learned very much from them. To sneer at superficial differences is to lose all profit from intercourse with other peoples. Goethe is right, "Uberall lernt man nur von dem, den man liebt!" The argument is only all on our side when we are impervious to impressions and to other standards of manners and morals than our own.

"Am Ende hangen wir doch ab Von Kreaturen die wir machten"

are two lines at least from the second part of "Faust" that we can all understand.

It is sometimes thrown at us Americans that we love a t.i.tle, and that we are not averse to the ornamentation of our names with pseudo and attenuated "Honorables" and "Colonels" and "Judge" and so on; and I am bound to admit the impeachment, for I blush at some of my be-colonelled and becaptained friends, and wonder at their rejoicing over such effeminate honorifics, especially those colonelcies born of clattering behind a civilian governor, on a badly ridden horse, a t.i.tle which may be compared with that most attenuated t.i.tle of all, that of a Texan, who when asked why he was called "colonel" replied, that he had married the widow of a colonel!

I prefer "Esqr." to "Mr." merely because it makes it easier to a.s.sort the daily mail; "Mr.," "Mrs.," and "Miss" are so easily taken for one another on an envelope, and particularly at Christmas time this more distinctly legible t.i.tle avoids, the deplorable misdirection of the secrets of Santa Claus; aside from that I am happy to be addressed merely by my name, like any other sovereign.

We are, too, somewhat overexcited when foreign royalties appear among us. "What wud ye do if ye were a king an' come to this counthry?"

asked Mr. Hennessy.

"Well," said Mr. Dooley, "there's wan thing I wuddent do. I wuddent r-read th' Declaration iv Independence. I'd be afraid I'd die laughin'."

In Germany not only are t.i.tles showered upon the populace, but it is distinctly and officially stated by what t.i.tle the office-holder shall be addressed.

In a case I know, a certain lady failed to sign herself to one of the small officials working upon her estate as, let us say, "I remain very sincerely yours," or its German equivalent; whereupon the person addressed wrote and demanded that communications addressed to him should be signed in the regulation manner. A lawyer was consulted, and it was found that a similar case had been taken to the courts and decided in favor of the recipient of wounded vanity.

In hearty and manly opposition to this att.i.tude toward life is the example of Admiral X. He had served long and gallantly, and just before he retired a friend said to him: "I hear that they're going to knight you." "By G.o.d, sir, not without a court-martial!" was the prompt reply. Indeed, things have come to such a pa.s.s in England that the offer of a knighthood to a gentleman of lineage, breeding, and real distinction, has been for years looked upon as either a joke or an insult.

Not so among my German friends; they have a ravenous appet.i.te for these flimsy tickets of pa.s.sing commendation. At many, many hospitable boards in Berlin I have been present where no left breast was barren of a medal, and where the only medal won by partic.i.p.ation in actual warfare, belonging to one of the guests, was safely packed away in his house. And as for the t.i.tles, there is no room in a small volume like this to enumerate them all; and the women folk all carry the t.i.tles of the husband, from Frau Ober-Posta.s.sistent, Frau Regierungs a.s.sessor, up to the Chancellor's lady, who, by the way, wears a t.i.tle in her mere face and bearing. Not long ago I saw in a provincial sheet the notice of the death of a woman of eighty, who was gravely dignified by her bereaved relatives with the t.i.tle, and as the relict of, a veterinary.

Upon a certain funicular at a mountain resort, where the cars pa.s.s one another up and down every twenty minutes, the conductors salute one another stiffly each time they pa.s.s.