Part 8 (1/2)

It may be a reaction from this negligence with which they are treated that produces a quality, both in the writing and in the ill.u.s.trations of the German newspapers, which is unknown in America. Many of the ill.u.s.trated papers indulge in pictorial flings which may be compared only to the scribbling and coa.r.s.e drawings, in out-of-the-way places, of dirty-minded boys. With the exception of the well-known Fliegende Blatter, Kladderadatsch, and one or two less representative, there is nothing to compare with the artistic excellence and restrained good taste of Life or Punch, for example.

There is one ill.u.s.trated paper published in Munich, Simplicissimus, which deserves more than negligent and pa.s.sing comment. It has two artists of whom I know nothing except what I have learned from their work, Th. Th. Heine and Gulbransson. These men are Aristophanic in their ability as draughtsmen and as censors, in striking at the weaknesses, political, military, and official, of their countrymen.

Their work is something quite new in Germany, and worthy of comparison with the best in any country. It is not elegant, it is Rabelaisian; and though I have nothing to retract in regard to coa.r.s.eness, and no wish to commend the att.i.tude taken toward German political and social life, in fairness one is bound to call attention to the pictorial work in this particular paper as of a very high order, and to recognize its power. If Heine could have turned his wit into the drawings of Hogarth, we should have had something not unlike Simplicissimus, and any German annoyed at the criticisms of his national life from the pen of a foreigner, may well turn to his own Simplicissimus, and be humbly grateful that no foreign pen-point can possibly pierce more deeply, than this domestic pencil, at work in his own country.

The danger for the critic and the wit, which few avoid, is that with incomparable advantages over his opponent he will not play fair. In spite of the awful reputation of our so-called ”yellow press,” which is often boisterously impudent, and sometimes inclined to indulge in comments and revelations of the private affairs of individuals which can only be dubbed coa.r.s.e and cowardly, there is seldom a descent to the indescribably indecent caricatures which one finds every week in the ill.u.s.trated papers in Germany. As we have noted elsewhere, just as the citizens of Berlin, as one sees them in the streets and in public places, give one the impression that they are not house-trained, so many of the pens and pencils which serve the German press, leave one with the feeling that their possessors would not know how to behave in a cultivated and well-regulated household.

Every gentleman in Germany must have been ashamed of the writing in the German press after the sinking of the t.i.tanic. There was a blaze of brutal pharisaism that put a bar-sinister across any claim to gentlemanliness on the part of the majority. When every brave man in the world was lamenting the death of Scott, the English Arctic explorer, one German paper intimated that he had committed suicide to avoid the bankruptcy forced upon him by England's lack of generosity toward his expedition. It is almost unbelievable that such a cur should have escaped unthrashed, even among the German journalists.

These two examples of lack of fine feeling mark them for what they are. Among gentlemen no comment is necessary. The mark of breeding is more often discovered in what one does not say, does not write, does not do, than in positive action. There was much, at that time, when fifteen hundred people had been buried in icy water, and scores of American and English gentlemen had gone down to death, just in answer to: ”Ladies first, gentlemen!” that should have been left unsaid and unwritten. The quality of the German journalist, with half a dozen exceptions, was betrayed to the full in those few days, and many a German cheek mantled with shame.

However, a man may eat with his knife and still be an authority on bridge-building; he may tuck his napkin under his chin preparatory to, and as an armor against, the well-known vagaries of liquids, before he takes his soup or his soft-boiled eggs, and still be an authority on soap-making; he may wear a knitted waistcoat with a frock-coat to luncheon, and be deeply versed in Russian history. He may have no inkling of the traditions of fair play, or of the reticences of courtesy, no shred of knightliness, and yet be a scholar in his way.

Indeed, in none of the other cultured countries does one find so many men of trained minds, but with such untrained manners and morals. In their hack of sensation-mongering, in their indifference to social gossip, in their trustworthy and learned comments upon things scientific, musical, theatrical, literary, and historical, they are as men to school-boys compared to the American press. They have the utter contempt for mere smartness that only comes with severe educational training. They have the scholar's impatience with trivialities. They skate, not to cut their names on the ice, but to get somewhere, and the whole industrial and scientific world knows how quickly they have arrived.

Our newspapers make a business of training their readers in that worst of all habits, mental dissipation. The German press is not thus guilty. Despite all I have written, I am quite sure that if I were banished from the active world and could see only half a dozen journals on my lonely island, one of them would be a German newspaper.

It may be that I have a perverted literary taste, for I can get more humor, more keen enjoyment, out of a census report or an etymological dictionary than from a novel. My favorite literary dissipation is to read the works of that distinguished statistician at Was.h.i.+ngton, Mr.

O. P. Austin, the poet-laureate of industrial America, or the toilsome and exciting verbal journeys of the Rev. Mr. Skeat. The cla.s.sic humorists do not compare with them, in my humble opinion, as sources of fantastic surprises. This, perhaps, accounts for my sincere admiration for that quality of scholars.h.i.+p, learning, and accuracy in the German press. Nor does the possession of these qualities in the least controvert the impression given by the German press of political powerlessness, of social ignorance and incompetence, and of boorish ignorance of the laws of common decency in international comment and controversy. A great scholar may be a b.o.o.by in a drawing-room, and a lamentable failure as an adviser in matters political and social. ”As a bird that wandereth from her nest, so is a man that wandereth from his place.” Germany has put some astonis.h.i.+ng failures to her credit through her belief that learning can take the place of common-sense, and scholars.h.i.+p do the tasks of that intelligent and experienced observation to which the abused word, worldliness, is given. Perhaps it is as well that the German press declines to keep a social diary; well, too, that it has no candidates for the office of society Haruspex, whose ghoulish business it is to find omens and prophecies in the entrails of his victims. In that respect, at any rate, both society and the press in Germany are as is the salon to the scullery, compared with ours. As for that little knot of ill.u.s.trated weekly papers in England, with their nauseating letter-press for sn.o.bs inside, and their advertis.e.m.e.nts of patent complexion remedies and corsets outside, there is nothing like them in Germany or anywhere else, so far as I know. You may advertise your shooting-party, your dance, or your dinner-party, and thus keep yourself before the world as though you were a whiskey, a soap, or a superfluous-hair-destroyer, if you please, and, alas, many there are who do so. At least Germany knows nothing of this weekly auction of privacy, this nauseating sn.o.bbery which is a fungus-growth seen at its strongest in British soil.

I am bound, both by tradition and experience as an American, to discover the reason for such conditions in the lack of fluidity in social and political life in Germany. The industrials, the military, the n.o.bility, the civil servants, and to some extent the Jews, are all in separate social compartments; and the political parties as well keep much to themselves and without the personal give and take outside of their purely official life which obtains in America and in England.

It is an impossible suggestion, I know, but if the upper and lower houses of the empire, or of Prussia, could meet in a match at base-ball, or golf, or cricket; if the army could play the civil service; if the newspaper correspondents could play the under-secretaries; if they could all be induced occasionally, to throw off their mental and moral uniforms, and to meet merely as men, a current of fresh air would blow through Germany, that she would never after permit to be shut out.

Personal dignity is refreshed, not lost, by a romp. Who has not seen distinguished Americans and distinguished Englishmen, in their own or in their friends' houses, or at one or another of our innumerable games, behaving like boys out of school, crawling about beneath improvised skins and growling and roaring in charades; indulging in flying chaff of one another; in the skirts of their wives and sisters playing cricket, or base-ball, or tennis with the one hand only; caricaturing good-humoredly some of their own official business, or arranging a match of some kind where their own servants join in to make up a side; or, and well I remember it, half a dozen youths of about fifty playing cricket with one stump and a broom-handle for an hour one hot afternoon, amid tumbles and shouts of laughter, and a shower of impromptu nicknames, and one or two of them bore names known all over the English-speaking world. n.o.body loses any dignity, any importance; but there is an unconquerable stiffness in Germany that makes me laugh almost as I make this suggestion. We have only a certain reserve of serious work in us. To attempt to be serious all the time is never to be at rest. This worried busyness, which is a characteristic of the more mediocre of my own countrymen also, is really a symptom of deficient vitality. Things are in the saddle and you are the mule and not the man, if you are such an one. The stiffness and self-consciousness of the Germans is really a sign of their lack of confidence in themselves. Youth is always more serious than middle age, for the same reason. A man who is at home in the world laughs and is gay; he who is shy and doubtful scowls. It is the G.o.d-fearing who are not afraid, it is the man-fearing who are awkward and uncomfortable.

The first thing to be afraid of is oneself, but after oneself is conquered why be afraid to let him loose!

It would be quite untrue to give the impression that there is no fun, no harking, no chaff, in Germany, although I am bound to say that there is little of this last. I can bear witness to a healthy love of fun, and to an exuberant exploitation of youthful vitality in many directions among the students and younger officers, for example.

Better companions for a romp exist nowhere. Having been blessed with an undue surplus of vitality, which for many years kept me fully occupied in directing its expenditure, alas, not always with success, I can only add that I found as many youthful companions in a similar predicament in Germany, as anywhere else.

But with the Englishman and the American, both temperament and environment permit youthfulness to last longer. The German must soon get into the mill and grind and be ground, and he is by temperament more easily caught and put into the uniform of a constantly correct behavior. As for us, we are all boys still at thirty, many of us at fifty, and some of us die ere the school-boy exuberance has all been squeezed or dried out of us. Not so in Germany. One sees more men in Germany who give the impression that they could not by any possibility ever have been boys than with us. They begin to look cramped at thirty, and they are stiff at fifty, as though they had been fed on a diet of circ.u.mspection, caution, and obedience. They are drilled early and they soon become amenable, and then even indulgent, toward the drill-master.

This German people have not developed into a nation, they have been squeezed into the mould of a nation. The nation is not for the people, the people are for the nation. ”By the word Const.i.tution,” writes Lord Bolingbroke, ”we mean, whenever we speak with propriety and exactness, the a.s.semblage of laws, inst.i.tutions, and customs derived from certain fixed principles of reason, directed to certain fixed objects of public good, that compose the general system by which the community hath agreed to be governed.” The Germans have no such const.i.tution, for the community was scarcely consulted, much less hath it agreed to the general system by which it is governed.

Of course, in every nation its affairs are, and must be, conducted by officials. That is as true of America as of Germany. The fundamental difference is that with us these official persons are executive officers only, the real captain is the people; while in Germany these official persons are the real governors of the people, subject to the commands of one who repeatedly and publicly a.s.serts that his commission is from G.o.d and not from the people. This puts whole cla.s.ses of the community permanently into uniform, and the wearers of these uniforms are almost afraid to laugh, and would consider it sacrilege to romp.

Caution is a very puny form of morality. ”He that observeth the wind shall not sow; and he that regardeth the clouds shall not reap.” It is as true politically as of other spheres of life that ”he or she who lets the world or his own portion of it choose his plan of life for him has no need of any other faculty than the ape-like one of imitation.” Thus writes John Stuart Mill, and what else can be said of the political activities of the Germans? What journalist or what patriot indeed can take seriously a majority that has no power? What people can call itself free to whom its rulers are not responsible?

The Social Democrats, at the moment of writing, have won one hundred and ten seats in the Reichstag, but the army and navy estimates are beyond their reach, the taxes are fixtures, a const.i.tution is a dream, and if they are cantankerous or truculent the Reichstag will be dismissed by a wave of the hand. Say what one will, they are a mammillary people politically, and the strongest party in the Reichstag is merely an energetic political mangonel. Their leaders moult opinions, they do not mould them, and could not translate them into action if they did.

Not since 1874 has there been a Reichstag so strongly radical, but nothing will come of it. The Reichskanzler, Doctor von Bethmann-Hollweg, did not hesitate to take an early opportunity, after the opening of the new Reichstag, to state boldly that the issue was Authority versus Democratization, and that he had no fear of the result. It is customary for the newly elected Praesidium, the president and two vice-presidents of the Reichstag, to be received in audience by the Emperor. On this occasion the Socialists forbade their representative to go, and the Emperor, therefore, refused to receive any of them. As usual, they played into his hands. Hans bleibt immer Hans, and on this occasion his vulgar hack of good manners only brought contumely upon the whole Reichstag, and left the Emperor as the outstanding dignified figure in the controversy. Such behavior is not calculated to invite confidence, and not likely to induce this enemy-surrounded nation to put its destinies in such hands, not at any rate for some time to come. ”Though thou shouldest bray a fool in a mortar among wheat with a pestle, yet will not his foolishness depart from him.”

Intellectually Germany is a republic, and we Americans perhaps beyond all other peoples have profited by her literature, her philosophy, her music, her scientific and economic teaching. We have kneaded these things into our political as well as into our intellectual life.

”Intellectual emanc.i.p.ation, if it does not give us at the same time control over ourselves, is poisonous.” And who writes thus? Goethe!

But the intellectual freedom of Germany has done next to nothing to bring about political or, in the realm of journalism, personal self-control.

It is a strange state of affairs. Intelligent men and women in Germany do not realize it. Not once, but many times, I have been told: ”You foreigners are forever commenting upon our bureaucracy, our officialdom, but it is not as all-powerful as you think. We have plenty of freedom!” These people are often themselves officials, nearly always related to, or of the society, of the ruling cla.s.s. The rulers and the ruling cla.s.s have naturally no sense of oppression, no feeling that they are unduly subject to others, since the others are themselves. I am quite willing to believe of my own and of other people's personal opinions that they are not dogmas merely because they are baptized in intolerance. I must leave it to the reader to judge from the facts, whether or no the Germans have a political autonomy, which permits the exercise and development of political power. A glance at the political parties themselves will make this perhaps the more clear.

The official organization of the conservative party, may be said to date back to the founding of the Neue Preussische Zeitung in 1848, and the organization of the party in many parts of Germany. Earlier still, Burke was the hero of the pioneers of this party, whose first newspaper had for editor, no less a person than Heinrich von Kleist, and whose first endeavors were to support G.o.d and the King, and to throw off the yoke of foreign domination.

In 1876 was formed the Deutsch-Konservativ party supporting Bismarck.

”Konigthum von Gottes Gnaden” is still their watchword, with opposition to Social Democracy, support of imperialism, agrarian and industrial protection, and Christian teaching in the schools, as the planks of their platform. They also combat Jewish influence everywhere, particularly in the schools. Allied to this party is the Bund der Landwirte and the Deutscher Bauernbund. In the election of 1912 they elected forty-five representatives to the Reichstag, a serious falling off from the sixty-three seats held previous to that election. The Free Conservative portion of the Conservative party, is composed of the less autocratic members of the landed n.o.bility, but there is little difference in their point of view.