Part 11 (1/2)
They are as adamant in their observance of the rules in such matters.
More than once I arrived at the opera a few minutes late, once four minutes late, the doors are closed and guarded, and I listen to the overture from the outside. At a concert led by the famous von Bulow half a dozen women come in after the music has begun, rustling, sibilant, and excited. The music stops, the great conductor turns to glare at them, and, referring to the geese which are said to have saved Rome by their hissing, thunders: ”Hier ist kein Capitol zu retten!”
There are some forty thousand professional musicians in Germany. The town council of Berlin is now discussing gravely the sum to be allotted to the support of the Symphony Orchestra, and Charlottenburg is building an opera house of its own, and Spandau a theatre; and there has just been formed in Berlin a ”Society of the German Artistes' Theatre,” with a capital of $200,000, which is a project along the general lines of the Comedie Francaise. The discussions and arguments relating to these munic.i.p.al expenditures, as I read them in the newspapers, are all based upon the a.s.sumption that the people have a right to good and cheap music, just as they have a right to good and cheap beer and bread.
At Dusseldorf one of the theatres, managed by a woman, and supported by the best people in the town, is not only a playhouse, but a school for actors, and a proving-ground for the drama. It is a treat indeed to attend the performances there. We have tried similar things in America, but with sad results. Fifty millionaires, no one of whom had ever read the text of a serious play in his life, build a temple for the drama, but there are no plays, no actors, no audience, nothing is accomplished. There is no critical body of real lovers of the drama, and there are no cheap seats, and there is still that fatuous notion that exclusiveness, except in the trifling matter of physical propinquity, can be bought with dollars.
The only impenetrably exclusive thing in the world is intellect, he is the only aristocrat left in these democratic days, and we are not devoting much attention as yet to his breeding. We do not realize that the only valuable democrat must be an aristocrat. ”Culture seeks to do away with cla.s.ses and sects; to make the best that has been thought and known in the world current everywhere; to make all men live in an atmosphere of sweetness and light, where they may use ideas, as it uses them itself, freely; nourished and not bound by them. This is the social idea; and the men of culture are the true apostles of equality.”
In Germany there are more men of culture per thousand of the population than in any other land, but they rule the country not by ”sweetness and light,” but by force. This seems at first a contradiction. It is not. Religion, life, and love are all savage things. Because we have known men who preach but do not believe; men who breathe and walk who have not lived; men who protest but who have not loved, we are p.r.o.ne to think of religion, life, and love as soft.
We have conquered and chastened so much of nature: the air, the water, the bowels of the earth that we fool ourselves with thinking that culture also is tame, that religion, life, and love are tame too.
Savage things they are! You may know them by that! If you find them nice, vivacious, amusing, amenable, be sure that they are forgeries.
This is the profound fallacy underlying the present-day economic peace propagandism, whose heaviest underwriter, Mr. Carnegie, is, by the way, an agnostic. While there is faith there will be fighting. Do away with either and society would crumble. What the Puritans did for us, the Prussians have done for Germany. They have fought, are fighting, and will fight for their faith. Though they have many unpleasant characteristics, this is their most admirable quality. They believe in an aristocracy of culture with a right to rule. Goethe said of Luther that he threw back the intellectual progress of mankind by centuries, by calling in the pa.s.sions of the mult.i.tude to decide on subjects that ought to have been left to the learned. This is a good example of imitation culture. This is very much the view that Mr. Balfour holds in regard to Cromwell. But Luther and Bismarck made Germany. The one taught Germany to bark, the other taught Germany to bite. The great deliverers of the world came, not to bring peace, but a sword.
When you leave the drab crowd in the streets, and enter the houses of the real rulers of Germany, the contrast between the aristocrat and the plebeian is nowhere so outstanding. I have seen no finer-looking specimens of mankind in face and figure and manner than the best of these men. If you stroll though the halls of the Krieges Academie, where the pick of the young officers of the German army, are preparing themselves for the examinations which admit a very small proportion of them, to appointments on the general staff, you will be delighted with the faces and figures, and the air of alertness and intelligence there. And you will find as fine a type of gentlemen, in face, manners, and figure, at their head as exists anywhere.
There are complaints that this Prussian aristocracy is socially exclusive, is given office both in the army and in civil life too readily; but what an aristocracy it is! These are the men whose families gave, often their all, to make Prussia, and then to make Germany. Service of king and country is in their blood. They get small remuneration for their service. There is no luxury. They spurn the temptations of money. Hundreds and hundreds of them have never been inside the house of a rich parvenu, nor have their women. They work as no other servants work, they live on little, they and their women and children; and you may count yourself happily privileged if they permit you the intimacy of their home life.
Officers and gentlemen there are, living on two thousand five hundred dollars a year, and most of them on much less, and their wives, as well born as themselves, darning their socks and counting the pfennigs with scrupulous care. These are the women whose ancestors flung themselves against the Roman foe, beside their husbands and brothers; these are the women who gave their jewels to save Prussia; these are the women, with the glint of steel and the light of summer skies braided in their eyes, who have taken their hard, self-denying part in making Prussia, and the German Empire. No wonder they despise the mere money-maker, no wonder they will have none of his softness for themselves, and hate what Milton calls ”lewdly pampered luxury,” as a danger to their children. They know well the moral weapons that won for this starved, and tormented, and poverty-stricken land its present place in the world as a great power.
”And as the fervent smith of yore Beat out the glowing blade, Nor wielded in the front of war The weapons that he made, But in the tower at home still plied His ringing trade;
”So like a sword the son shall roam On n.o.bler missions sent; And as the smith remained at home In peaceful turret pent, So sits the while at home the mother Well content.”
I, convinced democrat that I am, know very well that there are, and always have been, and always will be aristocrats, for there is no national salvation without them anywhere in the world. The aristocrats are the same everywhere, no matter what their distinctions of t.i.tle, or whether they have none. They are those who believe that they owe their best to G.o.d and to men, and they serve. Likewise the plebeians are the same all over the world; whatever their presumptions or denials, they believe that they are here to get what they can out of G.o.d and men, and they take far more than they give.
Perhaps no feature of German life is so little known, so little understood, as this simple-living, proud, and exclusive caste, who have made, and still protect and guard, Prussia and Germany. They say: ”We made Prussia and Germany, and we intend to guard them, both from enemies at home and from enemies abroad!” My admiration for these men and women is so unbounded, that I would no more carry criticism with me into their homes, than I would carry mud into a sanctuary.
They have done much for Germany, but the best, perhaps, of all is that they have made economy and simple living feasible and even fas.h.i.+onable; they have made talent aristocratic; they have insisted that social life shall be founded on service and breeding and ability.
They will have no dealings with Herr Muller, the rich shopkeeper, but whatever name the distinguished artist, or public servant, or man of science, or young giant in any field of intellectual prowess may bear, he is welcomed. In general this welcome given by German society to talent holds good. There is, however, a society composed of the great landed proprietors, who live in the country, who come to Berlin rarely, and whose horizon is limited severely to their own small interests, their restricted circle, and by their provincial pride.
They recognize n.o.body but themselves, for the reason that they know n.o.body and nothing else. There is an exclusiveness born of stupidity, just as there is an exclusiveness born of a sense of duty to one's position and traditions in the world. One must recognize that this side of social life exists in Germany just as it exists in England, and France, and Austria, but it is fast losing its importance and its power.
One hears it lamented that society is changing, that the rich Jew and the rich gentile are received where twenty-five years ago the social portals were shut against them, and that many go to their houses who would not have gone not many years ago. My experience is too slender to weigh these matters in years; my contention is only that, from an American or English stand-point, their social life is notably simple, and still largely founded on merit and service, rather than upon the means to provide luxury.
Though there are thousands of people received at court each year, this does not mean that they are invited to the more intimate parties of those in court control. They are tolerated, not welcomed. Such people are invited to the court ball, but never thought of, even, as guests at the small supper party of, say, a court official later in the evening. Prussia and Germany are still ruled socially and politically by a small group of, roughly, fifty thousand men, eight thousand of them in the frock-coat of the civilian official, and the rest in military uniforms. Added to this must be named a few great financiers, s.h.i.+pping and mining and industrial magnates, and great land-owners, and less than half a dozen journalists, and as many professors.
According to the census there are in all only 720 persons in Berlin with incomes of more than $25,000 a year, and 521 of these have between $25,000 and $60,000 a year, leaving a very small number, indeed, with incomes adequate, from an American point of view, for extravagant social expenditure. Of these 200, probably not 50 are figures in the social life of the capital. It may be seen at once, therefore, that entertaining cannot be on a lavish or spectacular scale.
The minister of foreign affairs and the imperial minister of the interior receive salaries of 36,000 marks, with 14,000 marks additional for expenses. The Prussian ministers have the same. Other ministers receive 30,000 marks and 14,000 additional for expenses. The chancellor of the empire receives 36,000 marks and 64,000 additional for expenses. The highest receivable pension is three-fourths of the salary?not counting the additional sum for expenses, or, as it is named, Reprasentationsaufwand--after forty years of service. The foreign amba.s.sadors to the more expensive capitals, London, Paris, Was.h.i.+ngton, Saint Petersburg, receive 150,000 marks a year. Where one has seen something of the innumerable demands upon the income of a foreign amba.s.sador, one is the more amazed that a great democracy like ours should so restrict the salaries of its representatives abroad that only rich men dare undertake the duty. What could be more undemocratic!
Germany is a rich, very rich, country in the sense that it has the most intelligent, hardest-working, most fiercely economical, and the most rationally and most easily contented population of any of the great powers. But Germany is not rich in surplus and liquid capital as compared with England, France, or America. It is the more to her credit that her capital is all hard at work. There is just so much less for luxury. The people in the streets; the shop-windows; the scale of charges at places of public resort and amus.e.m.e.nt; the very small number of well-turned-out private vehicles; the comparatively few people who live in houses and not in apartments; the simplicity of the gowns of the women, and their inexpensive jewelry and other ornaments; the fewer servants; the salaries and wages of all cla.s.ses, point decisively to plain living on the part of practically everybody.
Let me say very emphatically, however, that this economy means no lack of generosity. I doubt if there are people anywhere so restricted as to means, and so delightfully hospitable at the same time. Berlin is not as yet under that cloud that covers the new, uncultivated, and rich society in America, that tyranny of money which makes men and women fearful of being without it. Such people s.h.i.+ver at the bare thought of losing what money will buy, for the shameful reason that then there would be nothing left to them; and they are driven, many of them, both in London and in New York, to any humiliation, often to any degradation, to avoid it. They grossly overrate the value of money, and they exaggerate the terrors of being without it.
Professor William James, who succeeded in a.n.a.lyzing what is at the back of men's brains as well as anybody, writes: ”We have grown literally afraid to be poor. We despise any one who elects to be poor in order to simplify and save his inner life. We have lost the power of even imagining what the ancient idealization of poverty could have meant: the liberation from material attachments, the unbribed soul, the manlier indifference, the paying our way by what we are or do, and not by what we have, the right to fling away our life at any moment irresponsibly--the more athletic trim, in short, the moral fighting shape. ? It is certain that the prevalent fear of poverty among the educated cla.s.ses is the worst moral disease from which our civilization suffers.” They suffer from this malady less in Germany than in America or in England. I should like to introduce such people into dozens of households in Berlin; alas, they could not speak or understand the moral or mental language there, where there is everything that makes a home's heart beat proudly and peaceably, except money. ”La prosperite decouvre les vices, et l'adversite les vertus.”
These people need no tribute from me, and for their hospitality and friendliness I can make no adequate return. I sigh to think that we in America know so little of them. Germany would not be where she is without them; and I offer them as an example to my countrymen, and to my countrywomen especially, as showing what self-sacrifice and simplicity, and loyal service can do for a nation in times of stress; and what high ideals and st.u.r.dy independence and contempt for luxury can do in the dangerous days of prosperity. Unadvertised, unheralded, keeping without murmuring or envy to their own traditions, they are here, as everywhere, the saviors of the world.
In this great city of Berlin it may seem that I have over-emphasized their part in the drama of the city's life. Not so! They are the backbone of the munic.i.p.al as of the national body corporate. It is no easy industrial progress, no increasing wealth and population, no military prowess, no isolated great leader that makes a nation or a city. It is the men and women giving the high and unpurchasable gift of service to the state; giving the fine example of self-sacrificing and simple living; giving the prowess won by years of hard mental and moral training; giving the gentle courtesy and kindly welcome of the patrician to the stranger, who lift a nation or a city to a worthy place in the world. Seek not for Germany's strength first in her fleet, her army, her hordes of workers, nay, not even in her philosophers, teachers, and musicians, though they glisten in the eyes of all the world, for you will not find it there. It is in these quiet and simple homes, that so few Americans and Englishmen ever enter, that you will find the sweetness and the sternness, the indomitable pride of service, and the self-sacrificing loyalty that won, and that keep for Germany her place in the world.