Part 14 (2/2)
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- fas.h.i.+oned 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 wors.h.i.+ppers 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.
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