Part 16 (1/2)

The army officer's career is dependent upon his mental and physical vigor. The cylinder is quickly handed him and the helmet taken away if he grows too fat and too slow physically and mentally. There is no nepotism, no favoritism, and on reaching a certain rank he goes, if he falls below the standard required, and consequently he keeps himself fit. But a huge bureaucracy, with its stupid promotions by years and not by ability, with its government stroke, and its dangling pensions, positively breeds la.s.situde, laziness, and dulness. You may see it on every hand in government offices, in the railway and postal services, where men are evidently kept on not for their fitness but by the tyranny of the system. High officials admit as much.

In the little state of Prussia the railways pay well and are well managed, but they are clogged to a certain extent by inefficient and unnecessary employees, and were the system spread over the United States the chaos in a dozen years would be almost irreparable, and even here the complaints are many and vigorous. Probably one male over twenty-five years of age out of every four is in government employ.

This alone would account for the general air of la.s.situde which is one of the most noticeable features of German life. The Germans as a whole are beginning to look tired. It is a German, not an Italian or a Frenchman, the philosopher Nietzsche, who writes: ”Seit es Menschen giebt, hat der Mensch sich zu wenig gefreut; das allein ist unsere Erbsunde.”

There has been a great change in the status of women in the last twenty-five years. The apophthegm of Pericles, or rather of Thucydides, ”that woman is best who is least spoken of among men, either for good or evil,” is not so rigidly enforced. Increased wealth throughout Germany has left the German woman more leisure from the drudgery of the home. She is not so wholly absorbed by the duties of nurse, cook, and house-maid as she once was. But even to-day her economies and her ability to keep her house with little outside a.s.sistance are amazing. Some of the most delightful meals I have taken, have been in professional households, where small incomes made it necessary that wife and daughters should do most of the work.

The German professor has his faults, but in his own simple home, the work of the day behind him, his family about him at his well-filled but not luxurious board, with some member of the family not unlikely to be an accomplished musician and with his own unrivalled store of learning at your service, when he raises his gla.s.s to you, filled with his best, with a smile and a hearty ”Prosit,” he is hard to beat as a host, to my thinking. Perhaps there is nothing like overindulgence to make one crave simplicity, and no doubt this accounts for the fact that the really great ones of earth are satisfied and happy with enough, and abhor too much.

They tell me that the Dienstmadchen is no longer what she used to be, but to my untutored eye her duties still seem to be as comprehensive as those of a Sioux squaw, and her performances unrivalled. As is to be expected, Germany is not blessed with trained servants. They are helpers rather than professional servants. In the scores of houses, public and private, where I have been a guest, only in one or two had the servants more than an alphabetical knowledge of what was due to one's clothes and shoes. The servants are rigidly protected by the state: they must have so much time off, they cannot be dismissed without weeks of warning, and they themselves carry books with their moral and professional biographies therein, which are always open to the inspection of the police; and they must all be insured.

In many towns, and cities too, there are hospitals and bands of nurses who for a small annual payment undertake to take over and care for a sick servant. If the doctor prescribes a ”cure” for your servant, away she goes at the expense of the state to be taken care of. Wages are very small as compared with ours. Ten dollars a month for a cook, five for a house-maid, ten for a man-servant, forty to fifty for a chauffeur, and of course more in the larger and more luxurious establishments; though a chef who serves dinners for forty and fifty in an official household I know is content with twenty dollars a month. A nursery governess can be had for twelve, and a well-educated English governess for twenty dollars a month. Even these wages are higher than ten years ago. To be more explicit, in a small household where three servants are kept the cook receives 30 marks, the maid-servant 25 marks, and the nursery governess 35 marks a month. In the household of an official of some means the man-servant receives 45 marks, the cook 30 marks, and the maid-servant 30 marks a month. When dinners or other entertainments are given, outside help is called in.

In the household of a rich industrial, whose family consists of himself, wife, and four children, the man-servant receives 80 marks, the chauffeur 200, the cook 45, the lady's maid 35, the house-maid 25, kitchen-maid 12, and the governess 30 marks a month.

I carry away with me delightful pictures of German households, big, little, and medium; and though it does not fit in nicely with my main argument, households whose mistresses were patterns of what a chatelaine should be. But I must leave that loop-hole for the critics, for I am trying only to tell the truth and to be fair, and not to be scientific or to bolster up a thesis.

I can see the big castle, centuries old, with its rambling buildings winging away from it on every side, and in the court-yard its regal-looking mistress positively garlanded with her dozen children. There is no sign of the decadence of the aristocracy here. We sit down twenty or more every day at the family luncheon. Tutors and governesses are at every turn. A French abbe, as silken in manner and speech as his own soutane, bowls over all my prejudices of creed and custom, as I watch him rule with the lightest of hands and the softest of voices a brood of termagant small boys; to turn from this to a game of billiards, and from that to the Merry Widow waltz on the piano, that we may dance. An aide-de-camp trained in India and a French abbe, I am convinced that these are the apotheosis of luxury in a large household. My Protestant brethren would, I am sure, throw their prejudices to the winds could they spend an evening with my friend, Monsieur l'Abbe! Nor Erasmus, nor Luther, nor Calvin would have had the heart to burn him. He is just as good a fellow as we are, knows far more, can turn his hand to anything from photography to the driving of a stubborn pony, knows his world as few know it, and yet is inviolably not of it. I have chatted with Jesuit priests teaching our Western Indians; I have travelled with a preaching friar in Italy on his round of sermonizing; I have seen them in South America, in India, China, and j.a.pan, and I recognize and acclaim their self-denying prowess, but no one of them was a more dangerous missionary than my last-named friend among them, Monsieur l'Abbe!

”For ever through life the Cure goes With a smile on his kind old face-- With his coat worn bare, and his straggling hair, And his green umbrella-case.”

There was a profusion at this castle, a heartiness of welcome, a patriarchal att.i.tude toward the countless servants and satellites, an acreage of roaming s.p.a.ce in the buildings, that smacked of the feudalism back to which both the castle and the family dated. How many Englishmen or Americans who sniff at German civilization ever see anything of the inside of German homes? Very few, I should judge, from the lame talk and writing on the subject. Let us go from this mediaeval setting for modern comfort to a smaller establishment. Here a miniature Germania, with blue eyes and golden hair, presides, looking like a shaft of sunlight in front of you as she leads the way about the paths of her gloomy forest. In these, and in not a few other houses, there is little luxury, no waste, a certain Spartan air of training, but abundance of what is necessary and a cheery and frank welcome.

I sometimes think the Germans themselves lose much by their rather overdeveloped tendency to meet not so often in one another's homes as in a neutral place: a restaurant, a garden, a Verein or circle, of which there is an interminable number. You certainly get to know a man best and at his best in his own home, and you never get to know a wife and a mother out of that environment; for a woman is even more dependent than a man upon the sympathetic atmosphere that frames her.

I should be, after my experience, and I am, the last person in the world to say that the Germans are not hospitable; but there is much less visiting even among themselves, and much less of constant reception of strangers in their homes, than with us. Habit, lack of wealth, lack of trained servants, and a certain proud shyness, and in some cases indifference and a lack of vitality which welcomes the trouble of being host, account for this. No doubt, too, the old habit of economy remains even when there is no longer the same necessity for it, and saving and gayety do not go well together. In Geldsachen hurt die Gemuthlichkeit auf.

I should be sorry to spoil my picture by the overemphasis of details.

The reader will not see what I have intended to paint, if he gets only an impression of caution, of economy, of sordidness and fatigue. No nation that gives birth to an untranslatable word like Gemuthlichkeit can be without that characteristic. The English words ”home” and ”comfort,” the French word ”esprit,” and the German word Gemuthlichkeit have no exact equivalents in other languages. This in itself is a sure sign of a quality in the nation which bred the word.

The difficulty lies in the fact that another language is another life.

The Germans are not cheerful as we are cheerful; they are not happy as we are happy; they are not free as we are free; they are not polite as we are polite; they are not contented as we are contented; and no one for a moment who is even an amateur observer and an amateur philologist combined would claim that the three words, love and amour and Liebe mean the same thing. No word in the English language is used so often from the pulpit as the word love, but this cannot be said of the use of amour in France or of Liebe in Germany. Nations pour themselves into the tiny moulds of words and give us statuettes of themselves. The Anglo-Saxon, the Latin, and the Teuton have filled these three words with a certain vague philosophy of themselves, a hazy composite photograph of themselves. No one writer or painter, no one incident, no one tragedy, no one day or year of history has done this. To us, love is the coldest, cleanest, as it is perhaps the most loyal of the three. L'amour sounds to us seductive, enticing, often indeed little more than l.u.s.t embroidered to make a cloak for ennui.

Liebe is to us friendly, soft, childlike.

The nations of the earth, close as they are together in these days, are worlds apart in thought. Each builds its life in words, and the words are as little alike as in the days of Babel; and thus it comes about that we misunderstand one another. We translate one another only into our own language, and understand one another as little as before, because we only know one another in translations, and the best of the life of each nation remains and always will remain untranslatable. No one has ever really translated the Greek lyrics or the choruses of Aeschylus, or the incomparable songs of Heine. Who could dream of putting the best of Robert Louis Stevenson into German, or Kipling's rollicking ballads of soldier life into Spanish, or Walter Pater into Dutch, or Edgar Allan Poe into Russian! The one language common to us all, music, tells as many tales as there are men to hear. Each melody melts into the blackness or the brightness of the listener's soul and becomes a thousand melodies instead of one. What does the moaning monotony of a Korean love-song mean to the westerner, or what does the Swan song mean to the Korean? Only G.o.d knows. We can never translate one nation into the language of another; our best is only an interpretation, and we must always meet the criticism that we have failed with the reply that we had never hoped to succeed. We are forever explaining ourselves even in our own small circles; how can we dare to suggest even, that we have made one people to speak clearly in the language of another? The best we can do is to give a kindly, a good-humored, and, at all times and above all things, a charitable interpretation. Information, facts, are merely the raw material of culture; sympathy is its subtlest essence.

There is a world of good humor, of cheerfulness, of contentment, of domestic peace and happiness in Germany. There are courtesy, politeness, even grand manners here and there. But these words mean one thing to them, another thing to us, and it is that I am striving, feebly enough to be sure, to make clear. May I beg the reader and the student to follow me with this point clearly in mind? While I am outlining with these painful details that their ways are not as our ways, I am not denouncing their ways, but merely offering matter for consideration and comparison.

A nation is most often punished for its faults by the exaggeration of its qualities, and if, as it seems to me, Germany suffers like the rest of us in this respect, it is none of my doing. It will be my failure and the reader's failure, if we do not profit by watching these qualities in ourselves, and in others festering into faults.

Woman's position and ambitions, the home, the amus.e.m.e.nts, and the satisfactions of life, are very different in Germany from ours. I note these as facts, not as inferiorities. I note, too, that in Germany, as elsewhere, Hegel was profoundly right in his dictum, that everything earned to its extreme becomes its contrary. Too much caution may become a positive menace to safety; too much orderliness may result in individual incapacity for sell-control; just as liberty rots into license, and demos descends to a crown and sceptre and tyranny. I am merely calling attention to this great law of national development, that the exaggeration of even fine qualities is the road to the punishment of our faults, in Germany, as in every other nation under the sun.

It is only when you have had a peep into a small farmer's house in Saxony, into the artisans' houses in the busy Rhine and Westphalia country; spent a night in a peasant's house and stable, for they are under the same roof, in the mountains of the South; and visited the greater establishments of the large land-holder and the less pretentious houses of the gentleman farmer, and the country houses, big and little, in all parts of Germany, that you get anything of the real flavor of Germany.

If, as Burke says, it is impossible to indict a whole nation, it is even more difficult to fit a people with a few discriminating and really enlightening adjectives. One word I dare to apply to them all, though I know well how different they are in the north and south and east and west, as diversified indeed as any nation in the world, and that is the word patient. They can stand longer, sit longer, eat longer, drink longer, work longer hours, and dream longer, and dawdle longer than any people except the Orientals. This custom may date back to far distant times. Sitting, in the Greek view, was a posture of supplication (Odyssey, XIV, 29-31). The Emperor himself sets the example. He is an indefatigable stander, if I may coin the word, and on horseback he can apparently spend the day and night without inconvenience. Their patient quarry work in archeology and in comparative philology laid the foundations for the new history-writing of Heeren and Mommsen; and their scholars.h.i.+p to-day is still of the digging kind. They seldom produce a Jebb, a Jowett, a Verrall, and never that type of scholar, wit and poet combined, a Lowell or an Arthur Hugh Clough. Indeed, with a suspicious self-consciousness the German professional mind inclines to be contemptuous of any learning that is not unpalatably dry. What men can read with enjoyment cannot be learning, they maintain.

I have visited half a dozen hospitals, and on one or two occasions been present at an operation by a famous surgeon. It is evident from the bearing of patients, nurses, and students that they are dealing with a less highly strung population than ours. Indeed, the surgeons who know both countries tell me that here in Germany they have more endurance of this phlegmatic kind. They suffer more like animals.

Their patience reaches down to the very roots of their being.

On that delightful big fountain, in that paradise of fountains, Nuremberg, the statues of the electors and citizens picture men who were untroubled and cheerful, slow-moving, contented, patient; while the little figures on the guns are positively jolly. The only mournful figure on the whole fountain is a man with a book on his knees teaching a child. He is pallid, even in bronze, and his face is lined as he muses over the problem that has stumped the wisest of us: how to make a man by stuffing a child with books! It cannot be done, but we follow this will-o'-the wisp through the swamps of experience with the pitiable enthusiasm of despair.

Only liberty can make a man, and she is such a costly mistress that with our increasing hordes of candidates for independence we cannot afford her; so we go on fooling the people with mechanical education.

But even this figure is patient!