of living in this country and in that, and never are statistics such
"damned lies" as in this connection. There is better and cheaper food
in Berlin, and in the other cities of Germany, than anywhere else in
our white man's world. Having for the moment no free-trade, or
protectionist, or tariff-reform axe to grind, and having tested the
pudding not by my prejudices but my palate, and having eaten a
fifteen-pfennig luncheon in the street, and climbed step by step the
gastronomical stairway in Germany all the way up to a supper at the
court, where eight hundred odd people were served with a care and
celerity, and with hot viands and irreproachable potables, that made
one think of the "Arabian Nights," I offer my experience and my
opinion with some confidence. You can get enough to stave off hunger
for a few pfennigs, you can get a meal for something under twenty-five
cents, and the whole twenty-five cents will include a glass of the
best beer in the world outside of Munich. If you care to spend fifty
cents there are countless restaurants where you can have a square meal
and a glass of beer for that price; and for a dollar I will give you
as good a luncheon with wine as any man with undamaged taste and
unspoiled digestion ought to have.
There is one restaurant in Berlin which feeds as many as five thousand
people on a Sunday, where you can dine or sup, and listen to good
music, and enjoy your beer and tobacco for an hour afterward, and all
for something under fifty cents if you are careful in your ordering.
During my walks in the country around Berlin, I have often had an
omelette followed by meat and vegetables, and cheese, and compote, and
Rhine wine, with all the bread I wanted, and paid a bill for two
persons of a little over a dollar. The Broedchen, or rolls, seem to be
everywhere of uniform size and quality, and the butter always good.
Paris is fast losing its place as the home of good all-round eating as
compared with Berlin. Of course, New York for geographical reasons,
and also because the modern Maecenas lives there, is nowadays the
place where Lucullus would invite his emperor to dine if he came back
to earth; but I am not discussing the nectar and ambrosia classes, but
the beer, bread, and pork classes, and certainly Berlin has no rival
as a provider for them.
After all our study of statistics, of figures, of contrasts, I am not
sure that we arrive at any very valuable conclusions. American
working-classes work ever shorter hours, gain higher wages, but they
are indubitably less happy, less rich in experience, less serene than
the Germans. This measuring things by dollars, by hours, by pounds and
yard-sticks, measures everything accurately enough except the one
thing we wish to measure, which is a man's soul. We are producing the
material things of life faster, more cheaply, more shoddily, but it is
open to question whether we are producing happier men and women, and
that is what we are striving to do as the end of it all. Nothing is of
any value in the world that cannot be translated into the terms of
man-making, or its value measured by what it does to produce a man, a
woman, and children living happily together. Wealth does not do this;
indeed, wealth beyond a certain limit is almost certain to destroy the
foundation of all peace, a contented family.
A shady beer-garden, capital music, and happy fathers and mothers and
children, what arithmetic, or algebra, or census tells you anything of
that? The infallible recipe for making a child unhappy, is to give it
everything it cries for of material things, and never to thwart its
will. We throw wages and shorter hours of work at people, but that is
only turning them out of prison into a desert. No statistics can deal
competently with the comparative well-being of nations, and nothing is
more ludicrous than the results arrived at where Germany is discussed
by the British or American politician. Whatever figures say, and
whatever else they may lack, they are better clothed, better fed and
cared for, and have far more opportunities for rational enjoyment, and
a thousand-fold more for aesthetic enjoyment, than either the English
or the Americans. That they lack freedom, in our sense, is true, but
freedom is for the few. The worldwide complaint of the hardship of
constant work is rather silly, for most of us would die of monotony if
we were not forced to work to keep alive, and to make a living.
The city, with its broad, clean streets, its beautiful race-course,
shaded walks, its forests and lakes, toward Potsdam, or at Tegel, or
Werder, when the blossoms are out, with its well-kept gardens, its
profusion of flowers and shrubs and trees, is physically the most
wholesome great city in the world; but Hans bleibt immer Hans! Goethe,
after a visit to Berlin, wrote: "There are no more ungodly communities
than in Berlin." [1]
[1] "Est giebt keine gottlosere Voelker als in Berlin."
No one knows his Berlin better than that prince of German literary
Bohemians, Paul Lindau, and he makes a character in one of his novels
say of it: "untidy and orderly, so boisterous and so regulated, so
boorish and so kindly, so indescribable--so Berlinish--just that!" [1]
[1] "Staubig und ordentlich, so Taut und geregelt, so grob und
gemuetlich, so unbeschreiblich, so berlinerisch, gerade so!"
In another place the same author writes: "Berlin as the Capital of the
German Empire! There are many respects in which it nevertheless hasn't
yet succeeded in taking on the character of a cosmopolitan city." [2]
Not even literature finds material for a city novel. There is no
Balzac, no Thackeray. Germany is still dominated by the village and
the town. Goethe, Auerbach, Spielhagen, Heyse, Gottfried Keller,
Freytag, my unread favorite "Fritz" Reuter, deal not with the life of
cities. There is as yet no drama, no novel, no art, no politics born
of the city. There is no domineering Paris or London or New York as
yet.
[2] "Berlin als Haupstadt des deutchen Reiches: in mancher Beziehung
hatte es sich dem weltstaedtischen Charakter doch noch nicht aneignen
koennen."
After some years of acquaintance with Germany as school-boy, as
student at the universities, and lately as a most hospitably received
guest by all sorts and conditions of men, I do not remember meeting a
fop. A German Beau Brummel is as impossible as a French Luther, an
American Goethe, or an English Wagner. We have had attempts at foppery
in America, but no real fops. A genuine fop, whether in art, in
literature, or in costumes, must have brains, ours have been merely
effigies, foppery taking the dull commercial form of a great variety
of raiment. It is a strange contradiction in German life that while
they are as a people governed minutely and in detail, forbidden
personal freedom along certain lines to which we should find it hard
to submit, they are freer morally, freer in their literature, their
art, their music, their social life, and in their unself-conscious
expression of them than other people. There is a curious combination
of legal and governmental slavery, and of spiritual and intellectual
freedom; of innumerable restrictions, and great liberty of personal
enjoyment, and that enjoyment of the most naif kind. They seem to have
done less to destroy life's palate with the condiments of
civilization, and therefore, still find plain things savorous.
I am not sure that the ecumenical sophistication, known as
world-etiquette, marks a very high degree of knowledge or usefulness
anywhere. To know which hat goes with which boots, and what collar and
tie with what coat and waistcoat, and what costume is appropriate at
10 A. M., and what at 10 P. M., and to know the names of the head-waiters
of the principal restaurants, are minor matters. These are the
conveniences of the gentleman, but the characteristic burdens of the
ass. Such a mental equipment is not the stuff of which soldiers,
sailors, statesmen, explorers, or governors are made.
We must not overrate the value of this feminine worldliness in judging
the Germans. This effeminate categorical imperative of etiquette has
not influenced them greatly as yet. But on the other hand, one must
claim for the amenities of life that they have their value, that they
are, after all, the external decorations of an inward discipline. It
is not necessarily a fine disdain of material things, but rather a
keen sense of moral and physical efficiency, which pays due heed to
wherewithal ye shall be clothed, at any rate outside of Palestine.
Those who dream and discuss may wear anything or nothing. It mattered
not what Socrates wore. But men of action must wear the easy armor
that fits them best for their particular task. Men who toil either at
their pleasure or at their work must change their raiment, if only for
the sake of rest and health. Now that government is in the hands of
the vociferators rather than the meditaters, even politicians must
look to their costumes, merely out of regard to cleanliness. Evening
clothes with a knitted tie dribbling down the shirt front; a frock-coat
as a frame for a colored waistcoat, such as at shooting, or
riding, or golf, we permit ourselves to break forth in, as a weak
surrender to the tailor, or to the ingenuity of our womenfolk who are
not "unbred to spinning, in the loom unskilled"; the extraordinary
indulgence in personal fancies in the choice of colored ties, as
though the male citizens of Berlin had been to an auction of the
bastards of a rainbow; the little melon-shaped hats with a band of
thick velvet around them; the awkward slouching gait, as of men
physically untrained; the enormous proportion of men over forty, who
follow behind their stomachs and turn their toes out at an angle of
more than forty-five degrees, whose necks lie in folds over their
collars, and whose whole appearance denotes an uncared-for person and
a negligence of domestic hygiene: these things are significant. No man
who walks with his toes pointing southwest by south, and southeast by
south, when he is going south, will ever get into France on his own
feet, carrying a knapsack and a rifle. Cranach's painting of Duke
Henry the Pious, in the Dresden Gallery, gives an accurate picture of
the way many Germans still stand and walk; while every athlete knows
that runners and walkers put their feet down straight, or with a
tendency to turn them in rather than out. The Indians of northwest
India, and the Indians of our own West are good examples of this.
It is evident that the orderliness of Berlin is enforced orderliness
and not voluntary orderliness. Both pedestrians and drivers of all
sorts of vehicles, take all that is theirs and as much more as
possible. There is none of the give and take, and innate love of fair
play and instinctive wish to give the other fellow a chance, so
noticeable in London streets, whether on the sidewalks or in the
roadway. There is a general chip-on-the-shoulder attitude in Prussia,
which may be said, I think not unfairly, to be evident in all ranks,
from their recent foreign diplomacy, down to the pedestrians and
drivers.
Many people whom I have met, not only foreigners but Germans from
other parts of Germany, are loud in their denunciations of the
Berliners. "Frech" and "roh" are words often used about them. There is
a surly malice of speech and manner among the working classes, that
seems to indicate a wish to atone for political impotence, by braggart
impudence to those whom they regard as superior. When we played horse
as children, we champed the wooden bit, shied, and balked and kicked,
and the worse we behaved the more spirited horses we thought
ourselves. There is a certain social and political radicalism verging
upon anarchy, which plays at life in much the same way, with no better
reason, and with little better result. Shying, balking, and kicking,
and champing the political bit, are only spirited to the childish.
Their awkward and annoying attentions to women alone on the streets;
their staring and gaping; their rudeness in pushing and shoving; the
general underbred look, the slouching gait, the country-store clothes,
hats, and boots; the fearful and wonderful combinations of raiment;
the sweetbread complexions, as of men under-exercised and not
sufficiently aired and scrubbed; their stiff courtesy to one another
when they recognize acquaintances with hat-sweeping bows; their fierce
gobbling in the restaurants; their lack of small services and
attentions to their own women when they go about in public with them;
their selfish disregard of others in public places, their giving and
taking of hats, coats, sticks, and umbrellas at the garde-robes of the
theatres, for example; their habit of straggling about in the middle
of the streets, like the chickens and geese on a country road: all
these things I have noted too, but I must admit the surprising
personal conclusion that I have grown to like the people. A good pair
of shoulders and an engaging smile go far to mitigate these nuisances.
It makes for good sense in this matter of criticism always to bear in
mind that delicious piece of humor of the psalmist: "Let the righteous
rather smite me friendly; and reprove me. But let not their precious
balms break my head." The "precious balms" of the lofty and righteous
critic are not of much value when they merely break heads.
I have been all over Berlin, and in all sorts of places, by day and by
night. I have found myself seated beside all sorts of people in
restaurants and public places, and I have yet to chronicle any
rudeness to me or mine. I like their innocent curiosity, their
unsophisticated ways, their bumpkin love-making in public; and many a
time I have found entertainment from odd companions who seated
themselves near me, when I have strayed into the cheaper restaurants,
to hear and to see something of the Berliner in his native wilds.
Their malice and rudeness and apparent impertinences are due to lack
of experience, to the fact that their manners are still untilled, I
believe, rather than to intentional insult. They are not house-broken
to their new capital, that is all, and that will come in time. Their
malicious jealousy peeps out in all sorts of ways. In the lower house
of the Prussian Diet, recently, a member protested vigorously against
the employment of an American singer in the Opera House! Chauvinism
carried to this extreme becomes comic, and is noted here only to
indicate to what depths of farm-yard provinciality some of the
citizens of this great city can descend.
They are dreamers and sentimentalists too. There are more kissing,
more fondling, more exuberance of affection, more displays of
friendliness in Germany in a week than in England and America in six
months. I confess without shame that I like to see it, and when it
comes my way, as beyond my deserts it has, I like to feel it. How
lasting is this friendliness I have no means of knowing till the years
to come tell me, but that it is a pleasant atmosphere to live in there
can be no doubt.
The driving is of the very worst. A man behind a horse, or horses, who
knows even the elements of handling the reins and the whip and the
brake, would be a curiosity indeed. I have not seen a dozen coachmen,
private or public, to whom my youngest child could not have given
invaluable suggestions as to the bitting, harnessing, and handling of
his cattle. On the other hand, I one day saw a street sign twisted out
of its place. I was fascinated by this unexampled mark of negligence.
I determined to watch that sign; alas, within forty-eight hours it was
put right again.
Let it not be understood that there are no fine horses to be seen in
Berlin. You will go far to find a better lot of horse-flesh, or
better-looking men on the horses, than you will see when the Kaiser
rides by to the castle after his morning exercise; and he sits his
horse and manages him with the easy skill of the real horseman, and
looks every inch a king besides. It is told of Daniel Webster, walking
in London, that a navvy turned to his companion and remarked: "That
bloke must be a king!" You would say the same of the Kaiser if you saw
him on horseback.
At horse shows and in the Tiergarten, and in riding-places in other
cities, I have looked at hundreds of horses, and, if I mistake not,
Germany is both buying and breeding the very best in the way of
mounts, though their civilian riders are often of the scissors
variety. There are comparatively few harness horses, and in Berlin
scarcely a dozen well-turned-out private carriages, outside the
imperial equipages, which are always superbly horsed and beautifully
turned out; so my eyes tell me at least, and I have watched the
streets carefully for months. The minor details of a properly turned-out
carriage (bits, chains, liveries, saddle-cloths, and so on) are
still unknown here. I have had the privilege of driving and riding
some of the horses in the imperial stables; and I have seen all of
them at one time or another being exercised in harness and under the
saddle. I have never driven a better-mannered four, or ridden more
perfectly broken saddle-horses. There are three hundred and twenty-six
horses in his Majesty's stables, and for a private stable of its size
it has no equal in the world. I may add, too, that there is probably
no better "whip" in the world to-day, whether with two horses, four
horses, or six horses, than the gentleman who trains the harness
horses in the imperial stables. This German coachman would be a
revelation at a horse show in either New York or London. If the
citizens of Berlin were as well-mannered as the horses in the imperial
stables, this would be the most elegant capital in the world. It is to
be regretted that his Majesty's very accomplished master of the horse
cannot also hold the position of censor morum to the citizens of
Berlin. Individual prowess in the details of cosmopolitan etiquette
has not reached a high level, but in all matters of mere house-keeping
there are no better municipal housewives than these German cities and
towns.
As a further example, the statues of Berlin are carefully cleaned in
the spring, but what statues! With the exception of the Lessing, the
Goethe, and the Great Elector statues, the statue of Frederick the
Great, and the reclining statues of the late emperor and empress, by
Begas, and one or two others, one sees at once that these citizens are
no more capable of ornamenting their city than of dressing themselves.
Poor Bismarck! Grotesque figures (men, women, animals) surround the
base of his statue in Berlin, in Leipsic; and in Hamburg, clad in a
corrugated golf costume, with a colossal two-handed sword in front of
him, he is a melancholy figure, gazing out over a tumble-down beer-garden.
At Wannsee, near Berlin, there is, I must admit, a really fine
bust of Bismarck. On a solid square pedestal of granite, covered with
ivy and surrounded by the whispering, or sighing, or creaking and
cracking trees that he loved, and facing the setting sun, and alone in
a secluded corner, just the place he would have chosen, there are the
head and shoulders of the real Bismarck. Here for once he has escaped
the fussy attentions of the artistry that he detested. Lehnbach, who
painted Bismarck so many scores of times, never gave him the color
that his face kept all through life, and with the exception of this
bust, of the scores of Bismarck memorials one sees all commiserate the
lack of artist ability; they do not commemorate Bismarck. If this is
what they do to the greatest man in their history, what is to be
expected elsewhere? What has poor Joachim Friedrich done that he
should pose forever in the Sieges Allee as an intoxicated hitching-post?
What, indeed, have his companions done that they should stand in
two rows there, studies in contortion, with a gilded Russian dancer
with wings at one end of their line, and a woodeny Roland at the
other? But there they are, simpering a paltry patriotism, insipid as
history and ridiculous as art. What has become of Lessing, and
Winckelmann, and Goethe, and their teachings? Is this the price that a
nation must pay for its industrial progress?
The German, with all his boasting about the "centre of culture," has
not discovered that the beauty of antiquity is the expression of those
virtues which were useful at the time of Theseus, as Stendhal rightly
tells us. Individual force, which was everything of old, amounts to
almost nothing in our modern civilization. The monk who invented
gunpowder modified sculpture; strength is only necessary now among
subalterns. No one thinks of asking whether Frederick the Great and
Napoleon were good swordsmen. The strength we admire, is the strength
of Napoleon advancing alone upon the First Battalion of the royal
troops near Lake Loffrey in March, 1815; that is strength of soul. The
moral qualities with which we are concerned are no longer the same as
in the days of the Greeks. Before this cockney sculpture was planned,
there should have been a closer study of the history and philosophy of
art in Berlin.
It is true that we in America are living in a glass house to some
extent in these matters, but where in all Germany is there any modern
sculpture to compare with our Nathan Hale, our Minute Man, and that
most spirited bit of modern plastic art in all the world, the Shaw
Monument in Boston? You cannot stand in front of it without keeping
time, and here lips of bronze sing the song of patriotism till your
heart thumps, and you are ready to throw up your hat as the splendid
young figure and his negro soldiers march by -- and they do march by!
It is almost a consolation for what Boston has done to that gallant
soldier and humble servant of God, that modest gentleman, Phillips
Brooks. In a statue to him they have travestied the virtues he
expounded, slain the ideal of the Christ he preached, theatricalized
the least theatrical of men, and placed this piece of mortifying
misunderstanding in bronze under the very eaves of the house that grew
out of his simple eloquence. There is in Leipsic a similar misdemeanor
in a statue of Beethoven. He sits, naked to the waist, in a bronze
chair, with a sort of bath-towel drapery of colored marble about his
legs, and an eagle in front of him. He has a chauffeurish expression
of anxious futility, as though he were about to run over the eagle.
Men are without great dreams in these days, and art is elaborate and
fussy and self-conscious. The technical part of the work is
predominant. One sees the artist holding up a mirror to himself as he
works. Pygmalion congratulates the statue upon the fact that he carved
it, instead of being lost in the love of creating. It is as though a
lover should sing of himself instead of singing of his lady. The
subtle poison of self-advertisement has crept in, and peers like a
satyr from the picture and from the statue. Even the most prominent
name in German music at this writing is that of a man who is notorious
as an expert salesman of symphonic sensationalism.
Though the streets are so well kept, the buildings in these miles of
new streets are flimsy-looking, and evidently the work of the
speculative builder. The more pretentious buildings ape a kind of
Nuremberg Renaissance style, and are as effective as a castle made of
cardboard. This does not imply that there are not simple and solid
buildings in Berlin and, in the case of the new library and a score of
other buildings, worthy architecture; but the general impression is
one of haste multiplied by plaster.
The whole city blossoms with statuary, like a cosmopolitan 'Arriet who
cannot get enough flowers and feathers on her Sunday hat. A certain
comic anthropomorphism is to be seen, even on the balustrades of the
castle, where the good Emperor William is posed as Jupiter, the
Empress Augusta as Juno, Emperor Frederick as Mars, and his wife as
Minerva! On the facades of houses, on the bridges, on the roofs of
apartment houses, on the hotels even, and scattered throughout the
public gardens, are scores of statues, and they are for the most part
what hastily ordered, swiftly completed art, born of the dollar
instead of the pain and travail of love and imagination, must always
be.