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 lassitude 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
Erbsuende."
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
assistance 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 glass 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 Dienstmaedchen 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 Japan, 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 attitude toward the countless servants and satellites, an
acreage of roaming space 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 Gemuethlichkeit 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 Gemuethlichkeit
can be without that characteristic. The English words "home" and
"comfort," the French word "esprit," and the German word
Gemuethlichkeit 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 lust 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 God 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 amusements, 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 scholarship 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!
The Germans are patient even with their food. What would become of
them without the goose, the pig, the calf, and the duck, that meagre
alimentary quartette? The country is white with home-raised geese, and
yet they imported 8,337,708 in 1910, and 7,236,581 in 1911.
One of their most charming bits of classic art is the famous miniature
statue of the Gooseman; and the real name of the great Gutenberg, who,
by his invention of printing, did more than any other mortal to make
it easy for the human race to acquire the anserine mental habits, and
the anserine moral characteristics, was Gaensfleisch!
The goose is really the national bird of the German people. You eat
tons of goose, and then you sleep beneath the feathers. The goose
first nourishes you and then protects your digestion. The
extraordinary make-up of the German bed must be laid to the door of
the guilty goose. The pillows are so soft that your head is ever
sinking, never at rest. Instead of easily applied blankets, that you
can adapt to the temperature, you are given a great cloud of feathers,
sewn in a balloon-like bag, which floats upon you according to your
degree of restlessness, and leaves you for the floor, when in stupid
sleepiness you endeavor to protect your whole person at once with its
flimsy and wanton formlessness. As a rule the bed is built up at the
head so that you are continually sliding down, down under the goose
feathers, your nose and mouth are soon covered, and who can breathe
with his toes!
They accumulate comfort very slowly. The wages are small and the
satisfactions are small. On the street-cars the conductor is grateful
for a tip of five pfennigs, and his daily customers are handed from
the car-steps and respectfully saluted in return for this tiny
douceur. When you dine or lunch at a friend's house you are expected
to leave something in the expectant palm of his servant who sees you
out.
Women carry small parcels of food to the theatre, to the tea and beer
gardens, and thus save the small additional expense. Many a time have
I seen these thrifty housewives pocket the sugar and the zwiebacks and
Broedchen left over. In the hotels, soap, paper, and common
conveniences of the kind are taken, so I am told, not, I maintain, as
a theft, but as an economy. We are in the habit of carrying our small
change loose in a trousers pocket, but the German almost without
exception carries even his ten and five pfennig pieces carefully in a
purse. Outside many of the big shops is placed a row of niches where
you may leave your unfinished cigar till you return. The economy thus
illustrated shows a certain disregard, of a not altogether agreeable
chance of interchangeability, that might even be dangerous to health.
On the other hand, it is a wise precaution that marks beer-glasses and
beer-jugs with a line, to show just how much beer you are entitled to.
This puts the foam-stealing vendor at your mercy.
The entertainments, dinners, luncheons, teas, except among the small
cosmopolitan companies who do not count as examples of German manners
and customs, are very prolonged affairs. There is much standing about.
At ten o'clock, having dined at half-past seven, beer, tea, coffee,
sandwiches are brought in, and you begin the gastronomics over again
on a smaller scale. There is no occasion when eating and drinking are
not part of the programme. If you go to the play or the opera you may
eat and drink there; if you go for a walk the goal is not a bath and a
rub-down, but beer or chocolate and cakes.
I am not sure that there is
not something in the theory that their soil has less iron in it, being
so intensively cultivated, and that our food is consequently stronger
than theirs; at all events, they eat more frequently and more
copiously than we do. It seems to me that both the men and the women
show it in their faces and figures. They are a heavy, puffy, tumbling
lot after forty; and with my prepossessions on the subject I am
inclined to put it down to irregular eating, to too much eating of
soft and sweet food, too much drinking of fattening beverages, and
much, much too little regular exercise, and to the fact that they are
still infants in the matter of personal hygiene. Dressing-gowns,
slippers, proper care of the teeth and hair, regular ablutions,
changing of clothes, all these dozens of helps to health are patiently
neglected. It is just as troublesome to take care of yourself, to
groom your person, to be regular in your habits, and restrained and
careful in your diet as to take proper care of a horse or a dog. It
shows a rather high grade of persistent prowess in a man just to keep
himself fit, to keep himself in working or playing health. Without the
drilling they receive in the army in these matters, one wonders where
this population would be.
The doggedness, the patience of the German is notable, but the
alertness, vivacity, the energy easily on tap, these are lacking both
among the men and the women, and, as it seems to me, for these easily
apparent reasons. There are more rest-cures, rheumatism, heart, liver,
kidney, anaemic cures in Germany, and to suit all purses, than in all
Anglo-Saxondom combined, even if subject territories are included. In
Saxony alone, which is not renowned for its cures, the number of
visitors at Augustus Bad, Bad Elester, Hermanus Bad, Schandau, and
some seven others has increased from 13,000 ten years ago to 30,000 in
1910.
Between 1900 and 1909, while the population of Germany increased 15
per cent., the days of sickness in the insurance funds increased 59
per cent. and the expenditure 95 per cent. Some alterations were made
in the law between those years permitting a certain extension of the
days of sickness, but an accurate percentage may be taken between the
years 1905 and 1909. During those years the population increased by 7
per cent., the days of sickness by 17 per cent., and the expenditure
out of the sick-funds by 32 per cent. The total cost of sickness
insurance in 1900 was $42,895,000 and in 1909 $83,640,000. What will
happen in Great Britain when sickness insurance comes into thorough
working order is worthy of caricature. The way my Irish friends will
play that game fills me with joy. It is an abominable harness to put
on the Anglo-Saxon, and he has my very best wishes if he refuses to
wear it tamely. It is only another piece of tired legislation that
solves nothing. Even Germany would be a thousand times better off
without it. This attempting to make pills and powders take the place
of love one another, is merely the politician sneaking away from his
problem. Of course, it is impossible to tell how many people are sick
by being paid for it, probably not a small number. We all have
mornings when we would turn over and stick to our pillows if we were
sure of payment for doing so. The German apparently is the only person
in the world who is happy, aegrescit medendo. The Germans keep going,
we must all admit that, but at a slower pace, with less energy to
spare, and with far less robust love of life.
If the men are patient, the women must be more so, and they are. The
marriage service still reads: "He shall be your ruler, and you shall
be his vassal." The women are not only patient with all that requires
patience of the men, but they are patient with the men besides, a
heavy additional burden from the American point of view. Beethoven
writes: "Resignation! Welch' elendes Huelfsmittel! Und doch bleibt es
mir das einzige uebrige." They take resignation for granted as we never
do.