When Tacitus penned his famous certificate of good moral character for
the Germans of his time, he little suspected how many thousand times it
would be quoted by the grateful and proud descendants of those early
Teutons, and pinned to the lapels of their coats as a sort of prize
medal in the competition for ancestral virtue. The more candid
historians, however, admit that the Roman historian somewhat overdrew
his picture in order to teach his own profligate countrymen a sort of
Sunday school lesson, by the vivid contrast presented by these
inhabitants of the northern virgin forests.
There is no question that women were held in considerable honour among
these early Germans. Many of them served as priestesses, and adultery
was punished with death. Polygamy existed only among the chiefs, and
even among them it was not common. Yet the men did not treat the women
as their equals. “They had more duties than privileges,” says
Schweiger-Lerchenfeld. Their husbands were addicted to excessive
drinking or gambling when not engaged in war or the chase, leaving the
hard domestic and field labour to the women: and all this cannot have
tended to refine the women.
“Marriage in the old Germanic times,” says Ploss, “was mostly an affair
of expediency.... In the choice of a wife beauty was of less moment than
property and good social antecedents. Love _before_ the betrothal rarely
occurs.”
Gustav Freytag, in his _Pictures of German Life_, during the fifteenth,
sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, remarks: “Marriage was considered
by our ancestors less as a union of two lovers than as an institution
replete with duties and rights, not only of married people towards one
another, but also towards their relatives, as a bond uniting two
corporate bodies.... Therefore in the olden time the choice of husband
and wife was always an affair of importance to the relatives on both
sides, so that a German wooing from the oldest times, _even until the
last century_, had the appearance of a business transaction, which was
carried out with great regard to suitability.”
And a business transaction it is, unfortunately, to the present day, in
the vast majority of cases. A certain amount of dower or property on the
bride’s part is the first and most essential requisite. Second in
importance is the desirability of not descending even a step in the
social ladder, though an extra lump of gold commonly suffices to pull
down social Pride to a lower level. Health, temper, Personal Beauty, and
mutual suitability—these are the trifles which, other things being
equal, come in as a third consideration. And thus is the order of Sexual
Selection, as ordained by Love, commonly reversed.
What would an English or American youth of twenty-two say to his father
if the latter should undertake to write to all his relatives, asking
them to look about for an eligible partner for his son, and capping the
climax by starting himself on a trip in search of a bride for his son?
Would he accept without a murmur the girl thus found, and would an
English or American girl thus allow herself to be given away like a cat
in a bag, not knowing whither she was going? I have seen several such
cases with my own eyes. One of them was most pathetic. For when the
blooming bride, a sweet and refined girl, was introduced to the
bridegroom selected for her by her parents—a repulsive-looking brute,
twice her age—she conceived a perfect loathing for him, and almost wept
out her eyes before the wedding-day. But the man was rich, and that
settled the matter.
What aggravated this outrage was the fact that the bride’s father also
was rich. And herein, in fact, lies the canker of the German system.
Money is such a comfortable thing to have that it is useless to preach
against it. There are money-marriages enough in England and America. But
in these countries it is generally considered sufficient if one party
has the money. Not so in Germany. It is not so much the comfort ensured
by a certain amount of money that is aimed at as the superior social
influence ensured by a large amount of wealth. Hence the rich marry the
rich, regardless of other consequences, and poor Cupid is left shivering
in the cold. So that, after all, the silly pride of social position is a
greater enemy of Romantic Love than money.
And the consequences of such a matrimonial system? They have been most
eloquently set forth by the blind old philosopher, Dr. Dühring:—
“The amalgamation of fortunes, and the resulting enervating luxury of
living, are the ruling matrimonial motives; and the want of mutual
adaptation of the individuals becomes the cause of the degenerate
appearance of the offspring. The loathsome products of such marriages
then walk about as ugly embodiments and witnesses of such a degraded
system of legalised prostitution (_Kuppelwirthschaft_). They bear the
stamp of incongruity on body and mind; for their appearance shows them
to be the offspring of disharmonious parents, blindly associated, or
even, in many cases, of parents who themselves are already products of
this new matrimonial method. This degeneracy necessarily continues from
one generation to another, and in this manner maltreated Nature avenges
herself by leading to personal decrepitude and the formation of a new
sort of idiocy.”
“It is true,” he adds, “that love is not an infallible sign of mutual
suitability; but when it is absent, or even replaced by aversion, it is
certain that it is useless to expect a specially harmonious composition
of the offspring.”
Is this one of the reasons why Personal Beauty is so rare,
comparatively, in Germany?
But Individual Preference is not the only element of Love which thus
suffers in Germany through false Pride and parental tyranny. Gallantry
is another factor which needs mending. German women are sweet and
amiable. In fact, they are _too_ sweet and good-natured. They have
spoiled the men, who in consequence are excessively selfish in their
relations to women—the most selfish men in the world, outside of Turkey
or China. True, the German officer in a ballroom seems to be the very
essence of officious Gallantry. But his motives are too transparently
Ovidian: it is not true Anglo-American politeness of the heart that
inspires his conduct. He is either after forbidden sweets or parading
his uniform and his vanity. Take the same man and watch him at home. His
wife has to get him his chair, move it up to the fire, bring him his
slippers, put the coffee in his hand, and do errands for him. When he
goes out she puts on his overcoat and buttons it up carefully for him as
if he were a helpless big baby. This would be all very well—for why
should not women be gallant too?—if he would only retaliate. But he
never dreams of it. Even if it comes to a task which calls for masculine
muscular power—the carrying of bundles, etc.—he makes the wife do it. He
is, in fact, matrimonially considered, not only a big baby but also a
big brute, the very incarnation of masculine selfishness.
In former centuries it was customary in Germany, as it is now with us,
for women to bow first to men. The modern German has reversed this.
Woman has no right to bow until her lord and superior has invited her to
do so by doffing his hat.
The German girl, says the Countess von Bothmer in _German Home Life_,
“is taught that to be womanly she must be helpless, to be feminine she
must be feeble, to endear herself she must be dependent, to charm she
must cling.” “To keep carefully to the sheep-walk, to applaud in concert
and condemn in chorus, is the only behaviour that can be tolerated.”
“They have one bugbear and one object of idolatry, these monotonous
ladies,—a fetish which they worship under the name of Mode; a monster
between public opinion and Mrs. Grundy. To say a thing is not ‘Mode’
here, is to condemn it as if by all the laws of Media and Persia. It is
not her centre [_sic_], but the system of her social education, that
renders the German woman so hopelessly provincial.”
Of course it is the men who are responsible for this social education
and this feminine ideal of absolute dependence. It suits their selfish
pleasure to be worshipped and obeyed by the women without any efforts at
gallant retaliation on their part.
A native writer tells us that “a true German philosophises occasionally
while he embraces his sweetheart; while kissing even, theories will
sprout in his mind.”
No wonder, therefore, that one of the German metaphysicians, Fichte,
should have made a sophistic attempt to reduce masculine selfishness to
a system. He proves to his own satisfaction that it is woman’s duty to
sacrifice herself in man’s behalf; while man, on his part, has no such
obligations. His reasoning is too elaborate to quote in full; but is too
amusingly naïve to be omitted, so I will translate the summary of it
given by Kuno Fischer in his _History of Philosophy_:—
“What woman’s natural instincts demand is self-abandonment to a man; she
desires this abandonment not for her own sake, but for the man’s sake;
she gives herself to him, for him. Now abandoning oneself for another is
self-sacrifice, and self-sacrifice from an instinctive impulse is LOVE.
Therefore love is a kind of instinctive impulse which the sexual
instinct in woman necessarily and involuntarily assumes. She feels the
necessity of loving.... This impulse is peculiar to woman alone; woman
alone loves [!!!]; only through woman does love appear among mankind....
The woman’s life should disappear in the man’s without a remnant, and it
is this relation that is so beautifully and correctly indicated in the
fact that the wife no longer uses her own name, but that of her husband
[!].”
The latest (and it is to be hoped the last) of the German
metaphysicians, the pessimist Hartmann, goes even a step beyond
Fichte in arrogating for man special privileges in Love. If Fichte
makes Love synonymous with Self-Sacrifice—feminine, mind you, not
masculine—Hartmann tries to prove that man may love as often as he
pleases, but woman only once. And what aggravates the offence, he
does it in such a poetic manner. “Though it may be doubtful,” he
says, “whether a man can truly love two women at the same time, it
is beyond all doubt that he can love several in succession with all
the depth of his heart; and the assertion that there is only one
true love is an unwarranted generalisation to all mankind of a maxim
which is true of woman alone.... Woman can learn but once by
experience what love is, and it is painful for the lover not to be
the one who teaches her first. True it is that a tree nipped by a
spring frost brings forth a second crown of leaves, but so rich and
luxuriant as the first it will not be; thus does a maiden-heart
produce a second bloom, if the first had to wither before maturity,
but its full and complete floral glory is unfolded only where love,
aroused for the first time, passes in full vigour through all its
phases.”
Yet it is not ungallant selfishness alone that prompts German men to
bring up their women so that they shall be mere playthings at first and
drudges after marriage, never real soul-mates. They have the same old
stupid continental fear that culture of the intellect weakens the
feelings. This fear is based on slovenly reasoning—on the inference that
because a few blue-stockings have at all ages made themselves ridiculous
by assuming masculine attributes and parading their lack of tenderness
and feminine delicacy, therefore intellectual training must be fatal to
feminine charms. As if there were not plenty of masculine
blue-stockings, or pedants, without disproving the fact that the men of
the greatest intellectual power—men of genius—are also the most
emotional and refined of all men; or the fact proved by this whole
monograph, that Love and general emotional refinement grow with the
general intellectual culture of women.
A typical illustration of German feeling on the subject of female
education is to be found in Schweiger-Lerchenfeld’s _Frauenleben der
Erde_, p. 530. Referring to the attempts now being made in France to
give young girls a rational education, he quotes the opinion of a French
legislator that a girl thus brought up would not love less deeply than
heretofore, while she would love more intelligently; and then comments
as follows: “How far this anticipation may be realised cannot be decided
now or in the near future. At any rate we must leave to the French
themselves the task of getting along with this classical female
generation of the future. Certain it is that their experiment will
hardly be imitated, and that the old Romans and Greeks may eventually
become more dangerous to masculine supremacy (Autorität) than the
pilgrimage stories of Lourdes.”
It is time for German woman to rise in revolt against this mediæval
masculine selfishness. Not in active revolt, for a warlike woman is an
abomination. But in passive revolt. Let them cease to spoil the men, and
these bears will become more gallant. Germany is later in almost every
phase of literary and social culture than England. It was not an
accident that Shakspere came before Heine, the English before the German
poet of Love; for Love is much less advanced in Germany than in England.
It has not even passed the stage where a harsh sort of Coyness is still
in place. German women want to learn the cunning to be strange, They are
too deferential to the men, too easily won. They want to learn to
indulge in harmless flirtation, and they want the education which will
give them wit enough to flirt cleverly and make the men mellow.
It must be admitted, however, notwithstanding all these strictures, that
there is much genuine Romantic Love in Germany, often differing in no
wise from Anglo-American Love. At first sight it seems, indeed, as if
chaperonage were as strict as in France; and no doubt many German girls
are brought up on the spring-chicken-coyness system which regards every
man as a hawk, and a signal for hiding away in a corner. But in general
German girls have much more freedom than French girls. They may walk
alone in the street in the daytime, go alone to the conservatory to
attend a music-lesson. They meet the young men freely at evening
parties, dances, musical entertainments, etc.; and the chaperons are not
nearly so obtrusive and offensive as in France. The mothers appear to
have taken to heart Jean Paul’s saying that “in the mother’s presence it
is impossible to carry on an edifying conversation with the daughter.”
So that there is plenty of opportunity for falling in love; and were it
not for parental dictation, Love-matches would perhaps be as common as
in England. But the girls lack independence of spirit to defy parental
tyranny, which it is their _moral duty_ to defy where money or rank are
pitted against Love. For the health and happiness of the next generation
are at stake.
German girls also enjoy an advantage over the French in having a
literature which is pure and wholesome; and by reading about Romantic
Love they train and deepen their feelings. It is often said that Heine’s
influence has been chiefly negative. The truth is, _Heine is the
greatest emotional educator Germany has ever had_. More young men and
girls have wept over his pathetic lyrics than over any other poetry. His
_Buch der Lieder_ has done more to foster the growth of Romantic Love in
Germany than all other collections of verse combined; not only by their
own unadorned beauty, but through the soulful music wedded to these
poems by Schubert, Schumann, and other magicians of the heart. The fact
that the copyright on Heine’s works was soon to expire, and the country
to be flooded with cheap editions, has long caused Master Cupid to rub
his hands in gleeful anticipation of brisk business; and he has just
given orders in his arsenal for one hundred thousand new golden arrows.
Heine indeed fathomed the secrets of Love much more deeply than Goethe.
Whereas Heine sang of Love in every major and minor key, Goethe appears
to have emphasised chiefly its transitoriness. “Love, as Goethe knows
it,” says Professor Seeley, “is very tender, and has a lyric note as
fresh as that of a song-bird. In his _Autobiography_ one love-passage
succeeds another, but each comes speedily to an end. How far in each
case he was to blame is a matter of controversy. But he seems to betray
a way of thinking about women such as might be natural to an Oriental
sultan. ‘I was in that agreeable phase,’ he writes, ‘when a new passion
had begun to spring up in me before the old one had quite disappeared.’
About Frederika he blames himself without reserve, and uses strong
expressions of contrition; but he forgets the matter strangely soon. In
his distress of mind he says he found riding, and especially skating,
bring much relief. This reminds us of the famous letter to the Frau von
Stein about coffee. He is always ready in a moment to shake off the
deepest impressions and receive new ones; and he never looks back....
Goethe was a man of the old _régime_.... Had he entered into the
reforming movement of his age, he might have striven to elevate
women.... He certainly felt at times that all was not right in the
status of women (‘woman’s fate is pitiable’), and how narrowly confined
was their happiness (wie enggebunden ist des Weibes Glück) ... but he
was not a reformer of institutions.”
A reformer of institutions, however, has apparently just arisen in
Berlin. For we read that at a private female seminary the girls received
the following subject for an essay: “There is from the Ideas of Plato,
the atoms of Democritus, the Substance of Spinoza, the monads of
Leibnitz, and from the subjective mental forms of Kant, the proof to
bring, that the philosophy it never neglected has the to-be-calculated
results of their hypotheses with their into-perception-falling effects
to compare.”
Such subjects, so elegantly expressed, are no doubt eminently calculated
to bring out the latent possibilities of feminine feeling and culture.
To close this chapter with a sweet, soothing concord—major triad, horns
and ’cellos, _smorzando_—it must be admitted that the Germans have one
ingredient of Romantic Love which all other nations must envy them. They
have one more thrill in the drama of Love, in the ascending scale of
familiarities, than we have, namely, the word _Du_, which is something
very different from the stilted _Thou_, because still a part of everyday
language. The second person singular is used in Germany towards pet
animals and children, between students, intimate friends, relatives, and
lovers. French “lovers” do not say _tu_ to each other till after
marriage, and even then they do not use it in public. But the German
lover has the privilege, as soon as he is engaged, of exchanging the
formal _Sie_ for the affectionate _Du_; and the first _Du_ that comes
from her lips can hardly be less sweet than the first kiss.
There is a game of cards, popular among young folks in Germany, during
which you have to address every one with _Du_ whom you otherwise would
have to call _Sie_, and _vice versâ_; cards have to be called spoons,
white black, etc. If there is a young man in the company secretly in
love with a young lady, you can always “spot” him by the eagerness he
shows to speak to her, and the fact that he always gets the _Du_ right
and everything else wrong; while she, strange to say, appears to have
never heard of such a thing at all as a personal pronoun.