In Frankfurt-am-Main was born one of the three supreme poets since
Greece and Rome--Goethe--from whom I shall quote more than once; but
Frankfurt has present glories that I saw. It is one of many
beautifully governed German cities. I grew even fond of its Union
Station, since through this gate I entered so often the pleasures and
edifications of the town. The trains were a symbol of the whole
Empire. About a mile north of Nauheim the railroad passes under a
bridge and curves out of sight. The four-fifteen was apt to be my
express to Frankfurt. I would stand on the platform, watch in hand,
looking northward for my train. At four-eleven the bridge was
invariably an empty hole. Invariably at four-twelve the engine filled
the hole; then the train glided in quietly, and smoothly glided on,
almost punctual to the second. So did the other trains.
The conductors were officials of disciplined courtesy and informed
minds. They appeared at the door of your compartment, erect,
requesting your ticket in an established formula. If you asked them
something they told you correctly and with a Teutonic adequacy that
was grave, but not gruff. Once only in a score of journeys did I
encounter bad manners. Now I should never choose these admirable
conductors for companions, but as conductors they were superior to the
engaging fellow citizen who took my ticket down in Georgia and, when
I asked did his train usually make its scheduled connection at
Yemassee Junction, cried out with contagious mirth:
"My Lawd, suh, 'most nevah!"
In these German trains another little discord jarred with some
regularity: the German passengers they brought from Berlin, or were
taking back to Berlin, were of a heavy impenetrable rudeness--quite
another breed than the kindly Hessians of Frankfurt.
We know the saying of a floor--that it is so clean "you could eat your
dinner off it." All the streets of Frankfurt, that I saw, were clean
like this. The system of street cars was lucid--and blessedly
noiseless!--and their conductors informed with the same adequate
gravity I have already noted.
I found that I developed a special affection for Route 19, because
this took me from the station to the opera house. But all routes took
one to and through aspects of municipal perfection at which one stared
with envy as one thought of home.
Oh, yes! Frankfurt is a name to me compact with memories--memories of
clean streets; of streets full of by-passers who could direct you when
you asked your way; of streets empty of beggars, empty of all signs of
desolate, drunken or idle poverty; of streets bordered by substantial
stone dwellings, with fragrant gardens; of excellent shops; the
streets full of prosperous movement and bustle; an absence of rags, a
presence of good stout clothes; a people of contented faces, whether
they talked or were silent--the same firm and broad contentment, like
a tree deep-rooted, in the city face that was in the country face.
These burghers, these Frankfurters, seemed to be going about their
business with a sort of solid yet placid energy, well and deliberately
aimed, that would hit the mark at once without wasting powder. It was
very different and very superior to the ill-arranged and hectic haste
of New York and Chicago; here nobody seemed driven as though by
invisible furies--the German business mind was not out of breath.
Such are my memories of Frankfurt at work. Frankfurt at leisure was to
be seen in its Palm Garden. This was the town's place of general
recreation; large, various, beautifully and intelligently planned;
with space for babies to roll in safety, and there were the babies
rolling, and their nurses; with courts for tennis, and thither I saw
adolescent Frankfurt strolling in flannels and short skirts after
business hours; with benches where sat the more elderly, taking the
air and gazing at the games or the flowers or the pleasant trees; with
paths more sequestered that wound among bowers, convenient for
sweethearts--but I did not see any, because I forbore to look. A
central building held tropic plants and basins, and large rooms for
bad weather, I suppose, with a restaurant; but on this fine day the
music played and we dined outside.
An entrance fee, very small, served to make you respect the Palm
Garden, since humanity seldom respects what it pays nothing for. Most
unexpected show of all in this Palm Garden were the flowers under
glass. I had erroneously supposed that any German scheme of color
would be heavy, and possibly garish. Never had I beheld more exquisite
subtlety on so extended a scale of arrangement. One walked through
aisle after aisle of roses and other blooms in these
greenhouses--everywhere was the same delicate sense and feeling; the
same, in fact, in these flower schemes that one finds in German lyric
verse, and in the songs of Schubert, Schumann and Franz.
It was in the opera house--Frankfurt has a fine and commodious
one--that my whole impression of Germany's glory culminated. The
performances drew their light from no Melbas or Carusos, or other
meteors, but from a fixed constellation, now and then enriched by
some visitor; it was teamwork of drilled and even excellence, singers,
chorus, orchestra and scenery unitedly equal to the occasion, in
operas old and new, an immense sweep of repertory, with an audience to
match--an accustomed audience, to whom music was traditional food,
music having always grown hereabout plenteously, indigenously, so that
they took it as naturally as they took their Rhine wine, paying for it
as moderately, going to hear it in rather plain clothes, as a
rule--men in day dress, women in high-neck; not an audience that had
to put on its diamonds in order to listen conspicuously to a costly
and not comprehended exotic.
The difference between hearing opera where it grows and hearing it in
New York is the difference between eating strawberries warm from
their vines in June and strawberries in January that have come a
thousand miles by freight. Where opera grows, it is the blend of
native music, singers and listeners that gives a ripe flavor of a
warmth which Fifth Avenue can never purchase.
This, every performance in Frankfurt had; but even this could be
raised to a higher key of inspiration. I walked in one night and found
myself amid a pious ceremonial. They were giving an old work, of
bygone design, stiff in outline, noble, remote from all present
things. Why did they revive this somewhat pale and rigid classic? For
contrast, variety? Not at all. Two hundred years ago this day, Gluck
had been born. Gluck had written this opera. For this reason, then,
Frankfurt was assembled to hear Gluck's music and remember him; and,
as I looked at these living Germans honoring their classics, I thought
it was truly a splendid people that not only possessed but practically
nourished themselves with these masterpieces of their great dead.
But this was not all. This was Germany looking at its Past. In the
Frankfurt opera house I also learned one of the ways in which Germany
attends to its Future. It was on a Sunday afternoon. As I crossed the
open space toward the opera house it seemed as though I were the only
grown person bound there. Children by threes and fours, and in little
groups, were streaming from every quarter, entering every door,
tripping up the wide, handsome stairs, filling all the seats--boys and
girls; it was like the Pied Piper of Hamelin. After a few minutes I
found that I was indeed almost alone amid a rippling sea of
children--nearly two thousand, as I later learned. In the boxes here
and there was a parent or two with a family party, and dotted about
the house a few scattered older heads among the young ones.
The overture began. "Hush!" went several little voices; the sprightly,
expectant Babel fell to silence; they listened like a congregation in
church.
Then the curtain rose. It was a gay old opera, tuneful, full of
boisterous, innocent comedy and simple sentiment. Not Gluck this time;
Gluck would have been a trifle severe for their young understandings.
The enthusiasm and the attention of these boys and girls, with their
clapping of hands and their laughter, soon affected the spirits of the
singers as a radiant day in spring; it affected me. I envied the happy
parents who had their children round them; it was like some sort of
wonderful April light. Beneath it the quaint, sweet old opera shone like
a fruit tree in blossom. The actors became as children again themselves;
so did the fiddlers; so did the conductor. I doubt if that little old
opera, _Czaar und Zimmermann_, had ever felt younger in its life; and I
thought if the spirit of Goethe were watching Frankfurt, his city,
to-day, it would add a new happiness to a moment of his Eternity.
Between the acts I was full of questions. What occasion was this? I
read the program, wherein was set forth a most interesting account of
the composer--his character, life and adventures, with a historic
account also of Peter the Great, the hero of the opera; but nothing
about the occasion. So in the lobby I addressed myself to a group of
the men I had seen dotted among the rows of children. The men were
schoolmasters. The occasion was an experiment. The children were of
the public schools of Frankfurt--not the oldest scholars, but the
middle grades of the schools. For the oldest, Frankfurt had already
provided opera days, but this was the first ever given for these
younger boys and girls. The cost was twelve-and-a-half cents a seat.
If it proved a success, a second would follow in two weeks. At the
theater, throughout each winter school term, plays were given
expressly for them in this way--the great German classics; but never
any opera before to-day.
Well, the performance went on; but I was obliged, near the end of it, to
hasten away to my train for Nauheim, most reluctantly leaving the sight
and company of those two thousand joyous children of the Frankfurt
public schools. "Rosy cheeks predominated; eyeglasses were rare."--Again
I quote from my own diary:--"The children seemed between ten and
fifteen. The boys had good foreheads and big backs to their heads."
V
Nothing can efface this memory, nothing can efface the whole
impression of Germany; in retrospect this picture rises clear--the
fair aspect and order of the country and the cities, the well-being of
the people, their contented faces, their grave adequacy, their
kindliness; and, crowning all material prosperity, the feeling for
beauty as shown by their gardens, and, better and more important
still, the reverent value for their great native poets and musicians,
so attentive, so cherishing, seeing to it that the young generation
began early its acquaintance with the masterpieces that are Germany's
heritage of inspiration.
Such was the splendor of this empire as it unrolled before me through
May and June, 1914, that by contrast the state of its two great
neighbors, France and England, seemed distressing and unenviable.
Paris was shabby and incoherent, London full of unrest. Instead of
Germany's order, confusion prevailed in France; instead of Germany's
placidity, disturbance prevailed in England; and in both France and
England incompetence seemed the chief note. The French face, alike in
city or country, was too often a face of worried sadness or revolt;
men spoke of political scandals and dissensions petty and unpatriotic
in spirit, and a political trial, revealing depths of every sort of
baseness and dishonor, filled the newspapers; while in England,
besides discord of suffrage and discord of labor, civil war seemed so
imminent that no one would have been surprised to hear of it any day.
So that I thought: Suppose a soul, arrived on earth from another
world, wholly ignorant of earth, without any mortal ties whatever,
were given its choice after a survey of the nations, which it should
be born in and belong to? In May, June and July, 1914, my choice would
have been, not France, not England, not America, but Germany.
It was on the seventh day of June, 1914, that Frankfurt assembled her
school children in the opera house, to further their taste and
understanding of Germany's supreme national art. Exactly eleven months
later, on May 7, 1915, a German torpedo sank the Lusitania; and the
cities of the Rhine celebrated this also for their school children.