itn!mn«m!i»iitii- t\:liH)\n!'.h::H Mr ■1 ^tiil;' Jl: tjjij|ii*>;«« Si i ,' .1 ' ! I iii liiii itititjliil iiii !i Pill m I THE HUMAN GERMAN THE HUMAN GERMAN BY EDWARD EDGEWORTH Menschliches, allzu-menschlichcs. (Human, all-too-human.) Friedhich Nietzsche. METHUEN & CO. LTD. 36 ESSEX STREET W.C. LONDON First Published in igts I CONTENTS CHAPTER I. The Human Tenant II. The Human Bureaucrat III. The Human Maidservant IV. The Human Inside V. The Human Parcel VI. The Human Infant VII. The Human World-City VIII. The Human Holiday IX. The Human Lawmaker . X. The Human Law-breaker XI. The Human Puritan XII. The Human State XIII. The Human Professor XIV. The Human Warrior XV. The Human Tradesman . XVI. The Human Woman XVII. The Human Artist •CVIII. The Human Kaiser 17 36 48 59 74 93 117 136 150 170 183 199 209 224 238 254 272 325174 THE HUMAN GERMAN THE HUMAN GERMAN CHAPTER I THE HUMAN TENANT Oh that I had in the wilderness a lodging-place {Jeremiah). ON the third of October we removed from I our old flat in Aktiengesellschaftstrasse to Number 70 Konkursplatz, Schoneberg. Being now in residence a fortnight, Letitia wants to change ; and to-day for the seventh time in four days, she took me to brand-new flats in different quarters of Berlin, S.W., and required me to marvel at the greatness of German comfort. And she re- marked that while pretentious Britons want to live in fiats, and sniff at the meek villas of Putney and Chiswick, here men with just social ambitions seek out suburban villas, while poor and honest clerks pig it in central flats. The middle-class flats in New Berlin are indeed Europe's best ; they impose outside, and inside they are better than any fiats of London. There are lifts, and velvet-pile carpeted stairs with stained- 2 •• : :-^?>? >rHE HUMAN GERMAN glass windows, and central heating (which makes you sneeze), hot water, ice-chests, safes, vacuum-cleaners, and mysterious shafts in the wall, replacing dust- bins, through which you hurl to eternity bones, potato-skins, and compromising, affectionate letters from Grete and Mizzi. The splendour of the flats impresses you as visitor even more than as tenant. The flats are built for Besuch — for Visits ; and the greater splendours are marshalled in vast reception-rooms, while beds, twi- light, cockroaches, and the smell of dinner lurk elsewhere. You are surprised to find in your modest seven-roomed flat a drawing-room fit for a ball, a dining-room fit for a banquet, a large " living- room " and library ; and, tacked on behind, three shrunken bedrooms and a unicellular servant's bed- room and pantry, into which one servant and perhaps ten eggs may be wedged. Greatest of all is the dining-room. The fleck on its splendour is that it is often a " Berlin room " — a Berliner Zimmer — with only one window, stuck obliquely in a corner, overlooking the tiresome courtyard in which every Saturday morning untiring Herr Houseporter Schack beats his carpets and children. This dining-room takes up a fourth of the flat. The one servant's room has just space for a bed, so that straw-haired Hedwig only sleeps in her room, and makes her toilet in the kitchen or hall. This is bad for servants, and THE HUMAN TENANT 3 worse for masters and mistresses ; and some (of British birth) have died of fright on catching sight of virgin Brandenburg forms in efflorescence un- veiled. Berhn servants sometimes sleep in corridors, bath- rooms, and rooms which in daytime are used by their haughty employers. Until lately flats had no servants' rooms at all. Hedwig slept in the Hdnge- hoden — the hanging loft — a broad shelf near the ceiling, usually in the back hall, sacred to mildew and arachnids. When night drew nigh Hedwig climbed thither on a ladder ; and at icy dawn she descended to the floor to put on her clothes and take off her cobwebs. It is now unlawful to hang Prussian servants in a hanging loft ; but Letitia, usually humane, praises the old barbarous way, and wishes the meddlesome police . . . " What happened," she asks you, " if the ladder fell some night, and Hedwig couldn't get down ? " *' Then she stayed up." " It is a good custom," says Letitia, whose doc- trine is that servants " make more trouble than they save." " I should throw the ladder out of the window." Naturally since comfort is made subordinate to " visit " the decorations of hall and of reception- rooms are numerous and costly. Particularly splen- did is the great entrance hall below. It transcends 4 THE HUMAN GERMAN a Wall Street broker's. It glows and glitters with bronze and marble and (painted) malachite, as if it were meant not for bald surveyors and notaries but for bathing odalisques and reclining Nubian slaves. In our Aktiengesellschaftstrasse flat the drawing-room ceiling was adorned with green frogs in Secessionist style, and there was a frieze with scenes (so we thought) from the Inferno. Letitia turned the handsome dining-room (with dull gold medallions and purple doors) into a bedroom ; and thereby provoked trouble with Herr Apothecary Schmudy, our landlord, who affirmed that we were injuring the house's repute for distinction. The lawyers advised Herr Schmudy that he had had no case, as, when drawing up the contract, he had for- gotten this prohibition. Berhn tenancy contracts stand far above British for refinement and comprehensiveness. Where the indifferent Briton rents a castle on the strength of a letter, and pays the rent when he chooses or not at all, the meanest tenancy in Moabit, N., requires four thousand words. First is a clause requiring you to pay rent in advance. Next follow two thousand words of House Statutes, for violating any one of which you may be ejected. You may not tub before seven in the morning or after eleven at night ; in winter you may not open windows for more than an hour a day ; when you make music you must. THE HUMAN TENANT 5 at all seasons, keep the windows shut ; you may not wash sheets at home, though you may wash hand- kerchiefs ; you must not let your children play on the stairs ; you may keep no animals ; you must put a rubber sheet under your typewriter ; and you must not walk in heavy boots after ten. Some con- tracts provide that if you become a happy father your contract summarily ends. Although Prussia has a higher birth rate than most states, and children are welcomed in the Imperial Statistical Yearbook, in houses they are received with just displeasure. Prussian courts have quashed this ban on multi- plication as against good manners. Such Berlin contracts, opulent as they are, are less circum- stantial than the provincial. The provincial land- lord may insist, '' 47b. The tenant undertakes to hang his windows with beautiful and distinguished curtains " ; and when you walk through Pednitz or Schoppenstedt you see this injunction in force. The landlord, naturally, reserves all proper powers. If you are three days late with your rent, or if, after one warning, you break the meanest of the House Statutes, you may be summarily expelled ; and you must pay the rent to the end of your con- tract term. Some contracts say that this fate may overtake you if, without any warning, you break a House Statute ; so that if, on the day you move in, your button-nosed Hanschen rolls marbles down- 6 THE ^HUMAN GERMAN stairs you may be required immediately to leave, and made to pay three years' rent as fine. The landlord is not always as ferocious as his contract ; but the Berlin tenant signs his submission to such conditions ; and if he does not sign he gets no flat. For the houseowners are organised in unions which have a standard contract form ; and their unions even keep black Hsts of vicious and all too human tenants who pay their rent only on the fourth day, and whose button-nosed Hanschens are detected rolling marbles down the stairs. Germans change their dwellings usually in autumn. As material for wit the first days of October rank with Britain's spring-cleaning. In moving-time Berlin grows Babylonian in confusion. Wise men who remain in the dull old flat with the dusty tile- stove in the corner suffer together with the ambitious unwise who fly to brand-new suburbs in search of moderner Komfort. For the period September 20th to October loth, the stayers get no work done. Carters, carpenters, glaziers, paper-hangers, and other manual idlers vow that they're engaged by removers ; while lawyers, doctors, and members of the parasite professions, vow that they're busy superintending the manual idlers. Life is dry. News- papers groan under Answers to moving Correspon- dents, and instead of the usual animating " Swind- ling Count's Amours," you find the tiresome : *' A. N. THE HUMAN TENANT 7 StuUenstrasse. The shelf is a fixture : you cannot force the landlord to pay the 80 pfennigs." Police wisdom governs removals. Although you rent your flat from and to October the ist you may not necessarily remove on that day. That depends on Herr Police-President v. Jagow, who issues decrees. People, he says, who live in one-roomed flats must move by the ist October ; people with two rooms on the second ; and so on symmetrically. If you leave too soon you would spend the night in the street, for the parting tenant of your new flat might be in possession, flaunting Herr Jagow's authority to stay till the 4th. In moving-time you risk paying rates and taxes twice. Greater Berhn is made up of numerous boroughs ; and a change of address often means a change of municipality. The municipality is tax- collector. It collects its own rates, which are assessed on your income ; and with them it collects the State income-tax, the Church income-tax, the dog-tax, the drainage-tax, the land-tax, the supplementary tax, the communal tax, the industry tax. The law makes you pay these taxes to the old municipaUty down to the end of the removal month. If you give notice only on October 3rd, the old borough requires taxes for November ; and the new borough wants them from October 3rd. Moving-time has consolation. You lose no letters. 8 THE HUMAN GERMAN The Imperial Post shows bloodhound persistency in tracing you. Letitia and I have lived at seven addresses, and to-day we get letters which have been addressed to the first, and have been in turn at all the following five. Naturally when even letters of love and compliment thus pursue you, bills do not fail : even with unstamped circulars from St. Louis, Mo., to Mr. Ed. Edgeworth, Berl., Germ., the Reichspost sniffs us out. What we miss the most, after our charming house near Canonbury Junction, is, of course, a garden. Germans have no gardens ; and the House Statutes forbid their children to play in the courtyard. But you can rent a tiny, fenced patch of suburban ground which waits the speculative builder ; and thither every morning send Fritzchen, flat-nosed Ella, and nursemaid Martha. The working-man's garden is a patch in an Arbour Colony. An Arbour Colony is a stretch of sandy, unfertile soil, also awaiting the builder, which is cut into fenced patches the size of a room, dug, sown, and decorated. The patches have summer-houses, mostly rickety tarpauhned sheds built by the colonists. They have no grace. There are flags, and oleographs, glass balls, bird- cages, brand-new shrubs, grey-green cabbages, ligni- fied geraniums. Arbour Colonies — there are twenty thousand patches round^Berhn — are nests of rest, drink, skat, and occasional crimes of passion. Bureau- THE HraiAN TENANT 9 crats chivvy the colonists ; fine them for watering the Hgnified geraniums on Sunday ; forbid them to light matches ; evict their cooking-stoves because the shed is "an unregistered edifice the designs of which have not been passed by the Building-Police." Cooped with their infants in fenced squares on a chessboard desert, with wise authorities controlling, the colonists look, and feel, like the llama parents from Acay which in the Zoological Gardens last August gave life to twins. Only wealthy workmen settle in colonies. The garden of the poorer, indeed of most Berliners, is the flowering balcony. Most old, all new, houses have balconies — balconies big, solidly walled in, usually roofed, with tables, chairs, electric lamps, and ash-trays, where you can drowse, eat, even sleep. These are Berlin's hanging gardens. Balcony rises over balcony to five stories' height ; and all burn with geraniums, petunias, scarlet runners, hydrangeas, and sweet peas. That is, the distin- guished {vornehm) balconies. The workman's bal- cony shows more varied taste. For vegetation he likes vines, trained on elaborate lattices to exclude the light ; and for mood he seeks gaiety ; and you will see flags (seldom German), bright balls, teddy bears ; and on the wall behind merry pictures of clowns, of Count Posadowsky, of the doom of Mes- sina, Johnstown, Pa., and Sodom and Gomorrah, Pal. 10 THE HUMAN GERMAN The balcony plays a semi-public role. By a man's balcony you know him. And by a woman's. To some women balconies are back yards. You walk down a prosperous working-class street ; and see in terraces over you mostly gracious things : vines, Italian flags, roses dripping odour, aphides dripping honeydew, cohcea scandens climbing into windows, earwigs climbing into ears. And then you come across a naked balcony crossed by a cord, from the cord fluttering wet white flags of the kind displayed in incomparable England's shops at 2/iiJ. Beside them sit the attractive owners. Thus to degrade the balcony into a laundry yard — also to beat in it carpets — is polizeilich forbidden ; but policemen nod ; and sometimes you have the dust of some- body's carpets considerately washed from your neck by the drops from somebody's shift. Some take sunbaths in balconies. This at least is done by top-floor dwellers whom only angels over- look. The sun-bathers — the angels too — do it " splinter naked," as Germans say here ; mid nod- ings on, as angels say in New York. Sunbaths need foresight. The balcony, remember, is appendage to a room, often a drawing-room, and it is reachable only by way of the room. Through forgetfulness here a tragic tragedy was acted yesterday week. Our oldest German friend, Herr Dr. Ing. Gamradt, regularly takes sunbaths. As you will later meet Herr THE HUMAN TENANT 11 Dr. Ing. Gamradt, let me commend him as the clever technologist, whose lectures on Roofing and American Construction (he has lived in New York and Charles- town) had such success in Westphalia. At midday Dr. Gamradt lay lazily and nakedly on his balcony, roasting his Pomeranian skin, and reading the proofs of his Tendencies and Aspirations in the Belgian Portland Cement Industry. His clothes were in the bathroom. Just as his dreams were thickening, and his Pomeranian skin was turning rich Kanaka, two dreadful voices echoed from close by. It was his wife, Frau Dr. Ing. Gamradt (Mieze) conversing eagerly with a visitor, Frau Schoolteacher Morgen- stern. The two were in the drawing-room which opens on to the balcony. The position was grim. The noontide sun flamed with dog-day fierceness ; Herr Dr. Ing. Gamradt had emphatically had enough ; and something uncommonly like blisters rose on his rose-red arms. But between him and shadow sat unsuspecting Frau Dr. Gamradt with Frau Schoolteacher Morgenstern ; and the only robe in sight was Tendencies and Aspirations in the Belgian Portland Cement Industry. The position was grim. The sun persisted in flaming ; the last cloud shrank ; the voices echoed. Herr Dr. Gamradt's skin peeled. He suppressed screams with difficulty. He began to think of death, of overdone veal, of the Aztec Emperor Guatomozin. 12 THE HUMAN GERMAN And then, oh joy, dehverance transiently smiled. Frau Schoolteacher Morgenstern rose to go. Herr Gamradt's heart hopped. And then it stood still. " Sit down, Kathie," said hospitable Frau Dr. Med Gamradt. " Of course you're here for lunch. Let's look at my travel photographs. I have just eight hundred. After that we'll go on to the balcony, and see the nasturtiums." Watering balcony flowers is a well-ordered matter. By police decree you water them only in the morning before eight or after ten at night. Because water flows from the balcony, and wets the day-time crowd. Within lawful hours you may pour down Niagaras. This has possibilities. Some waterers gratuitously revive the tradesman's lettuces beneath. Some show less human zeal. It was while armed with a watering-can that Herr Undertaker Buehl of Berhn-Pankow fell dead with joy on seeing his wife's betrayer come down the street in a new silk hat. The balcony has better uses. By playing the part of the late Mr. Stead's Introductions League, it makes about 3 145 per cent, of all Berhn marriages. Prussians, remember, do not call ; and flat neigh- bours seldom see each other's faces. But often adjoining flats have adjoining balconies severed by mere iron shields ; and this dualism fosters fruitful companionships. Fraulein Typist Kupp comes out to swamp green-fly off her scarlet runners, and in- THE HUMAN TENANT 13 evitably Herr Cand. Theol. Flech, who lives next door, at once issues on his balcony to shear aged leaves from geraniums. If it is after ten, mother is asleep, and Fraulein Typist Kupp seeks a theological view why green-flies flourish in an otherwise perfect world. And naturally Herr Cand. Theol. . . . Thereon the estranging shield proves a barrier as frail as the wall of Thisbe and Pyramus. Thus the versatile balcony sends up the marriage rate. And sometimes, says Herr Dr. Gamradt, it merely sends up the birth-rate. With iron reserve in the matter of neighbourly calling, Germans have a freedom from vulgar pride which contrasts soothingly with the arrogance of England. That is your first discovery when you take a flat, the more so if it is one of those sumptuous apartments which the Dwellings-gazette calls *' high- gentlemanly." The flats seem all to be classed either as high-gentlemanly (hochherrschaftlich) or merely gentlemanly (herrschaftlich) ; but alike whether you live among high-gentlemen or merely among gentlemen, you welcome everywhere the pleasant freedom from pride. Though this for me is the same, Letitia has always insisted on a high-gentlemanly flat. The flat which we now inhabit is in a tolerable street ; has central heating, a hall-porter, a lift which sticks between floors ; and entrance-hall impressionist frescoes of 14 THE HUMAN GERMAN Swabian gleaners with rich green elbows and arth- ritic toes. The rent works out at £25 per year per room. At Canonbury Junction on such abundance we should put on side, give occasional bridge parties, and talk of our nephew's acquaintance with a baronet. But here vanity shrinks. We are struck into Christian meekness by our fellow-tenants' unexact- ing ways and unspoiled austere domesticity. Our high-gentlemanly house has two staircases, back and front. The front one is labelled in black on white enamel : *' For Gentlemen Only." This notice is meant to exclude servants and messengers — post- men are gentlemen within the sense of the enamel. But though our hall-porter, Herr Gielsdorf, sternly forbids the servants to drag home beer pitchers by the gentlemanly stairs, he makes no objection to the gracious lady coming up the gentlemanly stairs as her own domestic. And this gives you an illumin- ating view of the domesticity of local souls. At eleven every morning we go out to skate in Lutherstrasse Ice-Palace ; and twice in the week we meet on the stairs Frau Accountant Felix Curt. She lives overhead ; and gives dances ; so she must be a high-gentlewoman. She is tastefully dressed, wears five rings over her white cotton gloves ; and has plainly been marketing. Under her arm she carries, half-papered, a grey-green loaf of bread. At midday we return ; and stumble in the lift on THE HUMAN TENANT 15 nice-looking Fraulein Else Schimmelpfennig, who lives on Treppe 4. She is unquestionably a high- gentlewoman ; her colonel father fights the Artillery Staff in the Zeitschrift fur Kruppel, and her student brother at Bonn was fined for ungentlemanly con- duct. She has laid down in the lift a reed sack, such as is borne by carpenters and burglars, and above the edge twinkle six bottle-tops. Other high- gentlemanly neighbours are as domestic. Frau Architect Riehl, who used to nod so pleasantly to Letitia from her hall, the while she ate straight out of a frying-pan, lets beer drip on the stairs. On Letitia's complaint, our landlord took action ; and soon he sent us the answer of Frau Architect Riehl to the complaints of " die Englische Familie Groane which impertinently and with quite-unheard-of obtrusiveness in our internal affairs with persistence to meddle the assurance has." That little trouble led me to call on Herr Dr. Ing. Gamradt. I found him, seated on soft cushions, reading Pohlmann's Chemical Reactions of Sunlight on Organic Matter. He met me with the news that our house is not high-gentlemanly at all. " How many rooms have you ? " •' Five." " Then don't complain. Your flat is simply gentlemanly ; and you cannot expect high-gentle- manly amenities. The number of rooms in your 16 THE HUMAN GERMAN flat locates precisely your place in society. A house with five-roomed flats cannot possibly be genteel. Londoners take big houses because they have large families or many visitors ; Berliners take them because they have large positions. Follow my advice ; change next October into a six- or seven- roomed apartment. You may not want the extra rooms ; but you will gain high-gentlemanly privi- leges, and you can insist that beer is not ..." Herr Gamradt has nine rooms. On the way out we met a high-gentlemanly gentleman carrying — for all the world like a British election candidate — a large black load. Letitia thereat engaged me in the usual argument, I holding that Germans are not really as humble as they seem, while she persisted that they are meeker than lambs. " The transport of supper by the gentlemanly stairs," said I, "is probably not domesticity at all. More likely it's a perverse and subtle vanity. The origin is pride, the pride of conscious worth. It's the pride that apes humility." " If that is so," said Letitia, " it apes it exceed- ingly weU." CHAPTER II THE HUMAN BUREAUCRAT I see the lords of humankind pass by {Goldsmith). WHEN we removed to Konkursplatz we got into trouble. The cause was the basic assumption of Prussian criminology that every man is a burglar until he proves himself something worse. In short, we got into war with the pohce. In Prussia every citizen, native or aUen, must procure within three days of removal to anywhere three spacious, cream-coloured police registration forms. A registration form has eleven columns, and five-and- thirty questions, and all the questions must be answered, in triplicate, on pain of fine. They ask your Christian names and surname ; your occupation (or occupations) ; the names of your wife (or wives), of your children, of your servants. Your wife (or wives) must give her (or their) maiden name(s) ; and if she has (they have) been married before, then all disused surnames are required. Relatives and visitors must be entered. You must give your and their birthdays and birthplaces ; 2 17 18 THE HUMAN GERMAN religion ; conditions ; whether single, married, widowed, or divorced ; whence you have come ; your last settled address ; whether you have formerly lived in Police-District ; if so, when, with whom, at what address ; and lastly, you must truthfully describe the position and condition of your dwelling. Experienced men with no children and one servant do this in an hour. Letitia and I, being without experience and with two children, need a day ; for an hour is spent in dragging from nurse- maid Hesperia, whether she was born in Weissensee, Thiiringia, or Weissesee bei Berlin. She says they are the same. At nine that evening, thanking Heaven you're done with it, you fall exhausted on a bed, and dream of the birth of Hesperia in two places at once. It is the 8th October. On the loth October a document addressed "Herr Merchant Edge worth " requires your attendance at Police-Re vier 6, " for purposes of legitimation." " Legitimation " is no re^'ection on your birth. It means merely the documentary substantiation of the entries in the registration form. The assump- tion so far is that you have been lying. Armed with a passport you rush to PoUce-Revier 6. The police are very polite, even human ; they ask if Cork is near Edinburgh. You turn to go. An uncommonly tall, broad-shouldered, skinny policeman, whose tunic is wrinkled across in architectonic terraces, says, THE HUMAN BUREAUCRAT 19 " Wait a moment, please ! " He asks, " Where is your de-registration form ? " " You have it there." " You understand," he says. " We have your registration form. We want the de-registration form." And he explains that this is a document of discharge, or ticket-of-leave, issued by the police when you left your old address ; and that you ought to have got it when you moved. You say you did not know. " There are no registration certificates of either kind in England." He smiles incredulously. Luckily such troubles end. Having sent for the House-Book of your former dwelling, and got it accepted instead of de-registration certificate, you settle down in peace, and cease to shine as the sus- pect burglar of Konkursplatz. So you think . . . October the 13th is a rainy morning, and you are sitting in an icy tub conceitedly thinking you have the one tough skin in Berlin-Schoneberg. A mina- tory knock comes to the bathroom door. You peer round. It is the architectonic policeman. He is surprised to find you naked. " I thought this was the dining-room," he apologises. " I heard liquid flowing, and thought you were pouring out coffee." And he holds up the cream-hued registration form, points to something illegible in the column, " Re- ligious Confession," and asks alarmingly : " What is that ? " 20 THE HITMAN GERMAN " Protestant," you answer. " What is a Protestant ? " " A Protestant ... a religion." " There is no such reUgion. Do you mean Evan- geUcal ? " " Yes ; Evangehcal." " Then you belong to the Prussian State Church ? " As membership of the Prussian State Church has minatory fiscal implications, you answer at once : " No." " Then you are a Dissident." " No . . . not exactly." " I see. If you are neither Evangehcal nor Dissi- dent, you are plainly a Roman Catholic." Your coffee — that is your tub — ^is flowing over ; and you are tired. The policeman enters you up as Roman Catholic ; says, " You forgot to put your wife's maiden name in the duplicate, Guten M or gen " ; and goes. This time your spirits are excellent ; the pohce- man himself has admitted that all is in order. But at eight o'clock on the evening of November 4th new trouble comes. You have just sat down to dinner, and begun an argument with Letitia, who asks why the police have not caught the murderer of Frau Widow Torkel. " The Lokal-Anzeiger," you answer, "says the police are overworked." At this moment Hedwig enters and whispers that there is THE HUMAN BUREAUCRAT 21 a policeman in the hall. Convinced this time that it is a case of handcuffs, and that you yourself are the murderer of Frau Widow Torkel, you walk to your doom. It is the architectonic policeman. He says, " Guten Abend! " and apologises ; but as you are a Briton he does not say that he heard you swallowing bouillon, and thought you were filling your tub. Your blunders, it seems, are — (i) filHng the column " State-Citizenship " with englisch, whereas it should be gross-brittanisch ; and ignoring three of the more important questions in column number eleven : " Whether you are living in your own apartment or in a lodging ; if the latter in whose apartment ; whether you are living in a sublet apartment, or in a sleeping-corner, or in service ; whether the apart- ment is in a front-house, or a side-wing, or a back- house ; whether you live in the cellar, or on the ground-floor, or on the first-floor, or on the second- floor, and so on ? You are pleased to issue unfined from these com- pHcations ; and you soon forget the registration. In fact, for weeks you see only one policeman ; and that is slovenly Herr Detective Officer Schall, who works for the Foreign Office. He asks you abruptly : " Do you know Herr French Newspaper Correspon- dent Moulin ? " " I do," you answer. " Nobody reads his silly telegrams." This is your comradely way of saving M. Moulin from being put under 22 THE HUMAN GERMAN observation as a publicist of influence. You tell this to M. Moulin ; and he thanks you. He says it's strange the police have not yet caught the mur- derers of Frau Widow Torkel, Herr Brewer Wenzcezc and the schoolboy Pieper ; and you give him your cutting from the Lokal-Anzeiger , explaining that the police are overworked. He says : " Have you got through your registration troubles ? Then thank your stars." You thank them. On the 8th of December you are developing snapshots of the Stadion, when the architectonic pohceman knocks poHtely and enters in a trail of light. He holds up a sheaf of registration forms. "It's only a formality," he says. " Would you mind explaining. Here is your certificate when you first lived at Charlottenburg ; here is your first Berlin certificate, nineteen hundred and six ; here is the paper you filled in at Stettin when you arrived there from Derby, Scotland, on June the third — June the eighth, I mean — nineteen hundred and nine ; here is your Halensee paper, and here . . . Excuse this trouble. But in the Charlottenburg paper you call yourself a Protestant ; in the Berlin paper you are a Lutheran ; in the Derby paper an Evangelical ; in the Halensee paper a member of the Church of Ireland ; and now, it appears, you are a Roman Catholic. Would j^ou mind explain- ing . . ." THE HUMAN BUREAUCRAT 23 " Certainly. Most of them are the same . . ." " I know. But assuming that a Protestant and a Catholic are the same, how can you account. ... If you have changed your religion four times you must produce the Religions-Change-Certificates. . . ." And he explains, carefully premising that it is not his business, what you must do if you want a Religions-Change-Certificate. You must apply to the District Court for permission to change your religion, and pay a shilling fee. The Court may not withhold permission ; but it may first dispatch Herr Pastor Dittebrand to plead with you and make clear that you know your mind. Thereon you get a certificate recording your change of faith. " It is dangerous," says Herr Dr. Ing. Gamradt, "to enter yourself indiscriminately as Anglican, Lutheran, Irish Church, and Roman CathoUc — you risk being assessed with Church-tax by aU these churches at once." You are impressed by this registration system as an effective way of controlling aliens and natives ; and are doubly impressed when next day you read in the Morgenpost that Herr Ilja Lewy of Rathenau, falsely registered with the police as Count Louis Chmielnicki, of Cracow, has fled after marrying three West End widows and robbing four. You are further well impressed by the courtesy shown during investigation. Considering the vast police authority 24 THE HUMAN GERMAN such efficiency and polish are miraculous. For it is true that the police are overworked. Their functions are endless. You read in the Morgenpost of August ist that Herr Police-President Jagow has forbidden hat-wearing in the theatres ; on August 2nd, that he has forbidden hat-pins in hats ; on August 3rd, that he has fixed the ist October for opening autumn sales ; on August 4th that he has forbidden artists to paint public automobiles with purple grape- festoons on a silver background ; on August 5th, that he has expelled twelve hundred artists from sixth-floor studios ; on August 6th, that he says pedestrians must cross Friedrichstrasse at an angle of 43 "37 ; on August 7th, that he has forbidden Wil- mersdorf to build a swimming-bath. The dis- cretionary omnipotence of Herr Police-President are shown by the motives of his swimming-bath decision. He holds that Berlin has enough recrea- tion. It is in his competence to say when four million citizens have enough recreation. If police- men with such powers are ordinarily civil and help- ful (the most so when addressed insinuatingly as " Herr Sergeant-Major ") the charges commonly levelled against the Prussian constable are certainly untrue. Bravest of police institutions here is the station- ing at street crossings of constables versed in English. At many important corners stand scholarly men in THE HUMAN BUREAUCRAT 25 blue, with sleeves showing Union Jacks, effectively embroidered upside down. And Stars and Stripes. The flags are signals to helpless Britons and Ameri- cans that here is English spoken. Our little friend Bernal Harley lately wagered that he would puzzle the most learned of them with a simple question ; but he lost his bet. He chose as victim the Unter den Linden constable whose normal day goes in answering Americans from Mo. and Va., who pant to learn if the Cathedral is the Kaiser's palace, and if the Brandenburg Thor is called after the God of Thunder. After asking a number of simple ques- tions which the constable answered at sight, Bernal tried to puzzle him with : "I seek the address of Herr Professor Jank whose labours on logic ..." " Whose what ? " " Whose labours on logic ..." " I apprehend. If you will buy labels for luggage take the third. ..." Everywhere Bernal got intel- ligible answers ; and he came home vowing that England must rejoice thus to enforce her culture on alien breeds ; and have it proclaimed even by constable's elbows that her sons, alone in the world's fifty nations, speak no tongue but their own. Gentle and scholarly as are Prussia's pohcemen, they are perhaps too austere to fall in the group of all too human bureaucrats. " And all other bureau- crats," says Letitia, but she errs. The Prussian bureaucrat is very human. He pushes his humanity, 26 THE HUMAN GERMAN says Herr Dr. Gamradt, to the verge of fraud ; and he crowns his humanity in being humanly found out. For ages he has traded on his unimpeached incor- ruptibiUty ; on his Cimmerian gravity ; on his Olympian remoteness from all-too-human unofficials. Yet now it seems, he is a whited sepulchre ; he has fallen in the eye of the nation ; and when once- respectful Herr Gamradt spies him in the offing he keeps his hat on his head. Not that his sin is mortal. It is mere prestige- kilHng. He has gone on the Stage. Fact is the super - Scottish State {" ubey-schoUisch," saj's the Vossische Zeitung, writing on Thrift) pays him ill. And since here — even in tariff-reformed Prussia — bread costs pfennigs, he secretly supplements his super-scottish wage by making the world laugh and cry. Grand opera, concerts, the bearable legitimate drama, the base variety show, even the meek fifty- pfennig kino, yield him wealth. For him as citizen and parent, says Gamradt, these are decent expe- dients ; but with profane men the}' degrade his bureaucrat's dignity and they take black bread from the mouths of artists no richer than him- self. It was all due to the income-tax. The income-tax organism here is even less human than Britain's ; and even sharper in seeing that citizens do not humanly err. In the paper on which j^ou assess your THE HUMAN BUREAUCRAT 27 wealth you must supply a list of your family, servants, and all dependents ; and you must state the rent of your flat. So that if you support two children, three nieces, and five servants, and pay £300 in rent, it is useless measuring, as you would in cheaper England, your total income at £309. Like the registration system, the taxing system is highly effective ; for Herr Professor Dr. Hans Delbriick shows that one-fourth of Prussian income derived from land pays its lawful dues, while the remaining three-fourths stays, evasively untaxed, in the human Prussian purse. It was a breach of this just system which led to the exposure of bureaucrats. Herr Venetian-Blind- Manufacturer Kliemsch-Charlottenburg had been shamefully forced by Herr Income-Tax Assessor Flatau to pay on his real income ; and he flew to drown his woe in a Friedrichstadt Lokal. When the woe was soaked to insensibility he began to notice surroundings ; and he saw in the orchestra a familiar, dignified face collaborating with a fist that was banging a tambourine. It was Herr Income-Tax Assessor Flatau. Herr Kliemsch upset his mug ; flew, vengeance-winged, home ; and spent a fort- night gathering damning facts about bureaucrats who degrade their high vocation by playing the buffoon and taking black bread from the mouths of artists as poor as themselves. And he wrote a 28 THE HUMAN GERMAN letter to the TageUatt, and signed it " A Clown out of Work." The facts startled. Olympian bureaucrats, whose noonday haughtiness turns the public green, meta- morphise nightly into mild trombonists, into curled jeunes premiers on suburban footlights, into betrayed husbands for French kinematograph films, into circus Hussars whom the clown kicks to make a Berlin holiday. In the capital alone, wrote Herr Kliemsch, two hundred bureaucrats thus increase their wage — there are some who earn a pound a week as statesmen and two pounds a week as buffoons. Class keeps to class. Treasury runners shine in Wagner and Debussy ; subaltern insurance writers serve in night cafes ; and there are post office clerks who stand at theatre doors and sell programmes humbly to men to whom they haughtily sell stamps. Naturally the Kliemsch exposures brought on war. The bureaucrats kept calm — the exposures at least confuted Lassalle's unmannerly " idle as a post office clerk." But Actors' and Musicians' Unions sent thirty tear-stained petitions begging the Kaiser's ministers to make cease the abuse. They said that a whole seven thousand actors, musicians, buffoons, circus Hussars, and betrayed French husbands are chronically out of work, and that bureaucrat competition is the cause. The THE HUMAN BUREAUCRAT 29 super-scottish ministers answered that Prussia is free ; that healthy competition . . . that in ex- ceptional cases they might possibly . . . The Unions said, " The Stage is supporting public servants because the State is too mean to pay them a living wage." And they wrote pamphlets on A Municipal Housing Expert as Comic Aunt ; and signed them *' A Clown out of Work." Prussia's bureaucrats, says Herr Gamradt, thus decay to buffoons because of all civilian workers they are paid the least. Only Soldiers, on nine shillings monthly, envy them. In Prussia, Dr. Gamradt adds, wealth grew nearly seventy per cent in the twenty years after 1886 ; and industrial wages went up thirty per cent in ten years after 1897. But bureaucrats' wages remained unchanged ; and up till 1909 many thousands were passing poor on £40 a year. A lavish legislature yearly talked of better wages ; but super-scottish ministers said the State had no money. Four years ago they gave way. To-day there are seventy different wage-classes ; and the lowest wage for bureaucrats (but not the lowest wage for State employees) is £55. The highest class rises from £700 to £850. High officials are badly paid. Ministers of Prussia get £1500 ; most Imperial State Secretaries £2000 ; the Foreign Secretary is required to dine diplomats into im- becility on a thin £2500 ; and Wilhelmstrasse has 80 THE HUMAN GERMAN Privy Councillors who keep Europe a-tremble on a meagre £12 a week. Not only bureaucrats suffer from the State's sharp thrift. The public feels it too. The State neither stamps nor O.H.M.S.'s its letters ; but sends them unstamped, and collects pennies and half- pennies at your door. This not only when the State's relation to you is that of complainant and monitor, but always. When you order the State to install a telephone, thus degrading it to trades- man's rank, it makes you pay postage both ways ; you wait for the telephone a month, and once a week, even though you make no complaint, the State sends you an unstamped " coUect-on-dehvery " post card, saying that the telephone will come. When a milkman to whom you owe three marks goes bankrupt, the Official Receiver bombards you for months with unstamped letters telling you of the many ways by which you may observe and break the law. A gymnasium director named Neumann once sought to make the State pay its own halfpenny ; he fought the case through three judicial instances, recovered the halfpenny, and forced the State to pay two-thirds of the costs. Cause of official penury is official plethora. There is too much bureaucrat ; and too little work ; and the surplus energy goes in elaborating a " Chancel- lory style " which would brighten a Pekin literatus. THE HUMAN BUREAUCRAT 31 Too many ill-paid clerks who work little are more profitable to the State than too few well-paid clerks who work hard. The greater the bureaucrat army the firmer the grip of the State. Herr Dr. Gamradt thinks that an eighth of the male Germans whom the census returns as independently wage-earning are either permanent officials or casual State or municipal employees. He gives the number as 2,350,000 as against 17,000,000 private workers. His authority is the Reichstag Member Naumann who years ago put State and municipal officials at 1,200,000. These were officials — Beamte — in the narrow sense, and there are half a million more State-railway men who rank as '* workers." The official State-railway staff is 360,000 ; the official post and telegraph staff 320,000 ; the school teachers 183,000. To public employees of all kinds £170,000,000 is paid ; but, shared by two million bureaucrats, the sum, says Herr Gamradt, is small. The bureaucrat is even poorer in liberty than he is in pence. His politics are watched. Naturally he may not be a Socialist ; but even the bureaucrat- Radical has a thorny time. Herr Gamradt says that this has got worse since Bismarck thirty years ago produced a royal ordinance proclaiming that their oath of service compels officials to support Govern- mental policy. When rural commissaries with seats in the Diet voted against a Government Canal Bill 32 THE HUMAN GERMAN they lost their posts. The bureaucrat's vote at elections is — thanks to the open ballot — carefully controlled. Also social slavery oppresses him. Berlin municipal clerks are forbidden to live in the suburbs unless doctors swear they must. Because a cashier latety made off with some hundred marks, Berlin Municipality required all its fifteen hundred cashiers to be officially photographed " in order to facilitate tracing of future embezzlers " ; and it added insult to injury by appraising its bureaucrats' portraits at sevenpence a head. Probably the higher bureaucracy suffers from Reich sverdrossenheit, that psychopathic state induced by realisation that the Empire has not fulfilled its promise. To public servants the Empire has brought no substance, but it has stolen the old glory. Under the German Bund officerdom ruled, unchallenged, Berlin. Officials had no money ; but others had less. With the Empire, quickly came rich industrial men with social pretensions ; gracious Kaisers titled them " Commercial Councillor " ; and they gratefully edged officialdom and officerdom out of the dearer streets into mild Charlottenburg's suburb. In happier days bureaucrats and bellocrats kept one-horse victorias, and men without victorias stared. Now Herr Commercial Councillor Uth has three motor-cars, and he can afford to run over a Privv Councillor. In Berlin's brief season Herr THE HUMAN BUREAUCRAT 33 Privy Councillor plays — outside Court entertain- ments — no role. Fat men from Westphalia and Silesia monopolise Berlin's Park Lane, the Tier- gartenstrasse ; buy the best theatre seats, drinks, and women, and generally lord it, making a show aU the grander because the Junker aristocrats keep in their country homes. The penury of the higher bureaucrats is not salved with political glory. As these profess — in Herr Dr. Bethmann-Hollweg's words — to be above all parties, no party troubles about them. Though ministers — Imperial and Prussian — are at heart stout Conservatives, the Reichstag and Landtag Conservatives, having no chance to be ministers themselves, will not gratuitously risk odium by identifying themselves with irresponsible adminis- trators' acts. It is only when he falls that the bureaucrat becomes a national hero. Dernburg and Wermuth are instances. When Dernburg found that he could not get on with Herr Dr. v. Bethmann- Hollweg, and gave up office, his countrymen, till then indifferent, found him a hero and martyr. While Wermuth was finance minister his was a colourless name. Men said he was the usual safe, unsympathetic bureaucrat with small talents, with no tormenting principles. When he quarrelled with Bethmann-Hollweg 65,000,000 men realised he was the best financier the Empire has had, and 3 34 THE HUMAN GERMAN grateful Berlin showed its high regard by making him its Oberbiirgermeister. The system is perverse, but good. The hope of attaining loss of office spurs to work. Herr Bureau- crat Canzius slaves for his country thirty tedious years — as referendar, as assessor, as rural com- missary, as government-president, as provincial- president, as states-minister. All men ignore him. His pictures smile in no newspapers ; no one writes praise of his hats ; no one elopes with his wife. And at last, fatigued with obscurity, he provokes trouble. He tells his factious Chancellor that brandy rebates are bad, or that Schleswig's Danes must learn to plough with zebus ; and he goes to bed resigned, ennobled, and free. He wakes famous. Editors print his unfamiliar face wreathed in laurels ; cities beg him to be Oberbiirgermeister ; and " man of principle," " martyr to conscience," " at last a real statesman " whiz round his ears till death. The bureaucrat is human. Yet fallen from his estate (to the variety stage), unpaid, unpopular, he still stands above colleagues in less favoured lands. The Briton, as Gamradt says, has not only small respect for officials, but lacks even the word, for no man says, *' Smith is an official," and " Smith is a civil servant " may be praise of the cook. The fonctionnaire, the tchinovnik are no rivals. Democ- racy has clipped one's omnipotence ; thieving above THE HUMAN BUREAUCRAT 35 his rank has got the other in gaol. The Beamier stands alone. His coat-tails are potent as a pasha's horse-tails. The portfolio under his shiny sleeve is an arcanum. He is surly but placable, dignified and condescending, calm — even when kicked by circus clowns — devoted to duty, impeccable, remote. CHAPTER III THE HUMAN MAIDSERVANT Of humblest friends, bright Creature, scorn not one. ( Wonh-worth.) IT is getting on towards evening, and no work has been done ; for all day long from our kitchen comes a distracting murmurous buzz about marks, pfennigs, registry offices, bridegrooms, greedy devils, and boots. It is straw-haired Hedwig talking to next-door's cook. Judged by her tear- soaked protests Hedwig pants for marriage, but is checked by the gross venality of Prussian love. The cook agrees with Hedwig ; and the acoustically efficient dwelling rings. "If he asks for more than a thousand marks," screams the cook, " he's a greedy devil." " I . . . told him ... I had . . . eight hundred," sobs Hedwig. " He said . . . that wouldn't . . . pay for his boots." " Then marry Wilhelm," saj^s the cook. " He limps and I hate his trousers. But he's strong. . . . You could open a dairy." And she bangs the door and goes. From this dialogue we judge with drilled intuition 36 THE HUMAN MAIDSERVANT 37 that dinner will be late, and that Hedwig will shortly leave us to get married. As dinner is always late ; as six Hedwigs, Marthas, Lisas, Friedes, Huldas, and Antonias have already left us to get married, I take small notice. But Letitia breaks into tears. She is up again, she sees, against the immemorial, universal serving-maid-question, which plagues you in Paris, drives Romans to Libya, and slays each regenerative silence at Hampstead afternoon teas. It was only yesterday Letitia came to me with pre- monitions, for she overheard a kitchen conversation. " It's my opinion," said next-door's cook, " that the family Edge worth is suspicious. Why have they all these newspapers lying about ? Have you told the pohce ? " " There is nothing doubtful about them," said Hedwig, " except that they are not gentlefolk. They have no sideboard." Letitia makes no con- cealment that the German serving-maid-question is tenfold worse than the British. For whereas, in our happy years at Canonbury Junction, she daily ex- claimed with pathos, " That cook is beyond words," here she says to her friends with superior-sympathe- tic informativeness : " There are no real servants outside England." That is her graceful way of saying the basest English servant excels the noblest German. I find it exaggerated. Hedwig, like the flat she runs and the policeman who runs her, has a high redeeming 38 THE HUMAN GERMAN humanit}^ and virtues deserving note. Everyone finds her apostrophe " Gracious Lady " pleasanter than the smothered British " marm." And Hedwig has interest if only for her clever blend of antipodal civilisations. No Czech plough-girl has more strength and simplicity ; no Jersey City factory miss has a higher standard of life. She has the rude, healthy face, the butcher arms, the rolled-mattress breast, the earthquake gait, and the opaque, imperturbable ideology of the first ; but she has a thirst for cul- ture, for independence, hats, dancing-halls, and biographs which make her excel the second. She assimilates quickly. When she comes, raw, from East Prussia she tries to strain potatoes in the telephone receiver ; before a week has passed she spends her day at this telephone making appointments (^d. a time) with meine Schwester, the Schwester being a bright-nosed salesman in some near cigar-shop who has promised to wed her if she saves a thousand marks. Hedwig's ideal of eminence is a Privy Councillor. When bidden wash, or do something else unaccus- tomed, her conquering retort is, "My last employer, Herr Privy Councillor ..." Letitia advised Hedwig to cease making thumb-marks on the pale green walls. " Don't hurry," said chill Letitia. " Your zeal for registration on the Bertillon system will be met in good time." The answer was that Herr THE HUMAN MAIDSERVANT 39 Privy Councillor Fiirstenbaum liked damaged things; he bought old Biedermeier cupboards. By citing Privy Councillors Hedwig shows independence. She shows it also by choosing her mistresses. She de- cUnes to serve in top-floor flats, unless given a lift key ; and these flats, though airiest and brightest, must be let at lower rentals. The servility shown by free British serving-maids is rare in subject Prussia. Towards unknown callers, and unknown persons generally, Hedwig cherishes that incredulous reserve which is the attitude towards strangers of her country's police. Not after months of remonstrance can she be trained to open a hall door cheerfully, and lead a caller directly to a room. She opens the door a furtive inch, squints sharply through the chink, and glowers on the intruder from a strip of face primed with concentrated, dark suspicion, and inexpressible dread. Sometimes she shuts the door in his face. If she admits the foe at all, she leaves him waiting in a dark hall, shuffles her ploughmaid feet, giggles, announces fearfully that a nameless Herr is waiting outside ; and rushes back to make sure that the nameless Herr has not pocketed the chairs. Hedwig's way of looking suspiciously at callers is so universal that even builders give it heed. In the middle of hall doors they construct circular window- 40 THE HUMAN GERMAN lets the size of a monocle. They are called " stare holes." This makes it easy for Hedwig to recon- noitre without danger. When you arrive outside Herr Dr. Ing. Gamradt's Goltzplatz flat, the first sign of occupancy is a glazed Polyphemus eye glaring horribly out. Having thus been frightened from her own hall-door, Letitia said it must not happen again. It never did happen. When next Letitia arrived without her latchkey, she saw not Hedwig's Prussian- blue, East-Prussian eye, but a red ten-pfennig stamp, which neatly blocked the spyhole. The door flew open boldly, in generous English way ; and on Hedwig's features beamed the artist's satisfied smile, the divine smile of Raphael as he ended the Sixtine Madonna. " I learned it," said Hedwig, " from Frau Privy Councillor Fiirstenbaum. The gracious lady said it put her in mind of Venice." Hedwig nurses a passion herself to shine as gracious lady. She likes to call herself Stiitze, or help. She abjures caps. Her many virtues shrink when she has found a bridegroom. As a rule Hedwig looks on domestic slavery as rest-place on the road to wife- hood. But even if she has a strong passion to die a virgin as normal maids have to die widows, a bride- groom is needed to keep appearances up. An early question of all new acquaintances is, " Is it possible you have not a bridegroom? " Berlin maids too plain — ^rather, for beauty counts httle, too poor — THE HUMAN MAIDSERVANT 41 to think of marriage, pay wages to men to act as their stage sweethearts ; to take them, that is, to dances, and save them from pubHc shame. Hedwig has brave ideals of a bridegroom. She hkes him fair, moustachioed, saccharine in urbanity (saccharine often also in nutritive value), dressed respectably as shop-clerk, never as working-man. Naturally such perfection weds no maid without money ; and that is the key to the kitchen's murmurous buzz about marks and pfennigs and greed}^ devils and boots. Hedwig's way to find a bridegroom is to join a dancing-class, and pay five marks a month. Most betrothals are reached here or at some Tanzlokal, a public dance hall. Hedwig arrives at the dance hall in white satin dress and white satin slippers ; and she brings in a parcel a plain cotton blouse and skirt, and honest leathern shoes. When she has finished her initial tango, or perhaps after the " coffee- pause," she flies to a dressing-room ; sheds her satin splendour ; comes back in cotton and leather, and dances till dawn. She is a careful maid ; she knows that ceaseless dancing makes stout forms sweat ; and that satin costumes and satin slippers are easily damaged. So having made a reputation by showing off her clothes, she finishes her spree in storm-proof garments, and proves to rivals and bridegrooms that thrift may go with wealth. Hedwig's engagement is 42 THE HUMAN GERMAN a last blow to her fitness for servitude. Her bride- groom generally is a pert Social Democrat, who holds that the poor should not work for the bloated rich ; and once back in the kitchen, Hedwig rushes head- long towards the socialistic state. Prussian legislation evilly entreats Hedwig. She lives in servitude ; must obey unreasonable orders ; may be fined by her mistress ; must pay for spoiling things — not tempers ; and in strict law cannot claim to leave the house, except to a parent's funeral, or her own. Christmas and New Year's presents given to her by master or mistress may be demanded back if she is discharged owing to her own fault within a year. That is the Prussian Gesindeordnung ; and differs from Imperial Civil Law which allows anyone to demand back a gift if the giver becomes poor or can prove the beneficiary's ingratitude. When Hedwig goes to law the police act as magistrates ; they fine her without trial ; and in the high interest of authority take the employer's part. She must carry a sealed service-book with facts about her birth, condition, and past, and fiction from her employers on her Christian virtues. In one matter Hedwig is invincible. She must be treated with respect. The law which scorns to pro- tect her dinner faithfully defends her dignity ; and if you call her a donkey, a noisy hussy, or even a thoughtless thing, she will have you up for insult. THE HUMAN MAIDSERVANT 43 Frau Dr. Ing. Gamradt was fined forty marks for calling her nurse a goose. Eine grosse Gans ! " The cook," said Frau Dr. Ing. Gamradt, " was rude. She called me a cross thing." " Then prosecute her for calling you a cross thing," said the judge. ** You had no right to call her a goose." Luckily, only serious quarrels, like this, come into court. The oecumenical police without asking for evidence settle everything else. Berlin's best nursemaids come from the Spree Forest. The Spree Forest is two hours off by train. It is the one beauty-place within reach. There are few roads, but there are three hundred streams running through woods of dripping alders ; and you punt your way through life — to harvests, to christen- ings, to weddings, to the grave. The Spree Forest people are Wends, the last of the Slavs who once covered Prussia ; and they speak to-day the Wend- ish tongue and read the Wendish Bible. They are a good-looking, pale, pleasant race. The women wear numerous petticoats and head-gear made of folded tablecloths ; they carry ancestral umbrellas with chased brass handles ; and when they are not punting the streams they are riding, barefooted, bicycles. These women come to Berlin as nurses and wet-nurses ; and keep clannishly together, .talking their Wendish tongue, so that Slav, not German, is the language first heard by many a Berlin 44 THE HUMAN GERMAN babe. Berlin does not spoil the Wends. When they have done nursing they return unchanged to their watery alder wilderness, and punt, unchanged and unchangeable, to the end of life. Hedwig's critical time is round the First of April. That is a servant's change day, and many make for the seaside, and come back in autumn. About April First you see innumerable Hedwigs, all fat, rosy, and well-dressed, with rude dress-baskets and highly fashionable hat-cases, on the back platforms of tranicars ; or you may see them walking to the station beside a butcher's cart, while Wilhelm, the bridegroom, carts the things along. When not travelling, Hedwig favours the motor-omnibus, for reasons creditable to her, and to the conductor's, humanity. It gives the one opportunity to many an honest maid to get a warm, if furtive embrace. Herein comes the peculiar Berlin practice of tipping tram- and omnibus-conductors for their kindness in selling you tickets. The poorest servant girl has five pfennigs for Herr Wilhelm ; and Letitia and Frau Gamradt, who have watched the business many times, are convinced that this is Hedwig buying an ounce of love. Hedwig gets on the motor-bus, buys a ten-pfennig ticket to Bayerischerplatz, and gives Herr Conductor Wilhelm five pfennigs. Whenever the 'bus gets into thick traffic, also when it is nearing a stopping-place. THE HUMAN MAIDSERVANT 45 it slows down. Strict rules, which Herr Conductor Wilhelm has to enforce, prohibit getting off before it stops. But Hedwig, being determined to get her five pfennigs' worth, starts getting off the 'bus ages before it stops. And Wilhelm remembers his duty. He remembers he has had five pfennigs. He seizes Hedwig by the peek-a-boo blouse. She is obdurate, and makes a dash to the platform. He says " Nein," and puts his arm round her waist. She pretends to obey ; and is released. He grins. Hedwig grins back, and makes another dash. This time she reaches the step. Herr Wilhelm puts his arm round her, embraces her tightly, and hauls her back to the platform. She giggles. He grins again. Then he leaves her, to take fares. She could now easily jump down. But, strangely enough, she doesn't. She waits till Herr Wilhelm returns, and then makes a fresh dash ; and this time it is as much as he can do to stop her. He has to grip her tight ; and she rebels so violently — all the time with giggles — that he has to embrace her passionately before he has her in safety. Then again she makes a dash ; and at once two warm arms fly round her waist. Letitia says that she only once saw this happening when Hedwig had omitted to give Herr Conductor Wilhelm five pfennigs. But this Hedwig was so fat and hand- some that the most venal conductor would embrace her gratis. As a rule, when she gives nothing he 46 THE HIBIAN GERMAN does not embrace ; and, in fact, she expects nothing, and waits lawfully till the motor-bus stops. When Hedwig has left us because it's the First of April, then Letitia will go to a Servants' Registry Office, and compete viciously for Hedwig Number 2. That is a day of grief. Firstly, there are not enough Hedwigs to go round. That is the essential source of the serving-maid-question. Month after month the incontrovertible Imperial Labour Journal reports that " again in Berlin the demand for domestic servants exceeds the supply." The cause is that Hedwig marries early ; or seeks the freedom of a jam factory. At Registry Offices scores of matrons wait meekly all day in hopes that by evening a single servant may turn up to inspect them. The universal State, which meddles intrepidly in all affairs, lately reduced the fees of Registry Offices ; and the Registry Office has to even things up by doubling its business. It does this by enticing Hedwig with offers of better wages from the place it has just put her in. So the condition of a good maidservant is that she changes thrice a year. That is all about the human maidservant. In provinces the problem takes milder form. But everywhere — so Letitia says — like mistress, like maid is the source of the woe. Despite growing aspirations to English Smartheit, there is a low standard of refinement and comfort ; and this checks THE HUMAN MAIDSERVANT 47 the growth of a trained domestic class such as blesses servile, civilised England. And, indeed, when en- gaging our cook, Frieda, at Fraulein Schlaubein's office, Letitia had an experience which impressed her with that. She was shown into a waiting-room where sat thirteen of the roughest-faced, reddest- fisted, most-bedraggled females in all broad Europe. She fled in horror. " What's the matter ? " turned to her the astonished Fraulein Schlaubein. " The matter," said testy Letitia ; ** you don't expect me to take a cook from among creatures like those ? " " Beg your pardon, gracious lady," said Fraulein Schlaubein. " That is the room for the mistresses." CHAPTER IV THE HUMAN INSIDE L'esprit fait les mortels aimables, Mais I'estomac fait les heureux {C. J. Dorat). ONLY after passing through meaningless t double doors and two dusty curtains can you get to Boltuch's restaurant. The cur- tains exclude the air and entrap the smoke : and the hall is full of a blue hypnotic silence which in- duces sleep. Sleepy are the waiters, the hum of ventilators vainly churning the smoke, the street sounds. The weighty Schoneberg dinner inclines to dreams. Letitia's drowsy from the first. But not even the final buzz of summer's surviving fly acts with such opiate influence on slackened nerves as the endless restaurant chorus : " Mealtime ! Meal- time ! " It suggests Keats' Juveniha. When the Gamradts arrive to dinner at a quarter to two they yawn so threateningly that last summer's fly seeks refuge in Herr Boltuch's soup. Even after ages passed here you resent this inex- pHcable " Mealtime ! " Of course, in German it's always '' Mahlzeit ! " But "Mahlzeitl" trans- 48 THE HUMAN INSIDE 49 lated, is " Mealtime ! " and ** Mealtime ! " is the salutation bawled at you by man and woman at any time in the day between twelve and four. And in restaurants they hail with " Mealtime ! " day and night. Foreigners are puzzled. Letitia, who never ceases to growl at Berlin, has an unfair explanation. She says that eating is the sole social notion at the base of German culture. And, in fact, not merely Letitia notes the zeal with which men here pursue the higher interests of the inside. Only world-remote Britons, their mind possessed by Brillat-Savarin, their bowels with Legitime 's shilling dinner in Gerrard Street, ascribe this primitive passion to the French. The Saxon Karl von Rumohr forestalled Brillat-Savarin by three years. And a sounder scholarship would bring within their sphere Herr Aloys Rotkohl's clever Der Menschliche, Allzumenschliche Magen (The All-Too- Human Stomach) published by Lebertran of Leipzig in 1900. Here the brave word menschlich is brought into relation with deutsch (for both mean much the same) : the word Magen, which means stomach, is made cognate with Magnus ; and from this, by perverse ratiocination, the thesis reached that Germans are " superessentially a stomachic race " (''uberwesentlich-magengemassiges Volk") . This reason- ing has a basis of truth. No week goes by without cause being given to admire North-German tenacity 50 THE HUMAN GERMAN in dinner things, insight into the inside, and mono- polistic concentration on the things we eat. Not without reason the only theme that whips to storm the halcyon Reichstag sea is the claim of Berlin Municipality to trade in Danish beef. Lately we had occasion to notice this. The tale is tedious. About thrice a week business takes us to shining Leipzigerstrasse, Berlin's most honoured shopping-place. Outside a shop near Potsdamerplatz we always found excited crowds assembled, with policemen keeping order. The crowds were im- penetrably thick : and what they gazed so steadily at, no outsider could see. All that was visible above their heads was the signboard " Wulielm Linstedt." Of the nature of Wilhelm Linstedt 's merchandise, neither Letitia nor I could judge. The puzzle piqued us. It must, we easily reasoned, be something uncommon. Prussians are not loun- gers ; and Leipzigerstrasse glows with interesting shops which draw no crowd. Close by is the big shop Wertheim's with ten thin women in jupes- calottes ; across the street is the Kaiser's porcelain store : and farther on is a shop where wax Venuses undress to prove a corset's plasticity. These attrac- tions were ignored. Only the unknown wares of Wilhelm Linstedt focussed BerUn curiosity. But what on earth were these unknown attractions ? Letitia and idle I spent Wednesday evening guess- THE HUMAN INSIDE 51 ing ; and argued. No agreement was reached. My ultimate view was that it was a radium-mill grinding coffee : more imaginative Letitia guessed : an American surgeon transplanting hearts. The argu- ment grew so heated that we resolved to go to Leip- zigerstrasse early before the crowd collects ; and this we did. We rose at seven, and arrived just before eight. There were only eleven persons out- side Wilhelm Linstedt's. Panting for the apocalyp- tic solution, we edged our way through the assembly, trod on a Uhlan officer's obtrusive toe, pressed our faces to the window, and saw the mystery solved. It was a Delikatessen shop window arrayed in lobsters, sausages, asparagus, geese, and Limburg cheese. These things were not decorated ; they stood without meretricious trappings in Nature's cold, calm nakedness. That was the draw to the crowd which for five excited years had gathered day by day outside Herr Linstedt's shop. And Letitia and I stared while two gentlemen in silk hats, turned- up trouser-ends, and pink bow-ties — plainly enraged Anglophiles — stood before a basket and discussed artichokes with the grave gestures of Herr State- Secretary V. Jagow debating the ten to sixteen standard. And about them nine other superessen- tially stomachic men hopped, wedged, and peeped, deep in buzzing polemics on the price of geese : why lobsters are black ; do sardines mostly come from 52 THE HUMAN GERMAN Sardinia ; and is it true that compressed-air drills from America are used for boring cavities in Gruyere cheese ? When our friend Bernal Harley told the adven- ture to Herr Dr. Ing. Gamradt, Gamradt sniffed. He called it "obHque defamation." Because shop- windows prove nothing. " The true interests of Germans," he said, "are philosophy, music, letters, and art. And even if you will insist on judging by shop-windows ... I myself was in town to-day," continued Ing. Gamradt, " and saw quite as big a crowd as that outside Marzeck and Probst's, the art dealers at the end of Krohnstrasse. I am sure there were thirty. ... I'd bet you two to one . . ." " I'll take the bet," said Harley. " In hearse- wheels." (A " hearsewheel " is Berhnese for a crown.) "It's one to two that there are not thirty persons outside any art shop at any hour of the day you like to choose." Harley and Gamradt shook hands and got into an automobile. As they drove down Krohnstrasse a superessentially stomachic grin passed over Gam- radt 's face. Harley felt cheap. Not thirty, but at least a hundred persons thronged the narrow pave- ment, and stopped traffic in the roadway. Police- men kept order. . . . Harley paid. . . . Resolved to learn what picture thus impressed an art-loving public, he wormed his way through the crowd. A THE HUMAN INSIDE 53 single imposing canvas filled Marzeck and Probst's shop-window. It was Herr Louis Corinth's renowned Secessionist masterpiece The Butcher's Shop. Food dominates Berlin's Christmas shopping. Dur- ing all December the Delikatessen shops effloresce. They resemble not stores of vulgar edibles, but pantomime transformation scenes. The crowd out- side Herr Linstedt's has now reason to gather ; for it stares at things worth seeing. It stares at dozens of aerially delicate baskets with flower-decked handles and captivating baby-ribbon bows. Baskets like these a Briton would fill with violets and send to some other man's sweetheart. In Herr Linstedt's, the baskets bear varicoloured sausages. And every sausage has its appropriate bow. The Brunswick is tied, say, with pink ribbon ; the Salami with blue ; while the thoroughbred Battle-sausage has dark green ribbons wound about its neck. Thus food is purged of its dross associations, and exalted into the domain of the transcendental. By keeping to food and effigies of food you can solve all the Christmas-present-choosing embarrass- ments which in England plague to death. You can give real food, or imitation food made out of sweet- meats, or imitation food made out of timber. The marzipan sweet makes vital effigies of food. There are marzipan sausages, marzipan lobsters, marzipan 54 THE HUMAN GERMAN chickens, marzipan Swedish turnips, marzipan pats of butter. They make indefeasible gifts. They have the romantic aspects of food without its baser detriments. And so with toys. The toy that sells the quickest is a toy representing food. Toy sausages knock spots out of toy Zeppelins. But the two com- bine ; for you come across real sausages scientifically fitted with screws, planes, rudders, and national flags. There are wooden lobsters, wooden rounds of beef, wooden frying-pans with wonderful wooden dripping, and two wooden eggs, one verisimistically broken. Within the superessentially stomachic sphere you can lay in presents for a whole big family. For your undiscerning child niece you can buy a sausage of wood ; for some other man's sweetheart a ribboned marzipan sausage smothered in marzipan violets ; for your unpoetical brothers aerial baskets packed with real sausages. And all will be far more pleased than if you sent conventional gifts from conven- tional gift-shops. The Berlin gift -shop repels. It vomits cheap stamped-out Wiirttemberg metal on wobbly Secessionist lines : sham Tanagra figurines made, it seems, of soap : new-art belt -buckles with one glass eye which drops out next morning. You can abjure all these plagues, and keep to the grate- ful edible. And if your Germanised wife insists on asking you to buy her a basket with : — THE HUMAN INSIDE 55 One Brunswick Sausage, One Frankfurter Sausage, One Blutwurst Sausage, then you thank Heaven that it's cheaper than a sham Tanagra figurine ; and the ribbons, says Letitia, will do for Toni's doll. At Boltuch's restaurant we sit near the proprietor. He often has friends. Our dinners cost us each a mark and a quarter, or just one and threepence : and as for this we get three solid dishes and one Hquid one, we judge that Herr Boltuch profits from each a halfpenny a day. For this — such is Prussian business courtesy — he rises and bows, breaking off his tale of Bebel's retort to Prince Billow ; and he shouts " Mealtime ! " so passion- ately that his startled guests eat by mistake from their forks. There is the expense of a penny (that is, ten pfennigs) for "light" or helles beer; and another penny for Herr Waiter Otto. A penny in such restaurants is the customary tip, but circum- stances are where halfpennies are taken with joy. Our dinner consists of bouillon mit Einlage, that is, broth with interlude ; Zander, a disreputable fish, or Rollmops of herring ; Kaiser-Flesh which suggests regicide ; compote of bilberries, or a mushy fruit mus, which the competent Rumohr calls " on in- trinsic as on historical grounds the most primi- 56 THE HUMAN GERMAN tive of all evil sweets." And a globe of pastry with whipped cream inside. This whipped cream haunts you everywhere. You drink it in coffee and choco- late ; eat it with ices and sweets ; and we have even seen a diner drinking vinous Bowie from a glass held in one hand, and eating cream from a spoon held in the other. Were we natives we should cheapen our daily patronage of Herr Boltuch by joining his Round- Table — his Stammtisch — and on paying in advance for ten of his dinners we should get them at one and a penny. He would give us ten medallions, each with " Table-check " on the obverse and " J.B." (for Joseph Boltuch) on the reverse, and when we got out of tram-cars the medallions would roll about the streets, and kindly policemen would help us to pick them up. Boltuch's is a typical Berlin suburban restaurant. There is a Boltuch's at every street corner that is not occupied by a tobacconist. Berlin, of course, has eating places of nobler kind, though nowhere save in a few hotels are restaurants even moderately dear. Splendour and cheapness is Berlin's notion of joy : there is a restaurant which cost £700,000 to build where you can dine gorgeously and terribly for five shillings. The drink at the dearer restaurants is usually wine — a line of fifty pfennigs if you do not drink. At Boltuch's it is beer. Once out of ten it THE HUMAN INSIDE 57 is Munich beer ; mostly it is " light " (helles) beer, brewed by Schultheiss or Patzenhofer, always better than any British drink. There are places where you can order a halfpennyworth of beer. It is called a Pfiff. Drinks generally have queer names : Herr Gamradt calls his favourite mixture of beer and cognac " a little liaison " {ein kleines Verhaltnis). But Berlin has grown luxurious, for the drink which is truly Berlinese is drunk no more. And with it has passed away a stage of Berlin culture. This was " white beer," which poets dithyrambised as " The Cool Blonde." Die kuhle Blonde ! It is an alcohol-poor beverage brewed of undercured malt and bottled in stone. Experts drank it after taking a " string " of kiimmel, for kiimmel, experts said, whets the lips ; and made them better relish the kiss of the Cool Blonde. Once you could tell Ber- liners by their love of the Blonde. In this they showed their Berlin individuality ; and cherished — the Blonde cost a halfpenny — that Old-Prussian Thrift, which Prince Biilow praised to the Reichstag as a reason for wasting ten millions. In those days Berlin was poor. Friends met underground in fly- blown white-beer dens ; reasoned on high themes, and quaffed hke Berserkers in Valhalla. It was an age of high thinking and low drinking. Now so far from summoning the Blonde in a Friedrichstadt 58 THE HUMAN GERMAN restaurant few would notice her in a Rixdorf eating- hell. Obese Berliners swill showy beers at a penny or even ijd., while bargees, and cabman too old to be trained as chauffeurs, consort with the Cool Blonde. CHAPTER V THE HUMAN PARCEL Is not this a lamentable thing that of the skin of an innocent Iamb should be made parchment? {King Henry VI). SINCE we settled down in Germany our talk has been largely of food ; but this does not kill variety in our symposia at Boltuch's. For that I thank Letitia, who ever brings up themes for ever new, thanks to a fertility in associating incompatible notions which would puzzle Hume and Condillac. Snow makes her think of washing bills ; Schultheiss beer of topazes ; and when Otto, the waiter, fell with a basket of forks she began about Strauss' Electra. While waiting yesterday for '' haddock with mustard-butter " I took the Lokal-Anzeiger and read aloud a sentence apparently harmless. " The Char- lottenburg Town Council has purchased the Austrian engineer Konop's invention for the electrical de- struction of rats." Letita's face brightened. But assuaging as is usually her dinner smile, this time it presaged debates which spoiled two persons' tempers. 59 60 THE HUMAN GERMAN The subject was the high titles to which Prussia's bureaucrats aspire. Herr Gamradt admits that no German here can Hve without a title, description, or combination of letters affixed to his name. A distinguishing label is so essential to social validity that the phrase has even been made, Der Paket- mensch — the Human Parcel. The phrase-maker is Herr Jegor Maschuv, who, in his lively but over- praised Strayed Property, says, " This German was a human parcel ; without a label he was irretrievably lost." The label obsession explains why the names of nearly all persons who serve the State, and some who merely serve themselves, are charged with prefixes which have nothing in common with here- ditary titles. Herr Gamradt says a similar system obtains in Austria-Hungary, and in Russia, where it is known as tschin. The feature of the official titles is that they are borne before the name, and that they always end with the word " Consilarius," which is, in German, Rat. In olden days it was spelt Rath, but it is now mostly Rat ; and it was this orthography which in Letitia's associating brain was stirred by the rodentophobe Konop. Herr Gamradt read me on this a useful lecture ; but I recall only essentials. A minor bureaucrat may be a mere Rat or Consilarius ; if higher in rank he may be a Geheimer Rat or Privy Councillor ; still THE HUMAN PARCEL 61 higher, he may be a Privy Upper Government Councillor ; and when he scales the peak he may be Actual Privy Upper Government Councillor. With the last rank goes " Excellency/' When you must write to an University rector as Excellency Herr Actual Privy Upper Government Councillor Professor Dr. Jur. Phil., Med., Sc, et Ing. Platfuss, you understand the flourishing state of the commerce in ink. Outside the State service distinguished merchants get the honorary rank Commercial Coun- cillor ; distinguished, and undistinguished, lawyers and doctors, the ranks Justice Councillor, and Sanitary Councillor. The bureaucrat's title may show his horizontal speciality as well as his vertical dignity. Instead of being merely a Privy Councillor, which indicates rank, he may be Privy Admiralty Councillor, or Privy Finance Councillor, this re- vealing both rank and occupation. The minor bureaucrat may be Post Office Councillor {Post-Rat), or an Audit Councillor (Rechnungsrat) — in fact there are a hundred and fifty rats, with tails differing in longitude, as Herr Dr. Gamradt says, from Hofrat, which means Aulic Councillor, to Oberlandeskultur- gerichtsrat, which means Upper Land's Culture Court Councillor. And since women, quite as much as men, are human parcels ..." ** Very much so," says Letitia. '* Did you notice Frau Zimkat's waist ? " 62 THE HUMAN GERMAN the titles extend to them. Herr Privy Councillor Rohl's wife is not plain Frau Rohl, but Frau Privy Councillor Rohl. For women the longer titles are shorn of some of their longitude — only a lover or a borrower of money would address Frau Rohl as Frau Upper Land's Culture Court Councillor Rohl. While I was explaining this to Letitia an elderly officer entered ; and Letitia, eyeing steadfastly his nose, remembered a purple toque on the fourth floor of Wertheim's. The exegesis ceased. From Wert- heim's Letitia naturally got to bills ; and from bills she approached the problem why half my letters come to me addressed as "Herr Merchant Edgeworth." " First place," she said, " you are not a merchant, but a distinguished journahst ; and even if you were a merchant, why should you be so addressed ? Also — I want to get to the bottom — why are you entered in the Berlin Directory as Edward Edgeworth, Mer- chant ? Why don't you complain ? " "I did com- plain." " And got an apology ? " " Yes, the directory man smiled. He said few persons were victims of such flattering mistakes." Herr Gamradt, who joined us here, said that a German directory compiler, wrapper-writer, or private correspondent never rests until he finds a label for the man he writes to ; and that sooner than leave you without the humanising label he addresses you as " Herr Merchant." THE HUMAN PARCEL 68 The labelling of me as " Herr Merchant Edgeworth " follows a newspaper and book practice of always giving the human parcel's contents together with its address. Your newspaper speaks not of Herr Schwanitz the impresario, but of Herr Impresario Schwanitz. In zeal for precision it goes still farther, and tacks on the place of abode. So you have Herr Impresario Schwanitz-Berlin ; Herr Artist Kamm- holz-Munich ; Herr Reichstag-Deputy Miiller- Meiningen. That is the national instinct to degrade and subdue the mere human being, and to exalt the human trade, the human place — to qualify the immortal individual in terms of action and space. Germans, Herr Gamradt says justly, are in one respect less labelled than foreigners think. It is a foreign delusion that most of their surnames are preceded by " von." '* Your clever writers of invasion novels," says ironic Herr Gamradt, " per- sist in giving ' vons ' to Prussian lawyers, doctors, tradesmen, and even navvies. That is as funny as if a German described the curing of Lord Wilhelm Smith, undertaker's assistant, by Dr. the Marquis of Jones. The xenoculture — excuse my pedantry — of you world-Britons makes us laugh." Herr Gamradt points out that few men have " vons " outside the squirearchy, army, and higher bureau- cracy ; that the higher bureaucracy itself is two- thirds bourgeois, and therefore un-von-ed. Nobles, 64 THE HUMAN GERMAN he said, usually sign themselves "v.," not " von " ; while the handful of non-noble " vons " write the particle in full. These belong to bourgeois families which long ago in some unrecorded way got the " von," and now count it as part of their names. They are classed as " particled bourgeois." It is a misdemeanour for a bourgeois to appropriate the " von " ; and the one man who did it unpunished was Mr. Czolgosc Miiller, an American Ambassador at the Court of Sarmatia, who felt that unparticled " Miiller " — the joke-name of every comic journal — went ill with the gold-lace uniform of a great Republic. The spleenful (he lived long in England) Herr Prof. Dr. Scholermann of Weimar condemns the craze for labels. He ascribes it to servility ; to a national prejudice that no unlabelled citizen may claim from his fellows respect. " Germans," says this dry Anglophile, " live only from the grace of others ; only when they can appear to the public with a label do they feel that they have a pass and a passport which are valid throughout the Empire." Letitia agrees. She calls my attention to labels even on lifeless clay. We were approaching a tiny hollow in Friedenau, where enough water collects in eight days' rain to wet a grasshopper's thigh. A serious municipal workman was painting on a prominent placard ** No Bathing Allowed." THE HUMAN PARCEL 65 An urchin overtook us ; and flew headlong to the assiduous painter. ** Herr Painter ! " he bawled. '' What is it, laddie ? " " Herr Painter, you've forgotten . . ." " What have I forgotten, laddie ? " ** You've forgotten to paint ..." " What have I forgotten to paint ? " "You've forgotten to paint 'No Bathing Here* on your paint-can." Later, as we entered Boltuch's, we observed a horse labelled " Vorsicht ! Schldger ! " which means " Look Out ! A Kicker ! " and farther on a horse labelled " Vorsicht ! Bissig ! "—" Look out ! A Biter ! " Herr Gamradt says the horses do not bite, and gives this curious origin. The black- smith's apprentices Strolch and Strauch wanted to come to Berlin. As they knew that the spread of motoring had killed employment for blacksmiths, they changed their profession. They forged a pair of tongs with edges serrated like a horse's teeth. Then they made for the capital. When they saw a horse untended in Goltzstrasse Herr Strolch took the tongs and nipped severely his comrade's arm. Herr Strauch fainted. Crowds collected, bathed the arm, collected money, and condemned the brewer for not labelling his vicious horse. Damages were given of £80 ; and a just judge said that for a black- 66 THE HUMAN GERMAN smith to be bitten on the arm was particularly cruel. Since then all Prussians have labelled their horses **Look out! A Biter!" and "Look out! A Kicker ! " The Prussian human parcel excels the Russian, which a proverb says is Body, Soul, and Passport. Prussians, though they carry no passports, are Body, Soul, and Label. The Russ surrenders his label in death ; but the Prussian corpse keeps tightly tied to his, lest undiscriminating Peter should order hell- wards his honest Excellency Herr Privy Auhc Councillor Liebelt-Hamburg in mistake for swindhng Herr Commercial Councillor Liebelt-Bonn. News- papers describe the dead with micrometrical pre- cision. All round, Germans decease with more dignity than Britons ; their coffins weigh tons ; in death they are not divided from their titles ; their obituary notices imply that a cataclysm has wiped out all the family ; and the universal woe induced revives those high speculations on cumulative com- passion made by Immanuel Kant. On the next page is a specimen. The marriage notices are unsentimental, soldierly, brief : " Herman Goldfisch — Else Strehblow : en- gaged " is all you learn ; but births are announced with grace and charm. Where the ungrateful Briton grumpily says, " of a son," the human Pruss shares his joy with|^humanity ; he often dwells on the THE HUMAN PARCEL 67 DEATH NOTICE ! After grievous suffering died our beloved Husband, Father, Brother, Stepfather, Father-in-law, Uncle, Grandfather, and Great-uncle HERR COMMERCIAL COUNCILLOR WINE- DEALER RICHARD HIRSCH of Frankfurt-on-Main, Erfurt, London, Paris, and Bordeaux, March 20, 1913. His grievously stricken relatives : Minna Hirsch, Widow. Arthur Hirsch, a Carl Hirsch, !- Sons and Daughter Minna Warschauer, -' Zachary Hirsch, Brother. Wilhelm Brockmann, Stepson. Erwin Warschauer, Son-in-Law, Manfred Kuhn, Nephew. Minna Warschauer, Granddaughter. Max Landsberg-Bernauer, Grand-nephew. babe's incomparable beauty ; and he seldom forgets to speak of its perfect health. Even the most un- emotional notice radiates with joy. *' Walter and Emma Bartz, born Grosskopf, announce with delight the birth of a sturdy youngster ;" and the more emotional exhale genuine poetry and humour : " The joyous birth of a rosy Sunday maiden is announced ultra-jubilantly by Moritz Gerson, And Wife, Fekla, born Remack." 68 THE HUMAN GERMAN Instead of Cards ! Little Mary Has Come ! {Mariechen ist Da !) Patent-lawyer Oskar Cosmann, and Wife. Henny, born Zitko. Naturally the human parcel, at birth publicly stamped with certificates of charm, in death made to impose with Privy Councillor's patent, is duly labelled, stamped, and sealing-waxed on its way through life's transitory post. Germany is the land of orders and of order. No man is too base to earn, or at least to get, a star, or a medallion. Every January after the ceremony known as " Crown and Orders' Festival," newspapers print sixteen pages, each with many hundred names, of decorations and decorated. Of course, there are not enough dis- tinguished citizens for this ; but most of the decorated are distinguished only by their undis- tinction. Herr Gamradt thinks he is the one man in the Empire who has been distinguished by omission ; and he asks himself puzzledly : should he be pleased or angry ? All Germans in State employment have nearly as good a right to decorations as they have to salaries ; and they are promoted from one decoration to another as indiscriminately as they are pushed upward in salary-class. Like the Garter, there's no damned merit about it. Anciennit'dt — ancientness, THE HUMAN PARCEL 69 in English seniority — is the main thing that deter- mines whether you are worthy of the first or merely the fifth class of the Order of the Prussian Crown. Haste to be ancient rends bureaucrats' souls. In other lands ancientness is awaited with dread ; men descend to hair-dyes ; and wailful letters signed " Too Old at Forty " fly to the Daily Mail But here Peter Pan is an ass, Tithonus a hero — he can collect orders through eternity. There is danger in this. Sea-green incorruptible bureaucrats who if you offered them an unearned whisky would draw themselves up proudly and say, " I have my salary ! " have fallen out of zeal to be ancienter than their years. A painful case was that of Herr Gamradt's friend, Herr Chancellory-Councillor Tobusch, keeper of the roll of ancientness in the Prussian State Comptrol, who forged his own decent record " lo years' service " into no ; and by this incontinence of ambition was found ignominiously out. Some say that bureaucrats get orders that they may live down to their salaries ; others that they may live up to their trades. The names of their trades, that is. Vast as is the number of decorated every year, it would not fill sixteen pages were it not for the dignified length of the descriptions of the decorated. A star, for instance, is granted to Herr Dransfeld, whose post is Staatsschuldigungstilgungs- kassegeldz'uhler. His business is to pay off the 70 THE HUMAN GERMAN National Debt. And the list of starred and medalled speaks of : a Bahnunterhaltungsarbeiter — a roadmaintenance- workman ; a Fussgendarmeriewachtmeister — a f ootgendarmery- sergeantmajor ; a Reichsversicherungsamtkalkulator — an Imperial- insuranceofficecalculator ; an Obermilitdrintendanturregistrator — an overmili- taryintendancyregistrar ; and the official who gets the highest star of all, the Vorsitzender der Einkommensteucrveranla- gungskommission — the President of the Income- taxassessmentcommission. In matters of orders the State keeps its supcr- scottish track. When the human parcel for the last time opens and its contents fly heaven- or hellwards, labelled Statcdehtamortisationofficemoney- payer, the star or the medal returns to the fount of honour, who regilds it splendidly and hands it to some footgendarmerysergeantmajor newly come to years of ancientness. Paradoxically, the one excep- tion is for orders in brilliants. The super-scottish State, which takes back the poor roadmaintenance- workman's brazen disc, spends a whole thousand pounds on the brilliants ; and has the grace not to set them in the decoration, so that the decorated THE HUMAN PARCEL 71 man promptly sells them and shines in paste. But few reach brilliants. To get so far you must at least be a Reichsmarineamtsverwaltungsdepartmentsdirektor. As fruit of its fissiparous past and Particularist present, Germany dazzles with orders. The twenty- three States (three republics excluded) all have orders. There are eighty. Prussia has a dozen, Bavaria a lucky thirteen, Saxony eight, Lippe three ; and since many orders have different classes, some invisibly minute States can bestow fifteen decora- tions. This refinement of decoration has merits. There is no trade which has not its appropriate star. But jealousy results — a Post Councillor, whose breast blazes the Fourth Class of the Order of the Bear of Anhalt, nods coldly to a Stater ailway- permanentw ay auxiliary repairer, who has only reached the Fifth Class of the Second Division of the Griffin Order of Mecklenburg-Strelitz. There are under- takers with the Cross of Honour of Reuss of the Younger Line ; and watchmakers with the House Order of Watchfulness of the Saxe-Weimar White Falcon. Even lackeys of non-sovereign serenities have a chance. There is the Order of the House of Phoenix of Hohenlohe, though Hohenlohe was con- sumed when Napoleon built the Rhine Confedera- tion, and, unhke the phoenix, remains dead in the ash. In the multitude of orders is likeness, but no 72 THE HUMAN GERMAN wisdom ; and confusion comes. All are neatly made, polished, glittering, and stickly bright ; and most are Maltese crosses with crowns on top ; differences only in details ; and little to distinguish them save mottoes : " Fidehtas," " Fiir Badens Ehre," and "Si Deus nobiscum quis contra nos ? " No brain is enough to distinguish ; no breast is broad enough to wear them all. Yet it is said that the monarch who symbolises the union of Germany has a right to forty. Naturally trouble comes. In fact Letitia read in the Great Neck (L.I.) Democrat around this a story, certainly untrue, which might, however, have happened were order not kept among orders as it happily is : The sovereign who symbolises the union of Ger- many possesses the honourable Hubert Order of Bavaria, which dates from remote 1444. He treasures it so highly that he does not know its face. It is an attractive gold-rimmcd Maltese cross with a scarlet circle inside. And His Majesty resolved to put it on when he went to Munich in April. There is also the honourable Order of the Wiirttembcrg Crown, which is likewise an attractive gold-rimmed Maltese cross with a scarlet circle inside. The difference is small. Through inexphcable disorder among his orders, the sovereign was wearing the Wiirttembcrg cross when he sprang from his train in Munich on April the ist, 1910. THE HUMAN PARCEL 73 Of course the Regent smiled ; and pushed aside his cloak to show that he was wearing the Prussian order, Black Eagle. But Herr Eveningnewspaper- juniorreporter Tietz of the Munchner Kohlblatt, who had been let into the station on condition he wore white kid gloves and came no nearer than 35 m. 19I cm. to the Crowned Gentry, was properly wroth. He prepared an article proclaiming that Wiirttemberg is the fourth State in the Empire, and Bavaria the second (" morally and in esteem," he said, " the first ") ; and he explained at length that the Hubert Order has green in the centre, while the Wiirttemberg rival has a gilded anchor. He com- plained that the Head of Allied and Federated (not vassal) Germany took care not to blunder when he visited foreign monarchs ; he knew at a glance the Spanish Golden Fleece and the Russian St. Andrew, he could even tell the Montenegrin House Order of Peter. But he could not distinguish the honourable Order of Hubert, which glowed on the breasts of princes and paladins in an age when Prussia's Hohenzollerns were South German boors. CHAPTER VI THE HUMAN INFANT When the brisk minor pants for twenty-one {Pope). WE haven't seen for weeks Heir Adolph Bublitz. The loss is ours. Letitia hked him from the first for his honest Anglomania, and praised him to friends as the most dihgent, ambitious young German we know. Herr Adolph's father is a moderately wealthy banker of Frankfurt-on-Main, who sent his twenty-five-year- old son to study the ways of Das Grosskapital as unpaid clerk in the Deutsche Bank. Young Bublitz was a well-bred, well-educated boy ; he had studied law at Heidelberg ; spoke excellent French ; and some day hoped, he said, to master Spanish — his father did business with La Plata, also, I think, with Bucharest. His English was bad. As our German is execrable (we have been here barely seven years) we wanted to talk French to him ; but this was baffled by his passion for English culture and the English tongue. " I loave England," he said at our first meeting. " I was England twice. I loave the hawthorn railings, the race-course concurrences, the 74 THE HUMAN INFANT 75 fat sheep which feeds on the knights' country proprieties. I see from street the opening of House of Lords with thick procedure of noble country landlord and his beauteous landladies. May I make visit, yes ? " I shared Letitia's sympathy for Herr Bublitz. He was modest, animated, intelligent ; good-looking also in his way, clean-shaven in accord with his English prejudice ; and had it not been for the suspicion of a double chin I should have taken him for a Briton. He liked, he said, to wear an English sacco-suit. At West-End golf links he played twice a week, always (though with scientific earnestness) with good-humour and a drollish bold-brigand's pose. All round he was German in the nobler sense — industrious, practical, thrifty, sharp to let no opportunity pass that would bring him useful acquaintances or cultivate his mind. Once he brought to our house his cousin, Herr Cand. Jur. Schwiglewski, a boy as charming as himself ; but we saw Schwiglewski no more. '' He circulate," said Herr Bublitz, " in lawful societies ; he go mostly house of Herr Justice-Councillor Herms, for there he pick up utilious things about practice in Courts of Administration." Through the autumn of 1912 Herr Bublitz paid us two visits weekly. His earnestness won us. Also he argued, and Letitia loves arguing. Instead of 76 THE HUMAN GERMAN drawling like a vapid young Briton about record shots at golf, he plunged straight into the profundi- ties of life. He talked more than he listened. Indeed, with other young men his ceaseless " my views," " your views," " Herr Professor Anton Jellahk's wrong views," would have seemed presumptuous. But there was no conscious vanity about Herr Bublitz ; he blushed like a girl ; and his droll English — though it rapidly bettered — gave a charm to his most banal thoughts. ** As a Jacobean poet," said Letitia, *' however poor in wit, is by virtue of his quaint language stately." And Herr Bublitz never repeated. At every visit he raised some subject new; it was: "Do you think. Mister Edge worth, that Austria's tries at Parhamentarism . . . ? " ; "I am sure. Mistress Edge worth, that the followers of Edward von Hartmann ..." *' Mister Edge worth, how do you pronounce C-h-o-l-m-o-n-d-e-l-e-y ? " He often asked us little questions about English ; and we were charmed to help ; and approved his remark that men should not waste their time ; but should frequent a society which not only gives recreation, but also increases their stock of knowledge and fit- ness for communion with fellow- men. So, with every visit, we got to hke Herr Bublitz more and more ; and his English, we noted with pleasure, got better and better. Of course he met our Enghsh friends. He took THE HUMAN INFANT 77 to them as he had taken to us. And they to him. No day passed without our learning that Bubhtz had been at the Lambtons' dinner ; that Bubhtz had joined the Burtons' picnic in the Grunewald ; that he had been at the British Embassy charity theatricals ; that he had telephoned to Keswell asking if he were going to Grosslarms' concert, as, if so, he, Herr Bublitz, would go also. It would be so nice to have a schat. At every visit he surprised us by mentioning names of Englishmen he had met ; he had all the news worth having of the Berlin Colony ; and in two months he knew more Britons than we. His zeal and passion for collecting English- men puzzled me and others ; but it burned daily fiercer and fiercer ; and soon wherever we went we heard remarks of Herr Bublitz as emphatically the most English Prussian in Prussia. And all said nice things about Herr Bublitz ; and marvelled at his progress in English. He progressed indeed. He loved, and no longer loaved England : when he praised her charms, he said that he had lunched with a landlord ; lodged at Eastbourne with a landlady ; and on a walking tour in Sussex admired the hawthorn hedges. People daily paid him compliments over his English, which Bublitz, with the blush which won so many, said he did not deserve. His modesty was wrong. He spoke, though not without accent, with remarkable pre- 78 THE HUMAN GERMAN cision ; and with a finish and mastery over con- struction and vocabulary which native Enghshmen very seldom attain. And then we went for a month to Bozen ; and when we got back to Berlin-Schoneberg our society had broken up. Friends had dispersed. Herr BubUtz did not appear. As Letitia thought he did not know of our return I wrote him a little note. Next day he called. He looked the complete English- man now ; and he spoke in such correct and oratori- cal style that I judged he must have spent all his time in practice. But I noticed that Herr Bubhtz was embarrassed. He looked not his old self. He reddened even before I said the obvious thing about his English ; he hesitated ; he stammered ; he talked absent- mindedly ; and he said good-bye twice and then came back. He eyed Letitia. And as it was growing plain that the poor young fellow had something on his soul, and perhaps a woman's presence prevented him asking for help, I looked significantly at Letitia, and Letitia left us alone. I felt sure now that some intriguing minx was the cause of it ; and I pre- pared to say the banal consolatory : " Why, that happens to everyone. When I was two-and- twenty ..." But Herr Bublitz for long said nothing. He merely got redder and redder. At last, as I was on THE HUMAN INFANT 79 the point of asking him bluntly what was the matter, the mystery came out. He put his hand sacra- mentally to his breast, drew out a letter-case, and produced a paper. ** The minx's blackmail letter ! " so I guessed. But I recognised my own note of invitation. Herr Bublitz opened the note, laid it on the table, got redder than ever, and said with a hoarse voice and comically unnatural solemnity : " Is that a split infinitive ? " And, bending down, he pointed to the last passage of the note, where stood out in ungrammatical shamelessness the irredeemable sentence : " You ought to certainly come." Having done this Herr Bublitz broke down. He began a long and incoherent speech of which the main propositions were that I had always been kind to him : that Mrs. Edge worth had always been kind to him ; that he had been with Keswell to a concert ; that he loved the English ; and that he hoped that I would certainly pardon. . . . And he explained that for weeks he had been pained and tormented over irregular grammar and orthography which he had seen in English newspapers. . . . And that he was beginning to wonder if all his study was wrong, if he spoke too pedantically, if . . . And again he asked for pardon. And when I reassured him . . . told him that he spoke in a rarely expressive blend of science and colloquial rakishness, he smiled and 80 THE HUMAN GERMAN said : " Now that you have forgiven me I shall further exploit your kindness." ** By all means." " Are you sure you're not offended ? " " Not at all." Herr Bublitz again bent his back, took up the letter gingerly as if it were on fire, and said with double his original gravity : " Am I correct in assuming the intrusion of a superfluous * have ' ? " And he pointed to the reprobate sentence : " Keswell expected to have seen you." He said good-bye. For months after that we saw nothing of Herr Bublitz. Letitia feared he thought I was offended. That was not so. On the 4th of August business took me to the Chilian Consul in Mauerstrasse. A fierce argument in Spanish echoed from the Consul's room. As I entered I gasped with surprise. With hat on back of head, feet on the screen of the radiator, and cigarette in mouth — talking in easy Spanish over his shoulder — was our young friend Herr Adolph Bublitz ; Herr Adolph, who when I saw him last had not a word of Spanish. He was delighted to see me. He seemed to be on easy, familiar relations with the Consul and the Consul's secretary ; and when an Argentine lawyer and three other Spaniards came in to talk of emigration and THE HUMAN INFANT 81 ankles they slapped Herr Bublitz on the back. Our Anglomaniac friend seemed, in fact, to be a hero in the Spanish colony, as much at home in Spanish tongue and culture as any grandee of Castile. We left together. " You're not so keen as formerly on English things . . ."I said quizzically. " On the contrary . . . more than ever. . . . But you understand. . . . You won't be offended. The fact is I am now in with a crowd of Spaniards ... it is extremely nice of them. ... I am study- ing Spanish. ... Do you know I could tell you something really remarkable, but I believe you wouldn't believe it. . . ." And he hesitated for a second ; and said with pleasure and pride : " I have picked up my Spanish and Enghsh without ever taking a single, solitary lesson." And an automobile bore him off. When it got to the corner of Friedrichstrasse it stopped ; and out hopped Herr Bublitz and ran back towards me. The customary pleasant blush was on his boyish face ; and in his old charming, nervous way he hailed me : " You have always been so good. . . . And Mrs. Edgeworth. ... I have a favour. ... I know you won't be offended. . . . But could you give me an introduction to Herr Cuza-Slavici . . . the Jassy artist at the Kaiserhof, I saw you talking ..." 82 THE HUMAN GERMAN " With pleasure. Come over on Monday. . . . But tell me . . . explain to me how it is that you're hunting for new acquaintances when you say you've no time to keep up with old ? " Herr Bublitz got as red as on the day he quarrelled with the split infinitive. " Oh, nothing," he said, with embarrassment. ** I've got a craze for Roumanians. I mean, I don't know why. Yesterday father wrote me a letter telhng me to begin learning the language. . . . Roumanians, I'm told, are a delightful people. . . . L' esprit latin ! . . . There's a Roumanian lady named Stefanescu in Rankestrasse. . , . Do you think Mrs. Edge worth could get me an introduction ? " When I told Herr Gamradt of Herr Bublitz he said there is a real humanity in the German youth, who nowise, happily, resembles the humourless parodies of perfection which appear in the British teutonological Press. The human German youth is adequately human. He has weaknesses. Weak- nesses for everything. For beer, like Dr. Gamradt 's nephew Helmut ; for unfruitful The Footballplay (das Fusshallspiel), and The Rowingsport, like Helmut's brother Emmerich ; for skat, like Em- merich's brother Eberhard ; for golf and loose cosmopolitan gossip, like Adolph Bublitz. Herr Gamradt even read remarks by Herr Field-Marshal von der Goltz Pasha on the ruin by levity of Prussia's THE HUMAN INFANT 88 youth ; and wails from the Stamp Fiscal on betting ravages in Prussian land. The pasha thinks that levity and luxury ruin the soul ; the Stamp Fiscal thinks that betting empties the treasury. And the sour Radical People's Party backs both up, and says that the Human Infant is going swiftly to perdition as result of the once exclusively British vice of backing horses that lose. Herr Dr. Ing. Gamradt puts this down to the Totalisator, which drives men and youths, he says, to bet with rascals. The Totalisator is the only lawful system ; and when Germans brought it from France in 1872 they brought a revanche in itself. Anything deadlier than the Totalisator no French- man could dream of. You march phlegmatically to a shed with pigeon-holes, stake your marks on the horse you fancy, at odds you do not know. Only when the race is run are the odds decided. The money laid on losing horses is shared between backers of winners pro rata of their stakes ; and if nobody backs a loser the backer of winners gets nothing. Indeed, less than nothing. For the pigeon- holed shed deducts i6f per cent of its intake ; and of this gives two-thirds to the Stamp Fiscal, and keeps the rest for the race-course. The Totalisator has virtues. It does not cheat. Its vices are that it is without humanity and humour ; that you cannot avenge your losing by casting it in a pond. 84 THE HUMAN GERMAN The result is that the " savage bookmaker " — der wilde Buchmacher — who lurks unlawfully in every tobacco shop, is preferred by the excitement-loving human youth. The Stamp Fiscal loses because the savage pays no tax ; and the human youth loses because the savage cannot have a recognised address, and when he makes off with the money no one can track him down. Berlin tobacconists' shops are mostly betting dens, where you ma}^ back not only horses for Grunewald, but also remote thoroughbreds with no chances of winning at Auteuil and Goodwood. Scores of human young Germans will give you tips for the Cesarewitch. The bookies accept thankfully modest stakes ; and owing to the judicious subdivision of coinage into pfennigs, each worth half a farthing, you can stake your halfpenny even when odds are on. Why bets and tobacco trade go together no man knows. But women guess. Letitia, whose humour is humanly unpretentious, says the bookie waits till his backers light a Flor Biilow from Ham- burg ; and as they shake under the first over- whelming inhalations, offers three to one against Koniggratz when the fair odds are fifty. And now the Radicals have had their way ; and a Bill lies in the Imperial Office of the Interior which aims at driving savage bookmakers to hunger. The State will lay odds itself. It will appoint every- THE HUMAN INFANT 85 where State-concessioned bookmakers, who will compete with the savages. The number of State bookmakers will be based on population. The State will appropriate six per cent of the turnover ; and the bookmaker will deduct from winnings a further tax, rising to ten per cent, for benefit of the race- course. The State bookmakers' odds will be at fixed prices, or at Totalisator prices. There will be no wager of less than five shillings. That is the weakness of the plan. The savage bookmakers bet gratefully in halfpennies ; and who will compete in this ? Authority, says Herr Dr. Ing. Gamradt, must keep up its dignity ; and a concessioned bureaucrat bookmaker chasing milk-boys' half- pennies would not enhance the high consideration of the State. Prejudice against betting is strong in suburban and provincial circles ; things are said from the pulpit ; and newspapers tell of brave attempts to banish betting corruption. And horse-racing itself. The tales of the Wives of Weissenbach, cut from the Lokal-Anzeiger, show this, not without success. Seven brief miles from this unsleeping city, amid flowering meadows, dream the sister suburbs of Weissenbach and New Weissenbach. Pretty rococo villas, also awkward five-staged flat-barracks, rise cliff -like from the flowering meadows. There is a round, translucid lake edged with daisies ; a park ; 86 THE HUMAN GERMAN a toppling Schloss ; neat little avenues fringed with innocent plane-trees ; and pleasing, deep-sea-eyed children. And happy homes innumerable. At least, so people imagined. But as Eden had snakes, and the Hesperian Gardens their dragon, so the sister Weissenbachs were plagued by the ancient foe of virtuous men, who laid ingenious snares to bring them to a fall. His Sulphurity laid out near Weissenbach an excellent race-course, and offered handsome prizes for speedy trotters. The honest Weissenbachers had seen no races before ; and they viewed with just suspicion the Evil One's device. But sport burns in the blood ; and Weissenbach fell. It began to attend the matches. At first it attended fur- tively in twos and threes, with hats covering eyes, in dark blue goggles. But as seduction waxed, shame insensibly waned. Weissenbach came in tens and twenties ; then in hundreds ; and at last wholesale, so that every male over twelve in the sister villages spent Sundays and hohdays watching the delirious sport. Churches were void. Skittles were sneered at. There ceased the idyllic walks with wives and sweethearts down the plane-tree avenues ; and tears over absent fathers rose in the children's deep-sea eyes. The fact is, sport did no harm to Weissenbach. But Weissenbach betted — and lost. Abjuring the THE HUMAN) INFANT 87 legal Totalisator which robs you honestly, they laid their money with savage betting men from Baby- lonian Berlin, who unlawfully made books on Eng- lish principles ; and started home each evening with beaming faces and hypertrophied purses. Very different were faces — and purses — in Weissenbach. Gloom darkened thresholds. Everyone was poor. Husbands had no money for innocent pleasures ; children played without toys ; the umbrageous beer- garden closed ; and summer headgear dwindled like Encke's comet. " Business," said husbands, " has gone to the dogs." What was worse, in the savages' wake came ethereal beings from Berlin, who smiled to the gambling husbands ; and it was seen that as Weissenbach's headgear shrank, the hats on the ethereal heads waxed in radius and radiance. Things were approaching a crisis. It was the fault of the Devil, his race-course, and the corruptions of a Babylonian capital. Griselda would have lost patience. But the hour of deliver- ance was nigh. The wives of Weissenbach met in council for self- defence. Dissensions were laid down ; hands were shook ; ladies who never exchanged salutes kissed one another's cheeks. What was to be done ? Expostulations, cozenings, curtain-lectures, threats — all had signally failed. But Frau Sanitary Coun- cillor Dr. Leiner found a remedy. As the husbands, 88 THE HUMAN GERMAN she reasoned, had succumbed not to harmless trotters, but to the allurement of savage betting, the one unfaihng remedy was to get the savages in gaol. " If the police can't catch the bookmakers, how can we ? " said jealous Frau Upper-Lieutenant Voigt. " The police can't suckle babes . . . but we . . . at least, I can," snapped Frau Sanitary Councillor Leiner. And the meeting, she counselled, should elect a Permanent Watch Committee, track down the savage bookmakers, and, for the baser act of physical apprehension, call in the pohce. The meeting first gasped its surprise ; then it wavered ; next it beat into shape the unparalleled proposal ; and lastly every woman in Weissenbach swore to help. Beginning was hardest. There were no clues. But the resourceful wives enlisted young Herr Cand. Theol. Kompatzki, who had been but once on the race-course, and was not wholly lost. He was neck-high in love with Frau Leiner's rosebud Milli ; and with one of those overwhelming caresses for which rich men pledge their souls and poor men their breeches, Fraulein Leiner won him for the plot. From him came the needed basic facts. Sharp-eyed wives found others. At night, when •noring husbands dreamed of backing Siegfried for a miUion, their angels rose ; copied ambiguous THE HUMAN INFANT 89 names in pocket-books ; and carefully puzzled out suspicious words. If they found clues to the ethereal ladies from Berlin, they suffered in silence. The Cause consoled. This went on unsuspected ; the identity of the savages was thoroughly known ; and after two months of labour the blow thunderously fell. A secret petition, signed by seventy wives and virgins of Weissenbach, reached the police, with names, addresses, and birth-marks of the savage bookmakers, and lists of their crimes. Next Sunday the race-course was thronged. In addition to men of Weissenbach, and five thousand shameless Ber- liners, there were twenty sharp-faced strangers, who zealously hunted for bookmakers, accepting any odds. As Siegfried trotted victoriously to the winning-post fifty fierce - whiskered constables marched on the course ; and *' You better had come quietly " was the epitaph of savage book- making in Weissenbach and New Weissenbach. Gossiping, sporting, gambling are not the sole things to which German youth shows humanity ; and redeems itself from the shame of perfection imputed by our teutonologists. Even in public policy youth is human ; and millions of young men who ought to be drilling, reading, thinking in the cause of the universal State, are sadly given to interests in which their country has no share. 90 THE HUMAN GERMAN Letitia has been reading Mr. Blatchford's sore contrast between the lounging, sneakish Enghsh corner-boy, whose one passion is to see his fellows kicked at football, and the manly, bold-eyed, patriotic, God-fearing German lad. After a pair of tears on the pHght of her country, Letitia took up Ideas of the Modern Working Youth, and unearthed instructive matter about the manly, bold-eyed, patriotic. God-fearing German lad. The Rev. W. Ilgenstein, the author, shows how manly, bold-eyed young Germans are entirely under the thumb of an anti-patriotic Social-Democratic propagandist organisation which runs Socialist boys' journals, Socialist lectures, and Socialist country trips, all with the aim of teaching the manly, bold-eyed idea to shoot S.-D. -wards. The propaganda powerfully influences adolescent souls by means of verse ; and Herr Ilgenstein prints efforts of the S.-D. Muse, with effective choruses, compounded hke Amurrican 'Varsity yells : Jupheidi, heidi, heida ! Jupheidi, jupheida ! Jupheidi, heidi, heida ! Jupheidi, heida ! Socialist lyrists produce ingenious parodies of patriotic and religious songs. Translators are traitors, said Alfieri ; and Letitia is a clumsy rhymer ; but duty bids her Anglicise the best songs of the manly, bold-eyed. On German Christmas THE HUMAN INFANT 91 Eve around Christmas trees many millions of children sing, to the music of Haydn, the agreeable verses, ** Stilly Night." But when these children reach the cigarette and corset age they chant this Christmas carol as paraphrased by Socialist poets : Villainous night, hideous night ! That brings no peace and no delight To the inconsolable masses Who starve on the wage of the upper classes. . . . The manly, bold-eyed, etc.'s, songs are God- fearing. In the Social-Democratic " Youth's Song- Book " are some effective verses headed " Mittel wider Schlaflosigkeit : A Means Against Insomnia." They begin : All night I have not slept a wink, Growled Ursula on Sabbath's brink, I feel as sour as an apple. But there's comfort in chapel, For there I can nod like a pink ! Social-Democrat mentors view loyalty as a slavish baseness ; and they impart this moral verity to the manly, bold-eyed in verse which is a parody of *' The Song of German Loyalty " : The loyalist creature is the cur, He follows without chain ; You thrash him till his bones are sore, He fawns and licks the cane. And if at times his teeth are bared. He'll quail before your eye : O cur, thou splendid emblem of Our German loyalty ! 92 THE HUMAN GERMAN The Socialist Muse sings of budding Womanhood. There is a promising " Song of the Workgirls," possibly brewed in Clement's Inn, for it opens : " Spricht nicht vom schwdcheren Geschlechte ! " — " Call us no more the Weaker Sex ! " But this poem of trumpet opening ends unworthily. The Socialist Horace, it seems, has superficially skimmed the Workgirls' deep souls ; for he makes them pusillani- mously abjure their sacred aspirations : It's not our aim to be great dames ; To pose as beauties without a care, To be gaudy pictures in gilded frames, To don rich robes and deck our hair ; It's not our aim. . . . " Isn't it ? " asked Letitia, as Socialist Hedwig came for market orders in a purple mantle and Scotch tartan stockings. CHAPTER VII THE HUMAN WORLD-CITY Beautiful for situation, the joy of the whole earth, is Mount Zion . . . the city of the great King {Psalm xlviii.). j4 GES before Berlin was heard of by foreigners, /_% a Crown Prince Wilhelm, under thumb of X jLhis Anglophile wife, prayed that the half- born city be built in British way. He begged the town-planners to drop their plan to build a city like I Paris. Instead of broad, gardenless streets of five- story flat-barracks, he wanted mean streets with low, one-family houses in the way of Mayfair and Bermondse}^ They would have English gardens in place of French courtyards. . . . '' That is the English way. . . . The death-rate would certainly . . ." " That is true," said the town-planners. " Such a BerHn might be pleasant. But it would not be metropolitan. Small houses are not welt- st'adtisch — not world-city ish. A great state's capital must inevitably. . . . For the impressive, the im- posing, the architectonic, at least five stories are essential." And they built Berlin with five stories, with imposing flat-barracks holding eighty men 93 94 THE HUMAN GERMAN each, with impressive inconveniences, and archi- tectonic rate of death. That was the human, all too human way. It sprang from the instinct, diagnosed in The Human Comedy, of newly rich men to gather about them the things which most impressed in youth. Provincial Berlin was impressed in youth with the high houses of Vienna and Paris ; and nothing would drive from its head that high houses are the essence of metro- politanism. High houses meant a world-city (eine Weltstadt !) . And to be a world-city is the passion of Berlin. That the town be healthy, or graceful, or romantic matters less ; it exists to impose ; to flaunt its world-cityism on mediaeval villages ; to make a staggering impression on raw farmers from Stolp, on raw American tourists from Mo. and Va. Apart from sky-high houses, Berlin has precise notions of a world-city. It is a place of sound, crush, and show. It is a place where traffic is thick and thoroughfares thin ; where there are roaring spots of amusement and tedium ; adequate international thieves, and areas of Broadway-Piccadilly-Circus kind with winking, coloured-light signs, and winking coloured, light ladies. To concentrate these on narrow space is Prussia's high aim. Newspapers teem with them. When cabs clash in the Linden : " That Berlin is indeed a world-city is proved by the increasing accidents. ..." When a new Sport THE HUMAN WORLD-CITY 95 Palace rises in Potsdamerstrasse : " Berlin's finally attained maturity as world-city was yesterday made plain at the opening ..." When Prince Bazaro- vitch-Amuroff, who borrowed a million from Coun- tess von und zu Hedergott, turns out to be Herr Journeyman-Cobbler Stoff-Regensburg : " Every genuine world-city draws adventurers. ..." Berlin likes that. The more noise, sky-signs, kinos, cafes, pickpockets, sins, the happier it is. Not that these things always bring positive, measurable pleasure. But they flatter pride ; they label a mere shapeless house-heap a world-city ; and thriving Empires need world-cities as they need armies and gaols. By being a world-city Berlin confutes the old, resented charge that it is a town of soldiers and bureaucrats, a tedious provincial nest of order and virtue. As a hearth of wickedness Berlin can decently claim to be a world-city. It has even here, though notoriously nowhere else, an individuality, a soul of its own. Berlin's corruption is not Steinheil's mys- terious murder, Humbert safes, or Thaw paranoia. It is a lower middle-class corruption of spongers, souteneurs, blackmailers, and fraudulent counts who lack the courage to parade as dukes. The world- city is a heaven for men who pass themselves for what they are not. That is the fruit of the effective pohce spy system devised by the Human Bureaucrat. The world-citizen reasons that Herr Count's or 96 THE HUMAN GERMAN M. le Vicomte's rank has been tested by the all- registering police ; whereas all the police have done is to drag Herr Count from his bath, and ask him why he is a Protestant. Also Berlin more than other world-cities has weak, self-indulgent, snobbish, credulous people ; and it has a cultured Revolver- Press which gathers in marks and pfennigs by hint- ing at the vivid things it will print the week after next. That is Berlin's criminal character. In higher matters its character is nill. It has attained the state of all real world-cities, in that it abjures pro- vincial individuality ; and wants eclectically the best and the worst things of all the earth. Berlin's amusements show no trace of Berlin. The high amusements of the rich are mongrel ; the low amuse- ments of the poor are mongrel. No citizen of the World-City is so mean as not to pant for amusement in foreign style. The once individual Prussian Theatre is in woeful phght ; four theatres go bank- rupt in twelve months ; the foreign cabaret, kino, dance-local, bar, and ice-palace replace them — and they go bankrupt too. The opulent world-citizen, dressed in an engUsche Smoking, issues from an amerikanische Bar and makes for a Palais de Danse in Friedrichstadt. The meaner world-citizen dances to six in the morning in a Bavarian hall, with the wardrobe attendant in a green Tyrolean hat, waiters THE HUMAN WORLD-CITY 97 in red Bavarian waistcoats, and painted Moabit barmaids dressed as milkmaids of Swabia. With this no foreign influences are absorbed. The World- City takes only the words, phrases, clothes, manner- isms, drinks of distant lands ; and is thereby made " distinguished," for the native meaning of " dis- tinguished," as cynic Bismarck said, is : " borrowed from somewhere else." Because it is a world-city, Berlin is largely shaped — and misshaped — by America, for has not America, between the North River and Hudson, the essential world-city of the world ? But there is a difference. New York is a mongrel place of mongrel contents, while Prussian Berlin is Prussian in mongrel skin. Often it is American skin. There are no skyscrapers — Herr Jagow sees to that — but there are steel and concrete houses built like cross-sections of sky- scrapers. Fancy shops glow with pictures and post- cards of clear-chinned young Americanised Germans kissing with clean-shaven lips tempting Prussian Gibson girls. America's bright, particular joy, the " moving picture," planted by Manhattan culture- bearers, is Berlin's highest joy. It has fostered a whole specific kino-culture which circumscribes the World-City brain ; and drives to flight all less exalted thoughts. When Herr Dr. Ing. Gamradt took rachitic Kathie to Dresden, and set her down before the Sixtine Madonna, she opened wide her sea-green 7 98 THE HUMAN GERMAN eyes, and said : "It's splendid, papa. When will it begin to move ? " Berlin worships the bar. There are hundreds ; all with male barmaids behind, and female barmaids before ; and young American- English Germans with turned-up British breeches, who suck whisky through straws, or swallow ** American drinks," whose names alone — a Rie Highbowle, a Wasmay Cocktal, a Silver Juleppe with Rom — make Americans drunk. The passion for bars, cabarets, kinematographs goes so far that you find them in private houses in tedious suburbs. That is because of the housing trouble. The World-City is overbuilt. Speculative builders teem ; newspapers say there are fifty thousand empty flats where the normal is half that ; and house-owners are sad. So builders fit out from the beginning whole floors as " dance- locals," bars, kino-halls, and cafes ; and they let these at high rents to speculative managers. Resi- dential Berlin is thus made bright ; green squares and silent side-streets grow to resemble Broadway in colouring and the Bowery (old style) for Skandallen. Because the centre is dull compared with the world- cityfied suburbs, young Herr Lewi Gordon, dressed in Smoking, motors out at four in the morning ; and with him, astride his knee, comes Fraulein Rosa Knischka, zealous to paint pale Schoneberg suburb as ruddy as her name. THE HUMAN WORLD-CITY 99 The finance of this opulent squalor is made easy by an abundance of money for risky enterprises, and by an abundance of bankruptcies. Swindlers with plans to make the universe happy or drunk can get the Berlin widow's gold ; and honest men intent on prosperous bankruptcy can go bankrupt with repute. Naturally, neither law nor moral doctrine favours bankruptcy ; and mean-spirited persons — clerks, small bureaucrats, and peddlers of Persian carpets — keep solvent enough. But the high- flyers, the men who live by sky signs, the men who have made Berlin a world-city, break once a year ; and every entertainment enterprise of respectable size before reaching fiscal equilibrium takes some months' vacation in the Receiver's house. New theatres go bankrupt before playing a month. In May — amid newspaper trumping " Berlin a World-City ! " aU society meets at Blankow Opera House ; in June, without the trumpetings, all creditors meet. And that — though it ought to frighten enterprise — is precisely the source of the hotels, theatres, kinos, cafes, cabarets, and ice- palaces, which make Berlin the world-city it is. When Herr Building-Master Kleinstein has spent a milhon marks on a cafe too inhumanly gorgeous for a baby world-city, the enterprise smashes ; it is sold months later for a quarter of a milhon to mild Herr Cafe-Owner Huttmann, who since he need not pay 100 THE HUMAN GERMAN interest on a wasted three-quarters of a million, makes the business pay. So Berlin possesses things which other world-cities cannot afford — precisely because it cannot afford them. The town waxes in world-cityism ; and tourists gape at gorgeous places of recreation, stuck down somewhere in puny suburbs, always three-quarters empty, yet somehow keeping alive. German entertainment bankrupts resemble Antaeus and Wall Street's Olympians — touching the clay of liquidation brings back their strength. But creditors are evilly entreated. The ordinary creditor seldom sees his money. The law favours the privileged creditor, who gets his all before the unprivileged creditor gets a pfennig. Six kinds of privileged debtors get paid before the ordinary creditor's turn comes. First come the debtor's employees ; next the State and Municipality with claims for taxes ; next the Church and the School ; and so on. So the ordinary creditor ends as extraordinary creditor, as creditor who has nothing to his credit at all. The will to dance is strong in Berhn. " Dance- locals" are everywhere; and their erotic-ecstatic- bacchantics provoke decrees from Police-President V. Jagow. As in all things, the world-citizens here show industry. They dance all night. In the country and suburbs even all morning. When you awaken in a Spree Forest inn at seven on Sunday, THE HUMAN WORLD-CITY ,:,: ilQl you hear what sounds like an earthquake. It is a World-City tripper party just arrived ; and its way of touring the Spree Forest is whirhng around a hall. Most public balls are in Carneval. The World- City observes Carneval more splendidly than merry South Germany — with dearer drinks and cheaper wit . And without local colour — except on the cheeks. Every professional association has its ball. Men mostly come as Rosenkavaliers ; women as babies. The theatre world turns up strongly at the annual Servants' Ball — a costume ball at which all appear got up as servants. This ball endures from an age when Prussian actors and actresses were servants in the eye of the law ; and came under the same stern servants' ordinance as to-day governs Hedwig's relations to Letitia. When Letitia's brother Hubert rushed through on his way to Moscow, he insisted on seeing this Servants' Ball. He came back de- hghted. '* They make up splendidly ; there was hardly a man in the room who didn't look like a footman ; and as for the women, your Hedwig herself. ... By the way, as I was leaving the Phil- harmonic ..." " The Philharmonic ? " said Letitia. " You weren't at the Philharmonic ? " " I was," said Hubert. '* I know the place well. Well, as I was saying, they looked exactly the part. As I was coming out of the Phil ..." 102 ; ^ THE HUMAN GERMAN " Then," said Letitia, " you were not at the Servants' Ball. I told you to go to the Mozart Hall. You were at the Ball of the Allied Metro- politan Professions." After seven years' hesitation, Letitia and I went last Thursday to a public ball. We chose the ball of the Theatre Artists' Association, because that is the proudest, we thought, of World-City balls ; and Herr Dr. Ing. Gamradt affirmed that Covent Garden " is not inside it." As the tickets warned us that " Men in Smoking will not be admitted " ; and that "ladies must come in evening - dress ('cut-out gowns ')," we took Herr Gamradt 's assurance. We were not disappointed. On Friday morning, after getting to bed near five, we awoke at half-past six with nightmare cries. We had both had an evil dream. About fifty thousand ladies in gowns cut out down to their slippers were dancing to grisly death a single man like a sea- anemone. The anemone was "in Smoking" and smoked. Further on, about fifty thousand gentle- men oysters in Smoking were dancing to death a single lemon-like lady. Both of us yawned and slept. That was all the subconscious self reconstructed of the Theatre Artists' Ball, which began at eleven on Thursday ; and is still — for all we know — going uproariously on. Later, before the waking brain flashed swift kine- THE HUMAN WORLD-CITY 103 matograph flickers of what happened at BerUn's proudest ball. There were : A gentleman smoking a cigar in the middle of the hall. A tall dancer chewing an unlighted cigarette over his partner's head. An attractive blonde called Grete (all Berlin blondes are Grete) in a yellow dress dancing with a partner in a yellow skin. The pair abruptly stopped their two-step ; and the man put his yellow hands on Grete's naked shoulders, and began an impas- sioned speech. A cavalier, shaped like the Imperial Chancellor, threading his way with a full champagne glass through what fiction stylists call the giddy maze. He intended the drink for his wife ; but seeing a collision inevitable he gulped it down himself. Two brave-looking men dancing with a stoutish lady in transcendental flaming red. In front, as was proper, the lady was tightly embraced by the better-looking man, while the worse-looking fiercely embraced her eyeless rear. In a whirl of Laocoon inextricability the three thundered round the floor ; and combined with a decent two-step a *' Push- dance," and a wobbling danse de ventre. Numberless public, but modest, kisses on lips, breasts, and elbows. The attractive thing about the proudest of Berlin 104 THE HUMAN GERMAN balls was the artistic heterogeneity of types. Here you contrast the World-City's multitudinous culture with the egg-basket civihsation of London. At an English ball there are practically only two dancers, a man and a woman. At the Theatre Artists' no two were alike in class, manners, physique, or dress. There were fair, erect cavaliers with close-cropped skulls and Mensur-duel scars ; there were pale tuberculous aesthetes with long black hair and finger-nails. There were dancers dressed — despite the warning — " in Smoking " ; there were others who obeyed the law to come in swallow-tails, and with varicoloured waistcoats made themselves wholly swallows. There were ladies as " cut out " as our clotheless nightmare, who arrived with ladies in high lace collars and high-laced boots. There were superior gentlemen who sucked champagne through straws, and watched the dancing with remote, alienated sneers ; and there were uproarious blades who hurled paper darts at Herr Johann Strauss in the gallery, to make him repeat the two-step-^aws^- de-ventre--push-dsince. Letitia and I were pleased with our first public ball. But some men are exacting. At a quarter to three up came Herr Dr. Ing. Gamradt, with a growl that the evening was frigid and colourless, and that he, for one, was now going home. " I find it lively enough . . .," began I. THE HUMAN WORLD-CITY 105 " You were not at the Naughty Boys' Ball," said Dr. Gamradt. " The Ball der Bosen Buben." This Artists' Ball, of course, is socially select, but give me the Naughty Boys' for innocent jollity. At last year's I saw, for instance : " A gentleman forcing champagne ice down his partner's back. A lady putting . . . But that's no interest to a bloodless Briton. What do you think of Lord Haldane ? " Letitia made me pay for the Theatre Artists' Ball by taking her to The Night of Berlin. The last time we went to a theatre, she says truly, is ages ago ; and yet it is clear in my memory. But not so clear as the first time. This was soon after we first settled in Berhn ; and what we went to see was Strauss 's Bat at the Comic Opera. What seeing it took ! In matters theatrical world-citizens show their usual wise reserve towards strangers ; and not the Schone- berg police towards an Englishman, or Hedwig opening the door to an ambassador, is more suspicious than a Berlin theatre agent when asked to sell you a ticket. He declines to book you by telephone lest you do not pay ; and there are times when to get a seat at any price you must go to the theatre itself. When, on personal petition, you do manage to get booked, your work is only half done. The agent charged us two shillings extra for booking comic opera seats, but for this he merely gave us a 106 THE HUMAN GERMAN receipt, and told us we must get the tickets at the theatre. As we drove to the theatre Letitia read aloud a Spectator article on " British Anarchy and German Organisation." There was one box-office with one pigeon-hole for the whole theatre. It sold nine different kinds of seats, from boxes to gallery, and before this box-office a hundred persons crushed, jostled, panted, manoeuvred to get a look at the list of nine kinds of seats, and trod on a thousand toes. A policeman kept disorder. I felt back in my school- boy days when with sixpence burning in sweaty fist, I waited at Hengler's Circus. Two persons were dragged out by the policeman for not waiting their turn ; and a young woman fainted. Later things quieted ; but it took us fifteen minutes to get our tickets ; and had it not been for " British Anarchy and German Organisation " we should have been bored to death. Before starting from Schoneberg, Letitia and I had trouble on the matter of dress. We dined in our street clothes ; and it was my opinion that we had no right to sit in the stalls. Letitia differed. " Germans," she said, " are plain people. Here no one changes." As result of my weakness in giving way, we suffered a painful humiliation. It was true that in general the stalls in the dress matter did not differ from the top gallery ; they were filled with THE HUMAN WORLD-CITY 107 men and women like ourselves in dusty daylight dress. But, by malice of fortune, our seats happened to be next the seats of the one handsomely attired couple in the theatre. There was a good-looking, youngish man in evening dress, and a fashionably naked, unfashionably handsome wife. There was no mistaking that this was a pair in society. Their remote, distinguished air. . . . " It's a young guards' officer," whispered Letitia. " Why do they clip their moustaches } " " Probably it's one of the Emperor's aides-de-camp," said I. " Why are they all counts ? " asked Letitia. Certainly they were a chilly pair ; and they looked at us, and at the bourgeoisie close by, much as first-class passengers from Waterloo to Putney look at third-class in- truders. Our position was ugly ; and we did not enjoy the opera at all. At least, not the first two acts. But in the second interval things unexpectedly brightened. We had made for the restaurant. It was a whitewashed, well-smoked hall, already so overcrowded with beer-drinkers that only one table was free. As we consulted the bill of fare, an agreeable bass voice sounded over our shoulders. " Will you allow me ? " I looked round. It was our auditorium neighbours, the guardsman count and countess ; and they wanted to share our table. Naturally we were flattered. We nearly got into conversation. ** Ask him," 108 THE HUMAN GERMAN whispered Letitia, " if the Kaiser ..." I summoned my courage. But at this moment the waiter planted down two winking glasses of Munich ; the count's white-gloved hand dived mysteriously into a coat- tail pocket ; and out flew a greasy packet of pale grey, rye-bread sandwiches, each embracing some slices of Prague ham. Visions Uke the count's are rarer now than then ; for the World-City — even Letitia admits it — grows smart. Smart is a vulgar word, ennobled, however, in Herr Dr. Gamradt's Smartheit. Years ago the sole smart Berliners were Britons. Indifferent^ cut as were our clothes, journalistically unlicked as were our manners, Letitia and I felt smart by contrast. To-day we see rivals. This change does credit to the World-City's industry, for Smartheit has meant work. It is like aniline indigo, a synthetic triumph, made after assiduous search into the real things' nature. That proper study is indeed devoted to such things, I judge after sitting to-day in the Underground near a well-groomed young man who was reading Der Gentleman : A Guide to Dress and Manners. He was deep in a chapter called Der Shawl, which tells how Der (englische) Gentleman in evening dress wears a shawl to keep his collar clean. And a catalogue looked through later, shows me that the World-City book-market throbs with works explaining how to tuck a table-napkin into your THE HUMAN WORLD-CITY 109 collar, and how to present nice girls engaged to other men with bouquets of roses which you have not paid for. What, for instance, more useful than Der Trousseau des Herrn ; ein Kalendarium der Elegance. Verlag Fashion (1913) ? From the use of " Gentleman " and " Fashion " you see that it is our own England which is arbiter of elegances. It is Der Gentleman, not Der Herr, Der Monsieur, Der Gospodin, or Der Effendi, who smartens the World- City up. The daily, and the periodical, Press helps to quench and awaken the thirst for social culture. Quite as in degenerate Britain. Ten years ago " Society " interests were not. Now even the lower middle- class Lokal-Anzeiger prints columns on " Berlin Society " ; and a weekly journal, The Elegant World, does nothing else. Naturally this embryo smartness looks pale on contrast with the high snobbism of our England ; but Letitia admits that the World-City progresses ; and that one generation hence it will be as humanly smart, well-dressed, high-flying, slang-tongued, and rude as London itself ; and all in a synthetic, scientific, thunderingly Teutonic way. Social progress dictates restraint ; so with all its glory of amusement Lokals, the World-City seldom lets itself go. Indeed, only on the last day of De- cember. On Silvester Abend. Probably no other 110 THE HUMAN GERMAN world-city welcomes the year so terribly. It is the one night you see many world-citizens drunk. Rest of the year they swallow beer modestly — and small beer at that — but as the Old Year is dying, all men rise to Sekt ; and this exudes in bacchic wantonness from their unaccustomed skulls. Shiny Friedrich- strasse is impassable by men, impossible to women. The World-City hits them, pushes them, kisses them, pours things down their necks ; and bawls incessantly into their twitching ears its Prosit Neujahr ! With reason Silvester Night is a liquid night, for it takes its name from a saint who douched — in spiritless water — the Emperor Constantine. " But Silvester," says Herr Gamradt, " did not worry Constantine with Joke- Articles." Joke- Articles are Berlin's Silvester joy. When you decide to enjoy Silvester Night you lay in a stock of them. They are in your pocket — among them some rubber chocolates — as you take Fraulein Meta Teschendorff to New Year Supper. Before hors d'ceuvres you offer Fraulein Meta some chocolates. She puts one to her tongue, and rejects it wryly. " Ha, ha ! " you chuckle. " A Joke- Article ! " And you kiss her hand. If you are really in love you bribe a waiter to drop behind Fraulein Meta a tray of Joke- Article tumblers. She screams with terror and faints. When she comes to you console her, with a grinful THE HUMAN WORLD-CITY 111 " Only Joke- Articles ! " Or you win her noiselessly like this. You turn up at the Grunbein's Silvester feast — in the Rankestrasse — with a dirty, blood- stained bandage twisted round your thumb. The host asks questions ; Fraulein Meta makes sym- pathetic remarks ; the guests secretly think you might have stayed away. When supper is over, and everyone brims with Sekt, you slip off the bandage stealthily. " What about your thumb ; where's the bandage ? " asks someone. " There was no bandage," you say. ** There was," he argues. A dispute begins ; and it ends by your vowing the guests imagined the bandage ; they've drunken too much Sekt, and'll next see snakes. At the moment when the young lieutenant on your right is fiercely fumbling for his card, you slip on the bandage, and chuckle insanely : " Ha, Ha, Ha ! 'Twas only a Joke- Article." And everyone roars. The World-City's Silvester Night is chiefly noted for uproar ; its Christmas is noted for ordered merriment. Christmas endures a month. In the first days of December Christmas shopping starts. That helps. Where slipshod Britons leave things to the last, and on Christmas Eve thunder down Regent Street armed with scent-bottles, aeroplanes, diamond rings, and rocking-horses, the orderly world-citizen brings home one gift a day ; and never gets out of breath, or has to explain to his wife 112 THE HUMAN GERMAN that somehow the hungry rocking-horse has swallowed the diamond ring. Even Herr Pohce- President Jagow does not forbid Christmas shopping; he helps ; and on two Sundays of December allows shops to be opened. There is a Silver Sunday and a golden Sunday ; and on these shopping Sundays busy world-citizens make for the squares and boule- vards, which look like pine forests, and bring home Christmas-trees, gingerbreads (for servants), hares (to be eaten on Holy Night), and carp (to be boiled in beer). A genial simplification is the Wish-Ticket. Der Wunschzettel. The Wish-Ticket shows well the Prussian's high command of the organisation of life. It is a slip of paper on which men and women with a right to Christmas presents write what they desire. In sHpshod, unorganised England this problem makes men grey ; and reckless husbands purchase diamond earrings when their wives are thirsting for Pekinese pups. The Wish-Ticket spares such disappointment. The forethoughtful wife, at least a week in advance, hands in a slip of paper, making clear that she wants the Pekinese — and the diamond earrings as well. From the Wish-Ticket evil may come. Modest persons fear to ask enough, and are sore at not getting more. Greedy persons ask too much ; and are wrathful at getting half. And under rarer THE HUMAN WORLD-CITY 113 circumstances the Ticket may lead to grief, and even wild as it seems — may dissolve united families. The case of the Trotts of Doberitz and 13 Gesel- brechtstrasse, Wilmersdorf, as told by Herr Dr. Ing. Gamradt, shows plainly how. Herr Actual Privy Councillor Trott shines in the higher bureaucracy. Frau Privy Councillor Trott is of no lower worth. They are a model pair. The husband — twenty years expert in the Imperial Insurance Office, pillar of the Evangelical Church and synodal reform, zealot for bettering the toiler's lot, and killing Socialism with kindness ; the wife — dear, blacklead-haired, prim Frau Trott — ardent in all good causes, lamp of the Women's Dress- Reform Circle ; of the Hygienic Foot-Clothing Union, of the League of German Mothers with Sons in the Fleet. Such an inexpugnable couple seemed proof against tragedy. Yet the Christmas Wish- Ticket, which brings even the worthless rejoicing, brought the deserving Trotts intolerable woe. On December twelfth, when Christmas hove in sight, Frau Privy Councillor Trott compiled a Wish- Ticket imaging the motherly, disinterested spirit which moved her. It was a Wish-Ticket which mentioned not a single frivolous gift, and brimmed over with objects rightly dear to every domesticated wife. It asked for a tin-opener, eight pairs of thick woollen stockings, six rubbing cloths (for the bath- 114 THE HUMAN GERMAN room), a Reformkorset (Court-Surgeon Schadeldick's Patent, No. 3) and twelve calico aprons for Fanny, the pudding-faced cook. A Wish-Ticket so modest caused joy to Herr Privy Councillor Trott ; and he vowed that the woollen stockings, the Reformkorset, and Fanny's calico aprons should be the best that money could buy. And with his wife's homely Wish-Ticket nesthng near his heart, and Puppchen, du hist mem Aiigen- stern whistling from his lips, he paid his daily call at the Babelsbergerplatz apartment, where Friiulein Liebchen Gliihlicht waited in the style moderne boudoir which she had asked him to buy after their first delirious spree in the Cabaret Spider (corner of Aschaffenburgerstrasse and Bayerischerplatz) . Friiu- lein Liebchen wore a compelling Yuletide smile. And after receiving Herr Privy Councillor Trott with a warmth which, somehow, she had not displayed since Christmas 1911, she gave him a red-ink Wish-Ticket as long as his plan to reorganise the Synod. A score of the things on the list unlearned Herr Gamradt forgets. He remembers only "a set of chinchilla furs," " a gold net-purse (with a plain clasp, but get a good one)," "twenty-four pairs of thin silk stockings," "the silver box we saw at Schoen's with the make-up things," after which followed a hst of intimate indispensables which made the Ticket blush as red as its ink. THE HUMAN WORLD-CITY 115 And all would have gone off well had not worthy Herr Trott been made so distrait by his General Synod reorganisation that he put salt in his tea, wore his socks as mittens, and blew his nose in the Reichspost. But on Christmas Eve, when Frau Privy Councillor Trott opened before envious relatives the box containing her husband's gifts, there first flew out of it a handsome set of chinchillas. " In addition to what I asked for ! " said Frau Trott. *' Generous as ever ! But extravagant ! " Then she lifted some paper ; and one after another flew out unblushingly a silver box of rouge and depilatories, a bottle of Strawgold hair-dye, a casket with the shameful perfume Devilbreath, twenty-four pairs of silk stockings so thin . . . But just at the moment when six incalculable dualities, which would have been white as snow had they not been transparent as ice, sprang hissing out of the atrocious box, the door- bell rang. Down the drawing-room rushed an ill- washed, precipitate female, in whom thunderstruck Herr Privy Councillor Trott recognised Klementine, his Liebchen's inseparable maid. " Fraulein Gliihlicht's compliments," said Klemen- tine, hurling a second box on the table. " And she says that you're late starting practical joking in your old age. . . . And she says you may send round for your greasy slippers and your ragged old dressing- gown. ..." Frau Privy Councillor Trott looked 116 THE HUMAN GERMAN piercingly at Klementine and next at Herr Actual Privy Councillor Trott ; then with the face of a mother at the yawning grave of her first-born, she interred the Christmas gifts. Herr Dr. Gamradt wails that Berlin is pa3dng the price of world-cityism, Smartness, Kino-Culture, and cabaret chedness. Its soul and body are ill. Its death-rate and infant death-rate are high ; and a tenth of the children who reach the age for schooling are put back as unfit. The illegitimacy rate is four times greater than London's ; and despite this philo- progenitive zeal the general birth-rate fell to half in forty years. The conscript records point to decay. Crime grows. Field-Marshals nursed on Old- Prussian simplicity yearn for the days when the other-worldly city had five theatres, all chronically solvent, no kinos, no bars, no cabarets, one bath. In those days people rejoiced seldom, and washed never ; even the first of Wilhelms when he sought ablution borrowed a hotel tub. Now there are so many theatres that there are not enough plays. The meanest clerks have baths in their apartments ; and for brickets, formerly heaped in a kitchen corner, the^question of Housing is solved. CHAPTER VIII THE HUMAN HOLIDAY Wenn der Bliiten Friihlingsregen Ueber alle schwebend sinkt, Wenn der Felder griiner Segen Allen Erdgebornen blinkt {Goethe), HAPPILY the bad World-City is framed by regenerative Nature ; and spring and summer come with heaUng, if meagre joys. Meagre, for the North German Nature is bare, and is not helped with art. There are few lazy, opulent men with tastes for out of doors. And fewer women. The World-City has no Thames, no Hurlingham, no Brighton, not even a Southend. Motor-cars are used for transporting doctors and seltzer- water. Flat-races draw dowdy tens where in Britain they draw resplendent hundreds. Things are small. Partly the cause is Nature ; partly too- human Nature. Brandenburg, after two centuries' planting, still merits its derisive : " Sandbox of the Holy Roman Empire." It has yellow sand and pine-woods, broken by desiccating lakes, strewn with desiccating orange-peel. Moneyed idlers who want Nature yawn ; they prefer Dresden with its "7 118 THE HUMAN GERMAN dwarf Switzerland behind ; Munich on the brink of the Alps ; even the minute but pleasant world- villages high in Thuringia's hills. Berlin's surrounding forests are Hampstead Heaths given over to the honest workman and the dishonest shopkeeper. On Sunday, these in millions make their Fly-Out (their Ausfiug), and gulp beautifulh^ their weekly air, and beer. Lakes are fringed with eating-dens, beer-gardens and cafes which sleep all the week, and awaken on Sunday morn. The Fly- Out is usually a blow-out. Oceans of beer, swimming baths of coffee, Alps of sausage are swallowed. Yet Berlin's twenty Hampsteads have not one restaurant where you can get a human meal. Vienna Schnitzel is the one resource. The reason is this. A lunch or dinner in fastidious British sense is not sought by the Flyer-Out. Odious as is the beer-garden it stands economically on the Flyer-Out's level. The Flyer-Out is too thrifty to buy the graces of life. The restaurant's profit is often what it makes on a ten-pfennig glass of beer. By ordering a glass, or several glasses in succession, the world-citizen establishes his claim to a table for hours. He holds that a restaurant has no right to profit from food. Prosperous work- men, solid traders, haughty subaltern bureaucrats bring, like our Comic Opera count, dinner in their pockets ; and command the restaurant's plates. THE HUMAN HOLIDAY 119 Some bring coffee and sugar and pay only for water. This Old-Prussian way is now decaying ; but there are still gardens which hang the placard : " Patrons may bring their own coffee," or simply, " No Coffee- Compulsion." Beer-gardens have halls for dancing. Other movement is rare. Seats in the beer-garden are full ; the woods are empty. Herr Locksmith Kwasnick, with wife and babes, sits all day at the garden table ; and orders indiscriminately beer for solid Martha, for cunning, ten-year-old Albrecht, for snub-nosed, toddling Amalie. It's cheap. In boastful mood, Herr Locksmith Kwasnick swears that he once spent three marks of a morning. " It was before we married," he adds. " We were terribly in love," says Martha, " and two of the marks sHpped from Franz's fingers, and rolled into the lake." Flyers-Out bathe. Mostly at Wannsee. Wannsee is a pine-edged inlet of the blue Havel ; rich men Hve there ; poor men come there, to bathe in Free- bath and Familybath. Family bath is select. You pay little and wear less ; at Freebath you pay nothing, and wear next to nothing. Both have beaches of yellow sand ; and you may swim far into the Havel, and even dive from a platform. Few do either. It is fashionable to sit and get sunburned ; and thus save two marks, the price of Braunolin, 120 THE HUMAN GERMAN a popular sunburning specific which sells by buckets in^t he' pale-faced World-City. Ever since an EngUsh touring company showed young English lords shoot- ing pheasants, it is smartisch to be sunburnt. Brauno- ltn*s rival is Edelweiss, which makes you white again. An unpleasant thing happened to Herr Assessor v. Glenk, the active young jurist at Moabit Criminal Court, who shares his Halensee rooms with Herr Assessor Dorn. Herr v. Glenk incautiously went to sleep on his left side in his boat at Tegel ; and woke an hour later with his right cheek burnt a Socialistic red, and his left cheek its habitual aesthetic snow. Next morning his red cheek had changed to dark brown. He took from Herr Dorn's collection a bottle labelled Edelweiss ; rubbed in hard on the right side only ; and thinking the fresh air would hasten the bleaching of his cheek to judicial equi- librium, he made for Moabit. Laughter met him. Herr v. Glenk rushed out the mirror-backed hair- brush which all assessors carry ; and saw with awe that while his left cheek looked even paler than before, his right had turned to ultra-ebony black. Herr Assessor Dorn had cracked the bottle of Braunolin, and recklessly poured the contents into an Edelweiss bottle. At Freebath the sexes, being poor and therefore obscene, are kept decently apart — unless they climb the fence. Familybath has a beach for mixed THE HUMAN HOLIDAY 121 bathers ; and, on the platform, separate halves for Ladies and Gentlemen. Letitia restricts the word Familienbad to the mixed bathing part ; after seven years' study of German she translates, " Bad Familiarity." Letitia has reason. She has seen bathing every- where, she says, from red-hot Lido by Venetia's shore where monkey Latins skip in strips of red cotton to Sestroretsk on Finland's insipid gulf where men and maids as bare as pine-trees wade in side by side. But Family bath, though duller far than Lido, and miles behind Finland for exiguity of dress, leaves both these beaches behind for pleasant, innocent freedom. And the dress is plain enough. The world-cityman, with ladies, is not ashamed of his bones. Sometimes he wears the irreducible minimum imposed in English swimming-baths for men only. In this adamic napkin he talks, flirts, dances, plays games. Ladies approve. Most wear cork-tight maillot, striped horizontally in red and white ; and they look like models for picture-post- cards. " Without troubling," as says Letitia, " about the bath-robe which even disgusting Frenchwomen wear," Fraulein Wanda and Fraulein Gundelinde sprawl on the strand with worshippers, or gambol on horizontal bars while the worshipper claps his hands and their backs. When tired they come to the platform restaurant, swallow huitcfbrods, and 122 THE HUMAN GERMAN drink. Letitia and I are grave and reverend persons; but even we relax when a white-bearded notary, naked to the waist and naked a Httle below, puffs cigar-smoke in the face of a lady little less naked, who eyes with passion his copper skin, and shares his sandwich of ham. Such is Familybath. It is dryly decorous compared with Freebath, where every Sunday at twelve Frau Houseporter Thieme laces a pink corset over her bathing-dress, and hops merrily on her hands. " To the impure," says Herr Gamradt, " nothing is impure." Neither Freebath nor Familybath inflames Prussian blood. The way is too expansive, too decorative, too bold ; the dress is too glaring ; the skins are too red ; the drinks too drowsy ; the cigars too like chimneys ; the sand too like clay. Bareness — perhaps a reaction from world-civic sophistication — takes curative reality in the Back to Nature cult. Back to Nature consists in showing your back to Nature — and also your front. You wander in August by the emerald Krahhiigel ; lose your way ; and find it again in the middle of a Midsummer Day's Dream. From a grassy clearing in the pinewood comes laughter ; and on your eyes flash threescore twinkling arms and legs. It is a tent-colony of Back-and-Front-to-Nature world- citizens. In the broad-barred maillot of Family- bath. Over a dozen of them of all ages and shapes ; THE HUMAN HOLIDAY 128 an elderly, thin lady ; a still more elderly thinner lady ; two middle-aged ladies ; two round reposeful gentlemen ; a mother ; her sister ; her children Karl- chen, Trudchen, Gustav, Maidie, Erny; their dog Kiiss- chen. All — except Kiisschen — are in bathing-dress, though no water is near; all are active and merry; papa is drinking lemonade ; the elderly ladies are knitting; Erny is hopping ; Trudchen is digging ; mamma is playing with Karlchen ; Karlchen is playing with Kiisschen ; Auntie is eating tree-cake ; ants are eating Auntie. It is a pleasant holiday; and easy to have. You need bathing dresses ; a tent ; sausages, saucepans, tobacco ; and — for lady colonists — adequate face-powder ; for a tent colonist, as said Gamradt's Paulchen when he saw little Kathie in her tub, is " nearly all face." It is a calm life ; and brings back the good, unworld-citied Germania of Tacitus when blue-eyed, red-nosed giants roamed through trackless forests — heroic, naked, and chaste. August for world-citizens is not the month of holiday. The schools close early in July ; and at once parents with trails of spectacled infants fly away for rest. They do not always seek the sea. Some make for Tyrol, or even, despite heat, for Venice, where fastidious, business-like Latins despise and plunder them. Still, most world- citizens are maritime. The poorer go to the slow, 124 THE HUMAN GERMAN insipid Baltic, which tastes Hke British spinach ; the richer make for North Sea Norderney, where they find salt water and Prince Biilow. Or for Westerland on Sylt if fishers ; or for Borkum if spies. Half a million leave Berlin in summer. The Baltic is favourite, because it's near and cheap. You reach it in four hours. Its coast is flat ; its cookery flatter ; but its popularity flattering. Its scenery — sand, pine-sticks and kinematographs — pleases because it recalls Berhn. There are bits — chiefly Riigen — with high chalk cliffs and beech-woods ; and down Flensburg way are fjords. The North Sea coast also is flat, but prices undulate. By the North Sea you live splendidly in hotels ; by the Baltic in furnished flats, or in boarding-house-hotels. Also some Berliners go to the Harz ; and many stay at home and rub in Braunolin. The middle-class World-City tripper stands higher than with us. He is specialised. He is never, as in indiscriminate England, the mere grocer or clerk by the sea. Everything about him reflects his holiday mood. His equipment is beyond reproach. Instinct for costume is strong. And not only when tramping the sands. At Johannesthal flying-race, we lately met Herr Dr. Ing. Gamradt in airman's dress, with leather cap-flaps tightly pressing his ears. " So you're flying ? " said admiring Letitia, while I scowled enviously. " Not exactly, gracious lady," THE HUMAN HOLIDAY 125 he answered. " That is, not now." In the middle of luncheon he ran over and whispered, " But I'm writing a book on Relative Efficiency of Seven Tested Air-Propellers." When on July 7 Herr Gamradt with Frau Meize, Paulchen, and rachitic Kathie makes for Baltic Arendsee, no man is doubtful of their goal. Their very boots, as Keswell says enviously, smack of the wave. Herr Gamradt sports brief mustardy breeches, and a green Tyrolean hat with cock's- feather, and Frau Meize wears a mountaineering skirt, and a yellow hat. Both carry spiked sticks to help on the Baltic dunes. They do not take ice- axes. Frau Meize wears driving gloves. Few tipsy tars bound for Nelson's flagship ever looked more seaside. But seven-year-old Paulchen pleases me most. His very strut confirms the Kaiser's " young Germany, like young England, is immersed in sport." Paulchen wears a soldier's brass-rimmed Pickelhaube, leather breeches four inches short of the knee with silk arabesques, and a sweater. With correct sporting negligence, Herr Gamradt 's bathing suit swings round his neck. The luggage consists of a dress-basket, four roomy suit-cases with embossed geometry, three bags of fruit, and some sandwiches that sweat. Naturally in this get-up the Gamradts blend harmoniously with the pine-clad flats, the furnished 126 THE HUMAN GERMAN flats, and the halcyon waters of the Baltic. And they forget no amenities. Since the first of June the Sunday newspapers have teemed with praises of Travel-and-Bath-Things, miraculous seaside luggage, knapsacks. Thermos flasks, "sport trousers," " English tourist capes," and slayers of — and makers of — freckles. All these are englisch. The advertiser proves it with sketch of a clean-shaven, hard-faced tourist, fiercely biting a pipe, who blows out smoke which inscribes the compelling words " JOHN- BULL- ARTICLES. " Tyrolean dress is liked in the World-City. Often we notice this. In August last year Anhalt railway station was full of Tyrol peasants. They were returning to their counting-house desks, their tasks in the Rathaus, their . . . When waiting with Letitia and Herr Gamradt for Frau Gamradt's train from Niirnberg, we came across twenty, all with sunburnt knees, short, embroidered jackets, and hats full of Edelweiss and Alpine roses. It seemed like the top of the Sonnjoch. When the Munich train steamed in, out jumped more Tyro- leans ; one with every dress detail complete, and even a bramble scratch on his shin. In this un- impeachable hillman I recognised my pleasant friend Herr Tugendreich Biintig, who keeps the well- ventilated Franzosisches Cafe in a street near Schoneberg Park. THE HUMAN HOLIDAY 127 Herr Biintig was back from a fortnight spent by rainswept Achensee, and later in the rose-flushed Dolomites. He hailed in Schoneberg patois another Tyrolean ; and presented him as Herr Brewer Blum of Spandau. Then, looking kindly at his roasted legs, he remarked that when you go to Rome you must do as Romans do ; and when you go to the Tyrol you must dress like Berliners. He explained that most of the green-breeched, cock's-feathered men you meet down Innsbruck way come from level Brandenburg. *' The born Tyrolean's passion," said Herr Brewer Blum, " is to pose byronesquely on crags in a morning-coat from Berlin. Whenever I meet a round, white cragsman with broad, bare knees, I hail him in good North-German ; when I come on a sunburnt tourist in bowler hat I hail him with ' Gruass Gott ! ' The finest of all Tyroleans dwell west of the Tiergarten." And he explained that jodel-singers mostly come from Bremen. Herr Gamradt ascribes this Tyrolean verisimilitude to the plasticity of the race. Germans, he boasted, mould themselves to all things. In Guayaquil they are Spaniards ; in Minnesota New Yorkers. A German's instinct at home is to copy foreigners ; his instinct abroad is to copy natives. " The Britons and Germans," intervened Herr Blum, " dwell at opposite poles. The German abroad apes everything ; the Englishman abroad is stiJI 128 THE HUMAN GERMAN more intransigently English than at home. The German in England speaks English so much that he forgets German ; the Englishman in Germany speaks English so much that he forgets whatever German he knew. The German has a decent sympathy for foreign ways ; the Englishman has none. In England a German always turns up his trousers ; in Germany an Englishman merely turns up his nose. ..." He was developing this thesis. But here sprang from the train a blue-eyed, straw- haired giant in a Turkish fez and pale yellow knicker- bockers. To escape the revelation that Smyrna is peopled with transmuted Hessians, Letitia and I made off. The World-City obsession extends far from Bozen and Innsbruck. Scandinavia in August is more Berlinese than Berlin. Letitia and I did not know that when we asked an expert where we might have a rest from the World-City, who answered : " Try Danish islands. The Danes hate the Prussians and keep them away." We flew next week to Danish Bornholm ; and — found ourselves home in Berlin." The virtue of Danish Bornholm in summer is that it holds no Danes. There are only Germans. There are German hotel-keepers, German waiters, German porters, German guests. We stayed some weeks in an hotel at Helligdommcn, which stands near THE HUMAN HOLIDAY 129 pigmy but decently romantic cliffs. During those weeks we heard only once the Danish tongue; this was from a Stettin seed-merchant who was learning Danish from a phonograph. Though it lacks Danes, Bornholm has charms ; you can dive deep into blue water from granite cliffs, one foot to fifty high. At sight of the granite cliffs Berliners chorus : " Wonder-lovely ! " Herr Gamradt was furious when told that down Ballinskellig way these cliffs would be praised as " dacent big stones to take to Cassidy's wake." Bornholm has small, emerald woods, and a big, limp forest at Almindingen, whence you can see all the island. There are ruins of Ham- mershus, the governors' palace-fortress ; round churches built for praying and defence ; runes ; footsteps of glaciers ; and flourishing fields of wheat, oats, barley, rye, and cows. There are fishing and farming. That is Bornholm's joy. There are harbours with squat boats ; and inland valleys that flash with snow-white, white-timbered guards, shelter- ing three sides of a square, with windless yards inside. The weakness is famine. There is rich food in the fields but none on the table. Hotels choke you with oozy German Beefsteak and etiolated Atifschnitt ; and there is one, universal soup, which as creme danoise, creme portugaise, creme de Chine, and creme Manhattan dwells for years in the memory and intestine, 9 130 THE HUMAN GERMAN Bornholm's world-citizens are of basest hue. Nearly all are from Berlin, N. and E. Bornholm's Danes might compensate, could you only find them. But you cannot. Once Letitia and I drove ten miles inland from the World-City cliffs ; and entered a Danish farmyard to water our horse. The Dane was a Saxon from Chemnitz. He said, " There's not a Danish body in these parts." The same afternoon while climbing over a cliff-ridge, we observed six naked mermaids lying, fronts to Nature, on a sun-kissed rock. They waved their hands. " The savage natives," said Letitia, while I rejoiced, assured that at last we had seen some Danish bodies. We reached our hotel at dinner- hour, in sheer emotion swallowing cr^me portugaise. Brought thereby to our senses, we looked across the dining-room. There were six empty chairs, the seats of six distinctly cultured ladies from Zehlendorf, Berlin, S. Five hundred thousand leave the World-City in summer ; the saying is that only house-porters, brewers, and burglars stay at home. The porters stay to look after the flats ; the brewers to look after the brew ; the burglars to look after the silver. The porters profit most. The porter has charge of the whole empty house, which has two dozen flats. To him, before leaving, you hand your door-keys ; if not, you are liable for losses when a THE HUMAN HOLIDAY 181 fire or a barrel breaks out, and the porter can't enter to extinguish it or drink it up. This trust of your property puts responsibihty on the porter ; and when you get back you give him correspondingly *' drink- gold." But that is only one thing among many duties and tips. His highest office is Zoo-Curator. To him you entrust your dog, your cat, your canary, your gold-fish, your Hanschen's white mice ; and he stores them with the dogs, cats, canaries, gold- fish, and white mice of others in one room which he shares with his wife, seven children, and niece. You pay him to feed them. He feeds them usually, and if he forgets the cat there are openings for its own initiative. When you return he hands you an opulent cat, and the canary's cage with memorial feathers. You tip him for taking care of your letters, and once more for losing them ; and you tip him for keeping the prowling burglars out ; and a second time for letting them in. The burglar's lot is bettered. In winter days he lives still worse than in England, where he climbs easily in through ground-floor windows. But the World-City's five-storied houses are fortresses. Their doors, back and front, are double-locked at night ; and when the burglar breaks through, and gets to the general staircase, he has yet to tackle the hall-door of your flat. So for eleven months there are no burglaries at all ; the burglar decays to a 132 THE HUMAN GERMAN mere ingenious thief, who enters by saying he's come to mend the gas, or to collect pfennigs for Pensions for Postmen with Wens on their Necks. Summer brings the burglar a transient Golden Age. People are at Heringsbucht or Schellfischdorf, and if once he enters a fiat he may stay for weeks, and write monographs. And to get in is easy. The porter is disarmed by beer, heat, and work. He is watering your balcony flowers, or feeding Mizzi the dachshund ; his wife is busy feeding the gold- fish ; his children are busy feeding the white mice ; the canary is busy feeding the cat. That makes clear why nine-eyed summer sees threefold more burglaries than dark, propitious winter. So the burglar profits, the citizen who stays at home and the brewer in the saying also profit. They enter- tain no burglars ; bribe no porters ; feed their own animals ; take in their own letters ; and water their own flowers and beer. Newspapers find in German holidays a vicious change. Luxury, they say, is guilty. In olden days all men did as decent Gamradt does : took their families to tedious holes by the sea ; and yawned virtuously. This habit decays. Husbands, corrupted by world-city ism, send their wives and infants early to the seaside ; and take their holidays later, and alone. This, say scaremakers, is spoiling Germany ; and they point each August to a waxing THE HUMAN HOLIDAY 133 crop of murdered husbands, beaten wives, litigious servants, medical poisoning, and — worst of human torments — the dilemma of choice between a weak and human wife and a triumphant, immortal cook. The fact is, mamma, squat Julius, Gustav, and pasty Aennchen make for Schellfischdorf ; while papa, swearing like us he has lost money in Schantungs, stays spartanly at home ; and later (because of overwork) starts for curative Ostend on pain of death. Hence the insidious institution, the Strohwitwerzug, the Straw- (which means the Grass-) Widow Train. German straw- widow trains are tires omely full of dames and maids without cavaliers, and babes without papas. Some console themselves at Schell- fischdorf ; not for nothing is the damp British word " grass-widow " inflammably Germanised to straw. The ignition point is ten degrees below. This leads to family dissension. The fact is, while gracious lady starves on shellfish at Schellfischdorf, her straw-widower husband is being spoiled by regenerated servants. When freckled gracious- lady comes back, she finds unexampled bills, un- exampled paunches, unexampled dyspepsia, and unexampled cookish grins, the grins of menials who have been told for weeks on end that they keep house fiftyfold better than gracious lady. This is Hedwig's vengeance. For eleven months 134 THE HUMAN GERMAN of despotism and unearned flouts she pays herself in four ecstatic weeks. When gracious lady departs, the comfortless flat flashes into a palace. Hedwig, who wouldn't learn to boil water, is found reading Grimod de la Reyniere. Formerly there was no flower on the table, but much flour in the soup ; the sole was like lemon sole, and the beef like boot-sole ; the potatoes like sponges and the pears like potatoes. All this miraculously changes when gracious lady goes. Not only with LucuUus feats does the reptile cook silently condemn her mistress ; but for the first time in the flat is felt the touch of a woman's hand. Everyone seems to think of gracious Herr. When exhausted gracious Herr returns at five a.m. from a board-meeting (at the Palais de danse), he finds in his room a dish of peaches, three bottles of seltzer, and — provident Hedwig overlooks nothing — a spoon and bicarbonate of soda. And naturally gracious Herr, who reasons lucidly (next morning), sees that gracious lady is a heartless, incompetent hussy, whose one function as wife is to check an all-provident cook. When gracious lady gets back she finds gracious Herr fat, rosy, and bright of eye, but inexplicably complaining of overwork (at the Palais de danse). He is packing his bag for a fortnight in curative Ostend — the one alternative to final nervous collapse. And next evening one more straw- widow- THE HUMAN HOLIDAY 135 train steams from Friedrichstrasse, packed with nervous wrecks for Ostend, town of good, un- German inns, crisp dinners, and melting pears and maids. The while at home diabolical Hedwig regains her congenial baseness ; there is flour in the soup but no flowers on the table, the sole tastes like boot-sole ; and gracious lady . . . CHAPTER IX THE HUMAN LAWMAKER Turn him to any cause of policy, The Gordian knot of it he will unloose, Familiar as his garter {Kitt^ Henry V). GERMAN lawmaking mechanism, compared with Britain's, looks remarkably effective ; but Britain's reviled lawmakers have more business-like ways and do more work. That is our judgment after hearing seven debates on Reduced Veal Duties in Wallet's sugar-sweet Itahan-Renais- sance pile at Konigsplatz, " which cost over a milhon pounds," says Herr Gamradt ; "which is worth under a milhon marks," says Letitia. It is a well-arranged building. There is a sessions hall actually made for sitting in, with room for everyone, without any possibility of a struggle for seats. It is the usual continental amphitheatre ; and there are desks for members, each with its human label. There is, high up, a President's table ; lower, the Speaker's tribune ; lower still, the shorthand table ; and on both sides seats for Bundesrat members and bureaucrats. The Chan- cellor sits to the right. The gallery is for princes, 136 THE HUMAN LAWMAKER 137 diplomats, pressmen, and lookers-on. You may see there the Crown Prince booing pusillanimous Chan- cellors ; the British Ambassador hearing the truth about Britain ; distinguished and infamous corre- spondents ; and the citizens Metzing, Stockmann, Kruger, Gropius, and Kutchinski, all up from Nassau to hear their member speak. Their wives sit near them — even in the restaurant you will not find a grille. Seen from our seats, the Reichstag breathes a decent bourgeois air. Its note is mild. The aristo- cratic handful does not look aristocratic ; the rest does not look professional, commercial, literary, or proletarian — it looks bourgeois. The many Social- Democrats who war on bourgeoisie look most bourgeois of all. Ten members would pass the Tailor and Cutter. Uniforms, on Government representa- tives, appear when Defence questions come up. The Tories (Konservative) have some washed es- quires ; their tail, the Imperial Party, has diplomats in retreat whose clothes reflect Bond Street ; the National Liberals are redeemed socially by a prince ; the Radical People's Party is indiscriminately intellectual ; and the Socialists, who ought to be fierce and flame-eyed, look like ill-paid, pale- tempered clerks. The Reichstag is not literary. When Excellency Herr State-Secretary Privy Councillor Posadowsky 138 THE HUMAN GERMAN introduced a Bill against Phthisis with the words : " In Schiller's incomparable Werther ..." seven members grinned ; the other three hundred and ninety telephoned their booksellers to send up Schiller's Werther, with a list of Herr Schiller's other recent books. Such a Reichstag differs from the Reichstag of Frankfurt, which provoked Heine's brightest gibe ; from later Reichstags also, which had Mommsen, Treitschke, Gneist, Beseler, and Virchow. Reichstag work is dry. Long speeches and long sessions are rare ; and obstruction is unknown. But many parties mean many speeches. Often each puts up two speakers on everything. No man knows how many parties there are. Official Election- returns name sixteen, not counting the Savages — the non-party Wilde. There are five parties worth mentioning. The practice is to accept as an inde- pendent " fraction " any group with fifteen members or more. A fraction has its own committee and chairman ; and a servant paid by the Reichstag. Members are independent, and often a party vote is split ; the fractions, in fact, are fractious, though rarely — even Letitia says — vulgar fractions. Reichstag work is done in fraction meetings and committees. In the committees the fractions are represented. The chief committee, the " Senior Convention," arranges work. The Reichstag itself THE HUMAN LAWMAKER 189 judges the validity of elections. The test Com- mittee counts fourteen members, who divide the work. No member reports on the case of a party friend. The Reichstag Plenum speaks a final decision. Challenged members sit. In contested elections tons of papers are read, months are taken to decide : one contest lasted five years ; and the challenged member sat, voted, travelled at the nation's cost, and drew his £150. The Budget Committee stands highest. It hears in closed session declarations on policy and arma- ments. It is sharp on economy. Government speakers are heckled for days over squandered pfennigs. A Commission of twenty-eight handles petitions. Each session brings fifteen thousand, mostly demands for pensions, complaints by un- promoted postmen, and rhetoric against boracic acid preservatives. The private citizen holds that the public citizen should work. The Reichstag is bare of comedy. Good-humour prevails, but no humour : sitting on a hat would sooner provoke a challenge than a laugh. There are no Suffragists. During a debate on oxen (a theme which always crowds Reichstag benches) a farmer cast down pamphlets, shouting, " Votes for Cows' Rights, not Women's." Once a wretch scattered patent medicine advertisements. The Reichstag has no tradition ; and most of its hoariest tales were 140 THE HUMAN GERMAN made last week. Sometimes you hear of the hat- trick, a tale genuinely dating from years when no wage was paid. In those days counts-out were daily ; so Herr President, instead of tediously counting members, sent a lackey to the cloak-room to count their hats. The Opposition, which needed a quorum, brought twenty duplicate hats ; and with them made laws for months. And then the Bavarian member who rescued sixty marks. The clever man ingeminated twenty times a single speech and delayed a division until the Munich train brought along three colleagues, who must each have paid twenty marks had they missed the division. Twenty-marks' fines are almost the only meat in the soup of Reichstag wit. The fines arc imposed because Reichstag members, being paid and privi- leged, are under compulsion to work. Their privilege is juristic immunity. During the session civil actions against members lie dormant, even if the members want them tried. During the session, and eight days before and after, the member travels free. In order to get full value from this privilege the patriot Reichstag adjourns itself instead of letting itself be prorogued ; and in this way it gets free traveUing practically all the time. The wage (Marks 3000) is called " compensation for outlay." For years the Reichstag asked in vain for wages ; and since the Constitution forbids wages, the Bundesrat opposed. THE HUMAN LAWMAKER 141 But as unpaid members would not attend, and no work was done, compulsion was put on members in the shape of M.3000 a year, and M.20 fine on absentees. The Reichstag sits about 150 days a year ; so the M.20 is one day's wage. In the couloir stand lectern desks with lists for signature. Members are fined even for missing divisions ; were they not, say writers on Reichstag ethics, they would drop in once a day, sign the list, and then patriotically flee. Socially the Reichstag member is no great shakes. Not even to his constituents in Schmutzendorf- Klein-Schonhauser-Galtz. He keeps no position, feeds no parasites, bribes no football clubs. Periodi- cally he is entertained by an hospitable Chancellor — asked, that is, to a " beer evening " or "a cup of tea " — Eine Tasse Thee. The President holds parlia- mentary evenings. There are no town houses. Members live in furnished lodgings or in bad hotels, patronised, like Ulster shebeens, on party lines. The Centre Party formerly kept alive a whole hotel. Parties keep a decent union — except when dividing. Each has its wine-shop or beer-hall, where colleagues meet of an evening to explain why they voted against the party and to drink to party unity. Socialists alone condemn this party levity ; they show justly ascetic, righteously reproachful scowls ; and they make merry either not at all or somewhere unknown to anyone mysteriously on the sly. 142 THE HUMAN GERMAN Reichstag parties are not — in British sense — patriotic. Their pocket-attachments are strong ; they hate to vote an army corps or a Dreadnought ; and they consider just taxes are taxes paid by others. But though they grudge pfennigs for slaughter, lawmakers are not Pacifist. Here they faithfully represent the German people. There is little war spirit about, but there is less peace spirit. There are no German peace apostles. Frau Baroness von Suttner and Herr Fried, who write in German, are Austrians. Professors of internal law mostly concentrate on the laws of war ; the most prominent, Baron v. Stengel, represented Germany at the Conference of Peace and went home and wrote books glorifying war. England, France, and America have scores of peace societies — even mild, Tripolitan Italy has thirty-two — but Germany has a thin seven. The Press is not Pacifist. Newspapers stand for Peace because Peace means good business. They are content to oppose war as bad business. They print cartoons laughing at peacemakers and gibing at the Cause of Christendom, the Conscience of Europe, the Brotherhood of Burglars. The Sociahsts themselves are no Peace-fiends. They attack Chau- vinists and Navy Leagues because these are rascals and spend the pfennigs of poor Herr Master- Plumber Schultz ; but with denunciation their zeal ends. Nowhere do you see a creative glorification and THE HUMAN LAWMAKER 143 deification of Peace. No one writes Peace romances of Utopia, or draws Peace-virgins in diaphanous smiles twitching ohve-twigs over a regenerate earth. The cause is probably that Germans are not war- Hke. Only a Jingo brood, like Britain's, know the true passion for Peace. To exalt a heavenly principle you must have earthy aims ; and the absence of earthy aims marks off Germans from Europe. Other nations want things. Frenchmen want lost provinces ; Italians want to civilise — or plunder — Libya ; Danes want the Duchies ; Englishmen want everything. But Germany lacks a national objec- tive. Her plots are mostly British chimeras. The national brain is cold at the thought of Holland, Denmark, the German domains of Austria. There is no ideal of colonies, and steaming past Gravesend with a broom at the masthead is a goal too far off. Having no hungry ideals, Germans are depressed. Their individual ideals — making money and looking Tyrolean — are no good substitute for national aspirations. They have " a low tide in soul," as Shelley said. Their Government has a similar stagnant mood. Its favourite theme is that nothing will ever happen ; and that nothing need ever happen. The Empire is glorious ; Bismarck is great ; the Constitution has reached its last, un- improvable development ; and all things, in the way of Herr Dr. Phil. Leibniz and Herr Dr. Paed. 144 THE HUMAN GERMAN Pangloss, are for the best in the best of possible Empires. Thus Germany is shorn of divine dis- content, the fructifying stimulus of races and men. This low tide in soul checks Peace enthusiasm, and therewith checks War enthusiasm. The two go together. " Peace societies know that," says Herr Gamradt, " and that is why they condemn war generally ; and alwa3'S praise their own country's wars. For what would become of Peace prophets were not war waged once a week to prove their indispensabihty ? " Also the thinness of sentiment on Peace, War, and other high ideals comes from the national absorption in local and sectional things. That explains the threadbare party politics. Not politics, but religion in shape of a Protestant-Catholic feud. Business in shape of Protection and Socialism, Particularism in shape of inter-State animosity are the dynamic impulse of the so-called pohtical machine. These unpohtic antagonisms show no abatement. The Jesuit Law crops up to-day as furiously as in the 'seventies ; Protectionists and Free Traders fight as in 1878 ; Socialism makes dissension — as all along ; Land remains at strife with Finance ; Prussians still condemn Bavarians as drones ; and Bavarians believe that Prussians eat their children, and drink their beer without radishes. In particular Socialism and anti-Socialism rend the nation — they rend it THE HUMAN LAWMAKER 145 with a fissure deeper far than any mere Tory- Radical, Repubhcan-Democrat cleft. This, mainly because of panicky outbursts by Emperors, kings, policemen, and retired photographers with three hundred a year. Not, says Herr Gamradt, because of its merits. Ideological basis it has none. Its passion for schism has destroyed that ; and only by thinning principles down to water does it get its heretics to drink. The store of doctrinal purity is too small. Millions — 4,259,000 — call themselves Sociahsts ; and flop about in red ties and noses ; but when you start to question, they answer : " We're most unyielding Socialists, but naturally we don't accept the absurd Socialistic doctrine." Hence the spread of Socialist Revisionism under Herr Eduard Bernstein, who has been telling Germans for fifteen years past that Marx was a very great thinker, and was right in everything except his premises, conclusions, and prophecies. Herr Bernstein got himself proscribed, and managed to tear the Socialist Party nearly in twain ; but of late the Anti-Marx Marxians have had the upper hand ; and the Pro-Marx Marxians, though holding stoutly to all the founder's dogmas, have been forced to surrender to Revisionism in the matter of tactics. The feud of Socialists against Non-Socialists, of Marxians against Marx is part of that universal fissiparous Particularism which till lately made a 146 THE HUMAN GERMAN Germany of a hundred states, and still makes a Germany of six-and-twenty. It has compensations. SociaHst tyranny over Socialists is the joke of politics ; and nothing lends brighter change to morning journals than the passions of minor states. Like poets, the states reject the predicate ; but you can gallop through some before breakfast ; and in hill-strewn Thuringia you can walk over six before night. All have sovereigns, heirs, overceremony- masters, debts. Court theatres. Court scandal, and Court plaster : and most have implacable hate for unresenting Prussia. By malice of geography these cannot lose Prussia from sight. Some, like Schaumburg-Lippe, Prussia encloses and severs from civihsed parts. Others, like Brunswick and Hesse, she merely chops into forlorn slices. The unluckiest, like Waldeck, she at once surrounds and permeates, for sprinkled miserably on Waldeck's resentful inside are one-mile forests and six-hectare meadows which own to Prussia's sway. In Southern regions, when you think the enemy far, you find yourself on a Prussian knife which sticks in Wiirttemberg's vitals. There are men who say they know a Prussian enclave by its dreary neatness of landscape. This is stretching Prussophobia ; but temperance is no virtue of minor states. In zeal to punish Prussia these states, says Herr Gamradt, have THE HUMAN LAWMAKER 147 contemplated war. Years back, when feeling ran still stronger than now, Herr Lessing-Riicksack of Schaumburg-Lippe proclaimed universal boycott. He discovered that the foe owns twenty patches inset ("paste gems," he said, "in gold") in more honourable states, all remote from Prussia's parent territory. The paste stones Prussia ruled through tax-gatherers, school-inspectors, and other itinerant oppressors, who travelled without hindrance through the states of gold. The Lippe Hampden preached that the golden countries must challenge the right of way, and cause Prussia to rue her pilfered eminence and Low-Dutch cheek. The boycott failed. On day of outbreak Herr Lessing-Riicksack inherited eighty marks from a dead cousin in Liegnitz, to be paid only on condition he graced the funeral rites. At Lippe frontier a Prussian gendarme sent him imperatively home. " Prussia," said the gendarme, " has proclaimed a boycott of Lippe." And he opened a map. Only then did Herr Lessing-Riick- sack, who had diligently studied other countries' frontiers, learn that his native land is itself enclosed by Prussia, and that without grace from the enemy he must stay at home for ever. In private matters grave dilemmas rise. Bruns- wick has a schoolboy, blessed with considerable wealth, who lives captive on territory which he may leave only by sacrificing every mark. His 148 THE HUMAN GEEMAN name is Fresser. The property comes from the Hannoverian patriot Fresser, who fought Prussia at Hohensalza. Fresser never forgave his country's foe ; and he tied his lands with the hmitation that no tenant for hfe should set foot on Prussian soil. As Prussia encloses Brunswick young Fresser never leaves home. What is worse, Prussia slices Bruns- wick into sections ; and since luckless Fresser dwells in the smallest section, he may never even visit Brunswick town. The Kreishlatt says that Fresser should fly with Count Zeppelin. But his guardians fear that the airship might drop in a Prussian rye- field, and transfer young Fresser 's riches to his kinsman, Fresser zu Schmalz. Unluckily, questions of policy cause discord not only with Prussia. The quarrelhng states of Thuringia have at times surpassed the Balkans. Herr Gamradt says that in these conflicts Coburg commonly wins, so much so that other Thuringian states fear to give her offence. Her hegemony was established by an adventurous stroke. She had an outstanding dispute with Saxe-Meiningen over a share in the salary of an assistant veterinary surgeon who served both states. Meiningen was obdurate. Coburg sought a weak spot in Meiningen's armour. She discovered that a considerable part of Meinin- gen's revenue came from the taxation of the pros- perous beer-house, " The Glacier and Stocking," THE HUMAN LAWMAKER 149 which hes near the frontier. Tourists from all parts of Coburg and Meiningen came to a frontier seat in Coburg which commanded a famous view ; rested, and then made for the " Glacier and Stocking," where they quaffed deeply to the profit of the host and of the state. In this situation Coburg scented vengeance. It painted the frontier seat bright green and hung up the notice " Frisch Gestrichen," which means wet paint. So nobody could sit down, nobody enjoyed the view, and nobody drank in the Meiningen inn. When in five days the paint dried, the seat was given another coat and the wet paint notice left on. That was in 1900. Since then the seat, under Act of Legislature, has been painted every five days ; and the receipts of Meiningen from drink taxation have fallen off by half. CHAPTER X THE HUMAN LAW-BREAKER Oui, si nous n'avions pas de juges a Berlin {Miller of Sattssouci). HERR GAMRADT says that Germany is the land of criminals. It is peopled by innocent ruffians who go daily to gaol, who when the State Procuror gets more assistants will go hourly. Not Corsica or the frosty Caucasus has so many men in conflict with the law. Learned statisticians write books to prove that the only Germans who keep out of prison are forgers, wife- beaters, and warders. Some exaggerate. The competent Herr Dr. Finkelnburg, Governor of Moabit Gaol, brings things to proportion in a book which shows that one in twelve of his countrymen has been punished for breaking the criminal law. Still, that is adequate ; for Herr Finkelnburg counts only breakers of laws of the Empire ; and he excludes the thousands sentenced by minor courts for mis- demeanours, the hundreds sentenced by court martial, and the millions fined or imprisoned for breach of police prohibitions and decrees. Of first- class criminals — persons arraigned and punished ISO THE HUMAN LAW-BREAKER 151 for genuine, honest crime — Germany has barely 3,869,000. Every sixth adult man, every twenty- fifth adult woman is a criminal. Innocent children do their share. Of boys aged under eighteen, one out of forty-three, says Herr Finkelnburg, has been punished for crime. This plethoric state has concerned the Reichstag, the Landtag, Ministers of Justice, and abusive newspapers. Ignoring the circumstance, made clear by Herr Dr. Finkelnburg, that the State's high aim is to multiply criminals, some are displeased. The newspapers (part of the Reichstag too) wail that Germany has too many laws ; that the machinery of Justice has grown to be an end in itself ; that it measures its success by the activity of Moabit Court. Each year new laws are made ; and subtler, sterner tests of legality imposed ; so that when tying your boot-strings, or cutting your finger-nails, or friends, you are always in dread of violating a clause of the R.S.G.B. But that was always so. " It is impossible," said Bismarck, " to get out of bed and walk to the window without transgressing a Prussian law." From the standpoint of the chastising State, things since Bismarck's day have improved. For instance, in 1887 only 345,710 criminals received sentence, while in 1907 there were 521,435. This increase much exceeds the growth of population ; and it 152 THE HUMAN GERMAN compares favourably with the increase of trade, though not, perhaps, with the increase of the Fleet. Still the State does its best, in applying its innumer- able devices for keeping figures up. For instance, the State Procurors have usually no discretion as to whether they indict or not. This circumstance acts fruitfully. Men must be tried for cancelling a cheque-stamp with a " 6," when they ought to have written " June " ; fools who sign others' names in joke on the ist of April are arraigned as forgers ; and Christians who heap coals of fire on their enemies' heads get penal servitude for arson. Herr Dr. Finkelnburg makes a specious pretence that he does not approve of the high aims of the State ; he condemns its punitive zeal. But more enlightened men have praise. They say that in such ways crime is eradicated. The ugly distinction of being criminal is beneficially obscured in the public mind ; and it will soon be as lower-middle-class and stupid to get five years' penal servitude as it is to get the fifth class of the Order of the Prussian Crown. The State furthers its aim by providing a juris- prudence of rare comprehensiveness and refinement. No case is too tenuous to be tried before judges and jury ; and happily no wrong is too trivial for legal redress. German jurists condemn the levity of the London beak who bids a plaintiff not waste the Court's time with silly complaints. They say that it THE HUMAN LAW-BREAKER 153 is the highest function of Justice to determine dehcate questions. *' Anyone," I quote Herr Dr. Ing. Gamradt, " can hang a murderer, or say who owns a million." Hence every day some case of aetherial tenuity is tried by a civil or a mihtary court. The commonest motive is " offence " or '* insult " — Beleidigimg ! By etymology this word implies injury ; but it needs no injury to make it a crime. Lawyers may find in the words subjective injury, which means that the villain in the dock did not mean to insult you, but that you took his words as an insult. If Herr Troschel calls you a hen, you may lodge criminal information ; and even if he swears the sense was complimentary, for you resemble a flying man, you may get him into gaol by swearing you don't want to fly. " Offence " is the richest chapter in legal literature. Jurists of repute expound in volumes why a man went to gaol for writing : " Herr State-Minister Beckmann, like Cincinnatus, has returned to his right place before the plough " ; because these words " improperly reflect on the minister's official competence and therefore impugn his honour," though the prosecution failed against Herr Stockbroker Blind, who shouted *' Imperial canary-bird " at a red-haired deputy dressed in yellow nankeen. Trial for " offence " replaces our civil and 154 THE HUMAN GERMAN criminal trials for libel, slander, abuse, and assault. Even, it seems, it may replace the crim. con. case ; for a Court once sent a seducer to gaol on the ground that his conduct was an insult to the husband. Where a libelled Briton sues for a thousand damages, the libelled German lodges information with the Procuror, who always prosecutes. When not physical, " offence " is punished with a maximum imprisonment for one year, or £30 fine ; and when it is made by print or picture, with a maximum two years in gaol, or a fine of £75. The practice is to inflict small fines ; and you can charge your neigh- bour with child-torture, or even call him a turkey- cock, for the choice of a Chesterfield sofa. The consequence is that gross libel and slander flourish. A badly defamed man finds it not worth while to enter Court : he gets neither stern vengeance nor compensatory damages. So newspapers are reckless. Herr Schmidt, arrested on suspicion, is at once " The Murderer Schmidt." The Court does not punish such contempt ; and Herr Schmidt when released as innocent never thinks of an " offence " process. This at first sight seems to foil the State's high aim of increasing crime. But in compensation, minor " offence " trials for offences worth less than £30 take place every hour. Herr Pohceman Schindler is prosecuted for calling a citizen a " fellow " — a Kerl. The citizen is in a motor-car smash ; and THE HUMAN LAW-BREAKER 155 insufferable Herr Schindler says : ** Take down this fellow's name ! " The case goes through three instances. Sheep's-head costs £12 los. — for that sum in cheap England you could . . . But prices under Protection . . . These judgments strike by their refinement of reasoning. A Darmstadt Court decides that " old boot " is not criminal, " because under no normal circumstances could a veterinary surgeon of Hesse be confused with a boot." The epithet " Englishman " strained the best juristic brains of Hannover. When Herr Dr. Eissel from Budweis beat Herr Schwendy at chess, Herr Schwendy hurled at his conqueror the unexampled epithet " Engliinder." In Court Herr Dr. Eissel qualified the epithet as " serious," because he was not an Englishman and had never been in England. He was a temperate Austrian Anglophile who wore English clothes and had a son at Rugby. The Court convicted. " The epithet ' Englishman,' " it ruled, " is not always or even customarily cause of offence ; objectively the word is no more vituperative than ' German,' ' Spaniard,' or ' American ' ; subjec- tively, to the sensibihty of a hypothetical English- man who felt proud of his nationality, it might be qualified even as complimentary. But in the particular case in question, in view of the circum- stance that the accused man showed other signs of resentment on his defeat by the prosecutor at chess, 156 THE HUMAN GERMAN it is plain that * Englishman ' was uttered with conscious aim to cause deep moral suffering ; and therefore constitutes Offence within the meaning of Paragraph 195 of the R.S.G.B." By administering rigidly an equally refined and comprehensive system of " Railwaypenal jurispru- dence" (Eisenhahnstrafrechtswissenschaft) a decent addition is made to the total of condemned. Rail- waypenal jurisprudence hangs Damocles-sword- wise over your head through life, from the hour when, having been born in a D. -train, you are fined six marks for travelling without a ticket, to the merciful hour when a locomotive severs your neck. The railway servants are sworn constables ; and it seems are also judges and baihffs, for they not only arrest and indict you, but fine you and collect the fine on the spot. For not having a ticket (" being born in a D. -train." Par. 384 of the R.S.G.B.) you pay six shillings ; for taking a seat in the train without intent to travel, another six shillings ; for invading the platform without a ticket, one shilling ; for muddying a seat, one shiUing. For entering a train in motion you are fiercely chastised ; and even summary conviction and execution by the loco- motive do not stay proceedings against your mangled corpse. After the footboard has lined you a leg, at your first practice crutch-limp around the hospital yard a constable brings you a " fine-man- THE HUMAN LAW-BREAKER 157 date " "for unauthorisedly and to the Staterailway- regulations contrarywise, a train in motion enter- ing." For this offence a Russian who had alread}^ paid five fingers to a carriage door had later to pay five marks. The only conqueror of railwaypenal- jurisprudence is Herr Prof. Dr. Haeckel of Jena. Herr Haeckel raised in court, firstly, the meta- physical problem, is motion an objective reality ? and secondly, the physical problem : at what infinitesimal fraction of time do trains cease to stand still ? " From Archimedes to Poincare," he said, " authorities differ." Cultured German Justice has an enlightened tolerance for quarrels of science ; and, in the clash of expert witnesses, each proving his colleagues hopeless dunces, Dr. Haeckel got off. And many other trivial but effective factors help the State in its aim of filling the gaols. Justice, for instance, in defending the meek and lowly against oppression, punishes with proper severity abuses of power. Four judicial instances are kept at sweating work merely to decide the limits of police competence in injunction and prohibition. The great are cast down : Herr Police-President Jagow is proved to be wrong about theatre hats ; and Herr Maitrank, commandant of the Pirmasens Gen- darmery, is utterly overthrown by the barmaid Heinze. Commandant Maitrank sent an underling to bring him a pint of beer. Commandant Maitrank 158 THE HUMAN GERMAN found that the top three-fourths of the tankard were treacherous froth ; and that only in inacces- sible gulfs beneath did there lurk thin ripples of beer. He sent his underling back to fetch the unjust maid. She declined. He sent the underling again. She came. The Commandant read her a homity, saying : " For only two offences men go to hell ; the first is joining the Socialists ; the second is giving short beer." The barmaid wept. A fortnight later the Commandant was court martialled for false imprisonment. The court martial sent the matter to the civil court. Herr Maitrank was acquitted. The Procuror appealed. A higher court confirmed. But then Justice triumphed. At Leipzig's Imperial Court, the Empire's highest instance, former deci- sions were overruled, and the arbitrary gendarme went to three months' gaol. Even the rural commissary — the Landrat — mightiest official, uncrowned king of Prussia, is fought by his subjects. The feud of the Com- missary of Kohlow and the sweep of Wiistenheim long busied the Press. The Commissary forbade the sweep to pursue his trade in one commune of Kohlow. The sweep appealed. The quarrel came before the provincial assembly. While seven experts were putting forth overwhelming arguments. Nature set the Commissary's chimney ablaze. There was no sweep except Wiistenheim 's ; and the Com- THE HUMAN LAW-BREAKER 159 missary's wife had to send for him. He came, put out the fire, and sent the houseowner a bill for forty marks. The Commissary challenged this ; a sweep's extreme fee, he said, is five marks. Quite so, said the sweep, but Your Highwellbornness knows that that is the fee for practising in one's own commune, and Your Highwellbornness has just proved that this is not my commune. I'll split the difference, and take thirty-nine marks fifty. The trial went through three instances ; and the Commissary won. When he got home from the Appeal Court there lay a summons against him for letting his chimney catch fire. The sweep had lodged information. The Commissary was fined six marks fifty. As he re- turned via Wiistenheim he drove over the sweep's duck. The sweep proceeded for damages ; the Commissary said that the sweep had tied the duck in the roadway. The sweep prosecuted the Com- missary for offence ; the Commissary informed on the sweep for obstructing traffic. All these cases went through several instances ; and some of them went to the Imperial Court at Leipzig, for there is no criminal judgment, however mild, against which you cannot appeal to the Supreme Court. The litigation lasted from spring, 1907, till winter, 1912. The sweep was fined a total of £14 ; the Commissary was fined £12 los., and paid the sweep five marks for chimney - sweeping ; and the sweep spent 160 THE HUMAN GERMAN three days in gaol for calling the Commissary a leek. Fullness of jurisprudence and zeal to fill the gaols are not confined to Prussia. They go wherever you hear the German tongue. The celebrated Tyrol art prosecution shows you that. It happened appro- priately in the soaring Alps ; the heroes were the distinguished painter, Herr Gottlob Tauschleim, the admirable mountain-guides, Herr Josef Besser and Herr Pantz, and Herr Besser 's mountain sweet- heart, Fraulein Myrtha Bock, the milkmaid. Herr Tauschleim dwells in Munich by the incom- parable Isar ; Herr Besser dwells in Kufstein by the incomparable Inn. Herr Tauschleim engaged Herr Besser to guide him to the aerial Grotthiitte, the shelter of the Austro-German Alpine League. Herr Besser guided him so brilliantly that grateful Herr Tauschleim promised to draw his portrait. But as he carried neither crayon nor paper he seized a lump of coal, dashed off Herr Besser's profile on the shelter wall, and superscribed it " Josef Besser." Herr Besser was pleased and flattered. He did not notice that Herr Tauschleim, light of the Seces- sionist-Post-Futurist-Aorist-Imperative School, had drawn his nose four millimetres too long. Herr Pantz, his sharp-eyed rival in love and climbing, arrived ten minutes later and did notice it. He whirled back to Kufstein and reported that the THE HUMAN LAW-BREAKER 161 Grotthiitte wall bore Besser's caricature with a nose as big as your fist. It was the work of the famous artist Tauschleim. Before nightfall the story had improved, and all Kufstein knew that the famous artist Tauschleim had drawn Guide Josef with a nose a metre long. Fraulein Myrtha Bock awoke to the fact that her youthful Josef had become Kufstein 's laughing- stock ; and she resolved to see the Bergeracian nose, and know the worst. As milkmaids are used to lush pastures, she could not climb, so she implored her amorous Herr Josef and his equally amorous rival Herr Pantz to bear her to the summit. When she reached the shelter she was so primed with evil presages that though the nose was in reality only a trifle exaggerated, it seemed to her to project down the whole Inn Valley and cast shadows on Vorarlberg. And when she awoke from the indis- pensable swoon she adjured Herr Josef to erase the nose. " Otherwise," she menaced, " our bridal day will never dawn. I shall die a virgin." The awful thought that Myrtha might die a virgin caused Herr Josef to waver. He took from his pocket the " Municipal Instructions for Kufstein Guides," and declaimed Par. 99 C. : " Guides are required to protect the property of the Alpine League. ..." Thereupon he refused to extirpate the insulting snout. Fraulein Myrtha screamed. II 162 THE HUMAN GERMAN She vowed that Kuf stein's ridicule made her Hfe a burden, and she begged Herr Josef and Herr Pantz to drag her to the Devil's Precipice and drop her into the abyss. Herr Besser again wavered ; shut his eyes ; and, raising high his ice-axe, hacked the hideous image into the unreturning past. Such was the crime of Herr Besser. In indifferent Britain it would have led to sniffy leaderettes on Saxon vandalism. The Germanic states are serious. It was held proper to indict Herr Besser for " mali- cious destruction of a work of art." The Court acquitted, reasoning that though a drawing in coal is a work of art, an unlettered hillman could not know that. The Procuror appealed. But in vain. Again Herr Besser was acquitted, this time on the ground that a sketch in coal is not a work of art. The Procuror appealed. He appealed to the highest instance — and costs amounted to £300. Herr Besser was again acquitted ; this time on the ground that though a drawing in coal is a work of art, and even an unlettered hillman must know that, there failed evidence of malice. That was the end of Herr Besser's luck. Though his shame on the storm-girt Grotthiitte was effaced for ever, a reporter, unknown to him, wickedly copied the sketch, and it appeared duly in the Kufstein Meineidzeitung. Only, instead of the nose, as in Herr Tauschleim's sketch, being four millimetres too THE HUMAN LAW-BREAKER 163 long, it appeared a whole centimetre too short. And Kufstein roared with such laughter that humiliated Myrtha married Herr Rival Pantz. Law- suits began again. The case of Herr Josef's nose — a suit for return of presents, a suit for slander, and a suit for a suit (bought for Herr Besser's wedding) occupied Austria's courts from 1900 to 1906 ; and before they ended Herr Besser, Herr Pantz, Frau Myrtha — in fact everyone except the vicious cause, Herr Tauschleim — spent short periods in gaol. Naturally the abundance of suits exalts the dignity of law ; and ensures far more gravity, meti- culousness, and psycho-criminological penetration than obtains in frivolous England. Judges do not comment or joke, and if they need a gloss upon " a pony both ways " they send for an expert. In part, this dryness comes from newspaper in- difference to law. Trials of sensation are reported, though more briefly than with us ; divorces are not mentioned ; and civil actions are described only when they involve questions of law. There is no police-court wit, for there is no police-court. When you whistle, drop eggs off balconies, or neglect to register your death you are summoned to the police- station. The police treat you courteously, they inscribe the facts of your birth, the birthplace of your father, the maiden name of your mother, the number of your children, and the essential points 164 THE HUMAN GERMAN of your defence ; and they send the paper to the District Court — the Amfsgericht. A month later you get a " fine-mandate " stating fine and costs, and giving a week for appeal ; if no appeal, another week to pay. There is no trial. Many put up with unjust convictions rather than trouble to appeal ; but the system is good ; it saves working-men from losing their day's wage ; and idle men from wasting their precious time ; and it furthers, since publicity and trouble are avoided, the State's high aim of multiplying convictions. Such conviction without evidence seems no hard- ship ; for experience shows that evidence is useful mainly to cloud the truth. In German trials, the wit- ness who says what he likes, and the expert witness, who says what he's paid to say, hamper more than they help. The Court practice is elastic. A witness swears not only what he saw and knows, but also useful things he has heard and even things somebody else might have heard if he'd taken the trouble to listen. " Did the accused shoot at his grand- mother ? " asks the Judge. " He looked as if he'd been shooting at someone," says the witness. " In what way did he look ? " "I didn't see him ; his brother admitted he was in his shirt-sleeves." " What has that to do with the shooting ? " " Nothing, Your Highwellbornness ; but I'm sure he shot his grandmother." On top of this come THE HUMAN LAW-BREAKER 165 forty experts (Sachverstdndige) — all professors. No criminal trial takes place without professorial psychiatrists, who swear that the accused is psycho- pathically inclined, that he is " hereditarily burdened, ' ' that he is perfectly normal, and a practised malin- gerer. And civil trials need swearing experts. When Herr Gum-Manufacturer Breit sues in the Com- mercial Court Herr Cork-Manufacturer Ott for overcharges for bad corks, the views of Herr Expert Prof. Gerndt, author of Substitutes for Corks in Accadia and Sumeria, probably decide the case. Once in a bootlace trial after twenty experts had given evidence on both sides, a little unknown man raised his hand. " Keep quiet," said the Judge, "I'll hear no more bootlace experts." ** I'm not a bootlace expert," said the stranger. " I'm an expert of experts. Herr Prof. Dr. Damitz ! If you want an opinion on the relative values of any experts in Prussia ..." And by swearing the defendant's experts were all notoriously inexpert he won the plaintiff's case. Except by these experts, perjury is rare ; and few escape by untruth. But every- where among Germans useful casuistry obtains on the distinction between literal and moral truth ; and the case of Bertha Schwemme, of Cabaret Venus, Friedrichstrasse, is worth record. Bertha Schwemme abominated lies. In one other way she resembled General Washington. The 166 THE HUMAN GERMAN general slew a host of tiresome Britons and Bertha (so deluded Justice reasoned) slew Herr Thunicht. Herr Thunicht was Bertha's friend. Otherwise there was nothing to prove his taste ; and friends opined that his hasty death was a blow to morals in Hell. Still, you must murder thieves and souteneurs secretively. Not that Bertha could possibly have killed this thief and souteneur. Such small waist, such sky-deep saucer eyes, such rosebud mouthlet, such dizzy terraces of golden hair — resembling sun- rise on Everest — these were no murderess's charms. The trouble was that the Court, from Judge Herr Gerichtsrat Schmuehl, down to pert Referendar Klippe, believed that Bertha was guilty ; and before a word had been heard in defence treated her as a monster with blood on her hands. Indeed, evidence ran black. Bertha's toy pistol (bought at Pfeil's, in the Behrenstrasse) fitted the bullet found in Herr Thunicht 's neck ; Herr Juggler Koss swore to Bertha's repeated "I'll do for Thunicht " ; and house-porter Schiff told how at 8.25 on June 13 (within ten minutes of Thunicht 's death) an excited woman ran down the stairs of the Taubenstrasse house in which Thunicht lodged. Herr Schiff identified Bertha. Cross-examined by defending counsel Herr Dr. Juris Gulch-Bremer, whose wife watched admiringly from the back of the court, he said he'd noticed her big eyes and brooch. THE HUMAN LAW-BREAKER 167 ^ He did not, he added, remember her hair, but he admitted his impression that the excited woman's hair was less striking than Bertha's. Despite this flaw, conviction was almost certain. The jurymen's minds were made up. They would grant extenuating circumstances. Bertha's youth, beauty, temptations, the wasting cabaret life, and the utter reprobation of Herr Thunicht, all these were in some measure condonation. " Besides," said the carpenter, who was chairman, to the jury- man on his right, " you couldn't cut through a head of hair like that." And he grinned, contrasting the slack trade in decapitations with the good wages for joiners. But inclined as they were for mercy, the jury agreed that only one verdict was justified. And then took place one of those dramatic dis- entanglements which make the fame of lawyers and bless the Acht-Uhr-Zeitung with twice its normal sale. Herr Dr. Juris Gulch-Bremer rose, and said confidently : " The defence will need but ten minutes. I have an alibi. Fraulein Groen, my client's maid, a woman of irreproachable past, will prove that at the time when the crime was com- mitted she was combing her mistress's hair in her mistress's own room. Fraulein Groen, enter the box ! " At that moment the trial turned upside-down. Fraulein Groen swore that from eight o'clock on the 168 THE HUMAN GERMAN evening of the 13th she spent an hour dressing her mistress's hair. " Had you a watch ? " asked Herr Judge Schmuehl. " Remember, you're on your oath." " I knew the time exactly," said Fraulein. *' I was vexed because my young man had waited for me since eight, and I didn't finish the hair till nine." The maid's proof was unshakable. Next followed Frau Use Gastfreund, who swore that Fraulein Groen had won the " No Lies Prize " at Sassnitz school. And last came the maid's sweetheart. At five minutes to nine, he swore, Fraulein Groen had come down in an evil temper and said : "I am late, as always. If only my mistress's hair was shorter, then our walk out would be longer." Acquittal was unanimous. Fraulein Bertha wept, and laughed, and kissed her lawyer so gratefully that Frau Dr. Gulch-Bremer swooned. Mistress and maid drove home. When they reached the threshold Bertha took off her second-best bracelet, which had lost the green turquoise, and clasped it over the faithful servant's wrist. " I won't forget your loyalty, girl," she said with emotion. " Thank Heaven, you hadn't to commit perjury. I detest lies. . . . And now, dear Lotte, boil me some water and get out my frock . . . but first take off my hair and dress it thoroughly. Meantime I'll fry a Schnitzel ... I'm hungry as a wolf. Have the THE HUMAN LAW-BREAKER 169 hair ready by the time I'm back. I'm late already for the Venus." One of the minor clashes with law which happens daily is distraint for non-payment of taxes. All rich men enjoy this. The State drives them to it. It says you must pay your quarterly taxes by the middle of the second month. If you fail you get a blue warning and three days' grace ; and you are fined fivepence. If you do not pay you are dis- trained on. The ^ate tolerates no delays, hears no arguments, makes no allowance for accident. In vain is objected that you're absent in Denmark ; that the bank is closed till 3.0 ; that your wife is being operated on for cancer, and they might just wait till her death. Imperturbably the municipal bailiff — refusing to take payment : " It is now too late " — puts seals on your furniture, which no man may take off. When you return from the Schell- fischdorf holiday you find seals winking at you from every corner : and so common is this with men of position and wealth that visitors, seeing the seals on the Erdmannsdorfer table, ask you to lend them a pound. CHAPTER XI THE HUMAN PURITAN Skin for Skin {Job). HERR GAMRADT fears that his nation's growing instinct for aesthetics is being checked by a dullard police. Naked- Culture — in German Nackt-Kultur — has been driven from its last citadel in Munich. The Naked-Cul- turists have been forbidden to hold an assembly at which Munich's fairest — and bravest — were to show all their skins. Thereby a blow unprovoked has been dealt the truly beautiful, and the South German form has lost its chance of redemption. Naked-Culture was preached four years ago by a graceful lady named Desmond. It has nothing to do with Back to Nature, for Back to Nature is a move- ment of health which abjures beauty, whereas Naked- Culture is a movement of beauty which abjures clothes. It consists — in essentials — in wearing nothing in public. Did this happen in Paris it would pass as Gallic corruption and the rush of curates would sink the Calais boat. But Germans dress even nakedness in weighty robes. They called 170 THE HUMAN PURITAN 171 Naked-Culture a science. Thinkers were soon exalting Nakedness as an instrument of regenera- tion ; and expounding its high relation to aesthetics, metaphysics, art, spiritual aspiration, and the trans- cendental verities. And vicious husbands, having spent their evenings grinning at naked cultures, fired off these convincing polysyllables at their reproachful wives. At first things went swimmingly — as people swam before bathing dresses. Professors analysed the culture in weighty journals. The Culturists started organs of their own, and proved with dermal pictures that naked beauty refines the all-too-human heart. A catholic comprehensiveness was shown in stan- dards. Incontinently fat ladies turned up, and stared at the inordinately thin, who used their physical exiguity as advertisements of drugs against corpulence. Naked-Culture had fifty practical uses apart from its regenerative reactions on the soul. It established a standard of what a Prussian should be. Those who were beautiful stood forth for the imitation of sisters and brothers ; and those who were ugly gave a badly needed warning. The persecutions which track all reformatory movements were faced with spirit. The artistically pachydermatous police made war on the dermally aesthetic. Bare skins, said prefects, are not to be tolerated ; you must wear pocket-handkerchiefs, or 172 THE HUMAN GERMAN at least directoire dresses. The Cult parried with skill. It sent invitations to Prussia's Parliament ; and asked members to satisfy themselves that skin is no sin. The lawmakers accepted with ardour. They came, saw, were conquered ; eight offered marriage to Miss Desmond ; and all departed con- verts to the irresistible Cult. Unluckily moral fanaticism prevailed. Prefects gained their despotic way ; and the elderly, in- sensible Minister of Interior defended them. The Cult was driven to hold its soirees in houses. Some fled from Berlin to homes of artistic tolerance. The policcless, amoral forest raised no objections. Cul- turists held white pageants in the merry greenwood ; and many a wanderer, a-tramp through virgin thickets, stumbled on pictures rcsembhng the tale on a Grecian urn. In unrivalled Munich, shrine of high aesthetics, the Culturists formed a devoted band. This might have meant the ultimate exaltation of Naked- Culture, for all nude things are lawful in the metro- polis of art. But, alas, Munich is all-too-human. Unworthy, base-living women gained control of the Movement, and though their breasts were Phidian, their hips Praxitilean, they ignored the refining talk about aesthetics, metaphysics, art, spiritual aspira- tion, and the transcendental verities. The propa- ganda lost its philosophical justification. People THE HUMAN PURITAN 173 called it names. And when the Cult announced a congress at which three pearl-skinned graces would dance naked before three hundred worshippers, the police took Prussia's example, and said it must not be. Since Munich's downfall Nakedness has engaged the public. Newspapers teem with *' The Campaign Around Nakedness," " Should We Dance Naked ? " and " Die Nackte Nacht von Berlin." These per- plexities are not solved in accord with British prejudice. Britons think that prudes are always Britons. They believe that the high Continental, impregnable in virtue past seduction, or in vice past redemption, does not think of ill. In truth German prudery burns fiercer than any. It fights in the Press against naked dolls ; and brings Church declarations that Tyrolean knee-breeches are lustful. But morals have little to do with it. Politics dominate. If you know how Herr Klopfleisch voted on the 1 2th of January you can tell for a certainty his view of naked dolls. All anti-Nakedites are Conservative or Centre. Liberals, Radicals, and Sociahsts are Nakedites. High-flying aristocrats, who in England deride prudery as Radical narrow- ness, are in Germany blushful prudes ; they shake their heads in woe at sinful, skinful Radicalism. And Radicals snort and gibe at Tory prude hypoc- risy. The more meek, Pacifist, Nonconformist- 174 THE HUMAN GERMAN Conscience your German is, the more emphatically he worships the unclothed, and resents the despotic State's interference with pictures, statues, poetry, legs, piano-legs. Comic journals, being all pro- gressive, are all Naked. They war on prude Junkers, Centre-men, bureaucrats, and the Church ; they condemn the law for forbidding Nakedness, the pohce for suppressing it, the Courts for condemning it. The German prude when prudest is pruder than the British. He rivals the lowan, Cabel Pillsmith, who rejected an uncle's million, indecently left as a legacy. Also he is subtler, more conscientious than the Saxon. Where the slap-dash Saxon bids Fielding be burnt, the meticulous Pruss, armed with pen- knife and ink, painfully erases each incendiary phrase. When he comes on pages strewn with wickedness thick as the Milky Way, he has respect for letters ; he pastes the pages together, and thus he spares the book without spoiling the child. The southern cleric, also school inspector, Grabstein, say newspapers, fought through a whole library and slew nine thousand words. The home of this just man is Amorbach, itself a vicious word, reeking of twin iniquities, love and drink. Herr Grabstein dealt exemplary chastisement to winged words of sin. The most shameful fairy tales were white- washed. " The bear laid its head in the maiden's THE HUMAN PURITAN 175 lap " appeared, " the bear laid its head in the maiden's hand " ; decency in death was compelled by forbidding a mourner to kiss a corpse, and " a young officer who could not walk because he was shot in the leg," " could not walk because he was shot in the hand." The pasting down of pages is done with assiduous zeal, sometimes so happily that you do not know what you miss, sometimes so that you gain. Letitia found this when reading an English-censored book from an Amberg library. During an impassioned love-scene came the disturbing affirmation : " He kissed Kate's rosy toes," Even worldly Letitia jumped at the admission that Kate had shed her stockings ; and from shock she dropped the book. Thereon two pasted-down offending pages opened out. The author had decently written " rosy lips," but the second censored page had an eulogy of dinner, ending with the syllables " pota-." Not only books and verse are watched by the human Puritan. Statues and pictures suffer too. The Naked Wife of Kahlberg is case in point. The art-loving noble, von der Bleiche, bought Herr Schmucker's Autumn Maid and gave it to Kahlberg- Flittersdorf-Kleindorf-Hochdorf, four communes by the Rhine. The communes set the naked maid on Kahlberg's naked hill. The autumn maid adorned the peak ; sun smiled on, rain wept along, her 176 THE HUMAN GERMAN graceful legs ; even amateurs of the Kaiser- Allee found the statue good. But trouble came. The more decent burghers of Kahlberg-Flittersdorf-Kleindorf-Hochdorf got red. The more decent women jumped. They had never seen their own naked frames, except in mirrors and in front ; but the autumn maid flaunted her curved back, and showed even the sole of a foot. The young men fell from grace. They spent their Sundays watching the Naked Wife ; and they ignored their decent sweethearts. And a petition flew to the Emperor, which you'll find in the Berlin Tagehlatt. " We German men and women of the communes of Kahlberg-Flittersdorf-Kleindorf-Hochdorf with all earnestness enter protest against the exposure of a naked, the-morals-of-our-people-and-our-youth- endangering, woman's statue near communications- rich road on path of Rhine. Our good Kaiser and King, Wilhelm II, thank we for his manlike protec- tion of morals and Godfearingness — we believe, however, not that the exposure of such Art in the intentions of our all-honoured land's-father is." And the villagers concluded that if the hereditary foe heard of the Naked Wife he would take it as proof of universal corruption and emasculation, and again hurl his threatening legions across the German Rhine. The petition flourished. Its prediction THE HUMAN PURITAN 177 that France's legions would dash on Germany to get sight of a Naked Wife showed peasant brains versed beyond expectation in ethnopsychology. But that was not all. A nameless petitioner, after traducing with his pen, scaled the romantic Kahlberg and spent his ink in blackening from head to foot the Naked Wife. This might have ended the trouble. The Colonial Secretary, Herr Privy Councillor Solf, told the Reichstag there is natural repugnance between white men and coloured maids ; and now that the Naked Wife was darkened to Bantu black- ness, her dangers to Rhenish men, her scheme to cut out Rhenish women, seemed dead. But the commune council, ignoring the country's wishes, bid the autumn maid be scoured to whiteness ; and they named Herr Lamphghter Feibel, the betrothed of Fraulein Eulahe, to do the work. Herr Feibel began squeamishly ; proceeded with interest ; and as the negro wife returned to Caucasian seductive- ness, felt a human, an all-too-human, glow. And before the last black molecules had dissolved under his sponge, he kissed the Naked Wife's wet lips. The ink tinged his moustache. That was at six. At eight, in a rainstorm, not with the old ardour, he kissed EulaHe's wet face. The ink transferred itself. " What did you do to-day ? " said Eulahe, holding up a pocket-mirror. "I sponged the Naked Wife." " Then take back your garnet ring," said Eulalie. 178 THE HTOIAN GERMAN "I'll marry Herr Erich Breitbaum." Herr Feibel grieved a little ; and some say he's inconsolable. But when he contrasts Eulalie's hips with the Naked Wife of Kahlberg's, he says it's all for the best. In these things public authority is as wise as the Tories, the Church, the people of Kahlberg-Fhtters- dorf-Kleindorf-Hochdorf . Policemen censor theatres ; procurors seize copies of Titian and Giorgione ; courts condemn minor poets. Probably this is done in mere zeal for a decent record of crime ; for Germans, though lewd, are not debauched. There is little consciously evil display ; and much of what prudes ignorantly condemn as immodesty is domestic, innocent fun. Owing to some congenital grace in the people, things which in Western Europe would reek of wantonness, are done without offence. That was our reflection after a couple of hours with Herr Gamradt at the Ice-Palace in Lutherstrasse, W. It was an August evening ; and in summer the Ice- Palace is given over to lounging, dancing, and riding. For riding there are six exceedingly broad-backed horses, most with men's saddles. For fifty pfennigs each the respectable matrons and shop-girls of south- west Berlin trot round the ring. Two thousand persons drink, and watch. The respectable matrons and shop-girls wear tight street skirts, without petticoats ; and they choose to ride astride. A tight street skirt is scanty on a cross-saddle. So THE HUMAN PURITAN 179 the matrons and maids are pushed into the saddles, pull their skirts far above their knees, expose all their brightly coloured stockings, garters, inches of lace, sometimes cross-sections of thigh ; and trot round the circle, waving — those who have not to grip tight with both hands — to their cavaliers. It is pleasing. Herr Gamradt truly said that no other nation of Europe could do it so innocently. And he bade me note that the men about were zealous to guard their maids from shame. As one of the boldest horse-women, unclothed, save in white from the waist down, reined her horse to a standstill, a waiting cavalier seized her pale blue stocking at a point two inches over the knee and pulled it decently up. That these things, without offence, happen in society of honest character properly gives Herr Gamradt cause for pride ; and he said quite truly that " only French brains could fashion vicious thoughts." His boasts were justified. In no country is the corrupt aspect of the sex-question so benefi- cially left alone. The nation digs up wit and humour from a still more universal theme, which keeps it in the sound eighteenth century in company of Tobias Smollett. Its kinos, its music-halls, its comic post cards are full of this graceful matter ; and mirthful Ulk, which is spread in millions by the staid and decent Tageblatt, trots it out every week. 180 THE HUMAN GERMAN Justice does not treat these doubtful matters in blundering British way. It is not enough to make certain whether books or pictures are bad. Piercing enquiry is held into the publisher's aim. If the publisher swears that the aim was science, or art, or instruction, he gets off, however gross his works. The problem " What is Art ? " which has plagued philosophers from Baumgarten to Tolstoy, is solved once a day by experts who swear to Art's aims, essence, and externals with the easy confidence of a British handwriting expert swearing an armless man has forged a cheque. In settling the question of a publisher's aims the Court judges by the classes and ages the work is sold to. Educated men, it assumes, may safely read the obscene, but the obscene when given to the uncultured mass has criminally vicious effects. Perhaps because the educated are corrupt beyond corruption. In reality, education means money. Published at fifty marks the book is judged harmless, published at fifty pfennigs it gets you to gaol. On halfpenny post cards " Paris Salon " pictures are crime ; in ten-mark engravings they are art. A Court says that Zola's work is " the valuable creation of a renowned author," and punishes a working-class editor for printing it in bits. The workman would read only occasional chapters and fail to appreciate the intent. The inevitable adjectives " objective " and " sub- THE HUMAN PURITAN 181 jective " play a high role in these trials. Experts wrangle all day the problem whether a work is objectively bad or merely subjectively (in the views and prejudices of classes and individuals) bad. A work is criminally bad if it hurts the shame-feeHng of the normal man. The Normalmensch is assumed to be right. This is a fluid system ; and leads to normal man developing quite abnormal modesty. One such normal man resented a French rococo lady exposed — exposed all over — in Pankow. The picture was a copy ; and no man knew the original. The shocked Court examined the copy, and com- mented " no decent father would hang that in his house." So all expected a thunderous judgment. But here with fiery cheeks the shorthand-writer rose and whispered something in the Judge's ear. Next day the accused went free. The shorthand- writer had seen the picture on a wall in Potsdam Schloss. Herr Gamradt writes to the Tageblatt that the war on Naked-Culture, Giorgione, Titian, bare knees and bare dolls will succeed ; and he regrets it. " We are getting American. The decay of Naked- Culture is a national loss. The easy native figure whose recent progress gave hope even to exacting judges will revert to its old asymmetry. For there is now no standard of proportion, no criterion of fatness, no way of teaching the art-thirsty citizen 182 THE HUMAN GERMAN what is beautiful and what is base. Or for a lack of a human standard we may be forced to look like the Pythian Apollo and Venus Urania, and by such presumptuous aspiring provoke the wrath of the gods." CHAPTER XII THE HUMAN STATE Auf dem Dache'sitzt ein Greis, Der sich nicht zu helfen weiss {Students' Song). HERR GAMRADT is lobbying the National- Liberal Party to get a resolution through the Reichstag. The resolution requires the Chancellor to submit a Bill imposing an excise duty on socks made in WolUnhoop. Wollinhoop, as Herr Gamradt says in his favourite American, is the limit. In the old days it lived not dishonestly by fishing, wool, shoes, and making holes in spars ; and though wool, shoes, and hole-making are vaguely related to socks, Wollinhoop made no socks till 191 2. Now it makes them. Yet close by is sock- making Stardammdorf, which since Prussia acquired it by the Peace of Stockholm, has done nothing but make socks. And when Wollinhoop (as Herr Gam- radt says in American) butted in, the value of socks descended by thirteen pfennigs a pair. If Stardammdorf were in England — Herr Gamradt admits — or even in New England, this would not matter. Its citizens would ingeminate the penulti- 183 184 THE HUMAN GERMAN mate syllable, and start competitive hole-making. But Stardammdorf is Pomerania ; and its people, though half at least of Scandinavian blood, have been Prussian long enough to know that honest men abstain from competing. And further to know that it is the function of the universal State to prevent the dishonest competing ; and generally to prevent men doing what other men do not Hke, and to help other men to do exactly as they like. So that the State, being just at heart, spends most of its time helping A against the oppressions of B, and bringing things back to equilibrium by helping B against the insufferable presumption of A. Herr Dr. Ing. Gamradt has no interest in socks — when he served his year in the gth (Grosssaufer) Jagers, he always wore "foot-clouts" (Fusslappen), which you wind, putty wise, round your toes. But the position of his brother, Herr Estate-Proprietor Siegbert Gamradt, is different. Herr Siegbert resides near Stardammdorf ; and sells the sock- makers cheese ; the fall in socks has brought down cheese ; and cheese has brought down Herr Estate- Proprietor Gamradt : Herr Estate-Proprietor Gam- radt thinks that the State should help ; and Herr Dr. Ing. Gamradt thinks that the National-Liberals should help the State to help. Dr. Gamradt will gain his way. He expects a highly economical debate which will last till Christmas ; a compen- THE HUMAN STATE 185 satory duty will be put on Wolliiihoop socks ; WoUinhoop will decay ; and such distress will result that by Christmas 1915 an equilibrating duty will be put on Stardammdorf socks. Thus things will revert to their present bad stage ; and Herr Estate-Proprietor Gamradt will invite Dr. Ing. Gamradt to secede from National-Liberalism, and join the Conservatives on condition that they plunge for a bounty on Stardammdorf cheese. " I have small faith in this," said Dr. Gamradt. "I do it because I love my brother ; poor fellow, he is twenty years older than I am ; and imagine ! he has a big property on his hands, and no children to leave it to." Herr Gamradt, though thus denying its omnipo- tence, launched on praise of the universal State ; and sardonically contrasted its beneficent works with England's indifferent passivity. The EngUsh State, he said, does nothing much but talk. He had heard of the case of a lawyer of Hove who in order to annoy a rival lawyer resident next door, persistently copied his rival's clothes. When the second lawyer bought a bright yellow tie, the first lawyer bought a bright yellow tie. When the second lawyer bought a cane made out of seaweed- stalks, the first lawyer bought a cane made out of seaweed-stalks. " That is still going on ; and neither legislature nor administrative organs intervene to 186 THE HUMAN GERMAN regulate the abuse. It is one of the defects of having no centrahsed administration. By the way, is there any good book on the rights of London boroughs in extra-territorial drainage ? " Herr Gamradt explained to me the very remark- able system by which all men with grievances, and many men without them, pester the hundred- handed State. Farmers pester it most. For years they have pestered it to protect them against predatory Capitalism. The big farmers swear they are being ruined by Finance. They hold that Finance is a foe of farming ; and once they pestered the State so persistently that they got passed a Bourse Law which demorahsed the Bourse. The Produce Exchanges were so confounded that most of them shut down. Also Finance and Industry worry the State to check predatory Landlordism, but they do this, so far, with rather less success. Small men always worry the State against big. In particular, shopkeepers. They want the State to help. The big, say the small, are too enterprising ; they make money, and keep motor-cars. That is unfair. Put a stop to it. In passive Britain the State would answer, That is your affair ; open a big shop yourself, and borrow a motor-car. The German State says yes. It says yes, because under Universal Suffrage the small man's vote is as good as the big man's, and it is fifty times more numerous. THE HUMAN STATE 187 The State therefore flopped down a punitive tax on the big shops that trade in various goods, and let the small shops go free. At this time the skilled trades discovered that they were ruined. Impudent outsiders competed. So they asked the human State to revive the medi- aeval guilds ; to forbid men to work as cabinet- makers, goldsmiths, plumbers, engravers, and forgers unless they served apprenticeship, passed examina- tions, paid fees. This would quench competition. Since competing outsiders have votes, and out- number skilled insiders, the State did not give way. It set up mock guilds with the right to examine, and the right to take apprentices. This checked in- adequately competition ; so deep growls are audible still. The bankrupt theatres turn to the saviour State. They are all, they say, going to the dogs. The vicious, immoral, vulgar, sensation-fed kinemato- graph has ruined them. Thirty theatres last year closed, and two thousand men were made beggars. So the helpful State must tax, regulate, and censor the kinematographs to death. And this the kindly State is about to do. The kinematographs will retort by asking the State to meddle with theatres. The theatre, they say, is a one-horse, superannuated bore ; were it not for its vicious persistency the regenerative kinematograph would circle the earth. 188 THE HUMAN GERMAN Already they are making defence. They print cari- catures. One shows the dramatic authors waiHng to the shade of Goethe. " The Kino has ruined our business ! " say the authors. " Nobody goes to the Theatre ! " " Then you," says the Shade, " write kino plays, and nobody will go to the kino." Of course, the Universal State lacks this individualist wit. It will pass a law to help the Theatre against the Kino, and then another law to help the Kino against the Theatre, thus denying — but not at cJl infringing — man's inalienable right to succeed in life, and to fail. All this enriches Germany with scores of laws unknown elsewhere, laws which meddle with free- dom of contract, and fiercely restrict the subject's sovereign will. Infringement of liberty goes so far as denial of the right to lie. Not, of course, in politics — ^there all nations equally vindicate an immemorial privilege — but in business. In genuine culture- states, as Germans say, lying and business are as inextricably one as whisky and soda. In obscurantist Germany business lying is a crime. With the pretext of preventing unfair competition a law was passed against lying in business. The law says that what you say about your goods must be true. You must not push their sale by even an unicellular untruth. If you lie in advertisements you may be sent to gaol. It is a crime to advertise a great reduction of prices THE HUMAN STATE 189 unless the reduction is provably great ; and if you hurry up buyers with the harmless prevarication, " Only a few left/' you go to gaol. It is a lie to create the appearance that a specially favourable offer is being made unless the offer is really specially favourable. Even the honourable antediluvian lie about bankrupt stock is a crime. A bankrupt stock must really have come from a bankrupt ; and if the seller throws into a bankrupt stock a few things which do not belong to it, then he is a criminal liar. Under threat of gaol the shopkeeper must say truthfully in his advertisements whether his sale is seasonal, stocktaking, clearance, bankrupt, or other ; and if he says it's a clearance sale, and throws in things which he has only just bought, he may go to gaol for a year. Newspapers must see that their advertisements are true. They may not print lies — except on editorial pages. The German State, as result of its universal meddling, marches straight to Socialism, and its re- actionary pohtics only serve to veil the fact. With a weak left hand it makes war on Social-Democrats ; but with a strong right hand it does what Socialists want. Not for nothing are the Tory State-meddle professors called " Chair Socialists." For forty years, ever since the Tory professor Adolf Wagner abjured laisser faire, these Tory meddlers have been telhng everyone that Socialist Socialists are wrong, 190 THE HUMAN GERMAN and that Socialist measures are right. Both Tories and SociaHsts, with differences, want the same. SociaUsts want a meddhng demagogic State with a proletarian Kaiser ; and Tories want a meddling aristogogic State with Herr Heydebrand, the Con- servative chief, as Kaiser ; and the Kaiser as public orator. Both proclaim that the State must meddle, regulate, command, and forbid to exhaustion-point. Prince Biilow likened the Socialist Socialists to Nicholas II. He might as well have compared the Tory Socialists to that dusty despot Herr Bebel. Both sides in public things want their noses every- where ; and both sides in party affairs indiscrimin- ately bully and spy. As fruit of the general meddle craze, Too-Much- Government is the fashionable wail. Zuvielregieren ! Too much social legislation, too many factory laws, too much meddling with contracts, too many administrative, police, sanitary, and other regu- lations for things which need no regulation at all Herr Police Prefect Jagow's edict on the compulsory angle of Street-crossing brought things to a head. But the ill is as old as Frederick. Bismarck growled savagely about Beamtenherrschaft, the domination of bureaucrats ; and now books, pamphlets, and articles explain every month that the beneficent State does far too much, and that it might for at least a couple of generations beneficently do nothing THE HUMAN STATE 191 at all. Trades Councils say that the universal meddUng makes serious obstacles for Industry ; the chief organisation of metallurgical works says that there is " a perfect mania for regularising and paragraphing everything " ; Herr Professor Bern- hard prints pages of complaints. He says that the ardent authorities jealously compete in wealth of meddling. He cites growls from business men about "unmeaning paragraphs which regulate every action and reduce the men to the state of marionettes." Factory walls glow with rules forbidding workmen to sleep as they drive waggons, and warning wielders of sledge-hammers not to knock out brains. And the inductive workman reasons that everything not verboten is implicitly approved. State Insurance makes things worse. Its framers proclaimed it would need no bureaucratic centralisa- tion. Redtapeless self-governing organs were to administer the laws. Once the laws were made the central government might rest. This hope is frus- trated. The laws work badly when left alone. They bring scandals, chaos, litigation. To keep the wheels a-moving needs oil in the shape of more meddling from Berlin ; and the trend of amendments is to recognise this ; and to return control to State hands. So the ills of meddling are checked by more meddling; and Too-Much-Government is remedied with the drug of Much-too-Much-Government. 192 THE HUMAN GERMAN From zeal to stop injustice the human State does more injustice than the unjust. It allows con- scientious policemen to override vicious compacts, until no compacts are made at all. The famous Employment Agencies Law is an instance. Before it Germany had public and private employment agencies and registry offices. Then the social reformers set to work. They put policemen in control ; and let them frame schedules of the maxi- mum fees which agents might require for finding employment for workers and finding Labour for employers. To charge more became an offence. The law covered all occupations from directorial work in breweries down to domestic service and journalism. The policemen, guided by Old-Prussian Thrift, cut the prevaihng fees to atom-point. Fifteen shillings was the most an intermediary could charge for getting you a well-paid post as engineer, bank manager, or medical officer ; and the most that might be charged for getting you work as hotel-manager was six shillings. The law ruined agents. It ruined also others. It ceased to be worth while, for the sake of some odd shilUngs, to negotiate well-paid posts for work-seekers. The industries growled that the mechanism of employment was put out of gear ; and the police-made fee-list had to be radically changed. The human State did not lose heart. It measures its beneficence by wealth of laws. THE HUMAN STATE 193 multiplication of bureaucrats ; by clamour of over- regulated interests which say that it has done too much ; by tumult of under-regulated, expectant interests which say that it has done too little. The British faith needs revision that things are good because German. Even patriot Herr Gamradt prefers our railways ; and says that Britons would change their minds about Nationalisation if first they changed their nationality. If instead of thundering through Prussia in the Nord-Express, and comparing it with a local third-class carriage down Chatham way, they travelled cheap on Prussian local trains. They would find that Prussian trains are slower, dearer, and less comfortable than English ; and perhaps — though that is less certain — that they're worse for business and trade. The complaint here is that the State is greedy ; forgets its own principle that ** State railways are no milch-cow ; no financial resource of the State " ; and for thirty years has been piling up railway surpluses, taken from the public pocket. Prussia's State railways pay 7J per cent on money invested, while the private railways pay 3 J, and the State can borrow money at 3|. Since the Guarantee Law of 1882, a quarter of a milliard pounds have been diverted from Railway profits to the needs of the State. The railway capital account shows the result. The railways are valued at a thousand 13 194 THE HUMAN GERMAN million. The money invested is £475,000,000. £150,000,000 has been paid off. So the State has created from nothing values of £675,000,000. If English companies accumulated such wealth people would break their windows, and the growl for Nationalisation would double its strength. Also German fares and freight rates are high — for the inferior services rendered. Germans who best know England prefer the English railway system, as they prefer other things Enghsh. Popular discontent with the State as meddler and peddler docs not check the German Tory Socialist's zeal. The Tory Socialists think that meddling has only begun. The greatest ** Chair " Sociahst, Excellency Actual Government Privy Councillor Professor Dr. Theol.h.c, Dr. Jur., leg., polit. Adolph Wagner foresees an age when the human State will meddle so violently, so universally that the modest, tentative meddUng of to-day will seem anarchical passivity. Like all Chair Socialists, Herr Wagner is a fierce Tory, royalist, and Chau- vinist ; he abhors Socialists elsewhere than in Chairs ; and would like to execute them and their programme on one and the same day. He preaches that the coming State will control the disposition of wealth. It will dictate to individuals how they may, and how they may not, invest. This must be done, because the State will levy heavier taxes THE HUMAN STATE 195 on the rich ; and the rich — as indeed they threaten — might invest their wealth in less human, less meddle-mad lands, or take their wealth abroad, and evade the taxes. The coming State will stop that. It will rule against investment of capital abroad ; and it will punish as criminals men who break the rule. It will forbid citizens to emigrate ; it will trade in everything ; it will fix by public authority the prices of necessaries ; it will revive sumptuary laws ; and if the human German eats, drinks, dresses, dwells, or motors with more than human moderation he will end inhumanly, Prof. Wagner thinks, in gaol. The realisation of this is not far off. If not by the State then by the town, whose meddling and enterprise-killing enterprise are just now being sharply resented. Some profit from the meddling. You can get a municipal Housing Bureau to find you a flat for nothing ; and landlords can register their houses there, and save agents' fees. But house-agents, Hke the employment agents, close down. The human Town laughs at them, raises their rates, and proceeds to exterminate butchers. You can buy Danish beef in municipal shops which make no profit ; and you can buy municipal fish at cost price next door. You can buy municipal potatoes. In suburban Friedenau you can see a Berlin municipal rabbit-farm. Some towns sell 196 THE HUMAN GERMAN milk ; some have started stock-farms, and one breeds swine and sells citizens pork. Retailer, wholesaler, producer all suffer. And no parlia- mentary power is needed ; for Stein's emancipating Town Ordinance bids the commune do what it likes. Herr Gamradt says he has no prejudice against these activities. His trade is not threatened ; and he gains rather than loses. The city helped him gratis. From the municipal Housing Office he got his flat ; he dines agreeably upon municipal (Zeeland) veal ; and when the flat brings ague and the veal dyspepsia, he cures both ills at a municipal spa. In one week he went municipally to Karlsbad for his dyspepsia, to Ems for throat and ague, to Marienbad for his municipally fostered paunch ; and to-morrow he's off to Vichy, Kissingen, Bad Gastein, and Soden. He may turn up at Buxton. The fact is, meddling municipal Schonebcrg, in South Berlin, has made it possible to visit before breakfast all these regenerating places, and return cured to work. Schonebcrg lately opened, down Herr Gamradt 's way, a fine municipal park. Three years ago there was a yellow sand-flat, strewn with bottles, boots, and bits of the Lokal-Anzeiger. To-day on the sand-flat rise artificial hills ; there are artificial municipal rivers and a lake ; and artificial municipal trees (sustained by wires). And some genial munici- THE HUMAN STATE 197 palist proposed an artificial spa. So they built a wood pavilion ; and stocked it under care of an expert with waters from all the spas, all natural waters kept at natural warmth. The organisation was good. The " Cure-guests " got tickets of identi- fication ; and their own numbered tumblers, so there was no risk of catching some other man's gout. It was hygienic, German, and just. And every morning, mostly from seven to nine, the stricken " cure-guests '' assembled ; twenty sickly individuals extremely fat or inordinately thin, catarrhal, rheu- matic, arthritic, or hoarse ; and walked round the Kurhaus and conversed on chalk-stones, empyema, Bright 's disease, and the effect of aviation on middle- aged airmen with emboli. It was a merry crowd. You could have Yoghurt, mare's milk, and other cures, and imagine yourself one of Metchnikoff's Bulgars who died aged lOO (from wounds at the fall of Kotchana). The worst of this back-yard spa was its all-too- human facility. It fostered a spasmodic spa- mode. It created disease. Dr. Gamradt approached it in relative health — except for ague and dyspepsia; on Monday he felt an uncommon, threatening vertigo; on Tuesday he had twinges of gout ; on Wednesday . . . By Friday he had at least a dozen ailments, and as the morning was hot, he drank deep from Ems, Vichy, and two Karlsbad springs. He then sampled 198 THE HUMAN GERMAN Wildunger. And this curative enthusiasm led to unexpected scenes. His fellow-sufferers, who had at first ignored, began to look at him with honest surprise, and then with unquestionably sincere sympathy. They whispered as he passed ; and once he caught the phrase : " complications of malady." On Thursday a crippled antiquary patted him on the back, and said consoHngly : " Stick to the cure. You'll recover. When I was your age I had scurvy, neuritis, malaria, Bright 's disease, and enlargement of the spleen. I went to all the spas in succession, and now I'm as strong as a horse." On Sunday, when Herr Gamradt ordered Weilbacher water, the gloomiest looks were turned on him. " He gets worse," said the invalids. " Hardly a day without some new disease." And the black-haired girl, who under charge of a specialist, filled the numbered tumblers, shook her head. She couldn't change a twenty- mark note ; and refused to sell on credit. " It's risky . . . it's risky," she said. Naturally she didn't mean to give offence ; but Herr Gamradt read in her Frisian eyes the reflection : " Suppose he should die this evening, who will pay for his drinks ? " CHAPTER XIII THE HUMAN PROFESSOR Zu Potsdam trepanierte ich, Den Koch des grossen Friederich ; Ich schlug ihm mit dem Beil vor'n Kopf ; Gestorben ist der arme Tropf. {.Song of Doctor Etsenbarf.) OFTEN while supine, fruitless England dal- lies, determined Germany acts. Excellency Herr Actual Privy Aulic Councillor Pro- fessor Dr. Med., Jur., et Sc. Eugene Rothstein- Gottingen is a case in point. Whether it was that his life-work was biology, or that prescient Deter- minists had fixed his Christian name, no man knows, but certain it is he took an interest in race-culture from the cradle of that high science. And where others dreamed and hypothesised he worked. The hope of rearing a race of young Germans as strong and virtuous as Tacitus 's, with the mentality of Helmholtz, and the aesthetic sensibility of Kaiser Wilhelm the Second lured him, unresisting, on. First, indeed, as an unattainable ideal. But later it appealed to him as an immediate, practical problem ; and finally as a thing intimate, domestic, 199 200 THE HUMAN GERMAN inextricably mingled with his everyday interests as citizen and man. He began with the sub-phylum Vertebrata, class Aves. But the presumptuous scholars whom he took into counsel despised the modest plan to raise hens with the strength and virtue of Teutones, the mentality of Helmholtz, the aesthetic sensibility of Kaiser Wilhelm the Second. They counselled him brazenly to purchase stout and brainy men and maids, and to apply to these those principles and laws by which man's degenerate race has produced a knightly lineage of pigs. Hcrr Dr. Rothstein winced. As a family man in whom Gottingen prudery checked the amorahty of Science, he con- demned the human pig-farm. So the problem of finding ways to test his theses, to mate half-Junos, half-Minervas with half-Hercules, half-Apollos, and bring forth babes as stately as the first, as wise as the second, as sinewed as the third, as lyric as the fourth — this problem plagued Herr Dr. Rothstein ; and he had to take potassium bromide to bring on sleep. But a ray of hope entered Herr Rothstein 's life when he remembered his not inconsiderable power to guide the reproductive destinies of his own bright offspring. The three kind, gracious daughters, Fraulein Grete, Fraulein Roschcn, and Fraulein Parnassia, were all, as people said, nubile, and free THE HUMAN PROFESSOR 201 from entanglements. True, not one of them was a dream of beauty ; but Herr Rothstein rightly held that beauty will be ignored by eugenic generations ; and, Heaven be thanked, his children inherited their father's penetrating brain and their mother's useful Western Mecklenburg physique. Each was eugenic in some distinctive way. Crete — fair, slightly angular, abnormally strong — was clever, sharp for social interests, a member of the Bund fur MuUerschutz. Roschen — ^her parents' favourite — had a disfiguring birthmark and splendid health. Also, though not intellectual in the baser sense, she had an enquiring brain and an acid, ironic tongue. Parnassia was round and dark — she leaned towards art. At thirteen she had recited her Ode to Grief at Fraulein Schwanke's Higher- Daughters' School; at sixteen she had printed the elegiac Tears of Night, and now, though still in law an infant, she was half-way through her masterpiece, Methusaleh, Aetat. 278. The circumstances that only two years separated Crete from Parnassia ; and that there were five healthy brothers (among them twins), indicated a fecund, philoprogenitive strain ; and the thought that such stock by ill- judged mating might be lost to Eugenics so vexed Excellency Herr Actual Privy Aulic Councillor Professor Dr. Med., Jur., et Sc. Rothstein that he had to double his dose of potassium bromide. 202 THE HUMAN GERMAN It was only after a wordy wrestle with Herr Privat- Docent Beck (the promising histologist) that Dr. Rothstein resolved to eugenise his line. By eugenis- ing he meant the finding for his daughters bride- grooms without taking into account the obsolescent detriment of Love. Also he would ignore wealth. Strength, intellect, moral would be sufficient mar- riage settlements. Grandchildren with the strength of Teutones, the brain of Helmholtz, the aesthetic sensibility of Kaiser Wilhelm the Second would need no heritage of dross. But when he communicated his plan to Herr Privat-Docent Beck, the plan was laughed at as absurd. In condemning Applied Eugenics, Herr. Dr. Beck was not disinterested. He hoped next Semester to get a professorial Chair ; and he held without any eugenist arrieres-pensees that Fraulein Roschen would make him an adorable wife. Without serious intent Fraulein Roschen had given encouragement. On the morn of his verbal wrestle with Herr Roth- stein he had sat with her among the balcony petu- nias ; and had given her his doctorial dissertation on histology and a kiss. She returned both. Being unaware that uneugenic Fate was dragging his favourite daughter along Love's abandoned path, Herr Dr. Rothstein set to work. Husbands, strong, manly, clever, humane, of irreproachable lineages — these were all his thoughts. And the grandchildren THE HUMAN PROFESSOR 203 to be ! Herr Dr. Rothstein sometimes woke early of a morning, and lay on his back thinking of the adorable, chubby, rosy babes ; each weighing twelve pounds and lisping "Grandfather" at birth; solving M. Fermat's theorem in their second lustrum; and cutting capers in the playground before they cut their teeth. And he shut his eyes ecstatically ; and dreamed of the incomparable race to be when the issue of the Rothstein Frauleins would have spread its regenerative influence over a grateful earth. It was in this humane and reverent spirit that he made his high choice. The bridegrooms chosen even more than realised the chooser's exacting ideal. First was Herr Fichte, the brilliant young Stuttgart oculist, a remote collateral kinsman of the patriot philosopher, whom indeed he resembled in much. The oculist was strong, rosy, five times a prizeman, an athlete, an amateur photographer, a skilful player of skat. He would suit, Herr Rothstein reasoned, Grete. Second came Herr Engineer Dr. Karl Griitze. Herr Griitze, the professor thought, disregarding Herr Dr. Beck, would marry Roschen. The engineer was stout, abnormally broad-shoul- dered ; he had four medals from Charlottenburg Technological High School ; his grandmother was a niece of Humboldt ; his grandfather had made a three days' speech in the Frankfurt Parliament, and fought a duel with Bismarck. At Stockholm 204 THE HUMAN GERMAN his brother had beaten the English champion at bridge. And last, for musing Parnassia, came Herr Lieutenant Siegfried vom Rinnstein, whose body had stepped direct out of Ouida's novels, whose soul out of Kant's Prolegomena. In these three heroes' families was not one drunkard, editor, or suffragette, but there were athletes, scholars, poets, explorers, abductors, duellists, and privy councillors. Their fecundity was unexampled. Among Herr Griitze's ancestors was old Herr Landrat Griitze, who lived to ninety, married thrice, and left twenty-four children (among them twins) and two epics. It was this which decided Herr Rothstein to wed Roschen to Griitze ; his favourite, he fondly said, should have the most eugenic husband ; and from this combination he expected the finest progeny of all. But what of the inchoate romance of Roschen and Herr Privat-Docent Beck ? What of the popping of questions ? Dr. Rothstein made certain pitiful match-making manoeuvres, and failed. Herr Fichte, Herr Griitze, and Herr Lieutenant v. Rinnstein showed no ardour to propose. Time fled. Baffled Dr. Rothstein invoked his wife. With the cunning of pervert Science he concealed his aims. He swore untruthfully that Herr Fichte owned four hundred thousand marks ; that Herr Griitze had invented a new way of locking girders which would make bridges for railways as cheap as bridges for false THE HUMAN PROFESSOR 205 teeth ; and that Lieut, v. Rinnstein had won his cousin's estates at stud-poker, and warned by the cousin's ruin had vowed to gamble no more. Of course in a week Frau Rothstein easily did what her husband failed to do in forty weeks. She fed, flattered, manoeuvred, fooled the three Hercules- Apollos ; and she had the joy of seeing them pros- trate at her daughters' feet. Once, indeed, momentary hesitation threatened to wreck the plot. Fraulein Roschen wavered. She was displeased at the chill, exiguous love-making, and recalled with thrills the book and the kiss given her by Herr Dr. Beck. " Will Karl also give me a book and a kiss ? " she asked herself, thinking of Herr Griitze's sunlight moustache. '* And shall I return them ? " At this moment Herr Engineer Griitze entered the room and gave her the missing kiss. She did return it, muttering, " Now for the book." But instead of a book, Herr Griitze gave her a whole bookful of kisses, seventeen chapters of them, a preface, an index, and several errata. This was the one romantic interlude in the eugenistic wooing of the Rothstein brides. The wedding was brilhant. Brides and bride- grooms glowed ; but all six together were pale compared with Herr Rothstein. When the happy couples left — Herr Fichte for Stuttgart, Herr Griitze for his new post in Dar es Salaam, Herr Lieut, v. 206 THE HUMAN GERMAN Rinnstein for Thorn — the old man returned to his dusty study ; and began to reread the ancestral records of himself, of his wife, of the three young men he had chosen for his girls. It was a bright romance of unstained mental, moral, and bodily health. Without a flaw ! In particular the Griitze strain impressed him ; when crossed with Roschen's it promised at least a brood of Goethes and Beth- mann Hollwegs. Dr. Rothstein could not curb his impatience ; he restlessly counted the days before swift-winged telegrams from his daughters' scattered homes would prove that Eugenics is right. He neglected his work ; he lived in an ecstasy of es- trangement ; he received no one save Privat-Docent Dr. Beck ; he brooded. Lovelorn Dr. Beck still professed to despise Eugenics ; and this so irritated Dr. Rothstein that excuse was sought to avoid even him. Eleven months passed without news. But con- fident Dr. Rothstein was not disappointed. And on a sunny April morning his faith found its reward. He was seated in his study, reading with impatient contempt the foolish pamphlet by Prof. Loes- Freiburg, Eugenics a Fraud, when the door-bell rang. There was a rush of feet, then somebody stopped, hesitated, launched a breathless " Extraordinary ! " and flung open the door. On the threshold in her dressing-gown stood Frau THE HUMAN PROFESSOR 207 Privy Councillor Rothstein. She held excitedly several sheets of telegram. Her eyes glittered. ** Eugene ! Imagine ! " she shouted. " There are three of them ! Three of them all at once. ..." Dr. Rothstein rose. ** How amazing ! " he stammered. " And all the telegrams by the same messenger ! All born on the same day. I've never ..." Frau Rothstein stopped him. " The telegram says they're all very weak and undersized. The biggest weighs three and a half pounds. The doctors hope that one may possibly be saved, but the others ..." " Very weak and undersized ! " exclaimed Dr. Rothstein. " May be saved ? What on earth is the matter ? How is Grete ? . . . How is darling Roschen ? . . . How is Parnassia ? " " Grete and Parnassia have nothing to do with it," said Frau Dr. Rothstein. " Don't you under- stand. There's only one telegram. It's from Africa. They're aU Roschen 's." And she waited a moment, looked with fright about her ; and said in a strained voice with un- natural solemnity : " They're triplets." As she finished the door opened ; and Herr Privat- Docent Dr. Beck walked in. "I'm sorry, Herr Colleague," he said, with ill- 208 THE HUMAN GERMAN concealed malice. ** Evidently Heir Griitze and Fraulein Roschen don't mix. These things are inscrutable. By the way, did you see that queer brochure by Loes of Freiburg ? It's called Eugenics a Fraud. I'll send around my copy. ..." And he smiled sardonically. Excellency Herr Actual Privy Aulic Councillor Prof. Dr. Med., Jur., et Sc. Eugene Rothstein-Gottingen at first looked at him with fury. But quickly the joy of Eugenics stole into his aulic heart ; and he smiled too. CHAPTER XIV THE HUMAN WARRIOR Wenn's die Soldaten durch die Stadt marschieren. Dann offhen die Madchen Fenster und auch Tiiren. Ei Warum ? Ei darum ? Ei bloss wegen Tschinderassa, Bumderassasa. {Soldiers' Sofig). THRICE this week has Letitia been invaded by senile apologetic men who wanted orders. One was tout for a furniture remover ; the second sold Persian carpets made in Chemnitz ; the third offered cheap, at four and sixpence a bottle, an exceptionally lethal brand of Hessian champagne. The agents behaved in the courteous, deferential way of their calling ; each ** gracious lady-ed " unduly ; each on retiring bowed with deep-sea profundity and said, " I recommend myself ! " ** Ich empfehle mich ! " And one more thing common to all these modest callers was that the cards they tendered bore the impressive recom- mendation : " Lieutenant Out-of -Service." Seldom a week passes without the card " Johann Miiller, Leutnant a.D." being handed in at your door, followed by an embarrassingly respectful, bright-elbowed person with drill-ground reminis- 14 209 210 THE HUMAN GERMAN cences in his walk, who asks for a small order, and departs, recommending himself. It is a product of the German militarism, which innocent Britons — seeing from delusive distance — think unexception- able. But the fates of many officers, as Dr. Gamradt says, are evil ; and that is why some regiments can't get officers, though some well-favoured regiments get more than they need. Oificers choose the Army as a means of livelihood. Most have no private means, or only unearned allowances from parents which may any day cease. In the early stages of military life Herr Leutnant pulls tolerably along. But every year means greater trouble, greater dignity, and higher regimental outlay. Herr Leutnant must live as a gentleman ; he must pay silver-money into the regiment's re- serve ; he must pay library money, and music money, and representation money ; he must share in gifts to retiring comrades ; and the cost of weekly or fortnightly entertainments at which Bowie is consumed by the bowl. He must find a wife or a mistress. As life this is lively enough ; but as liveUhood it's unliveable. Herr Leutnant finds that out. He finds that the one way to get back his outlay on education is to reach at least a battalion-com- mander's rank, for no lower rank brings him suffi- cient pension to live even modestly as officer in retreat. His chance of attaining such rank is small ; THE HUMAN WARRIOR 211 and his chance of commanding a corps and drawing a corps commander's salary of £1500 is no chance at all. The Army List shows over ten thousand lieu- tenants, and only two thousand five hundred battalion-commanders or officers of higher pension rank. So three officers out of four who start with hope of an easy career leading to honourable idleness retire unpensioned, or barely pensioned, while they are still young, and, despite youth, unfitted for civil careers. That is the source of the numberless Lieutenants Out-of-Service. Their case is made worse by the rule that they remember their army past ; and old comrades treat them as declasses if they adopt derogatory trades. As food costs money, they put up with being declasses. That is why the purse-proud bourgeois has meetings with Herr Leutnant a.D. ; and if the bourgeois is not purse- proud, but sensitive, he is pained that officers and gentlemen should call at his flat and be snubbed by pert Hedwig when they ask, " Is the gentleman at home ? " This tragic comedy of Army life is ironic heaven's way of evening things up. Before becoming Out-of- Service unprophetic Herr Leutnant looks down on professional men, looks down more loftily still on the grubbing tradesman — the Koofmich — who is not " satisfactionscapable " — who cannot fight a duel. 212 THE HUMAN GERMAN He little dreams that he will some day call at the Koofmich's door, and say with respectful genu- flexion : "I recommend myself." Ministers do their best to frustrate heaven's ironical design. They make sinecure posts to which retired lieu- tenants are tied. But the resource is small. Suffi- cient sinecures would cost as much as sufficient pensions. So the super-scottish War Minister Falken- hayn asks the Chambers of Commerce to influence merchants to take Officers Out-of-Service as clerks, and civilians write protests to the Tagehlatt signed " A Clerk Out of Work." A remedy planned is to reduce the number of active lieutenants till it fits more closely the store of pension-earning posts. Those who want this say that half the lieutenant's work — and all his idling — might be better done by non-coms. But the Army suffers a famine in non-coms., due to the State's super-scottish virtue. Time-expired conscripts are not paid enough or privileged enough to make them serve for more than the compulsory term ; and of course were it not for compulsion few would serve even that. The pay, the food, the clothing, the lodging of the human warrior are adequate when viewed from compulsion standpoint. In a market of free con- tract they would not recruit a hen. The State loves tradition ; and all four things are measured by the THE HUMAN WARRIOR 213 tradition of " Old-Prussian Thrift " — by the plain living which made unconquerable the legions of skinflint Frederick ; and would satisfy to-day if the world had since stood still. But while the civil standard of comfort has risen, the military standard has lain flat as Brandenburg. The heroes of Ross- bach and Hohenfriedberg who were starved by Frederick, were starved also by their parents ; the heroes of Zabern and Kopenick are spoiled at home, and they get disagreeably shocked on reverting as soldiers to the material standards of the eighteenth- century boor. Super-scottish parsimony shows from the start. The conscript cannot join the colours without bringing his parents' money or getting into debt. He must spend at least ten shillings on necessary equipment. He must buy half a dozen brushes, cloths for rifle-cleaning, cloths for cleaning other metal things, a warm woollen jacket, and socks, or their substitute " foot-cloths " worn, hke the Russian soldier's portianki, wound around the foot. Herr Schneesieber, a veteran who published in Zwei Jahre Dienstzeit his memories of thirty years' service, says that young men prepare to join the colours by saving their money up. His super-scottish wage plagues the conscript through two hard-up years. The nine shilling monthly wage is barely enough for necessaries. 214 THE HUMAN GERMAN and not to be stretched towards recreation. It is paid three times a month, in sums of about three marks, or about 3d. a day. Necessary outlay takes a penny a day. There are sixty pfennigs for laundry, ninety for hair-cutting, ninety for soap, for cleaning, and sewing things. What remains over just repairs the depreciation of brushes, jackets, clothes, and socks. For amusement, reading, postage, the human warrior turns to wealthy parents, tribute from servant girls (small as result of his low value as ornament), and operations of credit. From such sources the soldier supports the canteen. With the canteen the super-scottish State acts hypersuper- scottishly. In generous fits it rewards soldiers for good shooting and other merits, and it takes the money from the canteen surplus which the soldiers' money has made. It requires the soldiers to buy from the same source pious, none-too-human journals which no one reads, and to pay for carts which carry their bread, for buckets which carry their water, and other things indispensable in army life. Old-Prussian Thrift is stamped on every shirt a Prussian soldier wears. The Ministry credits the administrative units with fixed, modest sums, which must not be exceeded ; and it instructs them to spend as little of this as it can. So a pair of trousers wanders from soldier to soldier, from one class of THE HUMAN WARRIOR 215 troops to another, till it has formed part of half a dozen " garnitures," and by virtue of patchwork metabolism has nothing, except buttons, of its original tissue. Straps, helmets, water-bottles, belts last generations. Food does not last from one meal to another. Until lately it cost just thirty pfennigs, which is threepence-halfpenny, a day ; now it costs a fraction more. The " small ration " allowed to men in barracks (that is, most of the year) is I J lb. of bread, lo grammes of roasted coffee, about I lb. of raw meat with lo per cent of bone, 3 lb. of potatoes, and about J pound of leguminous vege- tables. At manoeuvres there are " large rations " with 60 per cent more meat. The " larger ration " is barely enough for marching men ; and as barrack work is often as hard as marching, the small ration is too small. Most men are thin and active during their two years' service, and acquire their globi- ferous symmetry in civil life. The soldier is super- scottishly lodged. There are fine barracks in Berlin, Potsdam, and elsewhere. But there are not enough, and too often the brave fagades are veils for the invariable Old-Prussian Thrift. Since the last increase of peace strength the army is under- barracked ; there are men lodged in forts enclosed by wet ditches ; and others in corrugated iron sheds, where they freeze and fry in turn. Even the good barracks are ill-lighted and ill-heated. In summer 216 THE HUMAN GERMAN men do without artificial light. Old- Prussian Thrift makes off with the candles. The human State finds fresh occasion for parsi- mony in its way with the One- Year-Volunteer. One- Year- Volunteering is abandoned in France, but obtains here, as in Austria and in Russia. It is a device by which the privileged middle-class youth escapes the joy of living as common soldier in breeches dating from 1900, with rations dating from the Great Elector. The boy with a certain education (equivalent to secondary) who reports himself before reaching twenty as One- Year- Volunteer, serves only half the compulsory term. He compensates the super-scottish State by paying for equipment, uniforms, and food. One- Year-Volunteers who choose to serve with the cavalry must deposit twenty pounds ; and must pay for shoeing their own horses. The real qualification is not learning, but wealth ; a doctor of science could not serve as One-Year-Volunteer unless he paid for his boots. The volunteers, since their clothes are not made by the State, look very smart, though not as smart as in Russia, where they outshine their own officers. Medical One- Year- Volunteers serve only six months with the battahons ; the other six they practise as army doctors. ■ Most volunteers end as reserve or Landwehr officers. They may not if they are Jews. Where THE HUMAN WARRIOR 217 military exigencies permit, they are given time to continue their professional or scientific studies ; and many a ** One-Yearer " is the regiment's most learned man, and teaches the colonel to spell. Among them — in theory private soldiers — are doctors of medicine, doctors of law, candidates of theology, prize engineers, composers of symphonies, experts on canalisation, and seekers for extra-Neptunian planets. Some regiments are better at scholarship than at shooting ; and naturally this is not to their loss. Our young linguist acquaintance told us something of that. It happened on the day he took his place in the ranks of the 70th (Schneckenschritt) Sharpshooters. He was alone in the barracks court- yard polishing his spectacles in order to examine the unfamiUar, somewhat terrifying mechanism of his Mauser, 98. A raucous voice made him jump. It came from a window, where a red-necked officer stood making notes on a programme. " One- Year- Volunteer Bubhtz, what is your record ? " ** Candidatus Juris, Herr Captain : author of the doctorial dissertation Anatocism and Perversions of Usury under Justinian." " Then you are the man we want. Just knock off a barrack-room skit for our festival on Saturday. Something lively and personal that the men will understand, and with a few jokes about beer." 218 THE HUMAN GERMAN Uniform training for war of miscellaneous scholars, and the standardising of twenty successive privates with one pair of breeches, make for the solidity and coherence of national life. The mihtary imprint stays ; you see it later in poUtics, in organisation, in professorial militancy, in the disciplined tramp of Socialist mobs. At Reichstag Elections nearly three million political reservists who have learned tactics as soldiers are being summoned to the pohtical flag. These are the members of the Unions of Time-Expired Soldiers (Kriegervereine) , who turn out and try to vote Socialism out of the Reichstag. The Soldiers' Unions are the strongest organisations Germany has, outnumbering far the registered Socialists, the Navy League, and other big leagues. The Soldiers' Unions aim to keep old comrades together and foster in civil life the specific army virtues. The member must have served in Army or Navy and taken the " flag-oath." He is required to be loyal to the sovereign (of his own state), obedient to law, respectful to authority, and good as comrade. The Union notion is old. The first was started in 1839 to bring together veterans of the great wars ; and soon the Unions secured from the State the privilege of burying members with mihtary honours. In the long peace they decayed ; in the war age that ended in 1871 they revived ; and the new Unions admit all old soldiers. There are THE HUMAN WARRIOR 219 32,000 Unions, and they have 2,900,000 members, most of whom saw no fighting till now. Soldiers' Unions are federated on the federal lines of the Empire. The twenty-six states have their own Unions ; each state's Unions are united in a state Verbdnd ; and all state Verbande are repre- sented in the imperial Kyffh'dtiser Bund. Prussia, with 16,000 Unions and 1,700,000 members, comes first. In populous places, infantrymen, cavalrymen, and artillerists have their own Unions. The Unions celebrate anniversaries of victories, birthdays of sovereigns ; they bury worthily dead members ; line the streets when the monarch comes ; and foster patriotism. They keep up some orphanages and do charitable work. State governments give them railway fare reductions so that they may hold con- gresses ; and they get fire-arms at low prices. They publish newspapers. Their great work is the Kyff- hauser monument, built twenty years ago to Wil- helm I's memory. Wilhelm II calls them " an army in mufti." A Reichstag Radical called them '* Not Kriegervereine (Soldiers' Unions), but Krie- chervereine (Unions of Reptiles)." They are pillars of obedience. At Elections — Reichstag Elections, at least, where nearly all members have votes — they are indispensable ; some say that in 191 2 two million members voted against Socialist candidates. Natur- ally the two factions carr}^ on — on good military 220 THE HUMAN GERMAN principles — fierce political wars ; and newspapers teem with stories of boycott, derision, insult, and assault. No beer-hall that quenches Socialist thirsts ever gets the custom of a Soldiers' Union. The German soldier is human, all-too-human for alarmism. The " miracle of organisation," the " war-machine of steel," the " iron army which conquered at Sedan " is not as high, world-remote, and tediously unhuman as British newspapers say. You can prove its humanity any day, at the Doric Konigsivachc — the guard-house — in the Linden, near the Arsenal, in sight of the Kaiser's Schloss. There towards midday a crowd collects. You count three post card merchants, four youths from Mo. and Va. with Sandow (wadding) chests, and seven and twenty as unwashed, unlicked, unregenerate corner- boys as you'd find in Berkeley Square. The corner- boys hustle the passers ; spit on the gun ** Valeria " brought from Paris ; and stare at the human soldiers. All of them — post card men, Americans, and Prussian corner-boys — await the Changing of the Guard. The displeasing thing in the ceremony is that no nursemaids come. The guard is no draw. It is merely nineteen youthful, medium-sized privates in charge of a sergeant or corporal. The guards wear blue tunics, bleached to twenty shades ; black, red- piped breeches with olive knees, baggy enough to THE HUMAN WARRIOR 221 rout (or hold the milk-bottle of) the least fastidious nurse. Their rifles are not piled, but stuck singly in black and white iron rests, and the number of each is scrawled on the pavement. The soldiers are good-looking, but not handsome ; their rough, regular features suit the Doric columns ; and one of them closely resembles the Archduke Karl Franz Joseph. They would displease teutonological Mr. Blatchford. They do not look inhumanly patriotic, or unpleasantly zealous to conquer worn-out Eng- land. They look human ; take a human interest in the inhumanly dirty loungers ; and when an infant's marble invades their area they throw it humanly back. At the end of the area is a soldier in overcoat. He holds his rifle as holy men hold crucifixes. He is the sentry. There is something droll and un- reasonable about this sentry. He is handsome, moustachioed, erect ; he should, you feel, look martial, braggardly, and licentious. But he does not do this at all. He is mild and peaceable. A meek, scholarly, meticulous, unsoldierly air seems to blow about him ; he recalls young Herr Dr. Phil., Sc, Jur., Med., et Theol. Marzynski, author of Predicative-Nominal Prefixes in Suhiya Language- Stems. You ask yourself why. And the reason gradually dawns — the sentry has blue spectacles perched on his Doric nose. 222 THE HUMAN GERMAN At a quarter to one the guard is changed. Half a battahon of infantry, with band playing and colours flying, comes from the Opera Place and makes for the Schloss. An eagle standard shows the Emperor is there. The column drops twenty pink soldiers under a pink lieutenant ; and this is the new guard. Meantime the old guard soldiers have fled behind the portico, returned remarkably smartened, taken up their rifles, and laid down their humanity. They now look as stern as Niirnberg's wooden soldiers. The guard is changed by an amazing manoeuvre done in Prussian parade-step, a hammering, mathematical goose-step which brings you quickly forward. All lips are set ; all legs are straight ; and the nailed boots rattle as they fall with steam-hammer pre- cision. The pink lieutenant is excited. He flourishes his sword far beyond need ; and he helps the men into line by prodding at their belts. Then the re- lieved guard-men pile their rifles to the right ; a short-sighted soldier (not the sentry) takes off his goggles, and the soldier who looks like the Archduke Karl Franz Joseph makes off the last. The short-sighted soldier is taken as a matter of course. Herr Gamradt lent us Boysen's Army Service, a conscripts' manual, with the official list of " Slight Corporeal Defects which do not Prevent Service with the Colours " ; and among the defects which are no hindrance to soldiering are " short THE HUMAN WARRIOR 223 sight " and ** a Supernumerary Toe which Owing to its Position does not Impede the Possessor." This laxity is necessary, for the official journal Ver'6ffe7itlichungen der Milit'drsa7iit'dts'wesen says, " Germans have the shortest sight in Europe ; the percentage afflicted is 71." Some, says Herr Gamradt, who is very modern in this, are blinded by Gothic letters ; others by reading Ve7'dffentlichungen der Militdrsanit'dtswesen. He laughed when Letitia asked whether doctors would pass for service a lad so myopic that he could not see his Supernumerary Toe. While these problems puzzle you, changing the guard is done. The seven-and-twenty corner-boys disperse ; the post card sellers carry off their post cards ; the Americans carry off their chests. Alone the spectacled sentry stands unchanged. He looks more professorial than ever. He looks as if he is pondering a System of Peaceful War ; with gunners so blind that they could not hit a haystack; with the sight of each Dreadnought gun so spoiled by studv that the foe would feel no dread. CHAPTER XV THE HUMAN TRADESMAN That horrid profession which he had chosen to adopt {Thackeray). YESTERDAY all the evening we talked of business men. It was the fruit of a visit to Schauder's shop in the Leipzigerstrasse, and of an adventure that there occurred. We took with us as usual Aeroplane, who barked excessively in the Underground ; and brought remonstrances from broad Frau Pastor Zimkat, who got in at Nollendorfplatz. Frau Zimkat is unreasonably fat ; she has a low forehead, and flat feet : Letitia calls her " The Earth." " Why so, gracious lady ? " asked Herr Gamradt. " She's an oblate spheroid," said Letitia. And now in the Underground Frau Zimkat looked angrily at Aeroplane. " Please read the notice," said she. ** * Only small dogs are admitted that may be taken on the lap.' Is yours a lap dog ? " " That depends on the lap," said Letitia, looking towards the Equator. Our adventure at Schauder's in the Leipziger- strasse was due to enterprise by Aeroplane, whom we left chained up in the porch. We made pur- 224 THE HUMAN TRADESMAN 225 chases, slipped twice on the stairs, got wrong change as usual, and made for the main entry. We came on a tumultuous tumult. A dozen persons — " all men," said Letitia sneeringly — were screaming and gesticulating ; one was stopping blood from a yellow nose ; the hall-porter Fritz was explaining some- thing inexplicable ; and a policeman, hysterical from excitement, was bidding the crowd keep calm. We guessed immediately that Aeroplane had bitten a nose. But his offence was much more grave. You are aware that human Prussians, being super-scot tish by nature, haste to waste cigars. And as it's against police regulations to smoke inside, the larger shops provide temporary retreats for cigars. The retreat is in the porch. It is a handsome brazen rack with numerous numbered grooves. The hall-porter keeps watch. As you enter the shop you drop your cigar in, say. Number Eleven ; and as you leave you reclaim it, rehght it ; and — after the first momentary faintness, walk away. If you forget your number . . . Letitia says that no sane man having once surrendered a Prussian cigar . . . But Letitia is ignorant of life ; and more ignorant still is Letitia of the all-too-human nature of Aeroplane. Whether Aeroplane hoped to pose as a shopper, or was piqued by the all-too-human fragrance, no man knows ; but later facts are plain. While Herr IS 226 THE HUMAN GERMAN Hall-porter-Cigar-guardian Fritz was tumbling a shopper's parcels into her motor-car, Aeroplane flew to the cigar-retreat, and rose on his hind-paws. He sniffed superciliously cigar six ; ignored cigars seven and eight ; and when he drew near a brown number thirteen, put forth his paw ; and swept a dozen cigars from their restful grooves to the ground. When Herr Fritz returned he found the ejected cigars smoking with anguish in the dust. Had Herr Fritz been a porter of character he would have picked them up, laid them in- discriminately in a row, explained the tragedy, and bid the owners choose their favourites by nose, vision, taste, or luck. But Fritz faltered and pal- tered. He restored the cigars to twelve empty grooves, and prayed the smokers might not taste the difference. Fritz's prayer seemed granted. The first shopper to come out took from groove seventeen a cigar which properly belonged to groove twenty-two, struck a match, and went off puffing. Plainly he had insensitive gums. But the second shopper ! The second shopper, who had left in twenty-two a generous Havana, was faced by a fierce Flor Biilow from Hamburg ; and at once made off after shopper number one, who was trailing clouds of glory which should have been numbered twenty-two. He had hardly dodged a blow from the robber of twenty- THE HUMAN TRADESMAN 227 two, when other shopper-smokers came out of Schauder's. Each panted to regain the cigar which he rightly held was earth's best and brightest ; and each got instead what he was absolutely certain was incomparably earth's worst. Such things cause trouble. Within forty seconds the porch of Schauder's was thronged with well-dressed, angrily protesting, physically violent men. After insults had flown like kites, and Herr Policeman Schneip had tried to intervene with as much success as Europe had in the Balkans — ^the smokers turned like one man on Herr Porter Fritz, and expressed their conviction that he had smoked the cigars, and care- lessly mixed them up. This Fritz denied ; he adjured them to listen ; swore he would buy each man as good a cigar as he'd lost ; and blurted out the explanation. " 'Twas not I, meine Herren. No one could have smoked your cigars but the dog of the Englishman inside." In originality and intellectual plasticity German tradesmen stand ahead of British. We get this idea not from Schauder's cigar-retreat ; but from daily dealings with minor tradesmen and workers near home. For instance, from our deahngs with Herr House-porter Hiibsch, whose primary function is to work the hft and answer the door-bell at the house where Keswell hves. Herr Hiibsch's sphere is infinite. He paints, makes shelves, hangs curtains. 228 THE HUMAN GERMAN rubs parquets, mends bells, plants flowers, prints photographs. He is interested in a dairy. He is the incarnation of efficiency, order, and honesty. He is further — for his humble class — ^reasonably cultured ; and though not above Shakespeare in Greek, he can fire off his Virgil and Moliere with the best. His weakness is that he flatly declines to be paid. No man excels him in modesty. He spends hour after hour at your flat, while three streets off in his own house angry callers prod at the door-bell, and clamour to be taken up in the lift. But whether you offer him fifty marks or fifty pfennigs, he vows it's absurdly too much, and with a grateful iimeo Danaos thrusts back half in your hand. The least you can do in return is to recommend him to friends. We lately discovered that Herr Hiibsch is enabled to be thus moderate by his extensive connection as agent for matrimony. His clients are maid- servants in Schoneberg houses. In the case of servants classed as " ordinary " he charges five marks a husband ; but where servants have saved £50 or over he finds a husband for half that, the labour being considerably fighter. If the bridegroom has £100 or more, the bride pays him £1. The prices are high, but brides agree that bridegrooms are worth the money. These marriage enterprises put householders to considerable cost ; and since THE HUMAN TRADESMAN 229 the 4th of April we and our friends have ceased to employ Herr Hiibsch. The fact is, all servants left to get married, Letitia long puzzled in vain ; even when she chose a nursemaid with one glass eye and no savings, this nursemaid was wed in a month. An accident led to a clearing up of the mystery. We discovered that Herr Hiibsch's favourite homo homini lupus was no thoughtless joke. While melting glue, he had the run of the kitchen ; and he began by chuck- ing the servants under the chin, and then by offering to get them husbands for considerations. This proved costly ; for although Herr Hubsch charged only ten pfennigs for printing a photograph, the loss of a series of servants cost us pounds. Re- proaches poured in from friends, who asked : " Why did you recommend Herr House-porter Hiibsch ? He found a husband for our cook Patricia, the only woman in Prussia that can grill a chop." Soon the climax came. Our flaxen, Saxon Hedwig, whose head incomparably matched the Bieder- meier chairs, gave notice to leave. Some days later a well-printed card, inscribed " Herr House-porter Hiibsch," was handed in by Hedwig. We received Herr Hiibsch coolly, but with the respect imposed by success. " I am told, Herr," he said, " that your Hedwig is engaged." 230 THE HUMAN GERMAN " Indeed ? " " If you want to keep her, Herr, you could easily fix up . . ." " How do you come in ? " " Well, I have influence. ... I know. . . . That is ... La donna e mobile. . . . Les extremes se touchent. ..." And with a stammer, but without a blush, he explained that Hedwig had paid him five marks to find her a husband ; and that if twelve or even eight marks were bid on the other side he could bring the match to naught. Next day we learned that Herr House-porter Hiibsch is sleeping partner in a servants' registry office ; agent for a firm that hires out broughams ; and tout for Landrock's Baby Food. He gets paid for finding servants places ; next for finding servants husbands ; next for finding servants to replace them ; next for hiring out white-satin- lined broughams ; and a year or so afterwards. . . . So much for the specious epigram : a jack-of-all trades, master of none. Domestic exigencies make many as queer pro- fessions as Hiibsch s ; sometimes professions which cause more disturbance still. Our friend Bernal Harley can tell of that. Seldom in Germany have Britons cause for panic ; but all last fortnight Bernal's hands have so trembled that his type- writer (No. 189,773) hops. It happened at ten THE HUMAN TRADESMAN 231 o'clock on a Monday. Bernal was writing alone in his flat ; his wife and seven children had gone to Grunewald ; and his servants had gone to find bridegrooms. There was an emphatic ring, a later imperative ring, and at last a ring which Bernal calls a ring minatory and monitory. As protest against being asked to open doors Bernal ignored the rings. But the third ring frightened. Perhaps the house was on fire. The night before he had dreamed of eating smoked sigue off an ash-tray ; and such dreams seldom portend good. So he went to the door. Before it stood an unfamiliar, muscular, decently dressed stranger. He looked for a moment inquisitorially round the hall, hesi- tated, rubbed his nose, and put the portentous question : " Have you got any Frenchmen and Russians ? " '' Haben Sie Franzosen und Russen P " Bernal, who is normally cautious, ought to have answered evasively, or learned the aim of this unexampled query before committing himself. But under the catastrophic suggestions he lost his presence of mind, and blurted out miserably, '' Of course not ! " The stranger's manner here confirmed the worst of fears. He looked, indeed, neither surprised nor angry ; he seemed to expect an untruthful answer ; he had the cold, professional way of the practised detective trapping a helpless criminal. He crossed 232 THE HUMAN GERMAN the threshold, saying v^^th plain increduHty, " It's my business to see." And he entered the kitchen. At first poor Bernal stood rooted to the ground. What was the import of this domiciliary search ? Unluckily, though details were doubtful, the general import was too plain. When a German, certainly a detective, enters a Briton's house and hunts for Frenchmen and Russians, that of necessity means pohtics. Germany . . . the Dual Alhance . . . the Triple Entente. . . . Probably Bernal was accused of harbouring French and Russian spies. But there were other explanations. Suppose that, unknown to a retiring journalist, relations were broken off. Suppose that our British Government had boldly again proclaimed that the countrymen of Shakespeare and Goethe could never fight ; and thus made war inevitable. And suppose French and Russian soldiers were hiding disguised in Berlin. Perhaps with explosives. Where on earth should they hide if not in the flat of Teutonophobe scribbhng Bernal ? The detective had entered the kitchen. That confirmed the diagnosis. Soldiers — Frenchmen and Russians — would inevitably hide within reach of food and maids. And this reasoning led to thoughts of alarming possibihties. Suppose that, unknown to their master, Agnes the cook and Lucie the amorous housemaid had secreted their French and THE HUMAN TRADESMAN 233 Russian lovers. What court martial would believe the householder's obvious lie that he didn't know they were there ? Resolved to know the worst, ashen-faced Bernal trembled into the kitchen. The detective was at work. He opened vigorously the pantry door and slapped the bottom shelf. He examined the ice- chest. He then went into the passage behind the kitchen, banged a dusty clothes-basket, saying savagely, " Come out, you brutes ! " And next he did something amazing, something absurd. He returned to the kitchen, lay on his stomach, and peered under the range. Now the range stands only four inches above the floor ; and not the skinniest Frenchman, much less a clod-shaped muzhik, could possibly squeeze underneath. The detective was evidently not so smart as he seemed. But at this critical moment there was a significant " Ah ! " *' Come out, you brute ! " repeated the detective. And he thrust his hand far under the range ; and dragged out and displayed to thunder- struck Bernal, an unarmed, undisciphned cock- roach. All's well that ends well. " There are Frenchmen and Russians," said the detective, " in every house." And he explained that " Frenchmen and Russians " is Berlinese for cockroaches ; and that he was sent round by landlords whom the law compels to rid 234 THE HUMAN GERMAN their houses of pests. He'd been told, he added, that in Russia cockroaches are called Prusaki, which means Prussians, but he didn't know whether they were called Prussiens in France. The tragedy arose through Bernal's ignorance of German. Next morning he bought a Dictionary of Slang, and he will avoid such happenings. But it will be many days before his hands cease to tremble ; and his type- writer (No. 189,773) to hop. Though Prussians, as this tale shows, are ingenious in finding professions, Herr Knoblauch of Strassburg in Alsace, says Frenchmen are cleverer still. Herr Knoblauch keeps a beer-shop, a Kneipe, where university students foregather to swill from bottom- less tankards seas of Munich beer. Swilliest of all these swilUng students, despite his Gallic parents, is the Alsatian Ren^ Bouillebaise, of the Faculty of Philosophy. M. Bouillebaise lately swilled till he owed Herr Knoblauch 32 marks 80 pfennigs ; and when Knoblauch asked him for payment, he said with derisive tenderness, " Ask papa." As Knoblauch unexpectedly threatened to take this counsel the student felt disturbed. For though M. Bouillebaise, Senior, is the richest butcher in Colmar, he had a fortnight before paid for his son thirteen unreasonable bills, and had further advanced him Marks 200, which lovesick M. Bouillebaise gave to a barmaid in Bar — that means in Enghsh, cash. THE HUMAN TRADESMAN 235 To dispel his troubles the student of philosophy invented a rich maiden aunt, settled, he told Herr Knoblauch, at Toul, who had promised that when he paid her his belated visit she would pay off his belated debts. After inventing his aunt, M. Bouillebaise, Junior, wrote to Colonel Ducis de Montesquieu, Officer in charge of the Toul recruiting staff, saying that hopeless love was driving him to enhst in the Foreign Legion, on condition that he was sent at once to Morocco, where he might die a hero's death. He signed the letter ''Pierre Knoblauch, agede2$ ans" ; and added in postscript that as he spoke no French, he would bring as interpreter a young Alsatian, who had written his letter, the excellent linguist M. Bouillebaise. Next day he met Herr Knoblauch with the announcement that he was going at last to see his aunt at Toul ; and he asked Herr Knoblauch to accompany him, and receive the 32 marks 80 pfennigs on the spot. And as Toul is only half an hour from the frontier, Herr Knoblauch agreed. *' Toul is an attractive town and a well-planned fortress,'' said M. Bouillebaise as the train steamed in. He spoke with the instructive voice of a philo- sophy student grounded in Baedecker. " The popu- lation is fourteen thousand (three hundred Jews). You captured it from us in '70. It's a bit early to see my aunt ; let's look around." And seeing a 236 THE HUMAN GERMAN prim, unpicturesque building near the station, he dashed into it alone, and returned with the report that it was a veteran's home. He had met by good luck the governor, a charming militaire of the old school, who offered to show the tourists the whole institution. And he dragged Herr Knoblauch upstairs. The militaire sat at a table with many papers in front, and an uncommonly wiry sergeant behind. He received the tourists with courtesy, but somewhat formally ; and began to rain upon perplexed Herr Knoblauch innumerable questions. M. Bouillebaise interpreted. He told the innkeeper that the officer was asking about Strassburg, whether it still pro- duced the incomparable pate, what was the illegiti- macy rate, and cognate questions which rightly interest soldiers. At last the militaire ceased to fire off questions, and pushed a filled-up form across the table. " What's that ? " asked Herr Knoblauch. " A form for the visitors' records," said Bouille- baise. " Sign it, and he'll show us the veterans." Herr Knoblauch signed. M. Bouillebaise smiled diabohcally. With the excuse, "I shall now enquire if Auntie dear is up," he vanished down the stairs. He did not return. And when anxious Herr Knoblauch turned to follow, the sergeant's hand fell imperatively on his shoulder. Incensed Herr Knoblauch slapped the sergeant's THE HUMAN TRADESMAN 237 jaw. In a second he found himself on his back with vicious army handcuffs enclosing his wrists. Thereon began explanations. The militaire made clear (but only after another interpreter had been found) that Herr Knoblauch had signed an under- taking to serve in the Foreign Legion, on condition he was sent at once to Morocco where he might die a hero's death. Only after a day's negotiations with the aid of a Consul, three more interpreters, who quarrelled fiercely over the meaning of the present subjunctive of mourir, and a doctor who swore that Herr Knoblauch was dying of consump- tion (of beer), was the foreign legionary released. When he appeared that evening in his beer-shop an uproarious chorus greeted him : " How goes it, Boniface, in Casablanca ? " The chorus came from the students who owed him nothing. Their debtful comrades — at least a dozen of the twenty — hid their faces in their tankards and wept. CHAPTER XVI THE HUMAN WOMAN Uxori nubere nolo meae {Martial). HERR GAMRADT says that the Reichstag is "trembling in its elastic boots." Not because of the daily dilemma, Finance; the Finance of making extra army corps ; supple- menting sergeant-majors' rations ; docking Dread- noughts, salaries, or beards. But because of the wails of the Allied Imperial Matrimonial Agents, led by Herr Hiibsch, whom inconsiderate laws — again the meddling State — have driven to beg their bread. Because of Paragraph 656. Before it — as, source of all our joy and all our woe they merited — the agents flourished. And then Paragraph 656 forbade them to sue for fees, on the ground, " against good manners " ; and the agents can't make a living. This is not for lack of chents. Agents in Prussia always have clients ; for right-thinking men look on marriage as a means of keeping them idle, or getting them out of a hole. The dot — the Mitgift — 238 THE HUMAN WOMAN 239 is universal. Marriage is the last resource of millions ; even patriot Herr Gamradt, in reply to Letitia's " Englishmen before they marry fall in love," answered with unaccustomed cynicism, " Germans before they marry fall in debt." The agents' trouble is exposed in fourteen peti- tions. Since Par. 656, men married by agencies won't pay. They sign contracts to pay, but make mental reservations, or find excuses. One — says the fifth Reichstag petition — bound himself to pay M. 200,000 for a wife worth M. 1,000,000 ; and then *' out of charity, for the law is with me," paid M.500 : another, a Count of the Holy Roman Empire, shirked payment because though the wife's fortune, as promised, consisted of interest-bearing papers, her bust proved built of papers which had no interest at all. And he offered to pay the half if the agent who found him the wife would find him a co- respondent. In Berlin, says the Reichstag member Erzberger, co-respondent is a profession. News- papers say that names of titled and even famous men stand in the petition lists ; and, of course, at such exposures all richly wedded deputies squirm uneasily on their chairs. This little interlude in Reichstag tedium throws bright, desirable light on the study of the Human Woman. It helps you to see that Germany is essentially the land of higher Man ; that Man here, 240 THE HUMAN GERMAN is first, alone, and last. France, says Dr. Gamradt, is governed — and ably governed — by ministers' mistresses ; America — intermediately — by steel mag- nates' wives ; and in Russia the Woman Cult is so high that the honestest tchinovnik will steal a million if only it helps him to steal a kiss. And England . . . The feature in those countries, and others, is that woman is integral and an entity ; and the feature in Germany, says Herr Gamradt, is that she is fractional and auxiliary. There are fifty illustrative stories to make this clear ; but the Frankfurter Zeitung makes it plain with a flash, for every day it glows with advertisements headed EiNHEIRAT. Einheirat, the dictionary says, means " marriage into " ; and it adds the verbal einheiraten, " to marry into ... to get into by marriage." The Frankfurter Zeitung shows that to marry into, to get into by marriage, is the immediate ambition of every marriageable German. Where the fortune- hunting Frenchman prates about amour eternel ; and the swindling Briton advertises for "a graceful figure " when he means a graceful five figures, the honest German makes clear from the first that he wants to marry a factory or farm ; to marry, that is, the widow or daughter of some captain of industry ; and he words his Frankfurter Zeitung advertisement thus : THE HUMAN WOMAN 241 MARRIAGE INTO! EINHEIRAT! a thoroughly solid undertaking- which needs good management more than capital is sought by an intelligent technician, about 40 years old, with capital, mostly self-saved, of M. 20,000. He desires a domesti- cated lady whose ambition is happiness and a good turn-over rather than social distractions. Photograph of lady and precise description of business to U.3837, to Steinbruck und Tipphauer, A.G., Elberfeld. Herr Gamradt, when shown by Letitia a Frank- furter Zeitung with ten such advertisements, says that indeed the position of Woman is not great ; and he produced Herr Merkau's brochure The Superfluity {Der Ueberfluss), which tells you why. The Empire, says The Superfluity, has 930,433 more single women than single men ; and there are 1,576,093 women widowed and divorced, who pant for husbands as passionately as do virgins. The sum of husbandless is two millions and a half. In the Dresden districts, which have the highest average assessments, there are 150 women to 100 men ; and in Kurfiirstendamm, Berlin, there are 179 to 100. That is one reason why here more than anywhere women chase after men, while men chase after thoroughly solid undertakings which need good management more than capital. In the external relation of German women to men you see strong proof that prices depend on the relation of demand to supply. In clothing and pin- 16 242 THE HUMAN GERMAN money women here are as dear as anywhere ; but in relation to men they are cheap. Man is distant, famiUar, rude, rudely polite, condescending, con- ceited, contemptuously chivalrous ; and Woman is eye-uplifted, adoring, servile, thank-Heaven-he-sees- me. That is the attitude of Man to Woman — rather of Woman to Man, for magnificently passive Man needs no attitude. You see this in the wealthy West-Berhner who goes second-class on the Under- ground ; and in the plain working-man and maid when they go walking out. On the stage when Herr Assessor v. Jasnicki takes out a cigar, it is red- haired Fraulein Hertha who flies for a match, and, while he lolls magnificently with legs on high, lights it with the reverence of a vestal tending a millennial flame. And it is Fraulein Hertha who rises respect- fully when Herr Assessor leaves the room. And down Miiggelsee way on Sunday. You see them walking out : he well-dressed, thick, with Niagaras of crimson neck pouring over his collar ; she with crimson, mittened hands ; on his face splendid indifference ; on hers love and pride, earthworm humility to him ; eagle arrogance to the world at having him. And when the pair make for a seat, and with all the publicity of unashamed England, embrace, it is she who prints the kiss, and he who yawns, while he smokes, and plays the breaker of hearts. Rarely he stoops to show the humanity which THE HUMAN WOMAN 243 exudes all over him in his other, non-sexual, relations. As we talked with the Gamradts I was somewhat put out by an indiscretion of Letitia, who said inconsiderately that ladies of Berlin unlace their men-folks' boots. The issue arose through some- thing we had seen in the Underground, We had got at Biilowstrasse into a north-going carriage, marked " No Smoking." A pleasant -looking girl got in with us. She read Sudermann's Song of Songs. At the following station, Gleisdreick, in gets a good- looking, red-faced, hard, Mensur-sca.vTed Prussian of unmistakably better class — possibly an officer in Zivil, more likely an ambitious young Assessor, half-way on towards Rural Commissary. He is dressed in well-made yellow-brown clothes and smokes a cigar. The pretty girl exclaims, drops The Song of Songs, and rises with a blush. The good- looking man — while she stands respectfully — greets her with great politeness ; says it is wet ; looks at his smoking cigar ; and hesitates. The girl says that Friday is always wet ; looks at the smoking cigar ; and hesitates. Then she blushes violently and says : "I ought to have waited for you in a smoking carriage." The man says : " Oh, no, never mind ; I can put my cigar out." And he pushes the cigar-end against the glass partition. The girl puts her hand on his sleeve and says, " Oh, no, I 244 THE HUMAN GERMAN insist." The man says, " Oh, no, it'd be ridiculous." . . . Then, after waiting a moment while the girl gets redder and redder, he says, ** Oh, well, if you will insist. ..." And he takes her arm, and as the train is leaving the station makes with her for a smoking carriage. It was when I had told this to the Gamradts that Letitia made her unlucky remark about boot- laces. Herr Dr. Gamradt took it good-humouredly. " In the first place," he said, " the Underground incident proves nothing. After all, why shouldn't a man — probably a hard-worked bureaucrat — finish his cigar. As for the talk about boot-lacing, you will excuse me, gracious lady, but that remark has no basis in fact. I doubt if such a thing has ever happened. I have seen scores of men taking off their own boots when their wives were at home, and I have never once ..." " Do you remember that honeymoon couple," put in Frau Dr. Gamradt, " who got into our com- partment at Schierke ? " " I was going to mention it," said Herr Dr. Gamradt. " In this case, my superior British friends, the bridegroom wanted to rest his stockinged feet on the cushion — probably, poor boy, he was wearing new boots. According to gracious lady Frau Edgeworth, his bride would take them off. The notion's preposterous. ..." THE HUMAN WOMAN 245 " He took them off himself," said Frau Dr. Ing. Gamradt. " Frau Edgeworth takes too seriously the sneers at our country in the Matin and the Rire." The mastery of Man is evident in German art ; in the theatre : most of all on the variety stage. Man worships Man. At Winter Palace, Apollo, and all the different Chats, noir, bleu, and vert, Man holds the stage. Men dancers, men acrobats, men jugglers, men bicycHsts ; seldom a well-turned ankle or a gracious face. It is tiresome. Painters, when not limning beef, paint hairy men, gnarled and natural- istic ; and as for statues, except at Kahlberg- Flittersdorf-Kleindorf-Hochdorf, a woman's has not been seen. The public wants bull-necked colossi, monstrous and mythic ; always naked as flame. The Man by his god-hke nature is decent. But when Franz von Bayros draws a rococo shepherdess dressed in zephyrs and a crook they try to send him to gaol. Yet some women here are worth making graven images of. The North-German is derided as Haus- frau — derided with justice, for domesticity is the cancer of Love. But the Hausfrau is the dominant, not universal, type. Money, travel, Paris fashions, sport have made another type. You may see it in Tauentzienstrasse at five ; and on the front page of Lustige Blatter. It is feeble in girlhood; neutral in early youth; high at a later age, best when 246 THE HUMAN GERMAN far advanced in the nine-and-twenties. It is well- dressed, full-bosomed, straight ; without grace or ideality ; with something trim, acid, and keck, which pleases men who are tired of domestic adora- tion ; and think that food without sugar would be change after food without sauce. Till lately these women were unreasonably stout. That was the race-notion of beauty ; and the race- notion, say anthropologists, is an exaggeration of the race-type. Men loved fat women ; and began their love-letters, " My Thick One " (Meine Dicke !); and women knew it, and advertised themselves in the Frankfurter Zeitung as A sympathetic, healthy, rotund phenomenon, Eine sympatische, gesunde, rundliche Erscheinung ; and in the street foreigners were struck by the general stoutness, or would have been struck had not provident town-planners made the sidewalks wide. Decently fleshed Britons were pitied as consumptive ; they provoked remarks about Davos Platz, and our cousin Notarius Scheunemann, who saved his life by rubbing his chest with veal. News- papers brimmed over with luxuriant bust advertise- ments, promising fatness for a crown. The drawings of one advertisement were copied from England, with sense reversed. The slim, but sufficiently rounded lady who in England appeared as re- generated " After " here appeared as miserable THE HUMAN WOMAN 247 " Before " ; and the bulbous monstrosity which in England appeared as the terrible " Before " here came out as the regenerated " After." That stage has gone. With Europe's general thinning, and the orgy of undress, Woman here deliquesces into diaphanous tenuity ; and soon she will resemble German beef, which never bears on its brink the smallest ridge of fat. As usual — for human Germany, like human England, is nervous — the new orgy of thinness caused a fright. Herr Grosser printed the pamphlet Is Our Physique Worse ? to show that town-bred females are two inches less round the chest than they were in '85. " Big women," he says, " mean big Empires. The ancient Germanic mothers had vast hips and capacious busts ; the older drawings and statues of Germania show the type. Where to-day are the Germanias ? Once Europe used to laugh at our figures and fear our battahons ; now our figures, dwindled to British unsubstantiality, are treated with respect ; but are our battalions ? " Herr Dr. Ing. Gamradt has numerous reasons for this cult of thinness. The directoire dress, Herr Pachter's lectures on art, the charm of the Crown Princess' thinness, the woe of Prince Eitel Fried- rich's fatness. When he had mentioned ten recondite origins, he withdrew them all and gave an obvious one. 248 THE HUMAN GERMAN "It's the clearness of food," said Herr Gamradt. "It's the dearness of cloth/' said I. " If food grows dearer," said Gamradt, " they'll go without flesh." " If cloth grows dearer," said I, " they'll go without clothes." Herr Dr. Ing. Gamradt lately raised the question of the Backfisch as the most pressing of all in the woman's world. Backfisch is German for a maid of sixteen or so — in Enghsh " flapper " ; a dictionary says, " because half -grown fishes are used for baking." Another dictionary says, " because under- sized fish are returned to the sea over the Backbort, the sternsheets." The first etymology is better — nobody has ever thrown a Backfisch overboard. That is the cause of the trouble. A Saxon pastor, Herr Lie. Traugott AUwitz, complained that the Berlin Daisies, Idas, and Ellas are baked exces- sively. Having forsaken pastoral Saxony for world- city Berlin, he observed that the Tauentzienstrasse, W., is choked with long-haired, chaperonless maids from the prosperous quarter of " Zoo," who without concealment hunt for handsome sweethearts. In this hunt Backfisches seek the exotic. They abjure things German, drink five o'clock tea, and dress englisch, in golf jackets, picture hats, openwork stockings, and porpoise-hide hockey-boots. Every- thing remote allures. When the naked Somah- THE HUMAN WOMAN 249 men left Berlin after living six weeks appropriately in the Zoo they were seen off by two hundred maids who wept so noisily that the pohce intervened. And the Colonial Ofhce complains that schoolgirls are in impassioned correspondence with Herrero warriors, whose drawing-rooms are hung with signed portraits, and with letters to " my adorable savage/' " my bronze god/' " my sun-kissed Hermes in Afric's soulful waste/' Herr Gamradt says that this is innocent fun, or at worst thoughtless emotion, the fruit of the Berlin maid's habit of enthusiasm. " All BerUn girls under twenty," he says, " are enthusiasts. Their language has only five words — 'adore,' 'ecstatic,' 'ravishing,' ' soulful,' ' beatific' They are always crazy about something : about music, French novels, French bulldogs, Pavlova, collections of coins, of stamps, or of sweethearts. They have a more poetical and visionary relation to the world than your sport- ridden British maids ; they are more intense and more superficial ; they think ten years ahead — perhaps they act ten years behind." And he said that from their precocity, tragi-comic enthusiasm, and aesthetic velleities spring situations incon- ceivable in tedious England ; and told us the tale of the sisters Lieschen and Lydia, which is hardly excelled for woe. Lieschen and Lydia, treasures of Frau Widow 250 THE HUMAN GERMAN Siisswein-Griinewald, were flappers and gushers ! The two go together, and so did Lieschen and Lydia. They read together, played together, fought together, slept together, gushed together. Lately the loving sisters loved together — ^that was the source of Griinewald's black tragedy, the Blossom Beauty Death. A Beauty Death is suicide with bizarre, romantic scenario ; motived with enigmatical words ; com- mitted gracefully without disturbance or blood. A pleasant form is Blossom Beauty Death. The sick-of-the-world-one sinks languidly on a couch of narcotic blooms, sniffs the overwhelming fragrance, and slides into the unreturning. . . . Lieschen and Lydia had read Freiligrath's The Vengeance of the Flowers ; and, of course, assiduously studied Herr Bismarck-Reisetaschen's To Die in Beauty, which tells how lovelorn Kathie buried her head in jasmine, and . . . But it is notorious that white flowers . . . This Beauty Euthanasia sounds attractive to grass- green youth ; and treasure Lieschen was seventeen last birthday, while treasure Lydia was just fifteen and a quarter. . . . The impulse was Herr Pierre Lagrave of Troyes. Herr Lagrave daily visited the Griinewald Villa, and taught the treasures to speak French and Eng- lish with refined Parisian accent. He had black moustachios, black eyes, and a black wife (at THE HUMAN WOMAN 251 Mauritius), whom he'd pensioned off with twenty marks a week. Under the spell of Herr Pierre's black moustachios and eyes (but not of his black wife — they thought him single) Lieschen and Lydia loved. Lieschen and Lydia quarrelled. When sisters fall out ... In vain they drew lots for Herr Pierre with vernal daisies. One April morning they repaired to the Post Office. At the counter, un- expected, stood Herr Pierre, strangling the German tongue. *' I would have me," he explained, " sent twenty marks post office order to Frau Therese Lagrave. ..." The treasures heard. " Devoted son ! " gushed Lieschen and Lydia. " Devoted husband," corrected Herr Lagrave. " Ma pauvre mere est au ciel ! Mais ma femme ..." Lieschen and Lydia felt they must die. The bitterness . . . the humiliation ... " I at least will not survive," said Lieschen. " Nor I," said Lydia ; " but how can we do it ? " Then Lieschen's and Lydia's clear blue eyes fell on the tome. To Die in Beauty, by Herr Bismarck-Reisetaschen. ** The Beauty Death . . . the Blossom Beauty Death ! " rose simultaneously in both young minds. At tingling midnight (Frau Widow Siisswein fast asleep since ten) might be seen the nightgowned Lieschen and Lydia flitting through the chilly garden with armfuls of fragrant flowers. All of 252 THE HUMAN GERMAN them white . . . those flowers of magic breath that slay. . . . White roses, white pansies, white petu- nias, white pelargoniums, almost the whole white jasmine tree. ... In Lieschen's white arms alone enough blooms to . . . Then they flew back to their chamber, yearning for restful death. Lieschen and Lydia decked the Death Bed. They would creep under the odoriferous blooms and die. ... A farewell letter : " Accuse no one ! Good-bye ! We die in Beauty "... the letter cast on the landing near Lieschen's fairy shoe . . . a locked door ... a last sisterly embrace ; and down they lay, themselves two virgin hhes, in the flowers, assured that hateful day would never dawn. " In Beauty ! " they murmured, " To Death ! " At three next morning Frau Widow Siisswein woke to thrilling screams. She rose — rushed to the treasures' chamber — pushed the door. The door was locked. . . . Crescendo screams re-echoed. . . . Fainting Frau Widow Siisswein tore open the fatal letter. ..." Accuse no one. . . . We die in Beauty ! " . . . Visions of her heart 's-blood trea- sures fainting from opened veins . . . desperation ... a wild rush at the door ... a broken lock. . . . Never in Grtinewald's story did sight so dreadful strike a mother's eye. A yard from the door, having shed her last garment, looking like a young Walpurgis witch, THE HUMAN WOMAN 253 hopped and squirmed adorable Lieschen. And snow- skinned Lydia, equally naked and beautiful, hopped and wriggled on a chair. The sisters screamed simultaneously : '* Mother ! " " What is it, treasures ? " panted Frau Widow Siisswein. *' Are you mad . . . is it possible . . . ? '* " A horrid earwig is creeping over me ! " screamed Lieschen. " There's a spider in the jasmine," screamed Lydia. '* He's bitten me on the knee ! " CHAPTER XVII THE HUMAN ARTIST Th' adorning thee with so much art, Is but a barbarous skill {Cowle)'). A PLEASING symptom of progress in human Germans is their new love for the old. Not merely for ancientness of years, which brings imperial decorations ; but for old and for ancient art. This passion is new. A generation back Germans rejected these with scorn. They lived in brand-new villa-country-houses. They hked new-laid tables, chocolate nigger statues on bright pedestals, and clean alabaster widows' heads with perforated lace mob-caps. Faced with a Titian, a Trecento shrine, or a Georgian warming pan, they smiled with virtuosity ; but said, in the tone of a pretty girl wooed by a Croesus of sixty, '' It's old." To-day as fruit of wealth and forty volumes by Mommsen, all men turn to the immemorial past. And here, as ever, is surpassed that feckless anti- quary der Brite. While the uncultured Briton pur- chases specious frauds which deceive all except 254 THE HUMAN ARTIST 255 experts (and his wife), the Charlottenburg amateur chases ancient things which are unimpeachably new. He buys his antiques neat as tools of precision yield ; closes with beeswax wormholes made with buckshot ; and effaces the last mediaeval dilapi- dation with the colour schwarz antique. Tastes indeed change. Only five years ago things domestic were art nouveau, or echt (genuinely) modern, wobbly and bloodless, tricked out with strings of green beads. The note was new newness. Now the note is new oldness. ** Under English influence," say the newspapers, workshops vomit bulging Renaissance cabinets, etiolated Biedermeier chairs with blackleaded angles, and sticky Gothic cupboards which even the temerarious housefly keeps at arm's-length. The ancient motive and flawless finish give joy. Joy is given by new-old metalwork of stamped wrought-iron, ancient in design. You see it everywhere. Herr Gamradt's dining-room chandelier, swinging on grisly chains, seems a Nurnberg-castle torture engine, rusted with martyr's blood. It was the World-City which first divined what clever Aloys Goeben calls " the propriety of chrono- logical contrasts." It puts yawning gargoyles on sausage shops ; and on brand-new stucco fronts of drapers' emporiums it puts artificially eroded, smallpox-pitted gods. One triumph of shop archi- 256 THE HUMAN GERMAN lecture is so achieved. In this handsome, dignified, ecclesiastical edifice — all mass, brass, and glass — the builder, some say with Imperial counsel, found a remedial flaw. The fagade was bare. And the World-City — except at Family bath — hates bareness. So about the front were set deeply pitted statues with battered jaws. Herr Gamradt boasts that the zeal for realism went to extremes. The statues were graven with Athenian noses ; and then re- stored to antiquity by bombardment with iron spikes. There is a universal provider down Witten- bergplatz way whose antique lamp-reflectors of bronze have the patina of genuine age. Lest laymen think the patina dirt, it is made out of green porcelain and affixed in slabs. Some artists seek imagery in ages farther still. Down west is a house which smells of eternity. From its undistinguished stucco walls stick isolated stucco stones, stamped with stucco fossils. There are fossil lizards, fossil ferns, fossil ganoid fish, and fossil pterodactyls. The craze for ancientness blends well with German Anglomania, but seeks material, too, in brave King Friederich Wilhelm the Third's reign. There are shops full of Chippendale chairs and brand-new Sheraton ; and there are exhibitions of English furniture, all genuinely old, or old-new. Friederich Wilhelm crops up in the Biedermeier cult. Bieder- meier was a funny man, the creation of the poet THE HUMAN ARTIST 25T Eichrodt ; and Germans say " Biedermeier " where we say " Early Victorian." There are Biedermeier books, Biedermeier mild comedy, Biedermeier pic- tures in academies, and Biedermeier sofas and chairs. The cult, until overdone, pleasingly re- lieved the echt modern. The two things show Germany's weakness, says Herr Gamradt ; her weak resistance against wealth. Hungry Prussia, drained by wars of Napoleon, having scant material, and no money to pay artists for carving, embossing, inlaying, gilding, colouring, produced in cold Bieder- meier its one sufferable style. When beneficent poverty ceased, the hunger for splendour found everywhere food ; and the all-too-human fruits are the Kaiser's Cathedral, and Herr Wallot's Reichstag- house, and the Secessionist sideboard, set with glass medallions, in Herr Dr. Gamradt's house. Herr Gamradt plausibly argues that at least things are not demeaned. Nowhere is better followed the Grecian precept that art should sanctify hfe ; and nothing is left in flat, bare ugliness which an artist's touch could adorn. The basest things are intense, symbolical, significant. From the walls of flat-barracks seraphs in plaster blow apocalyptic trumps. From porches menace crossed flaming swords ; Bismarck's Wir Deutsche fiirchten Gott inspires you in the kitchen ; houses resemble churches ; churches (pubHc) houses ; and an ugly 17 258 THE HUMAN GERMAN dwelling down Wilmersdorf way is redeemed and beautified by an oval top window which glares like Hedwig's hall-door eye, from under a purple brow. There are staircases painted in the style of Bakst, with stained-glass windows in the style of Michel ; and outside there are skinny railings with contorted lotuses, or gilded scarabs, or yellow blobs. It is enough if the artist manages to keep clear of historical ornaments. And if he is strong, Strength is wor- shipped. Monuments affect Assyrian massivity ; they heap up (in artificial stone) vast men with gnarled legs and immemorial faces ; heap them up on masses of (artificial) masonry ; and praise them for their strength. Leipzig battlefield groans under such a heap. Against this high originality unin- ventive classicists-romanticists revolt ; they want nice fretwork churches like Notre-Dame, and honour- able Schinkel theatres held up by naked columns, holding up naked gods. The earnestness felt in this war of tendencies is proven by the circumstance that every project leads to deadly feuds. The day the artist makes pubhc his plans all other artists raise rows and write pamph- lets signed " A Lover of Truth." For years past artists have torn one another's hair over the monu- ment to Bismarck at Bingen ; and their pamphlets are written with skill ; and prove that some other artist is a knave or a fool, that he is one of the THE HUMAN ARTIST 259 Kaiser's lackeys, or a coarse tradesman soul. Just now the opera-house built by Frederick the Great is falling to bits ; and architects are tearing one another to bits over the way of its replacement. This time the trouble is the all-too-human Kaiser. The Kaiser in heart is a dour Tory. " Fear of change Perplexes monarchs " and the Kaiser's notion of opera-houses is other opera-houses. So the first competition was limited to things in the style of Schinkel. When the winner's design was printed war broke out. It is a war of politics. The modern, that is the Radical, free- thinking, want something echt modern. They do not care what, so long as it is ugly and the statues have oak-tree necks. The ancient — and Tory — school demand something classical and columned ; they don't care what it is so long as it is like some- thing else. As all German art wars, this was a war of World Views (Weltanschauungen) , an incurable oppo- sition between ways of thinking and attitudes towards life. Precisely the same opposition as lay be- hind the Dreyfus affair, the Nakedite-Anti-Nakedite quarrel, and the quarrel which, with fury fiercer still, severs the friends of Heine from his implacable foes. The Heine art war is kept up by the plan of Diisseldorf, where Heine was born, to raise him a statue. Heine has a monument at Montmartre, and 260 THE HUMAN GERMxiN another at Bronx Park, New York ; in Germany until 1913 he had none. Three times Diisseldorf tried to do for him what England would do for a mere poet laureate. It was foiled by the political animosity which invests all German art. When the monument plan is aired, it seems that every citizen is a fanatic Heinephile, who will pawn his boots for a statue, or a sulphurous Heinephobe, who will break the statue's nose. For Heine's merits as poet none care. The Heinephiles are content crudely to set him with Shakespeare ; and the Heinephobes to say he couldn't spell. Progressive, sceptical, literary men are Heinephiles ; and castes, royalists, bureaucrats, and obscurantists are Heinephobes. Hohenzollerns and anti-Semites are Heinephobes ; and they quote Treitschke's abuse, and Wagner's " lied himself into poetry." The feud flames. And as with Dreyfus, brothers fight, lovers fall out, and happy homes are dissolved, because no two men can agree that Heine was the greatest, or merely the basest, of men. Sometimes for years the Heine quarrel sleeps ; but the moment the dangerous name comes up every man wants to fly at his neighbour's throat. This has foiled all monument plans. The novelist Heyse started a movement to realise Heine's : ** A monument will be built to me at Diisseldorf." The Heinephobes, under the anti-Semite Stocker, THE HUMAN ARTIST 261 made trouble ; the plan dropped. Next, the Empress Elizabeth helped ; and Hertel designed a statue and a Lorelei fountain. The bureaucrats vetoed the statue — they feared that looking at it might turn useful burghers into Schabelewopskis. The plan to build the fountain was stopped by clamour. The fountain ended in Bronx Park. Elizabeth set up in the Achilleion Hasselreis' statue ; and the Kaiser cast it out. Hamburg wanted to give a site for the exile ; but the Heinephobes raged ; and the statue lurks in a Hamburg cafe, and is spat on by smokers of cigars. When Mayence Radicals planned a monument, the Heinephobe Tories turned up as of old. Stutt- gart also had a plan. Loyal students said they would tear a statue down ; and respectable citizens threatened to emigrate. Hauptmann, Paul Heyse, Humperdinck, and Hugo von Hoffmansthal six years ago revived the notion. It was killed. And now incautious Diisseldorf is again at the old plan with the old results ; lawsuits are threatened ; and words like " traitor," " court reptile," " Jew suck- Ung," and " boor insensible to truth and beauty," hurtle across the Rhine. The World-City war between Secession and Academy is an analogue of the war between Nakedites and anti-Nakedites, Assyrians and Schinkelites, Heinephiles and Heinephobes. It 262 THE HUMAN GERMAN is a war not of art but of Weltanschauung. The Academy is Berlin's Burlington House ; the Seces- sion (we have no Secession) is a society founded fourteen years back by Leistikow, Liebermann, and Slevogt. The Grand Berlin dwells in a palace at Lehrter Station ; the Secession dwells in a house at Kurfiirstendamm. The Grand Berhn glows with Privy Councillors and Professors ; the Secession blushes with mere undecorated Herren. The Kaiser loves the Grand Berlin painters, and gives orders for their pictures ; the Kaiser hates the Secession painters, and won't give orders even for their breasts. The Grand Berlin is officially unimpeachable ; the Secession is radically illegitimate. The Grand Berlin is correct, imperturbable, superior ; the Secession is tempestuous, fanatical, shameless. Men who think like the Secession ; men who wash like the Grand Berlin. The Grand Berlin has Herr Professor Friedrich Kallmorgen, Herr Professor Hermann Hosaeus, and Herr Professor Constantine Starck ; the Secession has Herr Louis Corinth, Herr Hans Baluschek, Herr Max Slevogt. The Grand BerUn has pictures of Venice by Moonlight, The Old, Old Story, and Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm ; the Secession has Girl Eradicating Blackheads, and Heidelberg Abattoir. Naturally the relations of two such polar in- stitutions fill the mind and keep at work the printers. THE HUMAN ARTIST 263 All Tories back the respectable Grand Berlin, and all Radicals back the disreputable Secession. And both show themselves worthy. Both have a proper respect for self and for art ; and both are properly- careful to exact respect. The German artist is sensitive. When, sometimes, inevitable misunder- standings arise, you see this in the dignity of their letters, in the jealousy they show for the painting art, in a quixotic passion to exalt one's cause ; yet always you will find fundamental oppositions veiled in graceful irony ; and disturbed relations decently circumscribed by the accepted forms of good official society. It makes pleasant reading. You take up your morning newspaper, expecting some dull pages on Herr Murderer Koppke's decapitation, and Herr Theatre-Founder Mirsch's bankruptcy ; and you find to your joy not a word about Herr Theatre-Director Mirsch ; while Herr Koppke's decapitation tale is as brief as Herr Koppke's neck. Your newspapers instead are filled with an acid correspondence between the heads of the rival art institutions, revolving round the fact that the head of one institution incorrectly spelt the name of the head of another in a card of invitation. And three days later you read that the head of one institution has started the prosecution for " offence " against the head of the other, on the ground that ** intentionally misspelUng a name with malicious 264 THE HUMAN GERMAN desire to cause suffering comes within Paragraph 197b of the R.S.G.B." The passion for Enghsh things and for art contro- versy which burns in German breasts is not confined to the decorative arts. Enghsh words are supreme ; and Englaenderei the prevaihng passion and vice. Of all the factors which make for social culture, pleasantest, most creditable to Germans is this wide receptiveness for things from abroad. Cosmo- poUtan Berlin twinkles with " West-End Clubs," " Star-Programmes," " Grill-Rooms," " Real English Trousers-Cuts," and " Cravats as Worn by King George." Its language grows English. A century back German had only a dozen English words ; thirty years back lexicographers counted 150 ; now there are 700 ; and hundreds of German words copied from English models, as " Dogge," " Ner- venschoc," " Punsch," " Schcck," " Buchmacher," " Schrittmaker " (for pace-maker), and " Wolken- kratzer " (for skyscraper). Herr Sudermann even writes of " Struggle-for-hfetum." The passion for Enghsh words goes with a passion for Enghsh things which indicates a more detached attitude towards issues of the intellect than is in intemperate England. Germans achieve what Enghshmen fail in ; they keep their pohtics apart from their higher mental life ; and while abating no jot of resentment at foreign insult or oppression, THE HUMAN ARTIST 265 continue wisely to import and enjoy the flowers of foreign culture. When Britons quarrel with any state, each Briton not only hates that state, but he hates also that land ; and if, say, on a music-hall stage in a dance of All the Nations, that land's flag impertinently unfurls, he greets the flag with boos, if not with boots. Here men stand higher. Their statesmen may snort diplomatic fire against Sir Grey ; their journals may spit vitrol at Sir Churchill, or Lord Cartwright Fairfax, Bart. ; Pan-Germans may scourge British sin in what Americans call " A 10,000 Congress." But the individual temper keeps serene ; when the Union Jack unfolds to Winter-Palace breezes no man casts a boo or a boot ; and the shop windows continue to beam with " Coronation Collars," " Real English Trousers- Cuts," and ''Cravats as Worn by King George." You hear stories of this. In 191 2 when — as fruit of the Agadir feud — feeling against England ran high, Herr Referendar Specht violated his country's law rather than abate his English passions. It happened in April. It is a custom of serious newspapers on April the First to print solemn joke-articles and pictures which deceive such readers as have for- gotten the date. The Vossische Zeitung published on All Fools' Day an essay on Men's Spring Fashions; and affirmed that King George V wears in his buttonhole a very large geranium bloom. Herr 266 THE HUMAN GERMAN Specht (author of the brochure Krieg mit England : Warum Nicht ? — Why Not Fight England at Once ?) read the Vossische Zeitung ; and he resolved to transplant one more flower of England's social achievement. So he bought a hothouse geranium, and clipped the stoutest bloom. Unluckily geranium blooms are brief as they are bright ; and by the time Herr Specht had crossed the Kraussstrasse roadway, the scarlet petals had fled. Herr Specht cast away the stalk ; returned ; and took another bloom. The event recurred. He cast the stalk away. At this moment along came Herr Policeman (ex-corporal) Dobbelein ; and with his mind full of Par. 1197 (" Against Depositing Rubbish ") of the Municipal Regulations, he stalked up to the stalks. In such circumstances a fine is just and reasonable. Since then Herr Specht has worn, as similar in anatomy and less transitory in Hfe, a pink hydrangea bloom ; and has published seven editions of his Why Not Fight Englatid at Once ? A new hotel in Kurf iirstendamm produced evidence of Anglomania more instructive still. Though christened thus like a swearing catenary, Kurfiirs- tendamm is Berlin's best boulevard. It is rich ; it is smartisch. It shelters retired Field-Marshals ; The Legation of China, and people who had appendi- citis in the same year as Edward VII. Its women are opulent, and it is no more true that they resemble THE HUMAN ARTIST 267 sacks than that their robes resemble sacking. It has a rink, the Secession Gallery, an englisches cafe, and sufficient vice to keep its memory clean. It needed nothing but a first-class hotel. Therefore it was to have a vast apartment hotel, which would outshine Manhattan's Plaza. Archi- tecturally not so high ; but with prices of such sky- scraper exaltation that you would need an express lift to get to the top ; and overwhelming Smartheit, It would have five hundred rooms, arranged in suites so that you could live in an hotel or live in a flat. There would be cool-air pipes, vacuum-cleaners, strong-rooms, ice-chests, electric curling-tongs and sunburners, gymnasiums, roof-gardens, flashlight barbers, automatic boot-cleaners, radium baths, concert and ball-rooms ; brilliant cafes, and brightly painted bars and barmaids. Though costly, things would be simple, refined, smartisch in the more honourable meaning of Dr. Gamradt's word. But above all, the apartment-hotel was to have a name which would proclaim it universally as a shrine of Smartheit. The choice caused trouble. The name, it was agreed, must sound dignified, literary, cos- mopolitan in appeal, alluring to the refined opulent ; politely repellent to the vulgar ; calculated to snare into residence mediatised princes from Austria's Embassy ; and rich, dyspeptic New Yorkers who come to see the Kaiser in Potsdam ; and their 268 THE HUMAN GERMAN insides in Rontgen rays. It must beckon England's indifferent aristocracy to visit Berlin. The directors cogitated, speculated, argued, pored over reference books, tore their hair, quarrelled, and abandoned the problem. Then — perhaps accidentally, perhaps inspired by someone versed in Mayfair termino- logical finesse, but in any case with overjoyed Eurekas ! — they produced what M. Flaubert called the inevitable word. They found something at once seductive, exclusive, recondite, foreign, and smartisch. They resolved to call their hotel The Boarding House. Rejoiced that they had found a name to focus the gaze of social Europe and America, the clever schemers drugged the Press with puffs. Leading journals printed impressive descriptions ; and none omitted a kindly word for " The Boarding House," a name, they rightly said, which " places a final seal on our patent of maturity as world-city." Not, indeed, all had praise. Some Nationalist journals sneered at the craze for foreign languages ; and sound, middle-class organs had apprehensions as to this flood of alien luxury, and asked why pretentious The Boarding House was not called plainly The Hotel. But these thin squeaks were unheard. The nation felt that after forty years of work it could afford a bit of show ; and London, said experts on English culture, has scores of boarding-houses ; why shouldn't we have one ? THE HUMAN ARTIST 269 But this undertaking, though unexceptionally managed, did not pay its way. It drew indeed a handful of newly-rich, who gained distinction by writing their letters on Boarding House paper, and printing " The Boarding House, W. " on their cards. But the wealthy mass stayed away. The more cautious were frightened off by the high implifications of ** The Boarding House," they feared charges as lofty as the name ; Austria's mediatised princes continued to dig in Roonstrasse rooms, and British aristocrats — who notoriously hate ostentation — went to mere hotels. For these reasons — and probably because it was a World-City enterprise — The Boarding House went bankrupt ; and it emerged ignominiously after months of reorganisation, as the middle-class " Cumberland Hotel." Of necessity this xenomania has correctives ; there is a strong Nationalist Press which fights it ; and grave organisations, petitioners, and draughts- men of penal laws, are pledged to defend and restore the purity of the once incorrupted tongue. Most effective is the German Language League, which has thirty thousand members, all doctors of philology with average command of 9.42 languages, and there- fore due respect for their own. The League holds meetings, and publishes books, and compiles lists of translations into good High Dutch of alien borrow- 270 THE HUMAN GERMAN ings. It recommends Foreign- Word Treasuries which fine you a halfpenny every time you use a translat- able foreign word ; it gives prizes to men who devise German equivalents ; it admonishes the Press ; it vows to die by hunger-strike rather than eat in restaurants which offer instead of honest German Speisekarten finnicking French mentis. It ger- manises sport. The word " sport," it sighs, must stay ; but other English sport words must go. Lawn-tennis is an intrusive scoundrel ; but nobody has a better equivalent than netballplay {Netz- ballspiel) ; and there are several netballplays. For eleven years the League has fought to get rid of other Enghsh tennis words ; and now the useful ambiguities of deuce and love are banned the German tongue. The writer Marie von Bunsen has fumigated golf by publishing a list of German golf words. Racing has lost its graceless English terminology ; and you talk of a totes Rennen (a deadly dull run) instead of a " dead heat." " Concours hippique," " a Gallicism," says the League, " which caused much offence," has given way to " prize-ride " (Preisreiten). " Sweater " is supplanted by " sport- jerkin " (Sportwams), which purists impeach as a hybrid ; but an Anglo-German marriage, says the League, is better than a withered British virgin. Science, since Germans prevail there, must be clothed in German. For ugly, incomprehensible THE HUMAN ARTIST 271 Greco-Latinisms are found honest compounds of Germanic etymology which the plainest peasant can understand. For instance, for Inorganiker (which means " inorganic chemist ") is proposed "Notcarboncombinationsseparateanduniteartist " (in the original Nichtkohlenstoffverhwdung-Scheide-wnd- Fiige-Kiinstler)^ while the puzzling kaliumferri- cyanide is revealed with a flash by Zwolffachver- hlaugastessechskaliumdoppeleisen. The Kaiser helps in this good cause. His Minister conseil is now Kronat, his Produkte, Industrie, and Kolonien now all have German names ; and he was so pleased when he turned his Zivil-liste into Hofhaushaltung that he asked the Diet to raise it by £175,000. CHAPTER XVIII THE HUMAN KAISER Neuer Prince was more wholly given to his affaires, nor in them more of himselfe {Bacon). THE wise Emperor had his Jubilee in 1912 ; and experts and Dr. Gamradt measured him and his reign. They were pleased with his size, but not with the size of his reign. They found him the bigger. His reign brought no European extensions ; and Germans remember Bismarck's saying to King Wilhelm of Prussia that all Hohenzollerns before him had seized someone else's land. The reign has brought no colonies worth plundering ; and it has brought Socialists and New Art ; and despite general economic prosperity, of late bear markets and barer women. The reign is not liked. But the Emperor is. When Herr Gamradt surveys our Europe's sad sovereigns, he says it is good to have a human Kaiser. His Kaiser is man and human. These things, says Gamradt, are rare ; dull Franz Josef is man and not human ; puny Victor Emmanuel is 272 THE HUMAN KAISER 273 human and not man ; and so on. It is a boon to have a sovereign who is brave, active, contentious, aspiring, universal. Wilhelm the Second, says Gamradt, is meritorious for one high reason. He is a foil to Germanism. Germany's plague is dull, full men. Wilhelm the Second is neither dull nor full ; he is bright and shallowly all-knowing. Germany is plagued with experts and specialists, who have studied it all their lives ; but Wilhelm the Second has not studied it at all, and his fullness of inspired error spurs dull men to motion. Germans are deeply ignorant in their knowledge ; but Wilhelm the Second is catholically comprehensively, cecumenically learned in his ignorance. Germany's experts growl that imperturbable Wilhelm the Second ignorantly tramps on their land. Wilhelm the Second does well. A land where dullards undisturbed wax fat in know- ledge is foredoomed by fate. Wilhelm the Second is liked by plain-thinking men, men who rightly treasure the State of which he is symbol as bravest efflorescence of man's poor activities. He is liked by farmers, by surveyors, by sound country shopkeepers, and by men who lost their legs while saving hens from motor-cars. These throng to Berlin, watch, cheer, and are pleased. Wilhelm the Second is less liked by newspaper proprietors, notaries, and men who have made piles i8 274 THE HUMAN GERMAN in potash. He is disliked by disloyal Socialists and by equally disloyal Junkers, whose loyalty means : Und der Konig absolut, Wenn er unsern Willen tut. by men, that is, who want no Kaiser, and who want an elastic, plastic Kaiser. He is not a rich man's Kaiser. Middle, reasonable men Uke him because he is no monomaniac and no visionary ; because he is no snob ; because he has neither the Olympian remoteness of the new-made rich Tory, nor the Polar unapproachability of the sea-green incorruptible Socialist who thinks he is as good as any man. The Kaiser is the people's Kaiser ; and because Germans are people — Teutsche the people, as Carlyle says — they like the Kaiser. When you come across a man who likes the Kaiser he asks you to lunch ; and when you come across a man who dislikes the Kaiser he is tiresome and soulless — even if he knows all about the orthoptera. The Kaiser's unpopularity is newspaper un- popularity ; and it is due in great measure to the Kaiser's position, and in small measure to himself. The plague of being half an autocrat is that you are treated as only half a man. People write things about you ; and draw pictures of you without dignity, without kingship, without clothes. You are held responsible for what you say and what THE HUMAN KAISER 275 you do not say, for bad laws, army duels, assaults by infantry corporals, lumbago, wet weather, poor crops, bad hops, and cold chops. Being half an autocrat you would cure these ills were you half a man. So you get abused and satirised ; lese-majeste laws fail ; and you look painfully across the sea to your cousin, who being no autocrat is let be man, whom artists draw heroically as Saint George killing some dragon, or — what needs a rarer bravery — drinking tea in Wales. Obloquy, in the Press, is the price of autocracy. The monarch's individuality cannot save him. Merely because he is Kaiser, the Kaiser must work everywhere, meddle everywhere, help every- where, hinder everywhere ; and thereby bring himself into polemical relations with subjects, which preclude silence. Therefore Germans, though drilled and whacked into meekness as no Briton might be, write things of their monarch which no Briton would of his. If newspapers printed on King George what is daily printed on the Kaiser, mobs of citizens would reduce their editors to pie. Often Dr. Ing. Gamradt shows me angrily books and pamphlets on the Kaiser which in Britain would make an Anarchist printer faint. He bought a pamphlet called The Kaiser and the Woman- Question, which says that " Our sovereign's views are not views of an English gaoler, but views of a 276 THE HUMAN GERMAN mediaeval executioner." Some books are ruder. There is a book by Herr Karl Scheidt, which begins every one of twenty mannerless chapters with " Mister Kaiser ! " The able Dr. Ilgenstein issues The Mirror of Prussia, which says, " If Wilhelm the Second had reigned in the Middle Ages he would have let loose religious war on his own country . . . he would have ordered Ibsen's writings to be burnt ; and made Kalthoff pay for his fidelity at the stake." That is not possible in free countries ; but it appears in Germany, precisely because Germany is not free. It is not the Kaiser's fault that it appears. Years ago he tried to stop it by ordering that lese- majeste prosecutions cease. That was the spirit of incomparable Frederick, who said : " I let my subjects say what they like ; and they let me do what I like." Bureaucrats have less sense. They forbade Prussian State railway bookstalls to sell Simplicis- simus. That is not done so much because Sifnplicis- simus rends the Kaiser ; but because it smiles at some extra-human institutions which to native bureaucrats are more sacred than he. The Kaiser's prime virtues are his humanity and vanity. He is the Kaiser of the camera and the kinematograph ; the only two things on earth that show the real, that is, the projected subjective man, or the man as he is because he wants to look so. The World-City every week sees a flickering, THE HUMAN KAISER 277 kinematograph Kaiser who has far more human substance than the sohd, physical Kaiser. The physical, unreal Kaiser's virtues are hidden. The physical, unreal Kaiser tears daily down the Linden in a yellow motor-car, heralded by apocalyptic trumping, which to other motorists is forbidden. He looks cross, Kaiserly, unhuman, unreal. The Kaiser, made known to Germans by Kino-culture, is a substantial human reality ; and he lays siege successfully to every susceptible heart. The kinematograph Kaiser has that one all- human, ever-real passion, the passion for pose. The moment the kinematograph lens opens its eye the Kaiser looks pleasant ; and an expansive, self-conscious kindliness shrouds him. This kindli- ness wins you. And that is why when he flickers across the sheet Socialists forget that he wants to shoot them. Suffragists that he wants to lock them in the kitchen ; and patriot Letitia that he wants to knock down England. The kinematograph Kaiser is the Kaiser taking a rest on lands of Prince Esterhazy, somewhere near Hungary's bloody field of Mohacs. The Kaiser, being a Berliner, wears Tyrol breeches ; a cock's feather sticks coquettishly in his hat ; and he gracefully presents presents to Esterhazy 's peasant maids, who all seem to come from the Opera House at Pesth. At least their garments. The Kaiser does 278 THE HUMAN GERMAN this well, and with praiseworthy self-consciousness. With ridiculous kinematograph quickness, he hands out the gifts, and every second he looks furtively aside to make sure that the kino is at work. You can see that he is sharply interested in the film succeeding. Then comes a pleasant, unmistakably un-re- hearsed manifestation of the Kaiser's humanity. His careless elbow sweeps a photograph frame on the ground. A thick Esterhazy peasant maid with a head-dress like a flowering magnolia, flies to pick it up. The chivalrous Kaiser forestalls her. He looks first to see if the kinematograph is working ; and, reassured, he picks up the frame himself, and hands it to the magnoHa girl with a Pesth-opera bow. The grateful maid flies to kiss his hand. The Kaiser (looks again at the kinematograph) and kisses her raw hand instead. Then he erects his spine, slaps his right thigh in boy-hero's style ; and nods towards the kinematograph man with an imperative, " Develop that carefully. The subject's good." The Kino-Kaiser's human ardour to be gracious and kindly is quite as plain in his northern kine- matograph tour. There is the same insuppressible humanity. The Kino-Kaiser walks the Hohcn- zoUerns deck arm-in-arm with a junior lieutenant ; he wears an arch schoolboy's grin ; and he sports THE HUMAN KAISER 279 a spy-glass. His Majesty's Consul at Bergen is announced. A venerable gentleman in a hyper- borean silk hat. The Kaiser shakes the consul's hand, pins a medal on his coat, slaps him on the back, and roars with laughter. Then he looks aside at the kinematograph, and slaps his right thigh. And next you see the kinematograph Kaiser kissing a Biirgermeister's straw-haired maid down Marburg way ; or you see him slaying a fierce kinematograph boar. The boar is nearly dead. Voracious kinodogs rend its shaggy flanks ; and three grand-opera huntsmen seize its tail and legs to keep it from kinematogoring the Kaiser. The Kaiser draws a hunting-knife, long as a sword, and plunges it boldly into the boar's heart. Letitia here starts insular comments on heartless Conti- nental sport. She has hardly finished when the Kaiser lifts his head, slaps his thigh, looks with a careful smile towards the kinematographer, and wins back her heart. Letitia corrects her first wrong impression that this is all kinematograph pose. A part of it is pose. There is no denying that the Kaiser in every act feels the kinematograph's eye, and that it is for the kinematograph mainly he slaps his thigh, stands all-too-humanly erect, and gives his moustachios that star-y-pointing twist. But when you see the kinematograph Kaiser's merry, sunburnt face, and 280 THE HUMAN GERMAN catch his boy-hero's glance, you are convinced that ^here there is something deeper far than pose. The Kaiser is enjoying hfe, enjoying the sun, enjoying the magnoha head-dress and the hyperborean hat ; he is human, mortal, fallible, vain, alive. He has a passion that people shall see him as he likes to be seen ; as he thinks people will credit he feels he really is. And you feel sure that if the kinemato- graph man had not come (being burned as a sorcerer by Magyar gipsies), the Kaiser — though a deal disappointed — would have played none the less his graceful part, presented the presents, smiled the boy-hero's smile, and chivalrously kissed the fist of the thick magnolia girl. A Kaiser like this is rightly sought by foreigners ; and Americans more than any fall beneath the spell. When sultry August sends natives off to Heringsdorf , Americans raid Berlin. They sport stars-and- stripy favours, stare from " rubber-neck " coaches, and want to meet Kaiser Wilhelm. Jest to shake his hand. When dry Ambassadors swear that is impossible, surprise knows no bounds. They would like to see Mr. Wilson refusing to give his fist. It would cost Mr. Wilson in 1916 the vote of Emporium, Pa. But Americans are indomitable ; and Porter U. Van Cuylers, bone-manure manufacturer of Newark, N.J., is American to the bone. This THE HUMAN KAISER 281 stout, elderly, artistic, good-looking, clean-shaven gentleman — eager above all things to meet Kaiser Wilhelm — arrived in BerHn in August, 1913, and brought along his agreeable wife, who resembled him in being stout, elderly, artistic, good-looking, and clean-shaven. When the Porter U. Van Cuylers learned that Kaiser Wilhelm was absent, they said they would return after motoring around Thuringia. Told it was impossible to see Kaiser Wilhelm even then, as the maximum twenty presentations were already claimed, they were astonished. " With- out special credentials," said a pert Embassy under- ling, " Berlin is impossible ; but you might be re- ceived at the Court of Schwarzburg-Sondershausen." Porter U. Van Cuylers was angry ; and asked why his country sent abroad ambassadors, and paid them salaries which nearly covered their house- rents, if they could not force a meeting with Kaiser Wilhelm. But Porter U. is a resolute man, as is every man who can live in Newark, N.J. ; and with a Disraelian, " He will not see me now, but the day is nigh when he shall see me," he left Berlin. For six months he was lost. But when January came, the twenty Americans who did squeeze into Court were amazed to see Porter U. and Mrs. Porter in the throng ; and to see that Kaiser Wilhelm long engaged them in talk. The Van Cuylers (Porter U. was in semi-diplomatic uniform) shone 282 THE HUIVIAN GERMAN with gratified ambition, and generously beamed on a score of other Americans whom the Kaiser cut. When he arose next morning from courtly dreams seven touring compatriots, all candidates for Wilhelmian handshakes, waited in his sitting- room to ask how it was done. And Mrs. Porter U., ignoring her husband's monitory wink, told how all last autumn they had been sapping snub-proof approaches to Berlin Schloss. When he spoke of Schwarzburg-Sonders- hausen, the Embassy underhng had unwittingly given them a tip. Schwarzburg-Sondershausen, fourth-rate state as it is, boasts a sovereign ruler and a Court in theory equal to BerUn's. But Sondershausen, far less spoiled than purse-proud Berlin, regards Americans of wealth with proper awe. They need no introductions. The Hof-und- Kiiche-Zcitung published articles on Porter U. Van Cuylers ("as collectionaire rivalled only by the late Pierpont Morgan ") ; the pair lunched with the prince ; they lent twelve marks to a courtier ; they entertained with taste ; and later when they motored away to Karlsruhe in Baden, they carried letters of introduction ensuring a fit reception. Now Karlsruhe has not like Sondershausen a fourth- rate Court, but at least a third-rate one ; and it represented a whole stage up towards the Van Cuylers' apotheosis. The Grand Duke welcomed THE HUMAN KAISER 283 them ; he had heard, he said, of their deserved success at Sondershausen ; and he introduced them to his relatives. The Van Cuylers took the princes' suite {Die Fiirstenzimmer) of the best hotel ; and entertained for a month. When — after Porter U. had danced with the Grand Duchess at a brilliant ball — they announced they were leaving for Dresden, they were overwhelmed with letters to Saxon officials, recommending a " wealthy and cultured American couple, whose interest in mediaeval ecclesiastical art is equalled only by their knowledge and taste." And now behold Porter U. and his wife, who had they gone direct to Dresden would have been snubbed as they were at Berlin, dining with King Friedrich August, and taking Court-Marshal Count Spank in their motor-car to Schandau. Already, having left behind third-rate, not to mention fourth-rate courts, they are valued guests at a second-rate court ; and it needed only the consummating match to blaze magnificently forth at Imperial Berlin. And with Dresden Counts and Barons all scribbling introductions for " our brilliant acquaintance Herr Porter U. Van Schuyler " the match was as good as laid. Like Cortes, chased by the rebel Aztecs from ruinous Mexico, Porter U. Van Schuyler, foiled in his first attempt to conquer the World-City, returned to the scene of his humiliation an envied, unchallenge- able victor. 284 THE HUMAN GERMAN To Herr Dr. Ing. Gamradt, in that he brought me together with Herr Dr. Jur. Miihlstepf, I am in- debted for a native, and human, view of the Kaiser. I say human, because Dr. Miihlstepf is above all things human. To an Englishman his humanity seems unreasonable. In England Dr. Miihlstepf would be Mr. Hopingwell Smyth, Barrister-at-Law ; and he would have chambers, a club, parliamentary velleities, and, even if his immediate goal were guinea briefs, the impressive aloofness of the man who means to go far. The position of Herr Dr. Jur. Miihlstepf is ahead of Mr. Hopingwell Smyth's. He has all that a lawyer wants ; twenty thousand (marks) a year ; a sunlit flat furnished in cchteni Mahogani mit Intarsien, a wife and three vegetative children. Dr. Miihlstepf is further a cultivated man ; he can quote Shakespeare and Wordsworth, where- as Mr. Hopingwell Smyth has only snuffed (via Bayard Taylor) at Goethe ; and does not know the difference between Kleist the poet who shot himself at Griinewald and Kleist the general who shot the French at Kulm. Yet Dr. Jur. Miihlstepf, despite this superiority, is far plainer, more human than Mr. Hopingwell Smyth ; and at Boltuch's stem- table on Thursday, he will talk to you as freely as did London busmen before motors made them proud. Herr Dr. Miihlstepf is a loyal man ; and nothing THE HUMAN KAISER 285 is brighter than to see him hungry, devouring sausages and Sociahsts. His softest mouthful is Herr Dr. Med. Lauwein. Herr Lauwein is assistant- surgeon to Steghtz Sick-Insurance Bureau, which — being governed by a committee two-thirds Sociahst— requires its salaried servants to join the regenerating faith. So Dr. Lauwein since his appointment has worn a necktie of fire. Dr. Miihlstepf belongs, I believe, to the Radical but monarchical People's Party. Radicals and Socialists, between them, own Berlin — even the blue-veined Palace electoral division polls four hundred Tories against twenty thousand Rads and Reds. When yesterday evening Dr. Med. Lauwein arrived at Klumpke's with a tie of ebony, the stem-table opined that he had either forsworn his tenets or lost his job. It was undeceived. For when frivolous Dr. Gamradt began about " roseate afterglows which fade to inky night," Herr Dr. Lauwein flushed to the missing colour and said somewhat lamely : ** It's because someone I need not name's at Corfu. With me Socialism is a protest against Caesarism. When Caesar's away — writing Com- mentaries on pithoi and amphorae — Brutus can dress like a bourgeois. It's the autocrat I condemn, not the excavator. Just now the autocrat's having a needed rest-cure ; and Germany's having the rest she needed still worse. ..." 286 THE HUMAN GERMAN Dr. Jur. Miihlstepf put down his mug of Schul- theiss, and said provocatively : " I must challenge you over that ! The rest- cure which seems to you badly needed is the worst of all possible treatments for Germany's ills ; and the best of all cures is that Wilhelm the Second should steam the Hohenzollern back to Pola, and take a fast train home. Presence — ^this is not Portugal, mind you — is the essence of fruitful monarchism. You men grumble daily about Caesarism ; but what is your grievance ? Your grievance is that a ruler whose business is to talk does talk a bit. He talks, you grumble, about pohtics, about architecture, about the way to restore the Corfu torso, about Folk-Music, about the duty of Hussars to dance, about navigare necesse est, about evils brought by New Art, by * hunger candi- dates ' — by journalists, that is ... by ... by .. ." " By Social Democrats," put in Dr. Ing. Gamradt. " You growl that in his zeal to preach the Gospel of Everything he treads on all men's toes. Now, in my opinion, the indispensable element of German progress is that the Kaiser shall tread on toes ; that he shall flout, thwart, and enrage as many subjects as possible. Do you know why ? " " Because it drives people to our side," said Dr. Med. Lauwein. " Because only by making people uncomfortable THE HUMAN KAISER 287 can you stir them up. Because it is a sovereign's solemn duty to play the beneficent, regenerative, indispensable part of Devil. ..." '' You mean Devil's Advocate." *' I mean plain Devil. I mean it in a high, lau- datory sense — the sense of Goethe. The problem why Satan is allowed to pester mankind has puzzled theologians through the ages. From Origen to Schleiermacher ! The likeliest answer is found in the Prologue to Faust. Because His Sulphurity stirs supine mankind into fruitful husthng. Des Menschen Tdtigkeit — but let me translate it for our English friend : *' Man's slothful spirit tends to vacant dreaming ; He falls a prey to ease, and learns to shirk : Therefore he has been given the Devil as Comrade, To plague him to some useful kind of work. " That is the only plausible apologia for His Sulphurity. And that is the justification of His Germanity. It is he — the Kaiser — who by ceaseless pin-pricks and challenges raises us, millions of drowsy beer-drinkers (Otto, another small Schul- theiss !) into a fermenting brew of restlessness, thoughtfulness, speculation. It keeps us busy. If you'll forgive my doggerel verse-making, I'd put it in this way : 288 THE HUMAN GERMAN ** Full of success, wealth, strength, and beer ; and fuller Of pride, Hans would grow lazy as a Turk ; Were he not chivvied by a ruthless ruler, Who plagues him daily into fruitful work. " You think I'm joking, I see. I'm not. Germany lives because she is kicked and pricked into vitality. Other countries — I don't deny — want the same thing. We should perish without an imperial anti- dote to bureaucratic tutelage. The human State does too much for us. It helps everj'one, and helps everyone in the same way. It teaches us by standards ; drills us by standards ; polices us by standards ; keeps us by standards out of danger and temptation ; and ends by making us a basket of sixty-five million identical, uninteresting eggs. And the City apes the State. It kills what individu- ahty the State admits. There's nothing it doesn't do. It runs trams and trains, and Labour and Housing Exchanges, and Theatres and Concerts ; it gives Free Work to Workers ; and Free Food to Shirkers ; yes, and in my little suburb, Zehlendorf, I believe it runs a bookshop. Yes ; and a municipal potato store. What with all this State and all this City peddhng and meddling, nothing at all is left to the unit, the Man. Therefore life has grown shallow, unheroic, effete, ineffective, and dull. We are dehumanised. We have excised even the saving element of risk, the animating gamble with THE HUMAN KAISER 289 Fate. We are insured against every ill from Death to German measles. ..." " And English-Sickness — as we call rickets," put in Dr. Lauwein. Dr. Miihlstepf looked at him derisively, and continued : " In this crisis of culture intervenes our Emperor Wilhelm — intervenes to save us from entire moral dissolution by infusing into our blood the missing corpuscles of contentiousness, of polemics, of pro- vocation. Of course he makes us swear. But he makes us think — that's the gain. And the fruits are ripening — I see them, though thin fruits so far. He laughed at our Secessionist daubers — now they give no cause to laugh. He called our dishevelled journalists hunger-candidates — since then they've taken to the regenerative hair-brush ; his very Daily Telegraph blunder brought us a dozen Dread- noughts. ..." " He said he was Guardian of Islam," interrupted Dr. Med. Lauwein, " and his own friends seized Tripoh." " That's true. He's not infallible. A people with the Erfurt Programme can dispense with infallibility. We want an irritant and a stimulant. W^e Germans talk a great deal about World-Things — about World-Policy and World-Trade and the World-Spirit, and we have a whole literature imaging World-Pain — der Weltschmerz. Other 19 290 THE HUMAN GERMAN nations have these too. But there is one thing which we only have given to humanity — that is the World-Stimulant, das WeltreizmitteL Wilhelm the Second is the World-Stimulant. ..." Dr. Jur. Miihlstepf took breath and beer, raised his right hand, and said apostolically : " That is why I invoke our Kaiser from Corfu ! I do not think our blessed Germany wants a rest- cure ! She needs a motion-cure. ..." " An emotion-cure," snapped Herr Dr. Med. Lauwein. " Other nations claim to have World-Stimulants," said Dr. Ing. Gamradt. ** The English have one — though it's Scotch, or Irish, I fancy. What do you say if we have it for a change ? " A SELECTION OF BOOKS PUBLISHED BY METHUEN AND CO. LTD., LONDON 36 ESSEX STREET W.C. 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