Part 14

An astounding number of Germans know Sophocles, Aeschylus, and Shakespeare better than we do, but they know nothing, and care nothing, for the sizzling, crackling stream of purposeless incident, and sterile comment, that pours in upon the readers of American newspapers, and which has had its part in making us the largest consumers of nerve-quieting drugs in the world. All too many of the pens that supply our press are without education, without experience, without responsibility or restraint. What Mommsen writes of Cicero applies to them: "Cicero was a journalist in the worst sense of the term, over-rich in words as he himself confesses, and beyond all imagination poor in thought."

No one of these journals pretends to such power or such influence as certain great dailies in America and in England. They have not the means at their command to buy much cable or telegraphic news, and lacking a press tariff for telegrams, they are the more hampered. The German temperament, and the civil-service and political close-corporation methods, make it difficult for the journalist to go far, either socially or politically. The German has been trained in a severe school to seek knowledge, not to look for news, and he does not make the same demands, therefore, upon his newspaper.

German relations with the outside world are of an industrial and commercial kind, and until very lately the German has not been a traveller, and is not now an explorer, and their colonies are unimportant; consequently there is no very keen interest on the part of the bulk of the people in foreign affairs. Even Sir Edward Grey's answering speech on the Morocco question did not appear in full in Berlin until the following day, though Germany had roused itself to an unusual pitch of excitement and expectancy.

As the Germans are not yet political animals, so their newspapers reflect an artificial political enthusiasm. Society, too, is as little organized as politics. There are no great figures in their social world. A Beau Brummel, a d'Orsay, a Lady Palmerston, a Lady Londonderry, a Duke of Devonshire, a Gladstone, a Disraeli, a Rosebery, would be impossible in Germany, especially if they were in opposition to the party in power. When a chancellor or other minister is dismissed by the Kaiser, he simply disappears. He does not add to the weight of the opposition, but ceases to exist politically. This has two bad results: it does not strengthen the criticism of the administration, and it makes the office-holder very loath to leave office, and to surrender his power. An ex-cabinet officer in America or in England remains a valuable critic, but an ex-chancellor in Germany becomes a social recluse, a political Trappist. Even the leading political figures are after all merely shadowy servants of the Emperor. They represent neither themselves nor the people, and such subserviency kills independence and leaves us with mediocrities gesticulating in the dark, and making phrases in a vacuum.

There are, it is true, charming hostesses in Berlin, and ladies who gather in their drawing-rooms all that is most interesting in the intellectual and political life of the day; but they are almost without exception obedient to the traditional officialdom, leaning upon a favor that is at times erratic, and without the daring of independence which is the salt of all real personality.

There are, too, country-houses. One castle in Bavaria, how well I remember it, and the accomplished charm of its owner, who had made its grandeur cosey, a feat, indeed! But all this is detached from the real life of the nation, which is forever taking its cue from the court, leaving any independent or imposing social and political life benumbed and without vitality. There is no free and stalwart opposition, no centres of power; and much as one tires of the incessant and feverish strife political and social at home, one returns to it taking a long breath of the free air after this hot-house atmosphere, where the thermometer is regulated by the wishes of an autocrat.

The press necessarily reflects these conditions. The Social Democrats, divided into many small parties, and the Agrarians and Ultramontanes, divided as well, give the press no single point of leverage. These political parties wrangle among themselves over the dish of votes, but what is put into the dish comes from a master over whom they have no control. If they upset the dish they are turned out as they were in 1878, 1887, 1893, and 1907, and when they return they are better behaved.

The parties themselves are not real, since thousands of voters lean to the left merely to express their discontent; but they would desert the Social Democrats at once did they think there was a chance of real governing power for them. A small industrial was warned of the awful things that would happen did the Socialists come into power. "Ah," he replied, "but the government would not permit that!" What has the press to chronicle with insistence and with dignity of such flabby political and social conditions?

The press may be, and often is, annoying, as mosquitoes are annoying, but its campaigns are dangerous to nobody. As I write, it is hard to believe that within a few days the members of a new Reichstag are to be elected. There are political meetings, it is true, there are articles and editorials in the newspapers, there is some languid discussion at dinner-tables and in society, but there is a sense of unreality about it all, as though men were thinking: Nothing of grave importance can happen in any case! We shall have something to say farther on of political Germany; here it suffices to say that the press of Germany betrays in its political writing that it is dealing with shadows, not with realities. "They have been at a great feast of language, and stolen the scraps," that's all.

The snarling Panther that was sent to Agadir, teeth and claws showing, came back looking like an adventurous tomcat that wished only to hide itself meekly in its accustomed haunts; and its unobtrusive bearing seemed to say, the less said about the matter the better. What a storm of obloquy would have burst upon such inept diplomacy in America, or in England, or even in France. Not so here. Everybody was sore and sorry, but the newspapers and the journalists could raise no protest that counted. It is all explained by the fact that the people do not govern, have nothing to do with the whip or the reins, nor have they any constitutional way of changing coachmen, or of getting possession of whip and reins; and hooting at the driver, and jeering at the tangled whip-lash and awkwardly held reins, is poor-spirited business. Only one political writer, Harden, does it with any effect, and his pen is said to have upset the Caprivi government.

As one reads the newspapers day by day, and the weekly and monthly journals, it becomes apparent that the German imagines he has done something when he has had an idea; just as the Frenchman imagines he has done something when he has made an epigram. We are less given either to thinking or phrasing, and far less gifted in these directions than either Germans or Frenchmen, and perhaps that is the reason we have actually done so much more politically. We do things for lack of something better to do, while our neighbors find real pleasure in their dreams, and take great pride in their epigrams.

As all great writing, from that of Xenophon and Caesar till now, is born of action or the love of it, or as a spiritual incitement to action, so a people with little opportunity for political action, and no centres of social life with a real sway or sovereignty, cannot create or offer substance for the making of a powerful and independent press.

There is no New York, no Paris, no London, no Vienna even, in Germany. Berlin is the capital, but it is not a capital by political or social evolution, but by force of circumstances. Germany has many centres which are not only not interested in Berlin, but even antagonistic. Munich, Hamburg, Bremen, Leipsic, Frankfort, Dresden, Breslau, and besides these, twenty-six separate states with their capitals, their rulers, courts, and parliaments, go to make up Germany, and perhaps you are least of all in Germany when you are in Berlin. It is true that we have many States, many capitals, and many governors in America, but they have all grown from one, and not, as in Germany, been beaten into one, and held together more from a sense of danger from the outside than from any interest, sympathy, and liking for one another.

With us each State, too, has a powerful representation both in the Senate and in the House of Representatives, which keeps the interest alive, while in Germany Prussia is overwhelmingly preponderant. In the upper house, or Bundesrat, Prussia has 17 representatives; next comes Bavaria with 6; and the other states with 4 or less, out of a total of 58 members. In the Reichstag, out of a total of 397 representatives, Prussia has 236.

Political society is not all centred in Berlin, as it is in London, Paris, or Washington, nor is social life there representative of all Germany. Berlin's stamp of approval is not necessary to play, or opera, or book, or picture, or statue, or personality. Indeed, Berlin often takes a lead in such matters from other cities in Germany where the artistic life and history are more fully developed, as, for instance, in other days, Weimar, and now Munich, Dresden, and, in literary matters, Leipsic. A recent example of this, though of small consequence in itself, is the case of the opera, the "Rosen Kavalier," which was given repeatedly in Dresden and Leipsic, whither many Berlin people went to hear it, before the authorities in Berlin could be persuaded to produce it.

The nobility, the society heavy artillery, come to Berlin only for three or four weeks, from the middle of January to the middle of February, to pay their respects to their sovereign at the various court functions given during that time. They live in the country and only visit in Berlin. It is complained, that the double taxation incident to the up-keep of an establishment both in town and in the country, makes it impossible for them to be much in Berlin. They stay in hotels and in apartments, and are mere passing visitors in their own capital. They have, therefore, practically no influence upon social life, and Berlin is merely the centre of the industrial, military, official, and political society of Prussia. It is the clearing-house of Germany, but by no means the literary, artistic, social, or even the political capital of Germany, as London is the English, or Paris the French, or as Washington is fast growing to be the American, capital.

There is no training-ground for an accomplished or man-of-the-world journalist, and the views and opinions of a journalist who is more or less of a social pariah, and he still is that with less than half a dozen exceptions, and of a man who begs for crumbs from the press officials at the foreign or other government offices, are neither written with the grip of the independent and dignified chronicler, nor received with confidence and respect by the reader.

It may be a reaction from this negligence with which they are treated that produces a quality, both in the writing and in the illustrations of the German newspapers, which is unknown in America. Many of the illustrated papers indulge in pictorial flings which may be compared only to the scribbling and coarse drawings, in out-of-the-way places, of dirty-minded boys. With the exception of the well-known Fliegende Blaetter, Kladderadatsch, and one or two less representative, there is nothing to compare with the artistic excellence and restrained good taste of Life or Punch, for example.

There is one illustrated paper published in Munich, Simplicissimus, which deserves more than negligent and passing comment. It has two artists of whom I know nothing except what I have learned from their work, Th. Th. Heine and Gulbransson. These men are Aristophanic in their ability as draughtsmen and as censors, in striking at the weaknesses, political, military, and official, of their countrymen. Their work is something quite new in Germany, and worthy of comparison with the best in any country. It is not elegant, it is Rabelaisian; and though I have nothing to retract in regard to coarseness, and no wish to commend the attitude taken toward German political and social life, in fairness one is bound to call attention to the pictorial work in this particular paper as of a very high order, and to recognize its power. If Heine could have turned his wit into the drawings of Hogarth, we should have had something not unlike Simplicissimus, and any German annoyed at the criticisms of his national life from the pen of a foreigner, may well turn to his own Simplicissimus, and be humbly grateful that no foreign pen-point can possibly pierce more deeply, than this domestic pencil, at work in his own country.

The danger for the critic and the wit, which few avoid, is that with incomparable advantages over his opponent he will not play fair. In spite of the awful reputation of our so-called "yellow press," which is often boisterously impudent, and sometimes inclined to indulge in comments and revelations of the private affairs of individuals which can only be dubbed coarse and cowardly, there is seldom a descent to the indescribably indecent caricatures which one finds every week in the illustrated papers in Germany. As we have noted elsewhere, just as the citizens of Berlin, as one sees them in the streets and in public places, give one the impression that they are not house-trained, so many of the pens and pencils which serve the German press, leave one with the feeling that their possessors would not know how to behave in a cultivated and well-regulated household.

Every gentleman in Germany must have been ashamed of the writing in the German press after the sinking of the Titanic. There was a blaze of brutal pharisaism that put a bar-sinister across any claim to gentlemanliness on the part of the majority. When every brave man in the world was lamenting the death of Scott, the English Arctic explorer, one German paper intimated that he had committed suicide to avoid the bankruptcy forced upon him by England's lack of generosity toward his expedition. It is almost unbelievable that such a cur should have escaped unthrashed, even among the German journalists. These two examples of lack of fine feeling mark them for what they are. Among gentlemen no comment is necessary. The mark of breeding is more often discovered in what one does not say, does not write, does not do, than in positive action. There was much, at that time, when fifteen hundred people had been buried in icy water, and scores of American and English gentlemen had gone down to death, just in answer to: "Ladies first, gentlemen!" that should have been left unsaid and unwritten. The quality of the German journalist, with half a dozen exceptions, was betrayed to the full in those few days, and many a German cheek mantled with shame.

However, a man may eat with his knife and still be an authority on bridge-building; he may tuck his napkin under his chin preparatory to, and as an armor against, the well-known vagaries of liquids, before he takes his soup or his soft-boiled eggs, and still be an authority on soap-making; he may wear a knitted waistcoat with a frock-coat to luncheon, and be deeply versed in Russian history. He may have no inkling of the traditions of fair play, or of the reticences of courtesy, no shred of knightliness, and yet be a scholar in his way. Indeed, in none of the other cultured countries does one find so many men of trained minds, but with such untrained manners and morals. In their hack of sensation-mongering, in their indifference to social gossip, in their trustworthy and learned comments upon things scientific, musical, theatrical, literary, and historical, they are as men to school-boys compared to the American press. They have the utter contempt for mere smartness that only comes with severe educational training. They have the scholar's impatience with trivialities. They skate, not to cut their names on the ice, but to get somewhere, and the whole industrial and scientific world knows how quickly they have arrived.

Our newspapers make a business of training their readers in that worst of all habits, mental dissipation. The German press is not thus guilty. Despite all I have written, I am quite sure that if I were banished from the active world and could see only half a dozen journals on my lonely island, one of them would be a German newspaper. It may be that I have a perverted literary taste, for I can get more humor, more keen enjoyment, out of a census report or an etymological dictionary than from a novel. My favorite literary dissipation is to read the works of that distinguished statistician at Washington, Mr. O. P. Austin, the poet-laureate of industrial America, or the toilsome and exciting verbal journeys of the Rev. Mr. Skeat. The classic humorists do not compare with them, in my humble opinion, as sources of fantastic surprises. This, perhaps, accounts for my sincere admiration for that quality of scholarship, learning, and accuracy in the German press. Nor does the possession of these qualities in the least controvert the impression given by the German press of political powerlessness, of social ignorance and incompetence, and of boorish ignorance of the laws of common decency in international comment and controversy. A great scholar may be a booby in a drawing-room, and a lamentable failure as an adviser in matters political and social. "As a bird that wandereth from her nest, so is a man that wandereth from his place." Germany has put some astonishing failures to her credit through her belief that learning can take the place of common-sense, and scholarship do the tasks of that intelligent and experienced observation to which the abused word, worldliness, is given. Perhaps it is as well that the German press declines to keep a social diary; well, too, that it has no candidates for the office of society Haruspex, whose ghoulish business it is to find omens and prophecies in the entrails of his victims. In that respect, at any rate, both society and the press in Germany are as is the salon to the scullery, compared with ours. As for that little knot of illustrated weekly papers in England, with their nauseating letter-press for snobs inside, and their advertisements of patent complexion remedies and corsets outside, there is nothing like them in Germany or anywhere else, so far as I know. You may advertise your shooting-party, your dance, or your dinner-party, and thus keep yourself before the world as though you were a whiskey, a soap, or a superfluous-hair-destroyer, if you please, and, alas, many there are who do so. At least Germany knows nothing of this weekly auction of privacy, this nauseating snobbery which is a fungus-growth seen at its strongest in British soil.

I am bound, both by tradition and experience as an American, to discover the reason for such conditions in the lack of fluidity in social and political life in Germany. The industrials, the military, the nobility, the civil servants, and to some extent the Jews, are all in separate social compartments; and the political parties as well keep much to themselves and without the personal give and take outside of their purely official life which obtains in America and in England.

It is an impossible suggestion, I know, but if the upper and lower houses of the empire, or of Prussia, could meet in a match at base-ball, or golf, or cricket; if the army could play the civil service; if the newspaper correspondents could play the under-secretaries; if they could all be induced occasionally, to throw off their mental and moral uniforms, and to meet merely as men, a current of fresh air would blow through Germany, that she would never after permit to be shut out.

Personal dignity is refreshed, not lost, by a romp. Who has not seen distinguished Americans and distinguished Englishmen, in their own or in their friends' houses, or at one or another of our innumerable games, behaving like boys out of school, crawling about beneath improvised skins and growling and roaring in charades; indulging in flying chaff of one another; in the skirts of their wives and sisters playing cricket, or base-ball, or tennis with the one hand only; caricaturing good-humoredly some of their own official business, or arranging a match of some kind where their own servants join in to make up a side; or, and well I remember it, half a dozen youths of about fifty playing cricket with one stump and a broom-handle for an hour one hot afternoon, amid tumbles and shouts of laughter, and a shower of impromptu nicknames, and one or two of them bore names known all over the English-speaking world. Nobody loses any dignity, any importance; but there is an unconquerable stiffness in Germany that makes me laugh almost as I make this suggestion. We have only a certain reserve of serious work in us. To attempt to be serious all the time is never to be at rest. This worried busyness, which is a characteristic of the more mediocre of my own countrymen also, is really a symptom of deficient vitality. Things are in the saddle and you are the mule and not the man, if you are such an one. The stiffness and self-consciousness of the Germans is really a sign of their lack of confidence in themselves. Youth is always more serious than middle age, for the same reason. A man who is at home in the world laughs and is gay; he who is shy and doubtful scowls. It is the God-fearing who are not afraid, it is the man-fearing who are awkward and uncomfortable.

The first thing to be afraid of is oneself, but after oneself is conquered why be afraid to let him loose!

It would be quite untrue to give the impression that there is no fun, no harking, no chaff, in Germany, although I am bound to say that there is little of this last. I can bear witness to a healthy love of fun, and to an exuberant exploitation of youthful vitality in many directions among the students and younger officers, for example. Better companions for a romp exist nowhere. Having been blessed with an undue surplus of vitality, which for many years kept me fully occupied in directing its expenditure, alas, not always with success, I can only add that I found as many youthful companions in a similar predicament in Germany, as anywhere else.