Chapter 13

Between 1860 and 1900 the proportion of urban to rural population in the United States more than doubled. In the last ten years the percentage of people living in cities, or other incorporated places of more than 2,500 inhabitants, increased from 40.5 to 46.3 per cent. of the total; while twenty years ago only 36.1 per cent. of the population lived in such incorporated places.

As late as the thirteenth century the Christian chivalry of the time was spending itself in the task of converting the heathen of what is now Prussia; and it was well on into the nineteenth century before serfdom was entirely abolished in this region. It is the newness and rawness of the population, in the streets of the great German and Prussian capital which surprise and puzzle the American, almost more than the cleanliness and orderliness of the streets themselves. It is as though a powerful monarch had built a fine palace and then, for lack of company, had invited the people from the fields and farm-yards to be his companions therein.

"Jamais un lourdaud, quoi qu'il fasse Ne saurait passer pour galaud."

One should read Hazlitt's "Essay on the Cockney" to find phrases for these Berliners. It is a gazing, gaping crowd that straggles along over the broad sidewalks. Half a dozen to a dozen will stop and stare at people entering or leaving vehicles, at a shop, or hotel door. I have seen a knot of men stop and stare at the ladies entering a motor-car, and on one occasion one of them wiped off the glass with his hand that he might see the better. It is not impertinence, it is merely bucolic naivete. The city in the evening is like a country fair, with its awkward gallantries, its brute curiosity, its unabashed expressions of affection by hands and lips, its ogling, coughing, and other peasant forms of flirtation. It should be remembered that this people as a race show somewhat less of reticence in matters amatory than we are accustomed to. In the foyer of the theatre you may see a young officer walking round and round, his arm under that of his fiancee or bride, and her hand fondly clasped in his. It is a commentary, not a criticism, on international manners that the German royal princess, a particularly sweet and simple maiden, just engaged to marry the heir of the house of Cumberland, is photographed walking in the streets of Berlin, her hand clasped in that of her betrothed, and both he, and her brother who accompanies them, smoking! Gentlemen do not smoke when walking or driving with ladies, with us, though I am not claiming that it is a moral disaster to do so. It is a difference in the gradations of respect worth noting, but nothing more. I have even seen kissing, as a couple walked up the stairs from one part of the theatre to another. In the spring and summer the paths of the Tiergarten of a morning are strewn with hair-pins, a curious, but none the less accurate, indication of the rather fumbling affection of the night before.

To live in a fashionable hotel, in a land whose people you wish to study, is as valueless an experience as to go to a zooelogical garden to learn to track a mountain sheep or to ride down a wild boar. You must go about among the people themselves, to their restaurants, to their houses, if they are good enough to ask you, and to the resorts of all kinds that they frequent.

The manners are better than in my student days, but there is still a deal of improvised eating and drinking. There is much tucking of napkins under chins that the person may be shielded from misdirected food-offerings. There is not a little use of the knife where the fork or spoon is called for; but this last I always look upon as a remnant of courage, of the virility remaining in the race from a not distant time when the knife served to clear the forest, to build the hut, to kill the deer, and to defend the family from the wolf; and the traditions of such a weapon still give it predominance over the more epicene fork, as a link with a stirring past. Mere daintiness in feeding is characteristic of the lapdog and other over-protected animals. Unthinking courage in the matter of victuals is rather a relief from the strained and anxious hygienic watchfulness of the overcivilized and the overrich. The body should be, and is, regarded by wholesome-minded people, not as an idol, but as an instrument. The German no doubt sees something ignominious in counting as one chews a chop, in the careful measuring of one's liquids, in the restricting of oneself to the diet of the squirrel and the cow. He would perhaps prefer to lose a year or two of life rather than to nut and spinach himself to longevity. The wholesome body ought of course to be unerring and automatic in its choice of the quantity and quality of its fuel.

A well-dressed man in Berlin is almost as conspicuous as a dancing bear. This comparison may lead the stranger to infer, in spite of what has been said of the orderliness of Berlin, that dancing bears are permitted in the streets. It is only fair to Berlin's admirable police president, von Jagow, to say that they are not.

If one leaves the officers, who are a fine, upstanding, well-groomed lot, out of the account, the inhabitants of Berlin are almost grotesque in their dowdiness. This is the more remarkable for the reason that the citizens of Berlin, wherever you see them, not only in the West-end, but in the tenement districts, in the public markets, going to or coming from the suburban trains, in the trains and underground railway, in the cheaper restaurants and pleasure resorts, taking their Sunday outing, or in the fourth-class carriages of the railway trains, or their children in the schools, show a high level of comfort in their clothing. There is poverty and wretchedness in Berlin, of which later, but in no great city even in America, does the mass of the people give such an air of being comfortably clothed and fed.

We have been deluged of late years with figures in regard to the cost of living in this country and in that, and never are statistics such "damned lies" as in this connection. There is better and cheaper food in Berlin, and in the other cities of Germany, than anywhere else in our white man's world. Having for the moment no free-trade, or protectionist, or tariff-reform axe to grind, and having tested the pudding not by my prejudices but my palate, and having eaten a fifteen-pfennig luncheon in the street, and climbed step by step the gastronomical stairway in Germany all the way up to a supper at the court, where eight hundred odd people were served with a care and celerity, and with hot viands and irreproachable potables, that made one think of the "Arabian Nights," I offer my experience and my opinion with some confidence. You can get enough to stave off hunger for a few pfennigs, you can get a meal for something under twenty-five cents, and the whole twenty-five cents will include a glass of the best beer in the world outside of Munich. If you care to spend fifty cents there are countless restaurants where you can have a square meal and a glass of beer for that price; and for a dollar I will give you as good a luncheon with wine as any man with undamaged taste and unspoiled digestion ought to have.

There is one restaurant in Berlin which feeds as many as five thousand people on a Sunday, where you can dine or sup, and listen to good music, and enjoy your beer and tobacco for an hour afterward, and all for something under fifty cents if you are careful in your ordering. During my walks in the country around Berlin, I have often had an omelette followed by meat and vegetables, and cheese, and compote, and Rhine wine, with all the bread I wanted, and paid a bill for two persons of a little over a dollar. The Broedchen, or rolls, seem to be everywhere of uniform size and quality, and the butter always good.

Paris is fast losing its place as the home of good all-round eating as compared with Berlin. Of course, New York for geographical reasons, and also because the modern Maecenas lives there, is nowadays the place where Lucullus would invite his emperor to dine if he came back to earth; but I am not discussing the nectar and ambrosia classes, but the beer, bread, and pork classes, and certainly Berlin has no rival as a provider for them.

After all our study of statistics, of figures, of contrasts, I am not sure that we arrive at any very valuable conclusions. American working-classes work ever shorter hours, gain higher wages, but they are indubitably less happy, less rich in experience, less serene than the Germans. This measuring things by dollars, by hours, by pounds and yard-sticks, measures everything accurately enough except the one thing we wish to measure, which is a man's soul. We are producing the material things of life faster, more cheaply, more shoddily, but it is open to question whether we are producing happier men and women, and that is what we are striving to do as the end of it all. Nothing is of any value in the world that cannot be translated into the terms of man-making, or its value measured by what it does to produce a man, a woman, and children living happily together. Wealth does not do this; indeed, wealth beyond a certain limit is almost certain to destroy the foundation of all peace, a contented family.

A shady beer-garden, capital music, and happy fathers and mothers and children, what arithmetic, or algebra, or census tells you anything of that? The infallible recipe for making a child unhappy, is to give it everything it cries for of material things, and never to thwart its will. We throw wages and shorter hours of work at people, but that is only turning them out of prison into a desert. No statistics can deal competently with the comparative well-being of nations, and nothing is more ludicrous than the results arrived at where Germany is discussed by the British or American politician. Whatever figures say, and whatever else they may lack, they are better clothed, better fed and cared for, and have far more opportunities for rational enjoyment, and a thousand-fold more for aesthetic enjoyment, than either the English or the Americans. That they lack freedom, in our sense, is true, but freedom is for the few. The worldwide complaint of the hardship of constant work is rather silly, for most of us would die of monotony if we were not forced to work to keep alive, and to make a living.

The city, with its broad, clean streets, its beautiful race-course, shaded walks, its forests and lakes, toward Potsdam, or at Tegel, or Werder, when the blossoms are out, with its well-kept gardens, its profusion of flowers and shrubs and trees, is physically the most wholesome great city in the world; but Hans bleibt immer Hans! Goethe, after a visit to Berlin, wrote: "There are no more ungodly communities than in Berlin." [1]

[1] "Est giebt keine gottlosere Voelker als in Berlin."

No one knows his Berlin better than that prince of German literary Bohemians, Paul Lindau, and he makes a character in one of his novels say of it: "untidy and orderly, so boisterous and so regulated, so boorish and so kindly, so indescribable--so Berlinish--just that!" [1]

[1] "Staubig und ordentlich, so Taut und geregelt, so grob und gemuetlich, so unbeschreiblich, so berlinerisch, gerade so!"

In another place the same author writes: "Berlin as the Capital of the German Empire! There are many respects in which it nevertheless hasn't yet succeeded in taking on the character of a cosmopolitan city." [2] Not even literature finds material for a city novel. There is no Balzac, no Thackeray. Germany is still dominated by the village and the town. Goethe, Auerbach, Spielhagen, Heyse, Gottfried Keller, Freytag, my unread favorite "Fritz" Reuter, deal not with the life of cities. There is as yet no drama, no novel, no art, no politics born of the city. There is no domineering Paris or London or New York as yet.

[2] "Berlin als Haupstadt des deutchen Reiches: in mancher Beziehung hatte es sich dem weltstaedtischen Charakter doch noch nicht aneignen koennen."

After some years of acquaintance with Germany as school-boy, as student at the universities, and lately as a most hospitably received guest by all sorts and conditions of men, I do not remember meeting a fop. A German Beau Brummel is as impossible as a French Luther, an American Goethe, or an English Wagner. We have had attempts at foppery in America, but no real fops. A genuine fop, whether in art, in literature, or in costumes, must have brains, ours have been merely effigies, foppery taking the dull commercial form of a great variety of raiment. It is a strange contradiction in German life that while they are as a people governed minutely and in detail, forbidden personal freedom along certain lines to which we should find it hard to submit, they are freer morally, freer in their literature, their art, their music, their social life, and in their unself-conscious expression of them than other people. There is a curious combination of legal and governmental slavery, and of spiritual and intellectual freedom; of innumerable restrictions, and great liberty of personal enjoyment, and that enjoyment of the most naif kind. They seem to have done less to destroy life's palate with the condiments of civilization, and therefore, still find plain things savorous.

I am not sure that the ecumenical sophistication, known as world-etiquette, marks a very high degree of knowledge or usefulness anywhere. To know which hat goes with which boots, and what collar and tie with what coat and waistcoat, and what costume is appropriate at 10 A. M., and what at 10 P. M., and to know the names of the head-waiters of the principal restaurants, are minor matters. These are the conveniences of the gentleman, but the characteristic burdens of the ass. Such a mental equipment is not the stuff of which soldiers, sailors, statesmen, explorers, or governors are made.

We must not overrate the value of this feminine worldliness in judging the Germans. This effeminate categorical imperative of etiquette has not influenced them greatly as yet. But on the other hand, one must claim for the amenities of life that they have their value, that they are, after all, the external decorations of an inward discipline. It is not necessarily a fine disdain of material things, but rather a keen sense of moral and physical efficiency, which pays due heed to wherewithal ye shall be clothed, at any rate outside of Palestine. Those who dream and discuss may wear anything or nothing. It mattered not what Socrates wore. But men of action must wear the easy armor that fits them best for their particular task. Men who toil either at their pleasure or at their work must change their raiment, if only for the sake of rest and health. Now that government is in the hands of the vociferators rather than the meditaters, even politicians must look to their costumes, merely out of regard to cleanliness. Evening clothes with a knitted tie dribbling down the shirt front; a frock-coat as a frame for a colored waistcoat, such as at shooting, or riding, or golf, we permit ourselves to break forth in, as a weak surrender to the tailor, or to the ingenuity of our womenfolk who are not "unbred to spinning, in the loom unskilled"; the extraordinary indulgence in personal fancies in the choice of colored ties, as though the male citizens of Berlin had been to an auction of the bastards of a rainbow; the little melon-shaped hats with a band of thick velvet around them; the awkward slouching gait, as of men physically untrained; the enormous proportion of men over forty, who follow behind their stomachs and turn their toes out at an angle of more than forty-five degrees, whose necks lie in folds over their collars, and whose whole appearance denotes an uncared-for person and a negligence of domestic hygiene: these things are significant. No man who walks with his toes pointing southwest by south, and southeast by south, when he is going south, will ever get into France on his own feet, carrying a knapsack and a rifle. Cranach's painting of Duke Henry the Pious, in the Dresden Gallery, gives an accurate picture of the way many Germans still stand and walk; while every athlete knows that runners and walkers put their feet down straight, or with a tendency to turn them in rather than out. The Indians of northwest India, and the Indians of our own West are good examples of this.

It is evident that the orderliness of Berlin is enforced orderliness and not voluntary orderliness. Both pedestrians and drivers of all sorts of vehicles, take all that is theirs and as much more as possible. There is none of the give and take, and innate love of fair play and instinctive wish to give the other fellow a chance, so noticeable in London streets, whether on the sidewalks or in the roadway. There is a general chip-on-the-shoulder attitude in Prussia, which may be said, I think not unfairly, to be evident in all ranks, from their recent foreign diplomacy, down to the pedestrians and drivers.

Many people whom I have met, not only foreigners but Germans from other parts of Germany, are loud in their denunciations of the Berliners. "Frech" and "roh" are words often used about them. There is a surly malice of speech and manner among the working classes, that seems to indicate a wish to atone for political impotence, by braggart impudence to those whom they regard as superior. When we played horse as children, we champed the wooden bit, shied, and balked and kicked, and the worse we behaved the more spirited horses we thought ourselves. There is a certain social and political radicalism verging upon anarchy, which plays at life in much the same way, with no better reason, and with little better result. Shying, balking, and kicking, and champing the political bit, are only spirited to the childish.

Their awkward and annoying attentions to women alone on the streets; their staring and gaping; their rudeness in pushing and shoving; the general underbred look, the slouching gait, the country-store clothes, hats, and boots; the fearful and wonderful combinations of raiment; the sweetbread complexions, as of men under-exercised and not sufficiently aired and scrubbed; their stiff courtesy to one another when they recognize acquaintances with hat-sweeping bows; their fierce gobbling in the restaurants; their lack of small services and attentions to their own women when they go about in public with them; their selfish disregard of others in public places, their giving and taking of hats, coats, sticks, and umbrellas at the garde-robes of the theatres, for example; their habit of straggling about in the middle of the streets, like the chickens and geese on a country road: all these things I have noted too, but I must admit the surprising personal conclusion that I have grown to like the people. A good pair of shoulders and an engaging smile go far to mitigate these nuisances. It makes for good sense in this matter of criticism always to bear in mind that delicious piece of humor of the psalmist: "Let the righteous rather smite me friendly; and reprove me. But let not their precious balms break my head." The "precious balms" of the lofty and righteous critic are not of much value when they merely break heads.

I have been all over Berlin, and in all sorts of places, by day and by night. I have found myself seated beside all sorts of people in restaurants and public places, and I have yet to chronicle any rudeness to me or mine. I like their innocent curiosity, their unsophisticated ways, their bumpkin love-making in public; and many a time I have found entertainment from odd companions who seated themselves near me, when I have strayed into the cheaper restaurants, to hear and to see something of the Berliner in his native wilds. Their malice and rudeness and apparent impertinences are due to lack of experience, to the fact that their manners are still untilled, I believe, rather than to intentional insult. They are not house-broken to their new capital, that is all, and that will come in time. Their malicious jealousy peeps out in all sorts of ways. In the lower house of the Prussian Diet, recently, a member protested vigorously against the employment of an American singer in the Opera House! Chauvinism carried to this extreme becomes comic, and is noted here only to indicate to what depths of farm-yard provinciality some of the citizens of this great city can descend.

They are dreamers and sentimentalists too. There are more kissing, more fondling, more exuberance of affection, more displays of friendliness in Germany in a week than in England and America in six months. I confess without shame that I like to see it, and when it comes my way, as beyond my deserts it has, I like to feel it. How lasting is this friendliness I have no means of knowing till the years to come tell me, but that it is a pleasant atmosphere to live in there can be no doubt.

The driving is of the very worst. A man behind a horse, or horses, who knows even the elements of handling the reins and the whip and the brake, would be a curiosity indeed. I have not seen a dozen coachmen, private or public, to whom my youngest child could not have given invaluable suggestions as to the bitting, harnessing, and handling of his cattle. On the other hand, I one day saw a street sign twisted out of its place. I was fascinated by this unexampled mark of negligence. I determined to watch that sign; alas, within forty-eight hours it was put right again.

Let it not be understood that there are no fine horses to be seen in Berlin. You will go far to find a better lot of horse-flesh, or better-looking men on the horses, than you will see when the Kaiser rides by to the castle after his morning exercise; and he sits his horse and manages him with the easy skill of the real horseman, and looks every inch a king besides. It is told of Daniel Webster, walking in London, that a navvy turned to his companion and remarked: "That bloke must be a king!" You would say the same of the Kaiser if you saw him on horseback.