Chapter 11

The reader of the little newspapers here in Munich finds evidence of at least three parties. There is first the radical. Its members sincerely desire a united Germany, and, of course, are friendly to Prussia, hate Napoleon, have little confidence in the Hapsburgs, like to read of uneasiness in Paris, and hail any movement that overthrows tradition and the prescriptive right of classes. If its members are Catholic, they are very mildly so; if they are Protestant, they are not enough so to harm them; and, in short, if their religious opinions are not as deep as a well, they are certainly broader than a church door. They are the party of free inquiry, liberal thought, and progress. Akin to them are what may be called the conservative liberals, the majority of whom may be Catholics in profession, but are most likely rationalists in fact; and with this party the king naturally affiliates, taking his music devoutly every Sunday morning in the Allerheiligenkirche, attached to the Residenz, and getting his religion out of Wagner; for, progressive as the youthful king is, he cannot be supposed to long for a unity which would wheel his throne off into the limbo of phantoms. The conservative liberals, therefore, while laboring for thorough internal reforms, look with little delight on the increasing strength of Prussia, and sympathize with the present liberal tendencies of Austria. Opposed to both these parties is the ultramontane, the head of which is the Romish hierarchy, and the body of which is the inert mass of ignorant peasantry, over whom the influence of the clergy seems little shaken by any of the modern moral earthquakes. Indeed I doubt if any new ideas will ever penetrate a class of peasants who still adhere to styles of costume that must have been ancient when the Turks threatened Vienna, which would be highly picturesque if they were not painfully ugly, and arrayed in which their possessors walk about in the broad light of these latter days, with entire unconsciousness that they do not belong to this age, and that their appearance is as much of an anachronism as if the figures should step out of Holbein's pictures (which Heaven forbid), or the stone images come down from the portals of the cathedral and walk about. The ultramontane party, which, so far as it is an intelligent force in modern affairs, is the Romish clergy, and nothing more, hears with aversion any hint of German unity, listens with dread to the needle-guns at Sadowa, hates Prussia in proportion as it fears her, and just now does not draw either with the Austrian Government, whose liberal tendencies are exceedingly distasteful. It relies upon that great unenlightened mass of Catholic people in Southern Germany and in Austria proper, one of whose sins is certainly not skepticism. The practical fight now in Bavaria is on the question of education; the priests being resolved to keep the schools of the people in their own control, and the liberal parties seeking to widen educational facilities and admit laymen to a share in the management of institutions of learning. Now the school visitors must all be ecclesiastics; and although their power is not to be dreaded in the cities, where teachers, like other citizens, are apt to be liberal, it gives them immense power in the rural districts. The election of the Lower House of the Bavarian parliament, whose members have a six years' tenure of office, which takes place next spring, excites uncommon interest; for the leading issue will be that of education. The little local newspapers--and every city has a small swarm of them, which are remarkable for the absence of news and an abundance of advertisements--have broken out into a style of personal controversy, which, to put it mildly, makes me, an American, feel quite at home. Both parties are very much in earnest, and both speak with a freedom that is, in itself, a very hopeful sign.

The pretensions of the ultramontane clergy are, indeed, remarkable enough to attract the attention of others besides the liberals of Bavaria. They assume an influence and an importance in the ecclesiastical profession, or rather an authority, equal to that ever asserted by the Church in its strongest days. Perhaps you will get an idea of the height of this pretension if I translate a passage which the liberal journal here takes from a sermon preached in the parish church of Ebersburg, in Ober-Dorfen, by a priest, Herr Kooperator Anton Hiring, no longer ago than August 16, 1868. It reads: "With the power of absolution, Christ has endued the priesthood with a might which is terrible to hell, and against which Lucifer himself cannot stand,-a might which, indeed, reaches over into eternity, where all other earthly powers find their limit and end,--a might, I say, which is able to break the fetters which, for an eternity, were forged through the commission of heavy sin. Yes, further, this Power of the forgiveness of sins makes the priest, in a certain measure, a second God; for God alone naturally can forgive sins. And yet this is not the highest reach of the priestly might: his power reaches still higher; he compels God himself to serve him. How so? When the priest approaches the altar, in order to bring there the holy mass-offering, there, at that moment, lifts himself up Jesus Christ, who sits at the right hand of the Father, upon his throne, in order to be ready for the beck of his priests upon earth. And scarcely does the priest begin the words of consecration, than there Christ already hovers, surrounded by the heavenly host, come down from heaven to earth, and to the altar of sacrifice, and changes, upon the words of the priest, the bread and wine into his holy flesh and blood, and permits himself then to be taken up and to lie in the hands of the priest, even though the priest is the most sinful and the most unworthy. Further, his power surpasses that of the highest archangels, and of the Queen of Heaven. Right did the holy Franciscus say, 'If I should meet a priest and an angel at the same time, I should salute the priest first, and then the angel; because the priest is possessed of far higher might and holiness than the angel.'"

The radical journal calls this "ultramontane blasphemy," and, the day after quoting it, adds a charge that must be still more annoying to the Herr Kooperator Hiring than that of blasphemy: it accuses him of plagiarism; and, to substantiate the charge, quotes almost the very same language from a sermon preached in 1785--In this it is boldly claimed that "in heaven, on earth, or under the earth, there is nothing mightier than a priest, except God; and, to be exact, God himself must obey the priest in the mass." And then, in words which I do not care to translate, the priest is made greater than the Virgin Mary, because Christ was only born of the Virgin once, while the priest "with five words, as often and wherever he will," can "bring forth the Saviour of the world." So to-day keeps firm hold of the traditions of a hundred years ago, and ultramontanism wisely defends the last citadel where the Middle Age superstition makes a stand,--the popular veneration for the clergy.

And the clergy take good care to keep up the pomps and shows even here in skeptical Munich. It was my inestimable privilege the other morning--it was All-Saints' Day--to see the archbishop in the old Frauenkirche, the ancient cathedral, where hang tattered banners that were captured from the Turks three centuries ago,--to see him seated in the choir, overlooked by saints and apostles carved in wood by some forgotten artist of the fifteenth century. I supposed he was at least an archbishop, from the retinue of priests who attended and served him, and also from his great size. When he sat down, it required a dignitary of considerable rank to put on his hat; and when he arose to speak a few precious words, the effect was visible a good many yards from where he stood. At the close of the service he went in great state down the center aisle, preceded by the gorgeous beadle--a character that is always awe-inspiring to me in these churches, being a cross between a magnificent drum-major and a verger and two persons in livery, and followed by a train of splendidly attired priests, six of whom bore up his long train of purple silk. The whole cortege was resplendent in embroidery and ermine; and as the great man swept out of my sight, and was carried on a priestly wave into his shining carriage, and the noble footman jumped up behind, and he rolled away to his dinner, I stood leaning against a pillar, and reflected if it could be possible that that religion could be anything but genuine which had so much genuine ermine. And the organ-notes, rolling down the arches, seemed to me to have a very ultramontane sound.

CHANGING QUARTERS

Perhaps it may not interest you to know how we moved, that is, changed our apartments. I did not see it mentioned in the cable dispatches, and it may not be generally known, even in Germany; but then, the cable is so occupied with relating how his Serenity this, and his Highness that, and her Loftiness the other one, went outdoors and came in again, owing to a slight superfluity of the liquid element in the atmosphere, that it has no time to notice the real movements of the people. And yet, so dry are some of these little German newspapers of news, that it is refreshing to read, now and then, that the king, on Sunday, walked out with the Duke of Hesse after dinner (one would like to know if they also had sauerkraut and sausage), and that his prospective mother-in-law, the Empress of Russia, who was here the other day, on her way home from Como, where she was nearly drowned out by the inundation, sat for an hour on Sunday night, after the opera, in the winter garden of the palace, enjoying the most easy family intercourse.

But about moving. Let me tell you that to change quarters in the face of a Munich winter, which arrives here the 1st of November, is like changing front to the enemy just before a battle; and if we had perished in the attempt, it might have been put upon our monuments, as it is upon the out-of-cannon-cast obelisk in the Karolina Platz, erected to the memory of the thirty thousand Bavarian soldiers who fell in the disastrous Russian winter campaign of Napoleon, fighting against all the interests of Germany,--"they, too, died for their Fatherland." Bavaria happened also to fight on the wrong side at Sadowa and I suppose that those who fell there also died for Fatherland: it is a way the Germans have of doing, and they mean nothing serious by it. But, as I was saying, to change quarters here as late as November is a little difficult, for the wise ones seek to get housed for the winter by October: they select the sunny apartments, get on the double windows, and store up wood. The plants are tied up in the gardens, the fountains are covered over, and the inhabitants go about in furs and the heaviest winter clothing long before we should think of doing so at home. And they are wise: the snow comes early, and, besides, a cruel fog, cold as the grave and penetrating as remorse, comes down out of the near Tyrol. One morning early in November, I looked out of the window to find snow falling, and the ground covered with it. There was dampness and frost enough in the air to make it cling to all the tree-twigs, and to take fantastic shapes on all the queer roofs and the slenderest pinnacles and most delicate architectural ornamentations. The city spires had a mysterious appearance in the gray haze; and above all, the round-topped towers of the old Frauenkirche, frosted with a little snow, loomed up more grandly than ever. When I went around to the Hof Garden, where I late had sat in the sun, and heard the brown horse-chestnuts drop on the leaves, the benches were now full of snow, and the fat and friendly fruit-woman at the gate had retired behind glass windows into a little shop, which she might well warm by her own person, if she radiated heat as readily as she used to absorb it on the warm autumn days, when I have marked her knitting in the sunshine.

But we are not moving. The first step we took was to advertise our wants in the "Neueste Nachrichten" ("Latest News ") newspaper. We desired, if possible, admission into some respectable German family, where we should be forced to speak German, and in which our society, if I may so express it, would be some compensation for our bad grammar. We wished also to live in the central part of the city,--in short, in the immediate neighborhood of all the objects of interest (which are here very much scattered), and to have pleasant rooms. In Dresden, where the people are not so rich as in Munich, and where different customs prevail, it is customary for the best people, I mean the families of university professors, for instance, to take in foreigners, and give them tolerable food and a liberal education. Here it is otherwise. Nearly all families occupy one floor of a building, renting just rooms enough for the family, so that their apartments are not elastic enough to take in strangers, even if they desire to do so. And generally they do not. Munich society is perhaps chargeable with being a little stiff and exclusive. Well, we advertised in the "Neueste Nachrichten." This is the liberal paper of Munich. It is a poorly printed, black-looking daily sheet, folded in octavo size, and containing anywhere from sixteen to thirty-four pages, more or less, as it happens to have advertisements. It sometimes will not have more than two or three pages of reading matter. There will be a scrap or two of local news, the brief telegrams taken from the official paper of the day before, a bit or two of other news, and perhaps a short and slashing editorial on the ultramontane party. The advantage of printing and folding it in such small leaves is, that the size can be varied according to the demands of advertisements or news (if the German papers ever find out what that is); so that the publisher is always giving, every day, just what it pays to give that day; and the reader has his regular quantity of reading matter, and does not have to pay for advertising space, which in journals of unchangeable form cannot always be used profitably. This little journal was started something like twenty years ago. It probably spends little for news, has only one or, at most, two editors, is crowded with advertisements, which are inserted cheap, and costs, delivered, a little over six francs a year. It circulates in the city some thirty-five thousand. There is another little paper here of the same size, but not so many leaves, called "The Daily Advertiser," with nothing but advertisements, principally of theaters, concerts, and the daily sights, and one page devoted to some prodigious yarn, generally concerning America, of which country its readers must get the most extraordinary and frightful impression. The "Nachrichten" made the fortune of its first owner, who built himself a fine house out of it, and retired to enjoy his wealth. It was recently sold for one hundred thousand guldens; and I can see that it is piling up another fortune for its present owner. The Germans, who herein show their good sense and the high state of civilization to which they have reached, are very free advertisers, going to the newspapers with all their wants, and finding in them that aid which all interests and all sorts of people, from kaiser to kerl, are compelled, in these days, to seek in the daily journal. Every German town of any size has three or four of these little journals of flying leaves, which are excellent papers in every respect, except that they look like badly printed handbills, and have very little news and no editorials worth speaking of. An exception to these in Bavaria is the "Allgerneine Zeitung" of Augsburg, which is old and immensely respectable, and is perhaps, for extent of correspondence and splendidly written editorials on a great variety of topics, excelled by no journal in Europe except the London "Times." It gives out two editions daily, the evening one about the size of the New York "Nation;" and it has all the telegraphic news. It is absurdly old-grannyish, and is malevolent in its pretended conservatism and impartiality. Yet it circulates over forty thousand copies, and goes all over Germany.

But were we not saying something about moving? The truth is, that the best German families did not respond to our appeal with that alacrity which we had no right to expect, and did not exhibit that anxiety for our society which would have been such a pleasant evidence of their appreciation of the honor done to the royal city of Munich by the selection of it as a residence during the most disagreeable months of the year by the advertising undersigned. Even the young king, whose approaching marriage to the Russian princess, one would think, might soften his heart, did nothing to win our regard, or to show that he appreciated our residence "near" his court, and, so far as I know, never read with any sort of attention our advertisement, which was composed with as much care as Goethe's "Faust," and probably with the use of more dictionaries. And this, when he has an extraordinary large Residenz, to say nothing about other outlying palaces and comfortable places to live in, in which I know there are scores of elegantly furnished apartments, which stand idle almost the year round, and might as well be let to appreciative strangers, who would accustom the rather washy and fierce frescoes on the walls to be stared at. I might have selected rooms, say on the court which looks on the exquisite bronze fountain, Perseus with the head of Medusa, a copy of the one in Florence by Benvenuto Cellini, where we could have a southern exposure. Or we might, so it would seem, have had rooms by the winter garden, where tropical plants rejoice in perennial summer, and blossom and bear fruit, while a northern winter rages without. Yet the king did not see it "by those lamps;" and I looked in vain on the gates of the Residenz for the notice so frequently seen on other houses, of apartments to let. And yet we had responses. The day after the announcement appeared, our bell ran perpetually; and we had as many letters as if we had advertised for wives innumerable. The German notes poured in upon us in a flood; each one of them containing an offer tempting enough to beguile an angel out of paradise, at least, according to our translation: they proffered us chambers that were positively overheated by the flaming sun (which, I can take my oath, only ventures a few feet above the horizon at this season), which were friendly in appearance, splendidly furnished and near to every desirable thing, and in which, usually, some American family had long resided, and experienced a content and happiness not to be felt out of Germany.

I spent some days in calling upon the worthy frauen who made these alluring offers. The visits were full of profit to the student of human nature, but profitless otherwise. I was ushered into low, dark chambers, small and dreary, looking towards the sunless north, which I was assured were delightful and even elegant. I was taken up to the top of tall houses, through a smell of cabbage that was appalling, to find empty and dreary rooms, from which I fled in fright. We were visited by so many people who had chambers to rent, that we were impressed with the idea that all Munich was to let; and yet, when we visited the places offered, we found they were only to be let alone. One of the frauen who did us the honor to call, also wrote a note, and inclosed a letter that she had just received from an American gentleman (I make no secret of it that he came from Hartford), in which were many kindly expressions for her welfare, and thanks for the aid he had received in his study of German; and yet I think her chambers are the most uninviting in the entire city. There were people who were willing to teach us German, without rooms or board; or to lodge us without giving us German or food; or to feed us, and let us starve intellectually, and lodge where we could.

But all things have an end, and so did our hunt for lodgings. I chanced one day in my walk to find, with no help from the advertisement, very nearly what we desired,--cheerful rooms in a pleasant neighborhood, where the sun comes when it comes out at all, and opposite the Glass Palace, through which the sun streams in the afternoon with a certain splendor, and almost next door to the residence and laboratory of the famous chemist, Professor Liebig; so that we can have our feelings analyzed whenever it is desirable. When we had set up our household gods, and a fire was kindled in the tall white porcelain family monument, which is called here a stove,-- and which, by the way, is much more agreeable than your hideous black and air-scorching cast-iron stoves,--and seen that the feather-beds under which we were expected to lie were thick enough to roast the half of the body, and short enough to let the other half freeze, we determined to try for a season the regular German cookery, our table heretofore having been served with food cooked in the English style with only a slight German flavor. A week of the experiment was quite enough. I do not mean to say that the viands served us were not good, only that we could not make up our minds to eat them. The Germans eat a great deal of meat; and we were obliged to take meat when we preferred vegetables. Now, when a deep dish is set before you wherein are chunks of pork reposing on stewed potatoes, and another wherein a fathomless depth of sauerkraut supports coils of boiled sausage, which, considering that you are a mortal and responsible being, and have a stomach, will you choose? Herein Munich, nearly all the bread is filled with anise or caraway seed; it is possible to get, however, the best wheat bread we have eaten in Europe, and we usually have it; but one must maintain a constant vigilance against the inroads of the fragrant seeds. Imagine, then, our despair, when one day the potato, the one vegetable we had always eaten with perfect confidence, appeared stewed with caraway seeds. This was too much for American human nature, constituted as it is. Yet the dish that finally sent us back to our ordinary and excellent way of living is one for which I have no name. It may have been compounded at different times, have been the result of many tastes or distastes: but there was, after all, a unity in it that marked it as the composition of one master artist; there was an unspeakable harmony in all its flavors and apparently ununitable substances. It looked like a terrapin soup, but it was not. Every dive of the spoon into its dark liquid brought up a different object,--a junk of unmistakable pork, meat of the color of roast hare, what seemed to be the neck of a goose, something in strings that resembled the rags of a silk dress, shreds of cabbage, and what I am quite willing to take my oath was a bit of Astrachan fur. If Professor Liebig wishes to add to his reputation, he could do so by analyzing this dish, and publishing the result to the world.