Part 13

We all know him, the smug snob of virtue. You may find him a professor at the university; you may find him leading prayer-meetings and preaching pure politics; you may find him the bloodless philanthropist; you may find him a rank atheist, with his patents for the bringing in of his own kingdom of heaven. These are the men above all others who make the Tammanyizing of our politics possible. Honest men cannot abide the hot-house atmosphere of their self-conscious virtue. Nothing is more discouraging to robust virtue than the criticisms of teachers of ethics, who live in coddled comfort, upon private means, and other people's ideas.

Germany is just now suffering from the spasms of moral colic, due to overeating. All luxury is in one form or another overeating. Berlin itself has grown too rapidly into the vicious ways of a metropolis, where spenders and wasters congregate. In 1911 the betting-machines at the Berlin race-tracks took in $7,546,000, of which the state took for its license, 16 2/3 per cent. There were 128 days of racing, while in England they have 540 days' racing in the year!

In 1911, 1,300,000 strangers visited Berlin, of whom 1,046,162 were Germans, 97,683 Russians, 39,555 Austrians, 30,550 Americans, and 16,600 English. Berlin killed 2,000,000 beasts for food, including 10,500 horses; she takes care of 3,000 nightly in her night-shelters, puts away $17,500,000 in savings-banks, and has deposits therein of $90,500,000. On the other hand, she has built a palace of vice costing $1,625,000, in which on many nights between 11 P. M. and 2 A. M. they sell $8,000 worth of champagne. No one knows his Berlin, who has not partaken of a "Kalte Ente," or a "Landwehrtopp," a "Schlummerpunsch," or "Eine Weisse mit einer Strippe." There is still a boyish notion about dissipation, and they have their own great classic to quote from, who in "Faust" pours forth this rather raw advice for gayety:

"Greift nur hinein ins volle Menschenleben! Ein jeder lebt's, nicht vielen ist's bekannt, Und wo Ihr's packt, da ist es interessant!"

Berlin is still in the throes of that sophomorical philosophy of life which believes that it is, from the point of view of sophistication, of age, when it is free to be befuddled with wine and befooled by women. But the German mind has no sympathy with hypocrisy. They may be brutal in their rather material views of morals, but they are frank. There may be mental prigs among them, but there are no moral prigs. In both England and America we suffer from a certain morbid ethical daintiness. There is a ripeness of moral fastidiousness that is often difficult to distinguish from rottenness. It is part of the feminism of America, born of our prosperity, for not one of these fastidious moralists is not a rich man, and Germany escapes this difficulty.

The government of a German city is so simple in its machinery that every voter can easily understand it. No doubt Seth Low and George L. Rives could explain to an intelligent man the charter under which New York City is governed, but they are very, very rare exceptions.

Our city government is bad, not because democracy is a failure, not because Americans are inherently dishonest, but because we are a superficially educated people, untrained to think, and, therefore, still worshipping the Jeffersonian fetich of divided responsibility between the three branches of the government. The judicial, the legislative, and the executive are, with minute care, forced to check and to impede one another, and we even carry this antiquated superstition, born of a suspicious and timid republicanism, into the government of our cities. With the exception of those cities in America which are governed by commissions, our cities are slaves as compared with the German cities. They are slaves of the predatory politicians, and they, on the other hand, are the bribed taskmasters of the rich corporations. The German asks in bewilderment why our men of wealth, of leisure, and of intelligence are not devoting themselves to the service of the state and the city. Alas, the answer is the pitiable one that the electoral machinery is so complicated that the voters can be and are, continually humbugged; and worse, many of the wealthy and intelligent, through their stake in valuable city franchises, are incompetent to deal fairly with the municipal affairs of their own city. Both in England and in America, the man in the street is quite sound in his judgment, when he declines to trust those who dabble in securities with which their own department has dealings. The British Caesar's wife official, caught with a handkerchief on her person, woven on the looms of a company whose directors are dealing with the British government, can hardly claim exemption from suspicion, because she bought the handkerchief in America. We all know that when London sniffles the value of handkerchiefs goes up in New York. Caesar's wife finds it difficult to persuade honorable men that she merely had a financial cold, but not the smallest interest in a corner in handkerchiefs.

In the great majority of German cities public-utility services, gas, water, electricity, street-railways, slaughter-houses, and even canals, docks, and pawn-shops are owned and controlled by the cities themselves. There is no loop-hole for private plunder, and there is, on the contrary, every incentive to all citizens, and to the rich in particular, to enforce the strictest economy and the most expert efficiency.

What theatres, opera-houses, orchestras, museums, what well-paved and clean streets, what parks Philadelphia, New York, Chicago, and San Francisco might have, had these cities only a part of the money, of which in the last twenty-five years they have been robbed! It is true that the older cities of Germany have traditions behind them that we lack. Art treasures, old buildings, and an intelligent population demanding the best in music and the drama we cannot hope to supply, but good house-keeping is another matter. Berlin, for example, is a new city as compared with New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Detroit, and its growth has been very rapid.

It cannot be said for us alone that we have grown so fast that we have had no time to keep pace with the needs of our population. Berlin, all Germany indeed, has been growing at a prodigious rate. The population of Berlin in 1800 was 100,000; in 1832 only 250,000; hardly half a million in 1870; while the population now is over 2,000,000, and over 3,000,000 if one includes the suburbs, which are for all practical purposes part and parcel of Berlin. Charlottenburg, for example, with a population of 19,517 in 1871, now has a population of 305,976, and the vicinage of Berlin has grown in every direction in like proportions.

There were no towns in Germany till the eighth century, except those of the Romans on the Rhine and the Danube. In 1850 there were only 5 towns in Germany with more than 100,000 inhabitants, and in 1870 only 8; in 1890, 26; in 1900, 33; in 1905, 41; in 1910, 47; and nearly the whole increase of population is now massed in the middle-sized and large cities. The same may be said of the drift of population in America. "A thrifty but rather unprogressive provincial town of 60,000 inhabitants," writes Mr. J. H. Harper, of New York, in 1810.

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.