Part 14

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.

At horse shows and in the Tiergarten, and in riding-places in other cities, I have looked at hundreds of horses, and, if I mistake not, Germany is both buying and breeding the very best in the way of mounts, though their civilian riders are often of the scissors variety. There are comparatively few harness horses, and in Berlin scarcely a dozen well-turned-out private carriages, outside the imperial equipages, which are always superbly horsed and beautifully turned out; so my eyes tell me at least, and I have watched the streets carefully for months. The minor details of a properly turned-out carriage (bits, chains, liveries, saddle-cloths, and so on) are still unknown here. I have had the privilege of driving and riding some of the horses in the imperial stables; and I have seen all of them at one time or another being exercised in harness and under the saddle. I have never driven a better-mannered four, or ridden more perfectly broken saddle-horses. There are three hundred and twenty-six horses in his Majesty's stables, and for a private stable of its size it has no equal in the world. I may add, too, that there is probably no better "whip" in the world to-day, whether with two horses, four horses, or six horses, than the gentleman who trains the harness horses in the imperial stables. This German coachman would be a revelation at a horse show in either New York or London. If the citizens of Berlin were as well-mannered as the horses in the imperial stables, this would be the most elegant capital in the world. It is to be regretted that his Majesty's very accomplished master of the horse cannot also hold the position of censor morum to the citizens of Berlin. Individual prowess in the details of cosmopolitan etiquette has not reached a high level, but in all matters of mere house-keeping there are no better municipal housewives than these German cities and towns.

As a further example, the statues of Berlin are carefully cleaned in the spring, but what statues! With the exception of the Lessing, the Goethe, and the Great Elector statues, the statue of Frederick the Great, and the reclining statues of the late emperor and empress, by Begas, and one or two others, one sees at once that these citizens are no more capable of ornamenting their city than of dressing themselves.

Poor Bismarck! Grotesque figures (men, women, animals) surround the base of his statue in Berlin, in Leipsic; and in Hamburg, clad in a corrugated golf costume, with a colossal two-handed sword in front of him, he is a melancholy figure, gazing out over a tumble-down beer-garden. At Wannsee, near Berlin, there is, I must admit, a really fine bust of Bismarck. On a solid square pedestal of granite, covered with ivy and surrounded by the whispering, or sighing, or creaking and cracking trees that he loved, and facing the setting sun, and alone in a secluded corner, just the place he would have chosen, there are the head and shoulders of the real Bismarck. Here for once he has escaped the fussy attentions of the artistry that he detested. Lehnbach, who painted Bismarck so many scores of times, never gave him the color that his face kept all through life, and with the exception of this bust, of the scores of Bismarck memorials one sees all commiserate the lack of artist ability; they do not commemorate Bismarck. If this is what they do to the greatest man in their history, what is to be expected elsewhere? What has poor Joachim Friedrich done that he should pose forever in the Sieges Allee as an intoxicated hitching-post? What, indeed, have his companions done that they should stand in two rows there, studies in contortion, with a gilded Russian dancer with wings at one end of their line, and a woodeny Roland at the other? But there they are, simpering a paltry patriotism, insipid as history and ridiculous as art. What has become of Lessing, and Winckelmann, and Goethe, and their teachings? Is this the price that a nation must pay for its industrial progress?

The German, with all his boasting about the "centre of culture," has not discovered that the beauty of antiquity is the expression of those virtues which were useful at the time of Theseus, as Stendhal rightly tells us. Individual force, which was everything of old, amounts to almost nothing in our modern civilization. The monk who invented gunpowder modified sculpture; strength is only necessary now among subalterns. No one thinks of asking whether Frederick the Great and Napoleon were good swordsmen. The strength we admire, is the strength of Napoleon advancing alone upon the First Battalion of the royal troops near Lake Loffrey in March, 1815; that is strength of soul. The moral qualities with which we are concerned are no longer the same as in the days of the Greeks. Before this cockney sculpture was planned, there should have been a closer study of the history and philosophy of art in Berlin.

It is true that we in America are living in a glass house to some extent in these matters, but where in all Germany is there any modern sculpture to compare with our Nathan Hale, our Minute Man, and that most spirited bit of modern plastic art in all the world, the Shaw Monument in Boston? You cannot stand in front of it without keeping time, and here lips of bronze sing the song of patriotism till your heart thumps, and you are ready to throw up your hat as the splendid young figure and his negro soldiers march by -- and they do march by! It is almost a consolation for what Boston has done to that gallant soldier and humble servant of God, that modest gentleman, Phillips Brooks. In a statue to him they have travestied the virtues he expounded, slain the ideal of the Christ he preached, theatricalized the least theatrical of men, and placed this piece of mortifying misunderstanding in bronze under the very eaves of the house that grew out of his simple eloquence. There is in Leipsic a similar misdemeanor in a statue of Beethoven. He sits, naked to the waist, in a bronze chair, with a sort of bath-towel drapery of colored marble about his legs, and an eagle in front of him. He has a chauffeurish expression of anxious futility, as though he were about to run over the eagle.

Men are without great dreams in these days, and art is elaborate and fussy and self-conscious. The technical part of the work is predominant. One sees the artist holding up a mirror to himself as he works. Pygmalion congratulates the statue upon the fact that he carved it, instead of being lost in the love of creating. It is as though a lover should sing of himself instead of singing of his lady. The subtle poison of self-advertisement has crept in, and peers like a satyr from the picture and from the statue. Even the most prominent name in German music at this writing is that of a man who is notorious as an expert salesman of symphonic sensationalism.

Though the streets are so well kept, the buildings in these miles of new streets are flimsy-looking, and evidently the work of the speculative builder. The more pretentious buildings ape a kind of Nuremberg Renaissance style, and are as effective as a castle made of cardboard. This does not imply that there are not simple and solid buildings in Berlin and, in the case of the new library and a score of other buildings, worthy architecture; but the general impression is one of haste multiplied by plaster.

The whole city blossoms with statuary, like a cosmopolitan 'Arriet who cannot get enough flowers and feathers on her Sunday hat. A certain comic anthropomorphism is to be seen, even on the balustrades of the castle, where the good Emperor William is posed as Jupiter, the Empress Augusta as Juno, Emperor Frederick as Mars, and his wife as Minerva! On the facades of houses, on the bridges, on the roofs of apartment houses, on the hotels even, and scattered throughout the public gardens, are scores of statues, and they are for the most part what hastily ordered, swiftly completed art, born of the dollar instead of the pain and travail of love and imagination, must always be.

A certain literary snob taken to task by Doctor Parr for pronouncing the one-time capital of Egypt "Alexandria," with the accent on the long i, quoted the authority of Doctor Bentley. "Doctor Bentley and I," replied Doctor Parr, "may call it 'Alexandria,' but I should advise you to call it 'Alexandria.'" It was all very well for the Medici, to ornament their cities and their homes with the fruit of the great artistic springtime of the world, but I should strongly advise the Berliners to pronounce it "Alexandria" for some years to come. No matter how fervid the lover, nor how possessed he may be by his mistress, he cannot turn out every day, even,

"A halting sonnet of his own poor brain, Fashion'd to Beatrice."

All this pretentious over-ornamentation is cosmeticism, the powder and paint of the vulgarian striving to conceal by a futile advertisement her lack of refinement. Paris was teaching the world when there was no capital in Germany; London has been a commercial centre for a thousand years, and Oxford was a hundred years old before even the University of Prague, the first in Germany, was founded by Charles IV in 1348. You may like or dislike these cities, but, at any rate, they have a bouquet; Berlin has none.

When Germany deals with the inanimate and amenable factors of life, she brings the machinery of modern civilization well-nigh to the point of perfection. As a municipal and national housewife she has no equal, none. But art has nothing to do with brooms and dust-pans, and human nature is woven of surprises and emergencies, and what then? An interesting example in the streets of Berlin is the difference between the perfection of the street-cleaning, which deals with the inanimate and with accurately calculable factors, and the governing of the street traffic. Horses and men and motor-driven vehicles are not as dependable as blocks of pavement. When the traffic in the Berlin streets grows to the proportions of London, Paris, and New York, one wonders what will happen. Nowhere are there such broad, well-kept streets in which the traffic is so awkwardly handled.

The police are all, and must be, indeed, noncommissioned officers of the army, of nine years service, and not over thirty-five years of age. They are armed with swords and pistols by night, and in the rougher parts of the town with the same weapons by day as well. After ten years service they are entitled to a pension of twenty-sixtieths of their pay, with an increase of one-sixtieth for each further year of service. They are not under the city, but under state control, and the chief of police is a man of distinction, nearly always a nobleman, and nominated by, and in every case approved by, the Emperor. In Berlin he is appointed by the King of Prussia. He is a man of such standing that he may be promoted to cabinet rank. The men are well-turned out, of heavy build, very courteous to strangers, so far as my experience can speak for them, and quiet and self-controlled. Under the police president are one colonel of police, receiving from 6,000 to 8,500 marks, according to his length of service; 3 majors, receiving from 5,400 to 6,600 marks; 20 captains, receiving from 4,200 to 5,400 marks; 156 lieutenants, receiving from 3,000 to 4,500 marks; 450 sergeants, receiving from 1,650 to 2,300 marks; and 5,382 patrolmen, receiving from 1,400 to 2,100 marks. There are also some 300 mounted police, receiving from 1,400 to 2,600 marks. The colonel, majors, and captains receive 1,300 marks additional, and the lieutenants 800 marks additional, for house rent. The mounted police are well-horsed, but it is no slight to them to say, however, that their horses are not so well trained and well mannered, nor the men such skilful horsemen, as those of our mounted squad in New York, who, man for man and horse for horse, are probably unequalled anywhere else in the world.

The demand for these non-commissioned officers of nine years of army discipline, who cannot be called upon to serve in the army again, has grown with the growth of the great city, with its need of porters, watchmen, and the like, and so valuable are their services deemed that the present police force of Berlin is short of its proper number by some seven hundred men.

The examination of those about to become policemen extends over four weeks, and includes every detail of the multiplicity of duties, which ranges from the protection of the public from crime, down to tracking down truants from school, and the regulation of the books of the maid-servant class. The policeman who aspires to the rank of sergeant undergoes a still more rigorous examination, extending over twenty weeks of preparation, during which time he studies -- note this list, ye "young barbarians all at play," German, rhetoric, writing, arithmetic, common fractions, geography, history, especially the history of the House of Hohenzollern from the time of the margraves to the present time (!), political divisions of the earth, especially of Prussia and Germany, the essential features of the constitution of the Prussian Kingdom and German Empire, the organization and working of the various state authorities in Prussia and Germany, elementary methods of disinfection, common veterinary remedies, the police law as applicable to innumerable matters from the treatment of the drunk, blind, and lame, to evidences of murder, and the press law. The man who passes such an examination would be more than qualified to take a degree, at one of our minor colleges, if he knew English and the classics were not required, and could well afford to sniff disdainfully at the pelting shower of honorary degrees of Doctor of Divinity, which descend from the commencement platforms of our more girlish intellectual factories of orthodoxy.

The cost of the police in Berlin in 1880 was 2,494,722 marks; in 1890, 3,007,879 marks; in 1900, 6,065,975 marks; and in 1910, 8,708,165 marks.