Part 19

Let us spend a day with them. It is Saturday. We get up rather late, having turned in late after the Commers of Friday, when the men who are to fight the next day were drunk to, sung to, and wished good fortune on the morrow, and sent home early. The trees are turning green at Bonn, the shrubs are feeling the air with hesitating blossoms, you walk out into the sunshine as gay as a lark, for the champagne and the beer of the night before were good, and you sang away the fumes of alcohol before you went to bed. There was much laughter, and a speech or two of welcome for the guest, responded to at 1 A. M. in German, French, English, and gestures with a beer-mug, and punctuated with the appreciative comments of the company.

It was a time to slough off twenty years or so and let Adam have his chance, and the company was of gentlemen who sympathize with and understand the "Alter Herr," and are only too delighted if he will let the springs of youth bubble and sparkle for them, and glad to encourage him to return to reminiscences of his prowess in love and war, and ready to pledge him in bumper after bumper success in the days to come. You might think it a carouse. Far from it.

The ceremony is presided over by a stern young gentleman, who never for a moment allows any member of the company to get out of hand, and who, when a speech is to be made, makes it with grace and complete ease of manner. Indeed, these young fellows surprise one with their easy mastery of the art of speech-making. Even the spokesman for the Fuechse, or younger students, at the lower end of the table, rises and pledges himself and his companions in a few graceful words, with certain sly references to the possibility that the guest may not have lost his appreciation of the charms of German womankind, which the guest in question here and now, and frankly admits; but not a word of coarseness, not a hint that totters on the brink of an indiscretion, and what higher praise can one give to speech-making on such an occasion!

My particular host and introducer to his old corps is youngest of all, and though seemingly as lavish in his potations as any one, sings his way home with me, head as clear, legs as steady, eyes as bright, as though it were 10 A. M. and not 2 A. M., and as though I had not seemed to see his face during most of the evening through the bottom of a beer-mug.

That was the night before. The next morning we stroll over to the room where the Schlaeger contests are to take place. It is packed with students in their different-colored caps. Beer there is, of course, but no smoking allowed till the bouts are over.

I go down to see the men dressing for the fray. They strip to the waist, put on a loose half-shirt half-jacket of cotton stuff, then a heavily padded half-jerkin that covers them completely from chin to knee. The throat is wrapped round and round with heavy silk bandages. The right arm and hand are guarded with a glove and a heavily padded leather sleeve; all these impervious to any sword blow. The eyes are guarded with steel spectacle frames fitted with thick glass. Nothing is exposed but the face and the top of the head. The exposed parts are washed with antiseptics, as are also the swords, repeatedly during the bout. The sword, hilt and blade together, measures one hundred and five centimetres. There is a heavy, well-guarded hilt, and a pliable blade with a square end, sharp as a razor on both edges for some six inches from the end.

The position in the sword-play is to face squarely one's opponent, the sword hand well over the head with the blade held down over the left shoulder. The distance between the combatants is measured by placing the swords between them lengthwise, each one with his chest against the hilt of his own weapon, and this marks the proper distance between them. When they are brought in and face one another, the umpire, with a bow, explains the situation. The two seconds with swords crouch each beside his man, ready to throw up the swords and stop the fighting between each bout. Two other men stand ready to hold the rather heavily weighted sword arm of their comrade on the shoulder during the pauses. Two others with cotton dipped in an antiseptic preparation keep the points of the swords clean. Still another official keeps a record in a book, of each cut or scratch, the length of time, the number of bouts, and the result. The doctor decides when a wound is bad enough to close the contest.

At the word "Los!" the blades sing and whistle in the air, the work being done almost wholly with the wrist, some four blows are exchanged, there is a pause, then at it again, till the allotted number of bouts are over, or one or the other has been cut to the point where the doctor decides that there shall be no more. We follow them downstairs again, where, after being carefully washed, the combatants are seated in a chair one after the other, their friends crowd around and count the stitches as the surgeon works, and comment upon what particular twist of the wrist produced such and such a gash.

I have seen scores of these contests, and during the last year as many as a dozen or more. There is no record of any one ever having been seriously injured; indeed, I doubt if there are not more men injured by too much beer than too much sword-play.

It is perhaps expected that the foot-ball player should sneer at bull- fighting; the boxer at fencing; the rider to hounds at these Schlaeger bouts; and that we game-players should say contemptuous things of the contests of our neighbors. Personally, if one could eliminate the horse from the contest, I go so far as to believe that even bull-fighting is better than no game at all. As for these Schlaeger contests, they seem to me no more brutal than our own foot-ball, which is only brutal to the shivering crowd of the too tender who have never played it, and not so dangerous as polo or pig-sticking, and a thousand times better than no contest at all.

I am not of those who believe that the human body and that human life are the most precious and valuable things in the world. They are only servants of the courageous hearts and pure souls that ought to be their masters. Without training, without obedience, without the instant willingness to sacrifice themselves for their masters, the human body and human life are contemptible and unworthy. I claim that it braces the mind to expose the body; that an education in the prepared emergencies of games and sport, is the best training for the unprepared emergencies with which life is strewn.

The most cruel people I have ever known were gentle enough physically, but they were hard and sour in their social relations, and often enough called "good" by their fellows. The disappointments, losses, sorrows, defeats, of each one of us, trouble, even though imperceptibly, the waters of life that we all must drink of; and to ignore or to rejoice at these misfortunes is only muddying what we ourselves must drink. I believe the hardening of the body goes some way toward softening the heart and cleansing the soul, and toward fitting a man with that cheerful charity that supplies the oil of intercourse in a creaking world of rival interests.

To see a youth swinging a sword at his fellow's face with delighted energy; to see a man riding off vigorously at polo; to see a man hard at it with the gloves on; to see another flinging himself and his horse over a wall or across a ditch; to see a man taking his nerves in hand, to make a two-yard put for a half, when he is one down and two to play; to see these things without seeing that -- perhaps often enough in a muddy sort of way -- the soul is making a slave of the body, that courage is mastering cowardice, that in an elementary way the youth is learning how to give himself generously when some great emergency calls upon him to give his life for an ideal, a tradition, a duty, is to see nothing but brutality, I admit. Who does not know that the Carthaginians at Cannae were one thing, the Carthaginians at Capua another! I have therefore no acidulous effeminacy to pour upon these German Schlaeger bouts. I prefer other forms of exercise, but I am a hardened believer in the manhood bred of contests, and though their ways are not my ways, I prefer a world of slashed faces to a world of soft ones.

Prosit, gentlemen! Better your world than the world of Semitic haggling and exchange; of caution and smoothness; of the disasters born of daintiness; of sliding over the ship's side in women's clothes to live, when it was a moral duty to be drowned. Better your world than any such worlds as those, for

"If one should dream that such a world began In some slow devil's heart that hated man, Who should deny it?"

Milton held that "a complete and generous education fits a man to perform justly, skilfully, and magnanimously all the offices, both private and public, of peace and war." It is my opinion that the Schlaeger has its part to play in this matter of education. A mind trained to the keenness of a razor's edge, but without a sound body controlled by a steel will, is of small account in the world. The whole aim of education is, after all, to make a man independent, to make the intelligence reach out in keen quest of its object, and at its own and not at another's bidding. An education is intended to make a man his own master, and so far as any man is not his own master, in just so far is he uneducated. What he knows, or does not know, of books does not alter the fact.

Much of the pharisaism and priggishness on the subject of education arises from the fact that the world is divided into two camps as regards knowledge: those who believe that the astronomer alone knows the stars, and those who believe that he knows them best who sleeps in the open beneath them. In reality, neither type of mind is complete without the other.

To turn from any theoretical discussion of the subject, it remains to be said that Germany has trained her whole population into the best working team in the world. Without the natural advantages of either England or America she has become the rival of both. Her superior mental training has enabled her to wrest wealth from by-products, and she saves and grows rich on what America wastes. Whether Germany has succeeded in giving the ply of character to her youth, as she folds them in her educational factories, I sometimes doubt. That she has not made them independent and ready to grapple with new situations, and strange peoples, and swift emergencies, their own past and present history shows.

It is a very strenuous and economical existence, however, for everybody, and it requires a politically tame population to be thus driven. The dangerous geographical situation of Germany, ringed round by enemies, has made submission to hard work, and to an iron autocratic government necessary. To be a nation at all it was necessary to obey and to submit, to sacrifice and to save. These things they have been taught as have no other European people. Greater wealth, increased power, a larger role in the world, are bringing new problems. Education thus far has been in the direction of fitting each one into his place in a great machine, and less attention has been paid to the development of that elasticity of mind which makes for independence; but men educate themselves into independence, and that time is coming swiftly for Germany.

"Also he hath set the world in their heart," and one wonders what this population, hitherto so amenable, so economical, and so little worldly, will do with this new world. The temptations of wealth, the sirens of luxury, the opportunities for amusement and dissipation, are all to the fore in the Germany of to-day as they were certainly not twenty-five years ago. Ulysses, alas, does not bind himself to the mast very tightly as he passes these enchanted isles of modern luxury. "The land of damned professors" has learned its lessons from those same professors so well, that it is now ready to take a postgraduate course in world politics; and as I said in the beginning, some of our friends are putting the word "damned" in other parts of this, and other sentences, when they describe the rival prowess and progress of the Germans.

VII THE DISTAFF SIDE

Madame Necker writes of women: "Les femmes tiennent la place de ces lagers duvets qu'on introduit dans les caisses de porcelaine; on n'y fait point d'attention, mais si on les retire, tout se brise."

When one sees women and dogs harnessed together dragging carts about the streets; when one sees women doing the lighter work of sweeping up leaves and collecting rubbish in the forests and on the larger estates; doing the gardening work in Saxony and other places; when one sees them by the hundreds working bare-legged in the beet-fields in Silesia and elsewhere throughout Germany; when one reads "Viele Weiber sind gut weil sie nicht wissen wie man es machen muss um boese zu sein," and "Der Mann nach Freiheit strebt, das Weib nach Sitte," two phrases from the German classics, Lessing and Goethe; when one recalls the shameless carelessness of Goethe's treatment of all women; of how his love-poems were sometimes sent by the same mail to the lady and to the press; and the unrestrained worship of Goethe by the German women of his day; when one sees time and time again all over Germany the women shouldered into the street while the men keep to the sidewalk; when one sees in the streets, railway carriages, and other public conveyances, the insulting staring to which every woman is subjected if she have a trace of good looks, one realizes that at any rate Madame Necker was not writing of German women. Let me add that so far as the great Goethe is concerned, it is by no Puritan yard-stick that I am measuring him, but by the German's own high standard which despises any mating of true sentiment with commercialism. "Beatus ille qui procul negotiis," certainly applies to one's affairs of the heart.

In the gallery at Dresden, where the loveliest mother's face in all the world shines down upon you from Raphael's canvas like a benediction, there is a small picture by Rubens, "The Judgment of Paris." The three goddesses--induitur formosa est; exuitur ipsa forma est --have taken literally the compliment paid to a certain beautiful customer by a renowned French dressmaker: "Un rien et madame est habillee!" They are coquettishly revealing their claims to the Eve-bitten fruit which Paris holds in his hand. Paris and his friend are in the most nonchalant of attitudes. They could not be more indifferent, or more superior in appearance, were they dandies judging the class for costermonger's donkeys at a provincial horse-show. The three most beautiful women in the world are squirming and posturing for praise, and a decision, before two as sophisticated and self-satisfied men as one will ever see on canvas or off it.

The same subject is treated by a man of the same breed, but of a later day, named Feuerbach, and his picture hangs, I think, in Breslau. Here again the supersuperiority of the male is portrayed.

In the Church of Saint Sebaldus at Nuremberg, there is a delightful mural painting which makes one merry even to recall it. The subject is the Garden of Eden. Adam and Eve are being lectured by an elderly man in flowing robes with a long white beard. His beard alone would more than supply Adam and Eve with the covering they lack. In an easy attitude, with neither haste nor anxiety, he is pointing out to them the error of their ways. He is as detached in manner as though he were Professor Wundt, lecturing to us at Leipsic on the fourth dimension of space. Adam is somewhat dejected and reclines upon the ground. Eve, unabashed, with nothing on but the apple which she is munching, is evidently in a reckless mood. She looks like a child of fifteen, with her hair down her back; the defiance of her attitude is that of a naughty little girl. The world-old problem is under discussion, but with an air of good humor and cheerfulness on the part of the lecturer, as though there were still time in the world, as though hurry were an undiscovered human attribute, as though possibly the world would still go on even if the problem were left unsolved, and this first leafy parliament adjourned sine die.

They were so much wiser than are we! They knew then that there would be other sessions of congress, and that it was not necessary to decide everything on that spring day of the year One. But here again in this picture it is the male attitude toward the woman that is of chief interest. Adam is plainly bored. What if the woman has broken into the sanctuary of knowledge, she will only be the bigger fool, he seems to say. As for the professor in the red robes, his easy, patronizing manner is indicative enough of his mental top-loftiness toward the woman question. You can almost hear him say as he strokes his beard: "Kueche, Kinder, Kirche!"

From the fields of Silesia, where the beet industry is possible only because there are hundreds of bare-legged girls and women to single the beets, a process not possible by machinery, at a wage of from twenty-five to thirty cents a day, to these German paintings with their illustrations of the spiritual and moral attitude of the German man toward the German woman, one sees everywhere and among practically all classes an attitude of condescension toward women among the polite and polished; an attitude of carelessness bordering on contempt among the rude. Their attitude is like that of the Jews who cry in their synagogues, "Thank God for not having made me a woman!"

One can judge, not incorrectly, of the status of women in a country by the manners and habits of the men, entirely dissociated from their relations to women. When one sees men equipped with small mirrors and small brushes and combs, which they use in all sorts of public places, even in the streets, in the street-cars, in omnibuses, and in the theatres; when one opens the door to a knock to find a gentleman, a small mirror in one hand and a tiny brush in the other, preparing himself for his entrance into your hotel sitting-room; you are bound to think that these persons are in the childhood days of personal hygiene, as it cannot be denied that they are, but also that their women folk must be still in the Eryops age of social sophistication, not to put a stop to such bucolic methods of grooming. Even though the Eryops is a gigantic tadpole, a hundred times older than the oldest remains of man, this is hardly an exaggeration.

In no other country in the cultured group of nations is the animal man so naively vain, so deliciously self-conscious, so untrained in the ways of the polite world, so serenely oblivious, not merely of the rights of women but of the simple courtesy of the strong to the weak. It is the only country I have visited where the hands of the men are better cared for than the hands of the women; and this is not a pleasant commentary upon the question of who does the rough work, and who has the vanity and who the leisure for a meticulous toilet. One must not forget that regular and systematic cleansing of the person is a very modern fashion. As late as the early part of the nineteenth century, tooth-brushes were not allowed in certain French convents, being looked upon as a luxury. Cleanliness was not very common a century and a half ago in any country. In 1770 the publication of Monsieur Perrel's "Pogonotomie, ou 1'Art d'apprendre a se raser soi-meme," created a sensation among fashionable people, and enthusiasts studied self-shaving. The author of "Lois de la Galanterie" in 1640 writes: "Every day one should take pains to wash one's hands, and one should also wash one's face almost as often!"

The copious streams of hot and cold water, turned into a porcelain tub at any time of the day or night; the brushes, and soaps, and towels, and toilet waters, and powders of our day were quite unknown to our not far-off ancestors. The oft-repeated and minute ablutions of our day are almost as modern as bicycles, and not as ancient as the railways. The Germans are only a little behind the rest of us in this soap and water cult, that is all.

In the streets and public conveyances of the cities, in the beer-gardens and restaurants in the country, in the summer and winter resorts from the Baltic to the Black Forest, from the Rhine to Bohemia, it is ever the same. They seat themselves at table first, and have their napkins hanging below their Adam's apples before their women are in their chairs; hundreds of times have I seen their women arrive at table after they were seated, not a dozen times have I seen their masters rise to receive them; their preference for the inside of the sidewalk is practically universal; even officers in uniform, but this is of rare occurrence, will take their places in a railway carriage, all of them smoking, where two ladies are sitting, and wait till requested before throwing their cigars away, and what cigars! and then by smiles and innuendoes make the ladies so uncomfortable that they are driven from the carriage. Even eleven hundred years ago the German woman had rather a rough time of it. Charlemagne had nine wives, but he seems to have been unduly uxorious or unwearying in his infatuations. He made the wife travel with him, and all nine of them died, worn out by travel and hardship. There is a constancy of companionship which is deadly.

The inconveniences and discomfort of going about alone, for ladies in Germany, I have heard not from a dozen, but in a chorus from German ladies themselves. I am reciting no grievances of my compatriots, for I have seen next to nothing of Americans for a year or more, and I have no personal complaints, for these soft adventurers scent danger quickly, and give the masters of the world, whether male or female, a wide berth.