A People Peculiar or Pagan?
CONCURRENT with all these lively happenings Kirtley had cultivated the acquaintance of Miles Anderson. The two became very friendly. Gard had been so rudely treated by the great German professor in the lecture room that he was quite willing to conclude he could learn from the journalist far more of what he was interested in than from a Teuton university pulpit.
Anderson, like himself, had entered Germany ignorant of the nation and its folk, and fully disposed to find almost everything worthy the highest praise. The elder's vivid convictions, his caustic reflections, were honestly born of what he had seen and heard in different parts of the land, not of what the Germans said of themselves in books, as was the customary rule. By virtue of his calling he had superior opportunities for observation. He was therefore not a negligible imparter of information.
Gard usually found him in a high-ceilinged, majestic chamber in a typical Dresden pension, frequented, however, by only three or four boarders. It was a little like a home for Anderson, even if gloomily august in the German style. Dark woodwork, severely waxed floors on which Gard often slipped violently, huge doors, huge chairs and tables—everything large to suit the national taste for big Teuton gods and supermen. Long, thick stuffs concealed the passageways and windows and contributed to the absence of cheering light—that sign and symbol of the Gothic environment and disposition.
The first question the old man usually plumped was:
"How's your German going?"
"Slowly. Pegging along. I suppose it's because I don't get up much of a liking for it. There's something about it that goes against my grain."
And then Anderson would be off for that particular session. On one early occasion he had said, jestingly:
"I guess you will have to fall back upon the natural method."
"What's that?" had come back the innocent interrogatory.
"Take a sweetheart. She will teach you more useful German in a month than you can learn from the pedagogues in a year. Right here in the best parts of Dresden are streets where these ladies can be rented with their rooms per week or per month cheap, with all the German you want thrown in. Are we to assume it is by this system that the German universities are able to turn out what the world believes are the best students?"
"I never heard anything about that back home," confessed Kirtley, always letting the bars down to encourage a monologue.
"Of course not. That would be to interfere with our American readiness to admit German transcendence."
"But how do you harmonize the frank state of morals here with the fact that the Germans are the great religious authorities? How have they established such a reputation abroad for the morality that is assumed to go with Protestantism?"
"That is simple enough. First, by claiming that the French are degenerate. Second, by retaining religion with its morals as an adjunct of an unmoral and authoritative militarism. Religion is to them a topic for expert investigation and study just as is militarism or any natural product—oil, coal, the chemical elements, anything. The Teuton specialist goes at it as at any objective science. His analytical and synthetic processes simply explore in his own subterranean caverns apropos of theology. He has taken over the Bible as the Kaiser has taken over Jerusalem. Wilhelm is becoming the Cerberus of Christianity—sole and surly guardian of its meanings and influence.
"But you never see any men in these German churches, do you? They don't go to church. Nor the women very much. You see old women and children at worship. This is because the German has always typically worshipped Gott on the battlefield or in the military camps—out in the open. The German God is an out-of-doors God and is distinctively associated with the thought of war. God within walls, within a church, is a deity of good will on earth. He is a deity of peace. Naturally this does not appeal to the Goth. He don't pay much lively attention to God unless there's a war on hand or in immediate prospect. Then he begins to shout and 'holler' at Him to attract His attention, because He is so far off from Germany."
Gard laughed. Then, after a moment, he asked, almost shyly,
"If German morals and religion have little necessary relation—little actual relation—how about love?"
"The German would never have known of love if he had not heard it talked of," replied Anderson with responsive geniality, pleased with Kirtley's amused face. "Generally an excess of a moral religion destroys love, just as the absence of it in the past has been apt to go with an indecent and widespread sensuality. So we have, what is called, the beastliness in the Teuton. For he has to go, as you know, to an extreme in things—logical extreme. This is why he is only partly human, from our standpoint. The human is so constructed that he can't stand excess in any direction very long and remain human. Everything has to be diluted, alloyed, temporized for him or it is not bearable—it will not work successfully.
"We see this in medicine—conspicuously. Medicines pure from the hands of Mother Nature are too strong, too rank in their purity, to be properly effective. They have to be weakened, reduced, compounded with inferior elements, to be of service. So with Truth. People are always begging for Truth, seeking the ultimate Truth, as if that would bring the perfect state of happiness. This is childlike ignorance. Truth in its pure, perfect condition would simply kill them—like unadulterated drugs. They could not stand its blinding light. They could not stand the shock. Like the rest—to change the metaphor—it has to be made up so largely of shoddy to wear well or wear at all.
"Love, the same way. When the world talks of love so much, it means only friendliness—you like me and I like you—you do something kind for me and I will do something kind for you. Love in its alloyed form of friendship is its efficacious shape for universal use. Pure love, which poor humanity is always reaching out its hands for, simply—as George Sand said—simply tears people to pieces without doing them any good. The result is tragedy, despair, wrecked lives, death before one's time. We see that everywhere depicted in fiction, in the drama, at the opera.
"So the German has kept love in a practical state—for him—by associating it so prominently with his procreative capacities. It is a case of Mars and Venus producing fighting men."
"If the German is not governed by love as an ideal," put in Gard, "how is it then that he is so sentimental? People always assure us that Fritz must be really at bottom as affectionate, tender, emotional, as anyone because he is so sentimental."
"Yes, that's the old conundrum that the enthusiasts over everything German confuse one with. The German's fondness—gobbling-down fondness—for food does not prove that he is a gourmet. The Teuton sentimentality is like mush. It's principally for children. As Fritz keeps a good deal of his childishness about him as he grows up, he keeps this taste for mush. It takes the place of sentiment which is of the proper mental pabulum for enlightened adults. You can't write poetry about mush. So the Germans have little poetry worth talking about. Where their emotional side ought to be, they are slightly developed beyond the youthful stage of sentimentalism. Their abortive conception of love, their treatment of their women and children—other things—all account for this naturally enough. One is rather forced, in spite of himself, to take the Germans at either of two extremes in order to understand them candidly—mushiness or iron."