During a literary evening, at which the King and the Queen, the leaders of official society of Dresden, and all the participants of the Congress were present, J. Grand-Carteret, in an address on “German Women as judged by the French,” said these words:
“Spiritually the German woman has been presented to us by Luther and Johann Fischart, later by Goethe and Schiller, until at last, like an incarnation of the human conscience she stands before us as the apostle of peace and civilization, and with the Baroness von Suttner utters the cry which long since ought to have found an echo in the heart of every mother, Die Waffen nieder!”
At the banquet in Leipzig, Grand-Carteret returned to the same theme in his toast:
“... I drink to the book, that is to say, to the general expansion of humane thought.
“To the book that had its origin in Germany, en pleine nuit armée, to the book born on crossroads and to-day casting a light on the highway of the future; to the book which has arisen against the sword....
“I drink to the feminine Volapük of the future, which all by itself, if men continue to want to kill one another, will permit the women of all countries to utter the cry, Die Waffen nieder! For the first time in thirty-five years we have felt the soul of the people here vibrating. I drink to that soul to-day!”
At the same banquet Émile Chasles, Inspector General of Public Instruction in France, delivered a speech which closed with these words: “I salute the spirit of internationalism, which rises above the quarrels of men and governs nations with the aim of drawing them together.”
We made an excursion to Prague, the city of my birth. The Concordia Union had invited me to deliver a lecture. Before this affair, which took place at eight o’clock in the evening in the mirror room of the Deutsches Haus, we were invited to dinner at Professor Jodl’s. The famous philosopher—a friend of my friend Carneri—was then a docent in the University of Prague, while he is now a light in our Vienna Hochschule. It was a pleasant little meal, with few but choice guests. The professor’s young wife, Margarete, was a fascinating housewife, who had already won my heart, because I knew her as the liberal-minded translator of Olive Schreiner’s stories. This same Olive Schreiner, in her “Peter Halket,” has said a wonderful thing,—a thing that expresses beautifully my profoundest belief: “With the rising and setting of the sun, with the revolving flight of the planets, our fellowship grows and grows.... The earth is ours.”
Since I was to speak in a literary union, I had chosen the subject of peace literature, and as I was in Bohemia, I cited also Bohemian authors,—the two great poets Vrchlicky and Swatopluck Czech. In my absolute innocence I had no suspicion of the fact that it was something unheard of in Prague, so torn by national jealousies, to praise Czech geniuses in the Deutsches Haus. For a moment a certain feeling of restraint seems to have manifested itself in the hall, but when the splendid verses of the two princes of Czech poetry—paraphrased rather than translated into German by Friedrich Adler—rang out, the German auditors were disarmed and the ill-humor passed off. There is no field which would be better adapted to bringing about reconciliation between two contending factions than the field of supernational pacification.
At the banquet which followed the lecture I made the acquaintance of many interesting people, and particularly of the theatrical manager Angelo Neumann, and his wife, Johanna Buska. The latter was very much after the style of Sarah Bernhardt,—so delicate, so thin, so golden-voiced, so exquisitely elegant, and so many-sided in her art. There is no leading part in the repertory, from the naïve to the heroic, the sentimental, and the coquettish, which la Busca had not played and made the most of. That evening she recited a poem which Friedrich Adler had composed as a rejoinder to Carducci’s “Ode to War.”