It is one o’clock, and you can’t do better than sit down to the table d’hôte: call it breakfast, if your prejudices run high, and take your place. I have supposed you at ‘Die Sterne’ (The Star), in the little square of the town; and, certes, you might be less comfortably housed. The cuisine is excellent, both French and German, and the wines delicious. The company at first blush might induce you to step back, under the impression that you had mistaken the salon, and accidentally fallen upon a military mess. They are nearly all officers of the cavalry regiments garrisoned at Bonn, well-looking and well-dressed fellows, stout, bronzed, and soldierlike, and wearing their moustaches like men who felt hair on the upper lip to be a birthright. If a little too noisy and uproarious at table, it proceeds not from any quarrelsome spirit: the fault, in a great measure, lies with the language. German, except spoken by a Saxon madchen, invariably suggests the idea of a row to an uninterested bystander; and if Goethe himself were to recite his ballads before an English audience, I’d venture long odds they’d accuse him of blasphemy. Welsh and Irish are soft zephyrs compared to it.
A stray Herr Baron or two, large, portly, responsible-looking men, with cordons at their button-holes, and pipe-sticks projecting from their breast-pockets, and a sprinkling of students of the higher class—it is too dear for the others—make up the party. Of course, there are English; but my present business is not with them.
By the time you have arrived at the ‘Rae-braten, with capers’—which on a fair average, taken in the months of spring and summer, may be after about an hour and a half’s diligent performance—you’ll have more time to survey the party, who by this time are clinking their glasses, and drinking hospitably to one another in champagne; for there is always some newly returned comrade to be feted, or a colonel’s birthday or a battle, a poet or some sentimentalism about the Rhine or the Fatherland, to be celebrated. Happy, joyous spirits, removed equally from the contemplation of vast wealth or ignominious poverty! The equality so much talked of in France is really felt in Germany; and however the exclusives of Berlin and Vienna, or the still more exalted coteries of Baden or Darmstadt, rave of the fourteen quarterings which give the entrée to their salons, the nation has no sympathy with these follies. The unaffected, simple-minded, primitive German has no thought of assuming an air of distance to one his inferior in rank; and I have myself seen a sovereign prince take his place at table d’hôte beside the landlord, and hobnob with him cordially during dinner.
I do not mean to say that the German has no respect for rank; on the contrary, none more than he looks up to aristocracy, and reveres its privileges; but he does so from its association with the greatness of the Fatherland. The great names of his nobles recall those of the heroes and sages of whom the traditions of the country bear record; they are the watchwords of German liberty or German glory; they are the monuments of which he feels proudest. His reverence for their descendants is not tinged with any vulgar desire to be thought their equal or their associate; far from it, he has no such yearnings. His own position could never be affected by anything in theirs. The skipper of the fishing-craft might join convoy with the great fleet, but he knows that he only commands a shallop after all.
This, be it remarked, is a very different feeling from what we occasionally see nearer home. I have seen a good deal of student-life in Germany, and never witnessed anything approaching that process so significantly termed ‘tuft-hunting’ with us. Perhaps it may be alleged in answer that rank and riches, so generally allied in this country, are not so there; and that consequently much of what the world deems the prestige of condition is wanting to create that respect. Doubtless this is, to a certain extent, true; but I have seen the descendants of the most distinguished houses in Germany mixing with the students of a very humble walk on terms the most agreeable and familiar, assuming nothing themselves, and certainly receiving no marks of peculiar favour or deference from their companions. When one knows something of German character, this does not surprise one. As a people, highly imaginative and poetic in temperament, dreamy and contemplative, falling back rather on the past than facing the future, they are infinitely more assailable by souvenirs than promises; and in this wise the ancient fame of a Hohenstauffen has a far firmer hold on the attachment of a Prussian than the hopes he may conceive from his successor. It was by recalling to the German youth the former glories of the Fatherland, that the beautiful queen of that country revived the drooping spirit of the nation. It was over the tomb of the Great Frederick that the monarch swore to his alliance with Alexander against the invading legions of France. The songs of Uhland and Goethe, the lyrics of Burger and Korner, have their source and spirit in the heartfelt patriotism of the people. The great features of the land, and the more striking traits of national character, are inextricably woven in their writings, as if allied to each other; and the Rhine and the male energy of German blood, their native mountains and their native virtues, are made to reciprocate with one another; and thus the eternal landmarks of Germany are consecrated as the altars of its faithfulness and its truth.
The students are a means of perpetuating these notions. The young German is essentially romantic. A poet and a patriot, his dreams are of the greatness of his Fatherland, of its high mission among the nations of Europe; and however he may exaggerate the claims of his country or overrate his own efforts in her cause, his devotion is a noble one; and when sobered down by experience and years, it gives to Germany that race of faithful and high-souled people, the best guardians of her liberty and the most attached defenders of her soil.
A great deal of mauvaise plaisanterie has been expended by French and English authors on the subject of the German student. The theme was perhaps an inviting one. Certainly nothing was easier than to ridicule absurdities in their manner and extravagances in their costume—their long pipes and their long beards, their long skirts and long boots and long sabres, their love of beer and their law-code of honour. Russell, in his little work on Germany—in many respects the only English book worth reading on that country—has been most unjustly severe upon them. As to French authors, one never expects truth from them, except it slip out unconsciously in a work of fiction. Still, they have displayed a more than common spirit of detraction when speaking of the German student. The truth is, they cannot forget the part these same truths performed in repelling the French invasion of their country. The spirit evoked by Kôrner, and responded to from the Hartz to the Black Forest, was the death-note to the dominant tyranny of France. The patriotism which in the Basque provinces called into existence the wild Guerillas, and in the Tyrol created the Jager-bund, in more cultivated Germany elicited that race of poets and warriors whose war-songs aroused the nation from its sleep of slavery, and called them to avenge the injuries of their nation.
Laugh, then, if you will, at the strange figures whose uncouth costumes of cap and jack-boot bespeak them a hybrid between a civilian and a soldier. The exterior is, after all, no bad type of what lies within; its contradictions are indeed scarcely as great. The spectacles and moustaches, the note-book beneath the arm and the sabre at the side, the ink-bottle at the button-hole and the spurs jingling at the heels, are all the outward signs of that extraordinary mixture of patient industry and hot-headed enthusiasm, of deep thought and impetuous rashness, of matter-of-fact shrewdness and poetic fervour, and, lastly, of the most forgiving temper allied to an unconquerable propensity for duelling. Laugh if you will at him, but he is a fine fellow for all that; and despite all the contrarieties of his nature he has the seed of those virtues which in the peaceful life of his native country grow up into the ripe fruits of manly truth and honesty.
I wish you then to think well of the Bursche, and forgive the eccentricities into which a college life and a most absurd doctrine of its ordinances will now and then lead him. That wild-looking youth, for all that he has a sabre-wound across his cheek, and wears his neck bare like a Malay, despite his savage moustache and his lowering look, has a soft heart, though it beats behind that mass of nonsensical braiding. He could recite you for hours long the ballads of Schiller and the lyrics of Uhland; ah! and sing for you, too, with no mean skill, the music of Spohr and Weber, accompanying himself the while on the piano, with a touch that would make your heart thrill. And I am not sure that even in his wildest moments of enthusiastic folly he is not nearly as much an object of hope to his country as though he were making a book on the Derby, or studying ‘the odds’ among the ‘legs’ at Tattersall’s.
Above all things, I would beg of you not to be too hasty in judging him. Put not much trust in half what English writers lay to his charge; believe not one syllable of any Frenchman on the subject—no, not even that estimable Alexandre Dumas, who represents the ‘Student’ as demanding alms on the highroad—thus confounding him with the Lehr-Junker (the travelling apprentice), who by the laws of Germany is obliged to spend two years in wandering through different countries before he is permitted to reside permanently in his own. The blunder would have been too gross for anything but a Frenchman and a Parisian; but the Rue St. Denis covers a multitude of mistakes, and the Boulevard de Montmartre is a dispensation to all truth. Howitt, if you can read a heavy book, will tell you nearly everything a book can tell; but setting a Quaker to describe Burschen life, was pretty much like sending a Hindu to report at a county meeting.