Luther has long since gone, and with him the Handwerksbursch of his time. The Chaussee has given away to the fourth-class railway car, and the wheelbarrow and kit of tools to a stingy knapsack. The Handwerksbursch still has two legs, as a rule, but he hates to use them.
Such good nature and fellowship as must have prevailed among Luther's traveling apprentices could also be found among the students of the time. They took to the Chaussee, saw men, cities and things, and their vacation over, returned to their lectures and books. Like the Handwerksbursch, however, they have found their accounting with the present, and to-day are quite as much at home in the fourth-class car as were their predecessors on the Chaussee.
In course of time it came my turn to make one of the students' tours of Germany. The Semester was over, a friendly companion was at hand, and, for a Rundreise excursion, we had sufficient money in our pockets. It may or may not have been a sop to Die Ferne that I undertook this jaunt, but I think now that it was merely a well-timed outing in order that Die Ferne should not be consciously considered. Here again, as so often before and since, credit must be given to my mother. She seemed to know to the hour almost, the time when it was necessary for me to jump out of harness and take to the open again.
My companion on this first exploration of Germany was a gentleman considerably older than myself. He was a stalwart Norwegian, perhaps forty years of age, with a burly blond beard, a great "bundle of hair," as the tramps say, and a pugnacious belief in the prohibition of the liquor traffic. Physically, Nietzsche's guter grosser blondes Mensch was found in him to a nicety. Some months before my arrival in Berlin, he appeared at my mother's door one evening and said in a western nasal drawl: "Glad to meet you. Believed in your sister-in-law's principles, and thought I'd come around and call."
My mother saw in him at first merely the typical Prohibitionist with a long rehearsal of the reasons why, if need be, one should go dry in a waterless, but alcoholic neighborhood. A partial rehearsal there was, and then the tall, blond man from "Minnesoty" got to talking most interestingly about the university, philosophy, religion, Norway—and Ibsen. He spoke also of his native language, of literature in general, and of men in "Minnesoty" who were trying to make a new Norwegian literature.
Ibsen was much discussed at the time, and "Nora" was the talk of the town. It had become almost an affair of state whether Nora did right in leaving her home, and decidedly a matter of etiquette whether a husband should, or should not, offer a disappearing wife an umbrella on a rainy night. (The "Doll's House," as I saw it, presumed a storm outside.) Ibsen was living in Munich in those days.
Our friend, the Norwegian, wrote to Ibsen, and asked him whether he would receive two Americans anxious to pay their respects to him. It had been decided that the Norwegian and I should make Rundreise together, and Munich was included in our itinerary. Ibsen replied to the Norwegian's letter in very neat handwriting, that he was usually at home in the Maximilian strasse at eleven o'clock, and that callers usually looked in on him at that hour. There was no conventional etiquette about the note; we were not even told that we should be welcome. The small missive might have been a dentist's "time card" so far as it expressed any sentiment. But scrupulously to the point it certainly was. Later Ibsen told us that so many people wrote to him that he had been compelled to boil his correspondence down as much as possible.
The journey to Munich in company with the Norwegian was very similar to all students' outings, and need not be described in detail here. The talk with Ibsen, our unheard of abstemiousness in restaurants, and the pains that we were at to see everything on a five pfennig tipping basis, were the only special features of the trip.
