I arrived at the age of twenty at this Berlin in active process of ultra-modernising itself, and in one respect I was most fortunate.
The then British Ambassador, one of the very ablest men the English Diplomatic Service has ever possessed, and his wife, Lady Ampthill, occupied a quite exceptional position. Lord Ampthill was a really close and trusted friend of Bismarck, who had great faith in his prescience and in his ability to gauge the probable trend of events, and he was also immensely liked by the old Emperor William, who had implicit confidence in him. Under a light and debonair manner the Ambassador concealed a tremendous reserve of dignity. He was a man, too, of quick decisions and great strength of character. Lady Ampthill was a woman of exceptional charm and quick intelligence, with the social gift developed to its highest point in her. Both the Ambassador and his wife spoke French, German, and Italian as easily and as correctly as they did English. The Ambassador was the doyen, or senior member, of the Diplomatic Body, and Lady Ampthill was the most intimate friend of the Crown Princess, afterwards the Empress Frederick.
From these varied circumstances, and also from sheer force of character, Lady Ampthill had become the unchallenged social arbitress of Berlin, a position never before conceded to any foreigner. As the French phrase runs, "Elle faisait la pluie et le beau temps à Berlin."
To a boy of twenty life is very pleasant, and the novel surroundings and new faces amused me. People were most kind to me, but I soon made the discovery that many others had made before me, that at the end of two years one knows Prussians no better than one did at the end of the first fortnight; that there was some indefinable, intangible barrier between them and the foreigner that nothing could surmount. It was not long, too, before I became conscious of the under-current of intense hostility to my own country prevailing amongst the "Court Party," or what would now be termed the "Junker" Party. These people looked upon Russia as their ideal of a Monarchy. The Emperor of Russia was an acknowledged autocrat; the British Sovereign a constitutional monarch, or, if the term be preferred, more or less a figure-head. Tempering their admiration of Russia was a barely-concealed dread of the potential resources of that mighty Empire, whose military power was at that period absurdly overestimated. England did not claim to be a military State, and in the "'seventies" the vital importance of sea-power was not yet understood. British statesmen, too, had an unfortunate habit of indulging in sloppy sentimentalities in their speeches, and the convinced believers in "Practical Politics" (Real Politik) had a profound contempt (I guard myself from saying an unfounded one) for sloppiness as well as for sentimentality.
The Berliners of the "'seventies" had not acquired what the French term l'art de vivre. Prussia, during her rapid evolution from an insignificant sandy little principality into the leading military State of Europe, had to practise the most rigid economy. From the Royal Family downwards, everyone had perforce to live with the greatest frugality, and the traces of this remained. The "art of living" as practised in France, England, and even in Austria during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was impossible in Prussia under the straitened conditions prevailing there, and it is not an art to be learnt in a day. The small dinner-party, the gathering together of a few congenial friends, was unknown in Berlin. Local magnates gave occasionally great dinner-parties of thirty guests or so, at the grotesque hour of 5 p.m. It seemed almost immoral to array oneself in a white tie and swallow-tail coat at four in the afternoon. The dinners on these occasions were all sent in from the big restaurants, and there was no display of plate, and never a single flower. As a German friend (probably a fervent believer in "Practical Politics") said to me, "The best ornament of a dinner-table is also good food"; nor did the conversation atone by its brilliancy for the lack of the dainty trimmings which the taste of Western Europe expects on these occasions. A never-failing topic of conversation was to guess the particular restaurant which had furnished the banquet. One connoisseur would pretend to detect "Hiller" in the soup; another was convinced that the fish could only have been dressed by "Poppenberg." As soon as we had swallowed our coffee, we were expected to make our bows and take our leave without any post-prandial conversation whatever, and at 7 p.m. too!
Thirty people were gathered together to eat, weiter nichts, and, to do them justice, most of them fulfilled admirably the object with which they had been invited. The houses, too, were so ugly. No objets d'art, no personal belongings whatever, and no flowers. The rooms might have been in an hotel, and the occupant of the rooms might have arrived overnight with one small modest suit-case as his, or her, sole baggage. There was no individuality whatever about the ordinary Berlin house, or appartement.
I can never remember having heard literature discussed in any form whatever at Berlin. For some reason the novelist has never taken root in Germany. The number of good German novelists could be counted on the fingers of both hands, and no one seemed interested in literary topics. It was otherwise with music. Every German is a genuine music-lover, and the greatest music-lover of them all was Baroness von Schleinitz, wife of the Minister of the Royal Household. Hers was a charming house, the stately eighteenth century Haus-Ministerium, with its ornate rococo Fest-Saal. In that somewhat over-decorated hall every great musician in Europe must have played at some time or other. Baron von Schleinitz was, I think, the handsomest old man I have ever seen, with delightful old-world manners. It was a privilege to be asked to Madame de Schleinitz's musical evenings. She seldom asked more than forty people, and the most rigid silence was insisted upon; still every noted musician passing through Berlin went to her house as a matter of course. At the time of my arrival from England, Madame de Schleinitz had struck up a great alliance with Wagner, and gave two musical evenings a week as a sort of propaganda, in order to familiarise Berlin amateurs with the music of the "Ring." At that time the stupendous Tetralogy had only been given at Bayreuth and in Munich; indeed I am not sure that it had then been performed in its entirety in the Bavarian capital.
In the Fest-Saal, with its involved and tortured rococo curves, two grand pianos were placed side by side, a point Wagner insisted upon, and here the Master played us his gigantic work. The way Wagner managed to make the piano suggest brass, strings, or wood-wind at will was really wonderful. I think that we were all a little puzzled by the music of the "Ring"; possibly our ears had not then been sufficiently trained to grasp the amazing beauty of such a subtle web of harmonies. His playing finished, a small, very plainly-appointed supper-table was placed in the middle of the Fest-Saal, at which Wagner seated himself alone in state. Then the long-wished-for moment began for his feminine adorers. The great ladies of Berlin would allow no one to wait on the Master but themselves, and the bearers of the oldest and proudest names in Prussia bustled about with prodigious fussing, carrying plates of sauerkraut, liver sausage, black puddings, and herring-salad, colliding with each other, but in spite of that managing to heap the supper-table with more Teutonic delicacies than even Wagner's very ample appetite could assimilate.
I fear that not one of these great ladies would have found it easy to obtain a permanent engagement as waitress in a restaurant, for their skill in handling dishes and plates was hardly commensurate with their zeal. In justice it must be added that the professional waitress would not be encumbered with the long and heavy train of evening dresses in the "'seventies." These great ladies, anxious to display their intimate knowledge of the Master's tastes, bickered considerably amongst themselves. "Surely, dear Countess, you know by now that the Master never touches white bread."