We attended a Kneipe that night, I think. All the rules of the Bierkomment, which I have already described, obtained. You sat at a table, and endless mugs of beer were brought in, and toasts were drunk, according to ritual, but the evening was enlivened by the singing of songs in chorus. Someone accompanied the songs, everyone had a song-book, and the entertainment led off with Goethe’s song, “Ergo Bibamus”; after that a song was sung about every quarter of an hour: “Der Mai ist gekommen,” “Es hatten drei Gesellen ein fein Collegium,” or “Es zogen drei Burschen wohl über den Rhein.”
The entertainment went on till about one in the morning. There was an official Kneipe three nights a week (offiziell), and an unofficial Kneipe (offizieuse) on the other nights. Besides this, the members of the Burschenschaft met in the morning for Frühschoppen in the castle gardens, or elsewhere, and in the afternoon went expeditions together. In the morning they had fencing lessons. They never went to lectures. When they wanted to work they went for a term to another university, and did nothing but work there. One morning Hubert and I attended a lecture on Philosophie, that is to say, history, and curiously enough the lecture was about England. The lecturer went through the gifts which different nations had bequeathed to the world as a legacy; how Greece had given the arts to the world, and the Romans had given it law; England’s gift to the world, he said, was Freedom, and as he said the word Freiheit, his voice rang, and we felt all of a tremble.
The country round Heidelberg was at this time of year at its most glorious. The fields were sheets of the brightest yellow. At night choruses of nightingales sang; the air was heavy with the smell of the lilacs. Sometimes we would go up the river and to the little town of Neckarsteinar, which is like a toy city on the top of a green hill, with a wall round it, and is exactly what I imagined the “green hill far away” to be when I was a child, except that it had a wall. One evening—but this was later in the summer when I went back a second time to Heidelberg—we had a Kneipe in Dr. Ihne’s garden and invited the Germania Burschenschaft. Professor Ihne came and made a speech and then left us; songs were sung, and I made a speech in German, and we sang: “Alt Heidelberg du Feine.”
Besides all these events, Hubert and I spent a good deal of time reading and discussing theories of life. We were intoxicated by Swinburne, spellbound by Kipling, and great devotees of Meredith and Hardy. We also read a certain amount of German, and I remember reading Lewes’ Life of Goethe. I had already read a certain amount of Goethe and Schiller with Dr. Timme, including Hermann und Dorothea, Iphegenie auf Tauris, and Tasso. Faust and the lyrics I had read by myself as soon as I could spell out the letters. Professor Ihne used to discuss books with us. He admired Byron enormously. He had no patience with the German infatuation for Tennyson, especially for “Enoch Arden,” which he thought a childish poem. Byron, he used to say, was a giant; Tennyson a dwarf. Shelley, he admitted, had written a fine philosophical poem: “Prometheus Unbound,” and Swinburne could schöne Versen machen. He could not abide the German cult for Shakespeare. It was not that he did not admire Shakespeare as a dramatist and a poet, but the German searching for meanings in the plays, and the philosophical theories deduced from them and spun round his work, made him impatient. This was a sound point of view, for he approached Shakespeare in much the same spirit as Dryden and Dr. Johnson did. Hamlet annoyed him. Why, he used to ask, did Hamlet presume to think he was born to set the world aright? Nobody had asked him to do so. Othello, he said, was stupid: ein dummer Kerl. The tragedies hurt him too much. He preferred Schiller.
He had no great love for Milton’s Paradise Lost either; he thought there was a lot of tautology in the English language. He said the phrase, “Assemble and meet together,” in the Prayer Book was an instance of this. He said the modern English writers used unnecessarily long Latin words. He had actually seen the word to pullulate in a Times leading article. Swarm would have meant the same thing and been a thousand times better. He was broad-minded in politics and the contrary of a Chauvinist. He had a hearty dislike of Bismarck. There was something refreshingly Johnsonian about him, and when Mr. Cuppy read him the thesis which he destined to show up to the Heidelberg examiners for his degree, Professor Ihne repeated the first sentence, which ran thus: “Ever since my earliest years I determined to be a great man,” and said: “Pooh, pooh, you can’t say that here.” “But it’s true,” said Mr. Cuppy.
Mr. Cuppy was a charming character. He had been in about twenty-five professions before arriving at Heidelberg, and he had been in a circus troop, a stoker in the railway, a clerk, a journalist, a farmer, and I don’t know how many other things, and he was now working hard for his degree. He was the kindest man I have ever met, and there was no trouble he would not take to do one a service, and there was no atom of selfishness in his composition.
The students took us to the Mensur to see the duels. The students fought with sharp rapiers, as sharp as a razor on one side, which they held high over their heads, all the fighting being done by the strength of the wrist; you could only, from the position that the rapier was held in, wound your adversary on the top of his head or on the side of his cheek, but lest your rapier should go astray, and wound some other vital part the duellists wore a padded jacket, and a protection for the neck. The wounds on the top of the head were formidable, and directly after a fight they were sewn up. The Mensur reeked with iodoform. After the entertainment was over Maibowle was drunk, a delicious sort of cup in which wild strawberries floated. Hubert used to have fencing lessons and found the exercise difficult.
The time came when I had to go back to Hildesheim. Shortly after I arrived there the Timmes invited Hubert Cornish to come and stay with them, and he stayed with us for about ten days. During his visit we went for a short walking tour in the Harz Mountains and climbed up the Brocken, a disappointing mountain, as, so far from meeting Mephistopheles and the witches, you walk up a broad and intensely civilised and tidy road, with a plentiful array of notice-boards, till you get to the top, where it is uncomfortably cold. After he left us, it was settled, at my earnest request, that I should go to the school, the Real Gymnasium, and take part in some of the lessons. I was to be an Oberprimaner: in the first class, that is to say; and to attend not all the lessons, but the English, German, and History classes. Before entering upon this school career, Frau Doktor Timme told me that I must make an official visit to all the masters with gloves. So I bought a pair of shiny glacé gloves and paid an official visit to the Headmaster and the various undermasters. The first class I attended was a mathematical lesson, given by the Headmaster. I sat next to a boy called Schwerin, whom I met years later as the director of one of the Berlin theatres. I was not meant to go to this lesson, and I went there by accident, but the Headmaster told me I might stay and listen to it if I liked. It was so far above my head that I did not even know what it was about. At the English lesson I was more at home, and I was asked to give the English dictation. I did this, but the boys at once complained, as I did not read out the English with the German pronunciation, which they were accustomed to, and they could not understand me. The master said they were quite right, and that it was plain I did not know how to pronounce English. The lessons in German literature and in history were interesting. Every week the boys had to write a German essay on the topic that was being discussed, or rather on the book that was being read and diagnosed. This essay was the main feature of the week’s work, just as Latin verses were at Eton. The writing of this essay took an enormous amount of time and trouble. I only wrote one, on Schiller’s Braut von Messina. It had to be neatly copied out, on paper folded in a special way, and the subject had to be divided into sections. The history master was fond of drawing parallels between ancient and modern history, and when he discussed the Punic wars, he laid stress on the fact that sea power had been beaten by land power. That was, he said, the universal lesson of history, and let England lay this matter to heart. The Napoleonic Wars seemed to have escaped him.
After I had been at Hildesheim a little time, Frau Timme told me one day that perhaps I was unaware how greatly Englishmen were disliked in Germany. This was a complete surprise to me, as I had always thought the relations between the two countries were supposed to be good, and that in a kind of way the Germans were supposed to be our cousins. “No,” said Frau Timme; “there is a real prejudice against English people,” and Timme added: “There had always been ein gewisser Neid,” a certain envy of the English. They knew, they said, that individual Englishmen were often admirable, but politically and collectively the English were disliked. One grievance was we supplied, they said, the French with coal during the Franco-Prussian War: another, the behaviour of the Empress Frederick, who was accused of redecorating Frederick the Great’s rooms at Potsdam. I found afterwards the Empress Frederick’s doings were a universal topic, wherever I went in Germany. Frau Timme’s brother, Onkel Adolph, deplored the relations between Great Britain and Germany, which he said could not well be worse, although looking back on that time they were supposed then, I think, to be good. The Timmes were Hanoverians, and used still to reckon in Thalers and speak of the Prussians with dislike; in spite of this they were whole-hearted admirers of Bismarck. I enjoyed my little bit of school life at Hildesheim immensely. I used to get up at half-past six, walk to school and be there by seven, wear a red cap, take part in the few classes I attended, and then come back for luncheon. In the afternoon, I used to go for walks or bathe in the little river which ran through Hildesheim, called the Innerste. In the evenings before supper we met at Hasse’s, and sometimes we used to walk to a distant village and hold a Kneipe, after which the boys used to dance to the strains of Donauwellen. It was difficult to believe that one had ever lived any other kind of life.