"Of course I know," you say impatiently. "All I am saying is that we do not bring it about by shutting the British Museum on Sundays."
But next time the subject comes up for discussion your German will say again, as he has said ever since he could speak, that the English Sunday is anathema, and a standing witness to British Heuchelei, because people sing psalms in the morning and get drunk and beat their wives at night. You can easily imagine the Hypocrite's Progress painted by a German Hogarth, and it would begin with a gentleman in a black coat and tall hat on his way to church, and would end with the same gentleman in the last stage of delirium tremens surrounded by his slaughtered family. For in Germany one of the curious deep rooted notions about us, who as people go are surely indifferent honest, is that we are ein falsches Volk. With the want of logic that makes human nature everywhere so entertaining, a German will nearly always cash a cheque offered by an English stranger when he would refuse to do so for a countryman. As far as one can get at it, what Germans really mean by our Heuchelei when they speak without malice is our regard for the unwritten social law. This is so strong in us from old habit and tradition that most of us do not feel the shackles; but the stranger within our gates feels it at every step.
CHAPTER XX[ToC]
SPORT AND GAMES
The word Sport has been taken into the German language lately, but Germans use it when we should use "hobby." "It is my sport," says an artist when he shows you furniture of his own design. He means that his business in life is to paint pictures, but his pleasure is to invent beautiful chairs and tables. When the talk turns on the absurd extreme to which the Marthas of Germany carry their housekeeping zeal, a German friend will turn to you in defence of his countrywomen. "It is their 'sport,'" says he, and you understand his point of view. Yet another will tell you that the English have only become sportsmen in modern times, and that the Germans are rapidly catching them up; but this is the kind of information you receive politely, disagree with profoundly, and do not discuss because you have not all the facts at your fingers' ends. But you know that the British love of sport, be it vice or virtue, is as ingrained in Britons as their common sense, and as old as their history.
In Germany the country gentleman is a sportsman. He rides, he shoots, he hunts the wild boar which he preserves in his great forests. "You have no country (Land)," said a German to me, using the word as opposed to town. "In Germany we have country still." He meant that England is thickly populated, and that we have no vast tracts of heath and forest where wild animals live undisturbed. I told him there were a few such places still in Scotland, but that they all belonged to American and Jewish millionaires; however, he would not believe it. He said he had spent a fortnight in England and had not heard of them.
It is not such a matter of course with Germans of a certain class to ride as it is with us. You see a few men, women, and children on horseback in Berlin, but not many; and in most German towns you see no one riding except cavalry officers. I am told that the present Emperor tried to institute a fashionable hour for riding in the Tiergarten, but that it fell through partly because there were not enough people to bring decent carriages and horses. On the great estates in East Prussia the women as well as the men of the family ride, and go great distances in this way to see their friends; but in cities you cannot fail to observe the miserable quality and condition of the horses and the scarcity of private carriages. In fact, the German does not make as much of animals as the Englishman does. If he lives in the country, or if he means to be a man of fashion, he will have dogs and horses, but he will not have one or both, by hook or by crook, whether he is rich or poor, as the Briton does. You see dogs in any German city that remind you of a paragraph that once appeared in an Italian paper, a paragraph about a case of dog stealing. The dog was produced in court, said the paper, and was either a fox terrier or a Newfoundland. But you often see a fine Dachs; in Heidelberg the students are proud of their great boar-hounds, and in the Black Forest there are numbers of little black Pomeranians.