But when you turn to the news columns for details of some event that is startling the world, whether it is a crime, an earthquake, a battle, or a royal wedding, you find a few lines that vex you with their insufficiency. Our English papers have pages about a German coronation, German manoeuvres, German high jinks at Köpenick. But when I wanted to see what happened in London on our day of Diamond Jubilee I found five lines about Queen Victoria having driven to St. Paul's accompanied by her family and some royal guests. I was in a country inn at the time, and the paper taken there was one taken everywhere in the duchy. It is a great mistake to think that German newspaper hostility to England dates from the Transvaal War. The same journal that spared five lines to the Jubilee gave a column to a question asked by one of our parliamentary cranks about the ill-treatment of natives by Britons in India. The question was met by a complete and convincing denial, but we had to turn to our English papers to find that recorded. The —— Tageblatt printed the question with comments, and suppressed the denial. As long ago as 1883, when there was cholera in Egypt, a little Thuringian paper we saw weekly had frenzied articles about the evil English who were doing all they could to bring the scourge to Germany. I think we had refused some form of quarantine that modern medical science considers worse than useless. The tone of the press all through the Transvaal War did attract some attention in this country, and since then from time to time we are presented with quotations from abusive articles about our greed, our perfidy, and our presumption. I am not writing as a journalist, for I know nothing whatever of journalism; but as a member of the general public I believe that we are inclined to overrate the importance of these amenities, because we overrate the part played by the newspaper in the average German household. One can only speak from personal experience, but I should say that it hardly plays a part at all. Whatever Tageblatt is in favour with the Hausherr comes in every morning, and is stowed away tidily in a corner till he has time to look at it while he drinks his coffee and smokes his cigar. If the ladies of the household are inclined that way they look at it too. But there really is not much to look at as a rule. These paragraphs about the wicked British that seem so pugnacious when they are printed on solid English paper in plain English words, are often in a corner with other political paragraphs about other wicked nations. At times of crisis, when the leading papers are attacking us at great length, the Germans themselves will talk of Zeitungsgeschrei and shrug their shoulders. It is absurd to deny the existence of Anglophobia in Germany, because you can hardly travel there without coming across isolated instances of it. But these isolated instances will stand out against a crowded background of people from whom you have received the utmost kindness and friendship; and of other people with whom your relations have been fleeting, but who have been invariably civil. Unfortunately the German Anglophobe is a creature of the meanest breed, and he impresses himself on the memory like a pain; so that one of him looms larger than fifty others, just as the moment will when you had your last tooth out, and not the summer day that went before and after. The truth is, that we are on the nerves of certain Germans. You may live for ever in an English family and never hear a German mentioned. You would assuredly not hear the nation everlastingly discussed and scolded. As far as we are concerned, they are welcome to their own manners, their own ways, and their own opinions. If they would only take their stand on these and leave ours alone we could meet on equal terms. But that is the one thing this particular breed of German cannot do. He must be always arguing with you about the superiority of his nation to yours, and you soon think him the most tiresome and offensive creature you ever met. In private life you can usually avoid him and seek out those charming German people who, even if their Tageblatt teaches them that they should hate England, will never extend their hatred to the English stranger within their gates, and who will admit you readily and kindly to their pleasant unaffected lives. Germany is full of such people, whatever the German newspapers are saying.
Presumably every country has the press that suits it, and in one respect German journalism is more dignified and estimable than our own. It does not publish columns of silly society gossip, or of fashions that only a duchess can follow and only a kitchen-maid can read. Nor would the poorest, smallest provincial Tageblatt descend to the depths of musical criticism in which one of our popular dailies complacently flounders all through the London season.
"I cannot tell you much about last night's Wagner opera, because to my great annoyance the auditorium was dark nearly all the time. Once when we were allowed to see each other for a moment I noticed that the Duchess of Whitechapel was in her box, looking so lovely in cabbage green. Mrs. 'Dicky' Fitzwegschwein was in the stalls with a ruby necklace and a marvellous coat of rose velours spangled in diamonds, and on the grand tier I saw Lady 'Bobby' Holloway, who is of course the daughter-in-law of Lord Islington, in black net over silver, quite the dernier cri this season, and looking radiant over her sister Lady Yolande's engagement to the Duke of Bilgewater. Richter conducted with his usual brilliance, and the new Wotan sang with great élan, although he was obviously suffering from a cold in his head."
It is impossible to imagine Berlin waking some winter morning to find such a "criticism" as this on its breakfast table. In Germany, people who understand music write about music, and people who understand about fashions write about fashions, and the two subjects, both of them interesting and important, are kept apart. Society journalists who write about Lady Bobbies and Mrs. Fitzwegschweins do not exist yet in Germany, and so far the empire seems to worry along quite comfortably without them. I once asked a well-known English journalist who is of German birth, why one of our newspaper kings did not set up a huge, gossipy, frivolous paper in Berlin, and it was explained to me that it would be impossible, because the editor and his staff would probably find themselves in prison in a week. What we understand by Freedom of the Press does not exist there.
On the other hand, books and pamphlets are circulated in Germany that would be suppressed here; and the stage is freer than our own. Monna Vanna had a great success in Berlin, where Mme. Maeterlinck played the part to crowded audiences. Salome is now holding the stage both as a play and with Richard Strauss' music as an opera; Gorky's Nachtasyl is played year after year in Berlin. Both French and German plays are acted all over Germany that could not be produced in England, both because the censor would refuse to pass them and because public opinion would not tolerate them, unless, to be sure, they were played in their own tongues. It is most difficult to explain our attitude to Germans who have been in London, because they know what vulgar and vicious farces and musical comedies pass muster with us, and indeed are extremely popular. It is only when a play touches the deeps of life and shows signs of thought and of poetry that we take fright, and by the lips of our chosen official cry, "This will never do." Tolstoy, Ibsen, Gorky, Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde, Hauptmann, and Otto Ernst are the modern names I find on one week's programme cut from a Berlin paper late in spring when the theatrical season was nearly over. Besides plays by these authors, one of the State theatres announced tragedies by Goethe, Schiller, and a comedy by Molière. The Merchant of Venice was being played at one theatre and A Midsummer Night's Dream at another; there were farces and light operas for some people, and Wagner, Gluck, and Beethoven at the Royal Opera House for others. The theatre in Germany is a part of national life and of national education, and it is largely supported by the State; so that even in small towns you get good music and acting. The Meiningen players are celebrated all over the world, and everyone who has read Goethe's Life will remember how actively and constantly he was interested in the Weimar stage. At a Stadt-Theater in a small town two or three operas are given every week, and two or three plays. Most people subscribe for seats once or twice a week all through the winter, and they go between coffee and supper in their ordinary clothes. Even in Berlin women do not wear full dress at any theatre. In the little towns you may any evening meet or join the leisurely stream of playgoers, and if you enter the theatre with them you will find that the women leave their hats with an attendant. You are in no danger in Germany of having the whole stage hidden from you by flowers and feathers.
Shakespeare is as much played as Goethe and Schiller, and it is most interesting and yet most disappointing to hear the poetry you know line upon line spoken in a foreign tongue. Germans say that their translation is more beautiful and satisfying than the original English; but I actually knew a German who kept Bayard Taylor's Faust by his bedside because he preferred it to Goethe's. I think there is something the matter with people who prefer translated to original poetry, but I will leave a critic of standing to explain what ails them. I have never met a German who would admit that Shakespeare was an Englishman. They say that his birth at Stratford-on-Avon was a little accident, and that he belongs to the world. They say this out of politeness, because what they really believe is that he belongs to Germany, and that as a matter of fact Byron is the only great poet England has ever had. I am not joking. I am not even exaggerating. This is the real opinion of the German man in the street, and it is taught in lessons in literature. An English girl went to one of the best-known teachers in Berlin for lessons in German, and found, as she found elsewhere, that the talk incessantly turned on the crimes of England and the inferiority of England.
"You have had two great names," said the teacher,—"two and no more. That is, if one can in any sense of the word call Shakespeare an English name ... Shakespeare and Byron, ... then you have finished. You have never had anyone else, and Shakespeare has always belonged more to us than to you."
The English girl gasped, for she knew something of her own literature.
"But have you never heard about Chaucer," she asked, "or of the Elizabethans, or of Milton, Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth...?"
"Reden Sie nicht, reden Sie nicht!" cried the teacher,—"I never allow my pupils to argue with me. Shakespeare and Byron ... no, Byron only, ... then England has done."