To turn from any theoretical discussion of the subject, it remains to be said that Germany has trained her whole population into the best working team in the world. Without the natural advantages of either England or America she has become the rival of both. Her superior mental training has enabled her to wrest wealth from by-products, and she saves and grows rich on what America wastes. Whether Germany has succeeded in giving the ply of character to her youth, as she folds them in her educational factories, I sometimes doubt. That she has not made them independent and ready to grapple with new situations, and strange peoples, and swift emergencies, their own past and present history shows.
It is a very strenuous and economical existence, however, for everybody, and it requires a politically tame population to be thus driven. The dangerous geographical situation of Germany, ringed round by enemies, has made submission to hard work, and to an iron autocratic government necessary. To be a nation at all it was necessary to obey and to submit, to sacrifice and to save. These things they have been taught as have no other European people. Greater wealth, increased power, a larger rôle in the world, are bringing new problems. Education thus far has been in the direction of fitting each one into his place in a great machine, and less attention has been paid to the development of that elasticity of mind which makes for independence; but men educate themselves into independence, and that time is coming swiftly for Germany.
“Also he hath set the world in their heart,” and one wonders what this population, hitherto so amenable, so economical, and so little worldly, will do with this new world. The temptations of wealth, the sirens of luxury, the opportunities for amusement and dissipation, are all to the fore in the Germany of to-day as they were certainly not twenty-five years ago. Ulysses, alas, does not bind himself to the mast very tightly as he passes these enchanted isles of modern luxury. “The land of damned professors” has learned its lessons from those same professors so well, that it is now ready to take a postgraduate course in world politics; and as I said in the beginning, some of our friends are putting the word “damned” in other parts of this, and other sentences, when they describe the rival prowess and progress of the Germans.
VII THE DISTAFF SIDE
Madame Necker writes of women: “Les femmes tiennent la place de ces lagers duvets qu’on introduit dans les caisses de porcelaine; on n’y fait point d’attention, mais si on les retire, tout se brise.”
When one sees women and dogs harnessed together dragging carts about the streets; when one sees women doing the lighter work of sweeping up leaves and collecting rubbish in the forests and on the larger estates; doing the gardening work in Saxony and other places; when one sees them by the hundreds working bare-legged in the beet-fields in Silesia and elsewhere throughout Germany; when one reads “Viele Weiber sind gut weil sie nicht wissen wie man es machen muss um böse zu sein,” and “Der Mann nach Freiheit strebt, das Weib nach Sitte,” two phrases from the German classics, Lessing and Goethe; when one recalls the shameless carelessness of Goethe’s treatment of all women; of how his love-poems were sometimes sent by the same mail to the lady and to the press; and the unrestrained worship of Goethe by the German women of his day; when one sees time and time again all over Germany the women shouldered into the street while the men keep to the sidewalk; when one sees in the streets, railway carriages, and other public conveyances, the insulting staring to which every woman is subjected if she have a trace of good looks, one realizes that at any rate Madame Necker was not writing of German women. Let me add that so far as the great Goethe is concerned, it is by no Puritan yard-stick that I am measuring him, but by the German’s own high standard which despises any mating of true sentiment with commercialism. “Beatus ille qui procul negotiis,” certainly applies to one’s affairs of the heart.
In the gallery at Dresden, where the loveliest mother’s face in all the world shines down upon you from Raphael’s canvas like a benediction, there is a small picture by Rubens, “The Judgment of Paris.” The three goddesses-induitur formosa est; exuitur ipsa forma est -have taken literally the compliment paid to a certain beautiful customer by a renowned French dressmaker: “Un rien et madame est habillée!” They are coquettishly revealing their claims to the Eve-bitten fruit which Paris holds in his hand. Paris and his friend are in the most nonchalant of attitudes. They could not be more indifferent, or more superior in appearance, were they dandies judging the class for costermonger’s donkeys at a provincial horse-show. The three most beautiful women in the world are squirming and posturing for praise, and a decision, before two as sophisticated and self-satisfied men as one will ever see on canvas or off it.
The same subject is treated by a man of the same breed, but of a later day, named Feuerbach, and his picture hangs, I think, in Breslau. Here again the supersuperiority of the male is portrayed.
In the Church of Saint Sebaldus at Nuremberg, there is a delightful mural painting which makes one merry even to recall it. The subject is the Garden of Eden. Adam and Eve are being lectured by an elderly man in flowing robes with a long white beard. His beard alone would more than supply Adam and Eve with the covering they lack. In an easy attitude, with neither haste nor anxiety, he is pointing out to them the error of their ways. He is as detached in manner as though he were Professor Wundt, lecturing to us at Leipsic on the fourth dimension of space. Adam is somewhat dejected and reclines upon the ground. Eve, unabashed, with nothing on but the apple which she is munching, is evidently in a reckless mood. She looks like a child of fifteen, with her hair down her back; the defiance of her attitude is that of a naughty little girl. The world-old problem is under discussion, but with an air of good humor and cheerfulness on the part of the lecturer, as though there were still time in the world, as though hurry were an undiscovered human attribute, as though possibly the world would still go on even if the problem were left unsolved, and this first leafy parliament adjourned sine die.
They were so much wiser than are we! They knew then that there would be other sessions of congress, and that it was not necessary to decide everything on that spring day of the year One. But here again in this picture it is the male attitude toward the woman that is of chief interest. Adam is plainly bored. What if the woman has broken into the sanctuary of knowledge, she will only be the bigger fool, he seems to say. As for the professor in the red robes, his easy, patronizing manner is indicative enough of his mental top-loftiness toward the woman question. You can almost hear him say as he strokes his beard: “Küche, Kinder, Kirche!”