There is a world of good humor, of cheerfulness, of contentment, of domestic peace and happiness in Germany. There are courtesy, politeness, even grand manners here and there. But these words mean one thing to them, another thing to us, and it is that I am striving, feebly enough to be sure, to make clear. May I beg the reader and the student to follow me with this point clearly in mind? While I am outlining with these painful details that their ways are not as our ways, I am not denouncing their ways, but merely offering matter for consideration and comparison.
A nation is most often punished for its faults by the exaggeration of its qualities, and if, as it seems to me, Germany suffers like the rest of us in this respect, it is none of my doing. It will be my failure and the reader’s failure, if we do not profit by watching these qualities in ourselves, and in others festering into faults. Woman’s position and ambitions, the home, the amusements, and the satisfactions of life, are very different in Germany from ours. I note these as facts, not as inferiorities. I note, too, that in Germany, as elsewhere, Hegel was profoundly right in his dictum, that everything earned to its extreme becomes its contrary. Too much caution may become a positive menace to safety; too much orderliness may result in individual incapacity for sell-control; just as liberty rots into license, and demos descends to a crown and sceptre and tyranny. I am merely calling attention to this great law of national development, that the exaggeration of even fine qualities is the road to the punishment of our faults, in Germany, as in every other nation under the sun.
It is only when you have had a peep into a small farmer’s house in Saxony, into the artisans’ houses in the busy Rhine and Westphalia country; spent a night in a peasant’s house and stable, for they are under the same roof, in the mountains of the South; and visited the greater establishments of the large land-holder and the less pretentious houses of the gentleman farmer, and the country houses, big and little, in all parts of Germany, that you get anything of the real flavor of Germany.
If, as Burke says, it is impossible to indict a whole nation, it is even more difficult to fit a people with a few discriminating and really enlightening adjectives. One word I dare to apply to them all, though I know well how different they are in the north and south and east and west, as diversified indeed as any nation in the world, and that is the word patient. They can stand longer, sit longer, eat longer, drink longer, work longer hours, and dream longer, and dawdle longer than any people except the Orientals. This custom may date back to far distant times. Sitting, in the Greek view, was a posture of supplication (Odyssey, XIV, 29-31). The Emperor himself sets the example. He is an indefatigable stander, if I may coin the word, and on horseback he can apparently spend the day and night without inconvenience. Their patient quarry work in archeology and in comparative philology laid the foundations for the new history-writing of Heeren and Mommsen; and their scholarship to-day is still of the digging kind. They seldom produce a Jebb, a Jowett, a Verrall, and never that type of scholar, wit and poet combined, a Lowell or an Arthur Hugh Clough. Indeed, with a suspicious self-consciousness the German professional mind inclines to be contemptuous of any learning that is not unpalatably dry. What men can read with enjoyment cannot be learning, they maintain.
I have visited half a dozen hospitals, and on one or two occasions been present at an operation by a famous surgeon. It is evident from the bearing of patients, nurses, and students that they are dealing with a less highly strung population than ours. Indeed, the surgeons who know both countries tell me that here in Germany they have more endurance of this phlegmatic kind. They suffer more like animals. Their patience reaches down to the very roots of their being.
On that delightful big fountain, in that paradise of fountains, Nuremberg, the statues of the electors and citizens picture men who were untroubled and cheerful, slow-moving, contented, patient; while the little figures on the guns are positively jolly. The only mournful figure on the whole fountain is a man with a book on his knees teaching a child. He is pallid, even in bronze, and his face is lined as he muses over the problem that has stumped the wisest of us: how to make a man by stuffing a child with books! It cannot be done, but we follow this will-o’-the wisp through the swamps of experience with the pitiable enthusiasm of despair.
Only liberty can make a man, and she is such a costly mistress that with our increasing hordes of candidates for independence we cannot afford her; so we go on fooling the people with mechanical education. But even this figure is patient!
The Germans are patient even with their food. What would become of them without the goose, the pig, the calf, and the duck, that meagre alimentary quartette? The country is white with home-raised geese, and yet they imported 8,337,708 in 1910, and 7,236,581 in 1911.
One of their most charming bits of classic art is the famous miniature statue of the Gooseman; and the real name of the great Gutenberg, who, by his invention of printing, did more than any other mortal to make it easy for the human race to acquire the anserine mental habits, and the anserine moral characteristics, was Gänsfleisch!
The goose is really the national bird of the German people. You eat tons of goose, and then you sleep beneath the feathers. The goose first nourishes you and then protects your digestion. The extraordinary make-up of the German bed must be laid to the door of the guilty goose. The pillows are so soft that your head is ever sinking, never at rest. Instead of easily applied blankets, that you can adapt to the temperature, you are given a great cloud of feathers, sewn in a balloon-like bag, which floats upon you according to your degree of restlessness, and leaves you for the floor, when in stupid sleepiness you endeavor to protect your whole person at once with its flimsy and wanton formlessness. As a rule the bed is built up at the head so that you are continually sliding down, down under the goose feathers, your nose and mouth are soon covered, and who can breathe with his toes!