It is too true, perhaps, that when, in maturer manhood, he becomes angestellt in some life-office in the gift of his little prince, his liberalism slumbers or dies out; but that does not affect the sincerity of his youthful sentiment. I am sure that I never spoke with one of them, on the subject, who had not some dream of a great united Germany.
There was no more interested watcher of our late civil strife than the German student. He felt that the battle then waging for the right of self-government had a connection with his hopes for the future of his own severed land. Germany’s wrongs and the sigh for universal liberty are the burden of his many songs. No higher and no more appropriate eulogy on the German student can be pronounced than to say that, in his university days at least, he is true to the spirit of one of his most beautiful and most popular melodies, “To the bold deed, the free word, the generous action, woman’s love, and the fatherland.”
By the laws of German universities, a matriculated student is not obliged to pay for more than the lectures of one professor during a semester,—that is, six months. I managed, therefore, to pay for the cheapest, and attended as many more as I liked; so about ten dollars a year were my collegiate expenses.
To confess the truth, my calendar and that of the University did not always agree. I often took vacations in session time, in the shape of long excursions on foot, and sometimes disappeared from Heidelberg for weeks together. My Hausfrau—she that received the princely income of eighty cents a month for my room—at first showed symptoms of anxiety about me; but she soon learned to be surprised at no wild freak of her aerial lodger.
By these tours on foot,—the only philosophical way of travelling,—and by the occasional aid of the cheap third-class cars of that country, I visited all parts of Germany, and learned more of the language, character, and habits of its odd, warm-souled people than I ever could have learned at the great hotels and in the first-class railway carriages. During the long vacations, and especially after leaving Heidelberg altogether, I extended my explorations into remoter parts,—into the Tyrol, Switzerland, Italy, and France.
I travelled in a way in which probably no American has ever travelled before or since, namely, disguised as a Handwerksbursche,—a wandering tradesman. Any one who has been in Europe will not ask why a stranger in that land should need to pass himself off as a poor native, if he wants to save money. On the Continent, as a general rule, a man in broadcloth, not personally known to the shop or hotel keeper, pays two prices; whereas a person speaking English, even if clad in fustian, pays three prices; and I should like to see him help himself. The English language has come to be mistaken for a gold-mine all through Europe.
These wandering tradesmen, these Handwerksburschen, let me say,—for they are unknown to nations under free, constitutional governments,—are a sort of fossil remains of feudalism. They are young fellows, half journeymen, half apprentices, who are obliged to wander for two or three years from city to city, working at their trades. They finally return to their homes, weary and poor; having learned little but the rough side of the world,—to make what is called their “masterpiece.” If this pass muster, they are entitled to style themselves masters of their trades.
They grow out of that old illiberal principle which compels the son to follow in the footsteps of his father and his grandfather. Yet, for all the narrow-minded enactments and regulations to crush their spirit and make them miserable, they always walk on the sunny side of nature. They are a jovial set of vagabonds, who have rarely the chance to be dishonest, if they had the inclination.
Disguised in the blouse of their class,—something like our Western “warmus,” except that it is of thin blue stuff,—I have spent many a happy hour, toiling along the same road with them, listening to their stories and merry songs. If I meet one of them on the highway, he stops, offers me his hand, and exchanges a kindly word. He takes out his pipe, asks me to fill mine from his tobacco-pouch, and tells me all he knows of the road passed over.
He never lodges in a city, unless he has work there. The village inn is his castle; here he obtains his bed at night and his breakfast in the morning for seven kreutzers,—not quite five cents; and trudges on, smoking and singing, through all Europe. This is the Handwerksbursche, poor, but merry; the knight-errant of the bundle and staff; the troubadour and minnesinger of the nineteenth century.