When an English lad goes to the university he usually goes there from a public school, where out of school hours he has been learning for years past to be a man. In these strenuous days he may have learned a little in school hours too, but that is a new departure. Cricket and character are what an English boy expects to develop at school, and if there is stuff in him he succeeds. He does not set a high value on learning. Even if he works and brings home prizes he will not be as proud of them as of his football cap, while a boy who is head of the school, but a duffer at games, will live for all time in the memory of his fellows as a failure. But the German boy goes to school to acquire knowledge, and he too gets what he wants. The habit of work must be strong in him when at the age of eighteen he goes to one of his many universities. But when he gets there he is free for the first time in his life, and the first use he for the most part makes of his freedom is to be thoroughly, happily idle. This idleness, if he has a backbone and a call to work, only lasts a term or two; and no one who knows how a German boy is held to the grindstone for twelve years of school life can grudge him a holiday. But the odd fact is, that the Briton who leaves school a man is more under control at Oxford or Cambridge than the German at Heidelberg who leaves school a boy.
A German university is a teaching inst.i.tution which prepares for the State examinations, and is never residential. There are no old colleges. The professors live in flats like other people, and the students live in lodgings or board with private families. There is one building or block of buildings called the _Universitat_ where there are laboratories and lecture-rooms. The State can decline a professor chosen by the university; but this power is rarely exercised. The teachers at a German university consist of ordinary professors, extraordinary professors, and _Privatdocenten_--men who are not professors yet, but hope to be some day. An Englishman in his ignorance might think that an extraordinary professor ought to rank higher than an ordinary one; but this is not so. The ordinary professors are those who have chairs; the extraordinary ones have none. But all professors have a fixed salary which is paid to the day of their death, though they may cease work when they choose. The salaries vary from 240 to 350, and are paid by the State, but this income is increased by lecturing fees. Whether it is largely increased depends on the popularity of the lecturer and on his subject. An astronomer cannot expect large cla.s.ses, while a celebrated professor of Law or Medicine addresses crowds. I have found it difficult to make my English friends believe that there are professors now in Berlin earning as much as 2500 a year. The English idea of the German professor is rudely disturbed by such a fact, for his poverty and simplicity of life have played as large a part in our tradition of him as his learning. The Germans seem to recognise that a scholar cannot want as much money as a man of affairs; therefore, when one of their professors is so highly esteemed by the youth of the nation that his fees exceed 225, half of the overflow goes to the university and not to him at all. In this way Berlin receives a considerable sum every year, and uses it to a.s.sist poorer professors and to attract new men.
As a rule a German professor has not pa.s.sed the State examinations.
These are official, not academic, and they qualify men for government posts rather than for professorial chairs. A professor acquires the academic t.i.tle of doctor by writing an original essay that convinces the university of his learning. The t.i.tle confers no privileges. It is an academic distinction, and its value depends on the prestige of the university conferring it.
Germans say that our English universities exist to turn out gentlemen rather than scholars, and that the aim of their own universities is to train servants for the State and to encourage learning. I think an Englishman would say that a gentleman is bred at home, but he would understand how the German arrived at his point of view. When a German talks of an English university he is thinking of Oxford and Cambridge, and he knows that, roughly speaking, it is the sons of well-to-do men who go there. Perhaps he does not know much about the Scotch and Irish and Welsh universities, or London, or the north of England; though it is never safe to build on what a German does not know. I once took for granted that a man talking to me of some point in history would no more remember all the names and dates of the Kings of Scotland than I remember them myself. But he knew every one, and was scandalised by my ignorance. So perhaps the average German knows better than I do what it costs a man to graduate at Edinburgh or at Dublin. Anyhow, he knows that three or four years at Oxford or Cambridge cost a good deal; and he knows that in Berlin, for instance, a student can live on sixty pounds a year, out of which he can afford about five pounds a term for academic fees. If he is too poor to pay his fees the authorities allow him to get into their debt, and pay later in life when he has a post.
There are cases where a man pays for his university training six years after he has ended it. But a German university comes to a man"s help still more effectively when there is need for it, and will grant him partial or even entire support. Then there are various organisations for providing hungry men with dinners so many days a week; sometimes at a public table, sometimes with families who arrange to receive one or more guests on certain days every week. The Jewish community in a university always looks after its poor students well, and this practice of entertaining them in private houses is one that gives rises to many jests and stories. The students soon find out which of their hosts are liberal and which are not, and give them a reputation accordingly.
A German comparing his universities with the English ones will always lay stress on the fact that his are not examining bodies, and that his professors are not crammers but teachers. A student who intends to pa.s.s the State examinations chooses his own course of reading for them, and the lectures that he thinks will help him. He does not necessarily spend his whole time at the same university, but may move from one to the other in pursuit of the professors he wants for his special purpose. He is quite free to do this; and he is free to work night and day, or to drink beer night and day. He is under no supervision either in his studies or his way of life.
English people who have been to Germany at all have invariably been to Heidelberg, and if they have been there in term time they have been amused by the gangs of young men who swagger about the narrow streets, each gang wearing a different coloured cap. They will have been told that these are the "corps" students, and the sight of them so jolly and so idle will confirm their mental picture of the German student, the picture of a young man who does nothing but drink beer, fight duels, sing _Volkslieder_ and _Trinklieder_, and make love to pretty low-born maidens. When you see a company of these young men clatter into the Schloss garden on a summer afternoon, and drink vast quant.i.ties of beer, when you observe their elaborate ceremonial of bows and greetings, when you hear their laughter and listen to the latest stories of their monkey tricks, you understand that the student"s life is a merry one, but except for the sake of tradition you wonder why he need lead it at a seat of learning. Anything further removed from learning than a German corps student cannot be imagined, and the noise he makes must incommode the quiet working students who do not join a corps. Not that the quiet working students would wish to banish the others. They are the glory of the German universities. In novels and on the stage none others appear. The innocent foreigner thinks that the moment a young German goes to the Alma Mater of his choice he puts on an absurd little cap, gets his face slashed, buys a boarhound, and devotes all his energies to drinking beer and ragging officials. But though the "corps" students are so conspicuous in the small university towns, it is only the men of means who join them. For poorer students there is a cheaper form of union, called a _Burschenschaft_. When a young German goes to the university he has probably never been from home before, and by joining a _Corps_ or a _Burschenschaft_ he finds something to take the place of home, companions with whom he has a special bond of intimacy, and a discipline that carries on his social education; for the etiquette of these a.s.sociations is most elaborate and strict. The members of a corps all say "thou" to each other, and on the _Alte Herren Abende_, when members of an older generation are entertained by the young ones of to-day, this practice still obtains, although one man may be a great minister of State and the other a lad fresh from school. The laws of a "corps" remind you of the laws made by English schoolboys for themselves,--they are as solemnly binding, as educational, and as absurd. If a Vandal meets a Hessian in the street he may not recognise him, though the Hessian be his brother; but outside the town"s boundary this prohibition is relaxed, for it is not rooted in ill feeling but in ceremony. One corps will challenge another to meet it on the duelling ground, just as an English football team will meet another--in friendly rivalry. All the students" a.s.sociations except the theological require their members to fight these duels, which are really exercises in fencing, and take place on regular days of the week, just as cricket matches do in England. The men are protected by goggles and by shields and baskets on various parts of their bodies, but their faces are exposed, and they get ugly cuts, of which they are extremely proud. As it is quite impossible that I should have seen these duels myself, I will quote from a description sent me by an English friend who was taken to them in Heidelberg by a corps student.
"They take place," he says, "in a large bare room with a plain boarded floor. There were tables, each to hold ten or twelve persons, on three sides of the room, and a refreshment counter on the fourth side, where an elderly woman and one or two girls were serving wine.
The wine was brought to the tables, and the various corps sat at their special tables, all drinking and smoking. The dressing and undressing and the sewing up of wounds was done in an adjoining room. When the combatants were ready they were led in by their seconds, who held up their arms one on each side. The face and the top of the head were exposed, but the body, arms and neck were heavily bandaged. The duellists are placed opposite each other, and the seconds, who also have swords in their hands, stand one on each side, ready to interfere and knock up the combatant"s sword. They say "_Auf die Mensur_", and then the slashing begins. As soon as blood is drawn the seconds interfere, and the doctor examines the cut. If it is not bad they go on fighting directly. If it needs sewing up they go into the next room, and you wait an endless time for the next party. I got awfully tired of the long intervals, sitting at the tables, drinking and smoking. While the fights were going on we all stood round in a ring.
There were only about three duels the whole morning. There was a good deal of blood on the floor. The women at the refreshment counter were quite unconcerned. They didn"t trouble to look on, but talked to each other about blouses like girls in a post office. The students drove out to the inn and back in open carriages. It is a mile from Heidelberg. The duels are generally as impersonal as games, but sometimes they are in settlement of quarrels. I think any student may come and fight on these occasions, but I suppose he has to be the guest of a corps."
A German professor lecturing on university life constantly used a word I did not understand at first. The word as he said it was _Commang_, with a strong accent on the second syllable. The word as it is written is _Comment_, and means the etiquette set up and obeyed by the students. The Germans have taken many French words into their language and corrupted them, much as we have ourselves: sometimes by Germanising the p.r.o.nunciation, sometimes by conjugating a French verb in the German way as they do in _raisonniren_ and _geniren_. The _Commang_, said the professor, was a highly valuable factor in a young man"s education, because it helped more than anything else to turn a schoolboy into a man of the world. So when I saw a little book called _Der Bier Comment_ for sale I bought it instantly, for I wanted to know how beer turned a schoolboy into a man of the world. It began with a little preface, a word of warning to anyone attempting to write about the morals, customs, and characteristics of the German nation.
No one undertaking this was to forget that the Germans had an amazing _Bierdurst_, and that they liked to a.s.suage this thirst in company, to be cheerful and easy, and to sing while they were drinking. Then it goes on to give the elaborate ceremonial observed at the _Kneiptafel_.
One of my dictionaries, although the German-English part has 2412 pages, translates _Kneipe_ as "any instrument for pinching." I never yet found anything I wanted in those 2412 pages. Another dictionary, one that cost ninepence, and is supposed to give you all words in common use, does not include _Kneipe_ at all. As an instrument for pinching, _Kneipe_ is certainly not common, except possibly amongst people who use tools. As a word for a sort of beer club it is as common as beer. It is not only students who go to the _Kneipe_. In some parts of Germany men spend most of the evening drinking beer and smoking with their friends, while the womenfolk are by themselves or with the children at home. But the beer _Commang_ that the professor thought had such educational value is the name for certain intricate rites practised by university students at the _Kneiptafel_. Those who sit at the table are called Beer Persons, and they are of various ranks according to the time of membership and their position in the Kneipe. Every Beer Person must drink beer and join in the songs, unless he has special permission from the chairman. The Beer Persons do not just sit round the table and drink as they please. If they did there would be no _Comment_, and I suppose no educational value. They have to invite their fellows to drink with them, and the quant.i.ty drunk, the persons who may have challenged, and the exact number of minutes that may elapse before a challenge is accepted and returned, is all exactly laid down. Then there are various festive and ingenious ways of drinking together, so as to turn the orgy into something like a game. For instance, the gla.s.s "goes into the world," that is, it circulates, and any Beer Person who seizes it with a different hand or different fingers from his neighbour is fined. Or the gla.s.ses are piled one on the top of another while the Beer Persons sing, and some one man has to drink to each gla.s.s in the pile at the word of command.
Or the president orders a "Beer Galop" with the words "_Silentium fur einen Biergalopp: ich bitte den notigen Stoff anzuschaffen._" At the word of command everyone, beginning with the president, pa.s.ses his gla.s.s to his left-hand neighbour and empties the one he receives. Then the gla.s.ses are refilled, pa.s.sed to the right, and emptied again as soon as possible. The president, it seems, has to exercise a good deal of discretion and ingenuity, for if the _Kneipe_ seems flat it lies with him to order the moves in the game that will make it lively and stimulate beer, song, and conversation. There are various fines and punishments inflicted according to strict rule on those who transgress the code of the _Kneipe_, but as far as I can make out they all resolve themselves into drinking extra beer, singing extra songs, or in really serious cases ceasing to be a Beer Person for whatever length of time meets the offence. An Englishman who was present at some of these gatherings in Heidelberg, told me that the etiquette was most difficult for a foreigner to understand, and always a source of anxiety to him all the evening. He was constantly invited to drink with various members, and the German responsible for him explained that he must not only respond to the invitation at the moment, but return it at the right time: not too soon, because that would look like shaking off an obligation, and not too late, because that would look like forgetting it.
A _Kommers_ is a students" festival in which the professors and other senior members of a university take part, and at which outsiders are allowed to look on. The presiding students appear _in vollem Wichs_, as we should say in their war paint, with sashes and rapiers. Young and old together drink beer, sing songs, make speeches, and in honour of one or the other they "rub a Salamander,"--a word which is said to be a corruption of _Sauft alle mit einander_. This is a curious ceremony and of great antiquity. When the gla.s.ses are filled, at the word of command they are rubbed on the table; at the word of command they are raised and emptied; and again at the word of command every man rubs his gla.s.s on the table, the second time raises it and brings it down with a crash. Anyone who brought his gla.s.s down a moment earlier or later than the others would spoil the _Salamander_ and be in disgrace. In _Ekkehardt_ Scheffel describes a similar ceremonial in the tenth century. "The men seized their mugs," he says, "and rubbed them three times in unison on the smooth rocks, producing a humming noise, then they lifted them towards the sun and drank; each man set down his mug at the same moment, so that it sounded like a single stroke."
A _Kommers_ is not always a gay festival. It may be a memorial ceremony in honour of some great man lately dead. Then speeches are made in his praise, solemn and sacred music is sung, and the Salamander, an impressive libation to the dead man"s Manes, is drunk with mournful effect.
In small university towns--and it must be remembered that there are twenty-two universities in Germany--the students play a great part in the social life of the place. German ladies have often told me that the b.a.l.l.s they looked forward to with most delight as girls were those given by students, when one "corps" would take rooms and pay for music, wine, and lights. For supper, tickets are issued on such occasions, which the guests pay themselves. The small German universities seem full of the students in term time, especially in those places where people congregate for pleasure and not for work.
Even in a town as big as Leipsic they are seen a good deal, filling the pavement, occupying the restaurants, going in gangs to the play.
But in Berlin the German student of tradition, the beer person, the duellist, the rollicking lad with his big dog, is lost. He is there, you are told, but if you keep to the highway you never see him; and, to tell the truth, in Germany you miss him. He stands for youth and high spirits and that world of ancient custom most of us would be loth to lose. In Berlin, if you go to the _Universitat_ when the working day begins, you see a crowd of serious, well-mannered young men, most of them carrying books and papers. They are swarming like bees to the various lecture-rooms; they are as quiet as the elderly professors who appear amongst them. They have no corps caps, no dogs, no scars on their scholarly faces. By their figures you judge that they are not Beer Persons. They have worked hard for twelve years in the gymnasiums of Germany, they have no idle habits, no interests so keen as their interest in this business of preparing for the future.
They are the men of next year"s Germany, and will carry on their country"s reputation in the world for efficiency and scholarship.
CHAPTER VII
RIEHL ON WOMEN
Not long ago I heard a German professor say that anyone who wanted to speak with authority about the German family must read _Die Familie_ by W.H. Riehl. He said that, amongst other things, this important work explained why men went to the _Kneipe_, because they were fond of home life; and also what was the sphere of women. I thought it would be useful to have both these points settled; besides, I asked several wise Germans about the book, and they all nodded their heads and said it was a good one. So I got it, and was surprised to find it came out in 1854. I thought ideas about women had advanced since then, even in Germany, though a German friend had warned me just before my last visit not to expect much in this way. She made a movement with her lips as if she was blowing a bit of thistledown from her. "Remember,"
she said, "that is what you will be directly you get there ... nothing at all." But I had been to Germany so often that I was prepared to be "nothing at all" for a time, and not to mind it much. What I wanted to discover was how far German women had arrived at being "something" in the eyes of their men. In my eyes they had always been a good deal: admirable wives and mothers, for instance, patient, capable, thrifty, and self-sacrificing. At first I thought that my friend was wrong, and that women of late years had made great strides in Germany. I met single women who had careers and homes of their own and were quite cheerful. When you are old enough to look back twenty or thirty years, and remember the blight there used to be on the "old maid," and the narrow gossiping life she was driven to lead, you must admit that these contented bachelor women have done a good deal to emanc.i.p.ate themselves. In England they have been with us for a long time, but formerly I had not come across them in Germany. On the contrary, I well remember my amazement as a girl at hearing a sane able-bodied single woman of sixty say she had naturally not ventured on a summer journey to Switzerland till some man who looked after her money affairs, but was in no way related, had given her his consent. I did once hear a German boast of having struck his wife in order to bring her to submission. He was not a navvy either, but a merchant of good standing. He was not a common type, however. German men, on the whole, treat their womenfolk kindly, but never as their equals. Over and over again German women have told me they envied the wives of Englishmen, and I should say that it is impossible for an English woman to be in Germany without feeling, if she understands what is going on around her, that she has suddenly lost caste. She is "nothing at all" because she is a woman: to be treated with gallantry if she is young and pretty, and as a negligible quant.i.ty if she is not. That perhaps is a bitter description of what really takes place, but after reading Herr Riehl, and hearing that his ideas are still widely accepted in Germany, I am not much afraid of being unjust. His own arguments convict the men of the nation in a measure nothing I could say would.
They are in extreme opposition to the ideas fermenting amongst modern women there, and the strange fact that they are not regarded as quite out of date makes them interesting.
Herr Riehl"s theory, to put it in a nutsh.e.l.l, is that the family is all-important, and the individual, if she is a woman, is of no importance at all. He does not object to her being yoked to a plough, because then she is working for the family, but he would forbid her, if he could, to enter any profession that would make her independent of the family. She is not to practise any art, and if she "commences author" it is a sure sign that she is ugly, soured, and bitter. In any country where they are allowed to rule, and even in any country where they distinguish themselves in art and literature, civilisation as well as statecraft must be at a standstill. Queen Elizabeth and Maria Theresa were evidently awkward people for a man laying down this theory to encounter, so he goes out of his way to say that they were not women at all, but men in women"s clothes. Moreover, he has no doubt that the Salic law must ultimately prevail everywhere.
A woman has no independent existence: he says she is taught from childhood to be subordinate to others; she cannot go out by herself with propriety; she is not a complete creature till she finds a mate.
The unlucky women who never find one (more than 400,000 in Germany) are not to make any kind of career for themselves, either humble or glorious. Each one is to search carefully for relatives who will give her a corner in their house, and allow her to work for them. If no one wants her she may live with other women and bring up poor children. He would allow women some education. Far be it from him to think that women are to remain in compulsory ignorance. But their education is to be "womanly," and carried on in the family. Women teachers in public schools he considered a danger to the State, and he would send all girls till they reach their twelfth or fourteenth year to the elementary schools, where they would be taught by men and a.s.sociate with bare-footed children. Woman, in short, is to learn how to be woman at home, and how not to be superwoman in school. She may even have some instruction in art and science, but only a limited instruction that will not encroach on her duty to the family.
The fate of lonely single women is much on Herr Riehl"s mind. What are we to do with them? he asks despairingly. "What is to become of the army of innocent creatures, without means, without a craft, doomed to an aimless, disappointed life. Shall we shut them up in convents?
Shall we buy them into Stifts? Shall we send them to Australia? Shall we put an end to them?" Quite in the manner of Dogberry, he answers his own questions. Let them go their ways as before, he says. He knows there is no short cut to social regeneration, and he will not recommend one, not even extirpation. He points out that the working women of Germany have never asked to be on an equality with men. The lower you descend in the social scale the less sharply women are differentiated from men, and the worse time women have in consequence.
The wife of a peasant is only his equal in one respect: she works as hard as he does. Otherwise she is his serf. The sole public position allowed to a woman in a village is that of gooseherd; while those original minds who in other circ.u.mstances would take to authorship or painting have to wait, if they are peasants, till they are old, when they can take to fortune-telling and witchcraft. Herr Riehl admits that the lot of women when they are peasants is not a happy one. He does not make the admission because he thinks it of much consequence, but because it ill.u.s.trates his argument that the less "feminine" women are the less power they exercise. He has no great fault to find with the peasant"s household, where the wife is a beast of burden in the field and a slave indoors, bears children in quick succession, is old before her time, and sacrifices herself body and soul to the family.
But he points out that on a higher social plane, where women are more unlike men, more distinctively feminine, the position they take is more honourable. Yet it is these same "superfeminine" women who are foolishly claiming equality with men.
Herr Riehl"s views expressed in English seem a little behind the times, here and there more than a little brutal. He speaks with sympathy of suttee, and he quotes the Volga-Kalmucks with approval.
This tribe, it seems, "treat their wives with the most exquisite patriarchal courtesy; but directly the wife neglects a household duty courtesy ceases (for the _genius_ of the house is more important than the personal dignity of the wife), and the sinner is castigated (_wird tuchtig durchgepeitscht_). The whip used, the household sword and sceptre, is handed down from generation to generation as a sacred heirloom." I have translated this pa.s.sage instead of alluding to it, because I thought it was an occasion on which Herr Riehl should literally speak for himself.
It is, however, fair to explain that modern men as well as modern women come under his censure. All the tendencies and all the habits of modern life afflict him, and he lashes out at them without discrimination, and with such an entire lack of prophetic insight that I have found him consoling. For this book was published sixteen years before the Franco-Prussian War, when Germany, the world must admit, proved that it was not decadent. Yet every page of it is a Jeremiad, an exhortation to his countryfolk to stop short on the road to ruin. He does not see that the whole nation is slowly and patiently girding its loins for that mighty effort; he believes it is blind, weak, and flighty. If he had lived in England, and a little later, he would certainly have talked about the Smart Set, Foreign Financiers, and the Yellow Press. As he lived in Germany fifty years ago, he scolds his countryfolk for living in flats. He wants to know why a family cannot herd in one room instead of scattering itself in several. As for a father who cannot endure the cry of children, that man should never have been a father, says Herr Riehl. He cannot approve of the dinner hour being put off till two o"clock. Why not begin work at five and dine at eleven in the good old German way? He praises the ruinous elaborate festivals that used to celebrate family events, and considers that the police help to destroy family life by fining people who in their opinion spend more than they can afford on a wedding or a christening. He objects to artificial Christmas trees, and points out that other nations set a tree in the drawing-room, but that Germans have it in the nursery, the innermost sanctum of family life. He arrives at some curious conclusions when he discusses the German"s habit of turning the beer-house into a sort of club that he calls his _Kneipe_. Other races can drink, he says; _aber bloss die germanischen konnen kneipen_--only the Germanic peoples can make themselves at home in an inn. What does the _Stammgast_, the regular guest, ask but the ways of home? the same chair every night, the same corner, the same gla.s.s, the same wine; and where there is a _Stammtisch_ the same companions. He sees that family life is more or less destroyed when the men of the household spend their leisure hours, and especially their evenings, at an inn, but he says that the homelike surroundings of the _Kneipe_ prove the German"s love of home.
In fact, he suggests that even the habitual drunkard is often a weak, amiable creature cut out for family life; only, he has sought it at the public-house instead of on his own hearth.
Herr Riehl is, in fact, deeply concerned to see amongst his countryfolk a gradual slackening of family ties, a widespread selfish individualism amongst women, an abdication of duty and authority amongst men. His views about women sound outrageous to-day, chiefly because he wants to apply them to all women without distinction; and also because they display a total want of consideration for the welfare and the wishes of women themselves. But his position is interesting, because with some modifications it is the position still taken by the majority of German men; naturally, not by the most advanced and intelligent, but by the average German from the Spree to the Danube. He thinks that woman was made for man, and that if she has board, lodging, and raiment, according to the means of her menfolk, she has all she can possibly ask of life. When her menfolk are peasants, she must work in the fields; when they belong to the middle or upper cla.s.ses, her place is in the kitchen and the nursery. Unless he is exceptionally intelligent he does not understand that this simple rule is complicated by modern economic conditions, and by the enormous number of women thrown on their own resources. He would send them as Herr Riehl did, to the kitchens and nurseries of other people; or he would give up the problem in despair, as Herr Riehl did, admitting with a sigh that modern humanitarianism forbids the establishment of a lethal chamber for the superfluous members of a weaker s.e.x.
The most modern German women are in direct opposition to Herr Riehl, and it must be said that some of their leaders are enthusiastic rather than sensible. They are drunk with the freedom they claim in a country where women are not even allowed to attend a political meeting except with the express consent of the police. In their ravings against the tyranny of men they lose all historical sense, just as an American does when he describes a mediaeval crime as if it had been committed by a European with a twentieth-century conscience. They charge men with keeping half humanity in a degrading state of slavery, and attribute all the sins of civilisation to the enforced ignorance and helplessness of women. Their contempt for their masters is almost beyond the German language to express, eloquently as they use it. They demand equality of education and opportunity, but they do not want to be men. Far be such a desire from their minds. They mean to be something much better. To what a pa.s.s have men brought the world, they ask? How much better would manners and morals and politics be in the hands of women! They repel with indignation the taunt that women have no right to govern the State because their bodies are too weak to defend it. They point out with a gleam of sense and justice that the mother of children does serve the State in a supremely important way; and for that matter they are willing to take many State duties on their shoulders, and to train for them as arduously and regularly as men train for the wretched business of killing each other. They will not mate with those poor things--modern men--under the existing marriage laws. They refuse to be household beasts of burden a day longer. Life, life to the dregs with all its joys and all its responsibilities, is what they want, and love if it comes their way.
But not marriage. Young Siegfrieds they ask for, young lions. Here one bewildered reader rubbed her eyes; for she had just heard Siegfried and the Gotterdammerung again, and sometimes she reads in the _Nibelungenlied_; and if ever a man won a woman with his club, by muscle seemingly, by magic really, but anyhow by sheer bodily strength, was not that man Siegfried? and was not the woman Brunnhilde? And what does the Siegfried of the Lied say when his wife has failed to keep a guard on her tongue--
"Man soll so Frauen ziehen," sprach Siegfried, "der Degen, Das sie uppig Reden la.s.sen unterwegen.
Verbiet es deinem Weibe; der meinen thu" ich"s auch.
Ich schame mich, wahrlich um solchen ubermuthigen Brauch."
And then, just as if he was one of those Volga-Kalmucks admired by Herr Riehl, he beats poor Kriemhilde black and blue.
"Das hat mich bald gereuet," so sprach das edle Weib; "Auch hat er so zerblauet deswegen meinen Leib!
Da.s.s ich es je geredet, beschwerte ihm den Muth: Das hat gar wohl gerochen der Degen tapfer und gut."
Yet here is the last development in women, the woman who refuses as an outrage both the theory of masculine superiority and the fact so evident in Germany of masculine domination, here is the self-const.i.tuted superwoman calling as if she was Eve to the primaeval male. It may be perverse of me, but my imagination refuses to behold them mated.
CHAPTER VIII
THE OLD AND THE NEW
Germany stands midway between France and England in its care for its womenfolk. French parents consider marriage the proper career for a woman, and with logical good sense set themselves from the day of a girl"s birth to provide a dowry for her. When she is of a marriageable age they provide the husband. They will make great sacrifices to establish a daughter in prosperity, and they leave nothing to chance.
We leave everything to chance, and the idea of marriage made by bargain and without love offends us. Such marriages are often enough made in England, but they are never admitted. Some gloss of sentiment or of personal respect is considered decent. But on the whole in this country a girl shifts for herself. If she marries, well and good; if she remains single, well and good too, provided she can earn her living or has means. When she has neither means nor craft and fails to marry, she is one of the most tragic figures in our confused social hierarchy, difficult to help, superfluous. She sets her hand to this and that, but she has no grip on life. To think of her is to invoke the very image of failure and incompetence. She flocks into every opening, blocking and depressing it; as a "help" she becomes a byword, for she has grown up without learning to help herself or anybody else. If she is a Protestant she has no haven. Only people who have set themselves to help poor ladies know the difficulties of the undertaking, and the miseries their protegees endure.
Even in the Middle Ages the conscientious German was doing more for this helpless element of his population than England and America are doing to-day. He saw that some of his daughters would remain unmarried, and that if they were gently bred he must provide for their future, and he did this by founding _Stifte_. The old _Stift_ was established by the gentlemen of some one district, who built a house and contributed land and money for its maintenance, so that when they died their unmarried daughters should still have a suitable home. Some of these old _Stifte_ are very wealthy now, and have buildings of great dignity and beauty; they still admit none but the descendants of the men who founded them, and when they have more money than they need to support the _Stift_ itself, they use it to pension the widows and endow the brides belonging to their group or families. In Hesse-Ca.s.sel, for instance, there is an ancient _Stift_ formed by the _Ritterschaft_ of the Duchy and it is so well off that it can afford to pension every widow and fatherless child, and buy an outfit for every bride whose name either by marriage or descent ent.i.tles her to its protection. The example set by the n.o.ble families of the Middle Ages was followed in time by other cla.s.ses, and _Stifte_ were established all over Germany for the daughters of the bourgeoisie.
They grew in number and variety; some had a school attached to their endowment and some an orphanage. In some the rule was elastic, in others binding. There are _Stifte_ from which a woman may absent herself for the greater part of the year, and yet draw an income from its funds and have a room or rooms appointed to her use; there are others where residence is compulsory. Some are only open to descendants of the founders; some sell vacancies. A woman may have to wait year after year for a chance of getting in; or she may belong to one that will admit her at a certain age. In many there is a presiding lady, the Domina or Abbess; and when the present Emperor visited a well-known _Stift_ lately he gave the Abbess a shepherd"s crook with which to rule her flock. Some are just sets of rooms with certain privileges of light and firing attached. Their const.i.tution varies greatly, according to the cla.s.s provided for and the means available.
But you cannot be much amongst Germans without meeting women who have been educated, endowed, helped in sickness, or supported in old age by one of these organisations. You come across girls of gentle birth but with no means who have been brought up in a _Stift_, or you hear of well-to-do girls whose parents have paid high for their schooling in one. You know the elderly unmarried daughter of an official living on his pension, and you find that though she has never been taught to earn her bread she looks forward to old age with serenity, because when she was a child her relations bought her into a _Stift_ that will give her at the age of fifty free quarters, fire, light, and an income on which, with her habits of thrift, she can live comfortably. Another woman engaged in private teaching and a good deal battered by the struggle for life, comes to you some day more radiant than you have ever seen her, and you find that influential friends have put her case before a _Stift_, and that it has granted her two charming rooms with free fire and light. I heard of a cook the other day who, after many years of faithful service, left her employers to spend her old age in a _Stift_. No social stigma attaches to the women living in one, and they are as free, in some cases as well placed and well born, as the English women living at Hampton Court. Some friction and some gossip is presumably inevitable wherever women herd together in an unnatural segregation from men and children. But at any rate the German _Stift_ saves many a woman from the tragic struggle with old age and poverty to which the penniless incapable spinster is condemned in our country.
It may not be a paradise, but it is a haven. As I said at the beginning, the Frenchman dowers and marries his girl, the German buys her a refuge, the Englishman leaves her to fate.
On the whole, the German believes that the woman"s province is within the limits of the household. He wants her to be a home-maker, and in Germany what "he" wants her to be still fixes the standard. But as the census reveals the existence of large numbers of single women, and as "he" often has a thoughtful and benevolent mind, more and more is done there every year to prepare those women who must earn their living to earn it capably. It has been understood for some time past that Herr Riehl"s plan of finding a family roof for every woman without one presents difficulties where there are 400,000-odd women to provide for in this way. One of the people who first saw this clearly, and supported every sensible undertaking that came to the a.s.sistance of women, was the Empress Frederick; and one of the inst.i.tutions that she encouraged and esteemed from the beginning was the _Lette-Verein_ in Berlin.
The _Lette-Verein_, named after its originator, Dr. A. Lette, was founded, says its prospectus, to further the education of women and to increase the efficiency of women dependent on themselves for support.
What it actually does is to train for housekeeping and office work, and for some trades. Its interest lies in the ordered and thoughtful provision it makes both for the woman who means to devote herself body and soul to the family; and for the woman who prefers, or who is driven, to stand in the market-place and compete with men. The _Lette-Verein_ does not train servants or admit servants to its cla.s.ses. It occupies a large block of buildings in the west of Berlin, for its various schools and hostels require a great deal of room.
Students who live in the city can attend daily cla.s.ses; but those who come from a distance can have board and residence for 1 a week or less. Once a week strangers are allowed to see the _Lette-Haus_ at work, and when I went there we were taken first to the kitchens, where the future housewives of Germany were learning to cook. The stoves were the sensible low closed-in ones used on the continent, and the vessels were either earthenware or metal, kept brightly polished both inside and out. The students were preparing and cooking various dishes, but the one that interested me was the _Leipziger Allerlei_, because I compared it with the "herbage" an English plain cook throws into water and sends up half drained, half cold, and often enough half clean. I could not stop to count the vegetables required for _Leipziger Allerlei_, but there seemed to be at least six varieties, all cooked separately, and afterwards combined with a properly made sauce. The Englishman may say that he prefers his half-cooked cabbage, and the English woman, if she is a plain cook, will certainly say that the cabbage gives her as much trouble as she means to take; but the German woman knows that when she marries her husband will want _Leipziger Allerlei_, so she goes to the _Lette-Haus_ and learns how to make it. Even the young doctors of Berlin learn cooking at the _Lette-Haus_. Special cla.s.ses for invalid cookery are held on their behalf, and are said to be popular and extremely useful. Certainly doctors whose work is amongst the poor or in country places must often wish they understood something about the preparation of food. The girls who go to the _Lette-Haus_ are taught the whole art of housekeeping, from the proper way to scour a pan or scrub a floor to fine laundry work and darning, and even how to set and serve a table.
An intelligent girl who had been right through the courses at the _Lette-Haus_ could train an inexperienced servant, because she would understand exactly how things ought to be done, how much time they should take, and what amount of fatigue they involve. If her servants failed her she would be independent of them. Some students at the _Lette-Haus_ do, as a matter of fact, form a household that is carried on without a single servant, and is on this account the most interesting branch of the organisation. The girls are from fourteen to sixteen years of age, and they pay 25 a year for instruction, board, and lodging. Some of them are the daughters of landed proprietors, and some will eventually earn a living as "supports of the housewife," an honourable career shortly referred to by Germans as _eine Stutze_.
They were a happy, healthy looking lot of girls. They wear neat serviceable gowns while they are at work, ap.r.o.ns, linen sleeves to protect their stuff ones, and pretty blue handkerchiefs tied like turbans over their hair. Some of them were busy at the wash-tub, and this seemed heavy work for girls of that age. The various kinds of work are done in turn, and the student when her washing week comes round is employed in this way three hours every morning. On alternate days she mangles clothes, and in the afternoons she sews. Our guide would not admit that three hours at the wash-tub could be too great a strain on a half-developed girl, and it is a question for medical wisdom to decide. The cooking and ironing looked hot work, but these young German girls were cheerfully and thoroughly learning how to do them, and whether they marry or stay single their knowledge of these arts will be of inestimable use in later years. I heard of an able-bodied Englishwoman the other day who took to her bed in tears because her maids left her suddenly. She could not have roasted a leg of mutton or made the plainest pudding. This is the school of the future, said our enthusiastic guide when we went to see the "children"
at work at the _Lette-Haus_; and I, remembering my helpless Englishwoman, agreed with her. The children"s afternoons are mostly given to needlework, and they are instructed in the prospectus not to bring new clothes with them, because it is desired that they should learn how to mend old ones neatly and correctly. They are taught to darn and patch so finely that the repair cannot easily be discovered; they make sets of body linen for themselves, three finely sewn men"s linen shirts, a gown for work-days, and some elaborate blouses. In another part of the _Lette-Haus_, where students were being trained as expert embroiderers and dressmakers, we were shown pieces of flowered brocade into which patches had been so skilfully inserted that you could only find them by holding them up to the light. In the bookbinding department there were amateur and professional students.