"I will explain my country to you," said the artist one day when I had expressed myself puzzled by the curious gaps in German taste, and even in German knowledge; by their enthusiasm for the second rate in poetry and literature, and by their amazing uncertain mixture of information and blank complacent ignorance. For when an Englishman says "Goethe!
Schiller!--Was is das?" you are not surprised. It is just what you expect of an Englishman, and for all that he may know how to build bridges and keep his temper in games and argument. But when a German teacher of literature tells you Byron is the only English poet, and when the whole nation neglects some of our big men but runs wild over certain little ones, you listen eagerly for any explanation forthcoming. "We have _Wissen_," said the artist, "we have _Kunst_; but we have no _Kultur_."
I did not recover from the shock he gave me till the evening, when I saw the professor of philosophy and aesthetics.
"The artist says that you have no _Kultur_," I told him; for I wanted to see how he received a shock.
"The artist speaks the truth," said the professor calmly. I have never met anyone more civilised and scholarly then he was himself; and I set a high value on his opinion.
"What is _Kultur_?" I asked.
"One result of it is a fine discrimination," he replied, "a fine discrimination in art, in conduct, and in manner."
"Are you not the most intellectual people in the world?" I said reproachfully.
He seemed to think that had nothing to do with it.
"Are you still worrying your head about _Kultur_?" said the artist next time I saw him. "Then I will explain a little more to you. I, as you know, am extremely _anti-Semite_."
"I am sure that is not a proof of _Kultur_," I said hurriedly.
"It is not a proof of anything. It is a result. Nevertheless I perceive that if it were not for the Jews there would be neither art nor literature in Germany. They create, they appreciate, they support, and although we affect to despise them we invariably follow them like sheep. What they admire we admire; what they discover we see to be good. But ... I told you I was _anti-Semite_, ... though they have most of the brains in the country, they have little _Kultur_. One of us who is as stupid as an ox, ... most of us are as stupid as oxen, ... may have more, ... but because he is stupid he cannot impose his opinion on the mult.i.tude."
"Do you mean that the Jews set the fashion in art and literature, and that they sometimes set a bad one?" I asked
"That is exactly what I mean."
It was a curious theory, and I will not be responsible for its truth.
But there is no doubt that in every German town artistic and literary society has its centre amongst the educated Jews. They are most generous hosts, and it is their pleasure to gather round them an aristocracy of genius. The aristocracy that is perfectly happy without genius would as a rule not enter a Jew"s house; though the poorer members of the aristocracy often marry a Jew"s daughter. Where there is inter-marriage some social intercourse is presumably inevitable.
But the social crusade against Jews is carried on in Germany to an extent we do not dream of here. The Christian clubs and hostels exclude them, Christian families avoid them, and Christian insults are offered to them from the day of their birth. "What do you use those long lances for?" said the wife of a Jewish professor to a young man in a cavalry regiment. "_Damit hetzen wir die Juden_," said he, with the snarl of his kind; and he knew very well that the lady"s husband was a Jew. I have been told a story of a Jewish girl being asked to a Court ball by the Emperor Frederick, and finding that none of the men present would consent to dance with her. I have heard of girls who wished to ask a Jewish schoolmate to a dance, and discovered that their Christian friends flatly refused to meet anyone of her race. How any Christians contrive to avoid it I do not understand, for wherever you go in Germany some of the great scholars, doctors, men of science, art, and literature, are men of Jewish blood. The press is almost entirely in their hands, and when there is a scurrilous artist or a coa.r.s.e picture your friends explain it by saying that the tone of that special paper is _judisch_. The modern campaign against Jews began nearly thirty years ago, when a Court chaplain called Stocker startled the world by the violence of his invective. But the fire he stirred to flame must have been smouldering. He and his followers gave the most ingenuous reasons for curtailing Jewish rights and privileges in Germany, one of which was the provoking fact that Jewish boys did more brilliantly at school than Christians. The subject bristles with difficulties, and no one who knows the German Jew intimately will wish to pose him as a persecuted saint. The Christian certainly makes it unpleasant for him socially, but in one way or the other he holds his own. I have seen him vexed and offended by some brutal slight, but his keen sense of humour helps him over most stiles. So no doubt does his sense of power. "They will not admit me to their clubs or ask my daughters to their dances," said a Jewish friend, "but they come to me for money for their charities." And I knew that half the starving poor in the town came to his wife for charity, and that she never sent one empty away.
When a very clever, sensitive, numerically small race has lived for hundreds of years cheek by jowl with a dense brutal race that has never ceased to insult and humiliate it, you cannot be surprised if those clever but highly sensitive ones become imbued in course of time with a painful undesirable conviction that the brutes are their superiors. So you have the spectacle in Germany of Jews seeking Christian society instead of avoiding it; and you hear them boast quite artlessly of their _christlicher Umgang_. They would really serve their people and even themselves more if they refused all _christlicher Umgang_ until the Christians had learned to behave themselves. An Englishwoman living in Berlin told me that once as she came out of a concert hall an officer standing in the crowd stared at her and said, so that everyone could hear: "At last! a single face that is not a _judischer Fratz_." The concert, you will understand, must have been a good one, and therefore largely attended by a Jewish audience. Possibly the officer who so much disliked his surroundings had married a Jewish heiress and was waiting for his wife. Such things happen. During the worst times of Stocker"s campaign a woman with Jewish features could hardly go out unescorted; and even now, though it is not openly expressed, you can hardly fail to catch some note of sympathy with the Russian persecution of the Jews. The deep helpless genuine horror felt in England at the pogroms is felt in a fainter way in Northern Germany.
Meanwhile the Jewish woman of the upper cla.s.ses takes her revenge by knowing how to dress. In German cities, when you see a woman who is "exquisite," slim that is and graceful, dainty from head to foot and finely clad, then you may vow by all the G.o.ds that she has Jewish blood in her.