My Life and Loves

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He asked me to his house, introduced me to a Professor Ihne, who had been a teacher of the Kaiser's children or something very honourable, and who talked excellent English. He agreed with Fischer and Fischer won the day by remarking: When a Latin theme was set, he used to write 'Livy' or 'Tacitus' or 'Caesar' at the head and never used an idiom or a word that he could not show in the special author he was imitating.

Twice a week at least the professor used to read out his essay to us, emphasizing the most characteristic sentences. Of course I became friends with the youth, Carl Schurz; I was resolved to find out how he had gained such mastery. He said, "'Twas easy"; he had begun with Caesar, and after reading a page tried to turn it back into Caesar's language; his Latin, he soon found, was all wrong, a mere mishmash, so he began to learn all the peculiar phrases in his daily lesson in Caesar; gradually he discovered that every writer had his own peculiar way of speaking, and even his own vocabulary.

That gave me the cue. I went home and took up my Shakespeare. I had already noticed similarities between Hamlet and Macbeth; now I began to read for them and incidentally learned all the poetic passages by heart. Soon I began to catch the accent of Shakespeare's voice, hear when he spoke from the heart, and when from the lips; glimpses of his personality grew upon me, and one day I sat down to rewrite Hamlet, using my memory and thought.

When I came to the scene in which Hamlet reproaches his guilty mother, I became aware of a Shakespeare I had dimly suspected. Visualizing the scene I saw at once how impossible it would be to write it. No man could possibly reproach his mother in that way. Hamlet was using the language of sexjealousy: I could not judge her temptation or my father's faults towards her. His goodness would make her sinning the more incomprehensible, and Hamlet's mother does not attempt to justify herself or explain. The ray of light came, inevitable, soulrevealing: Shakespeare was painting his own jealousy, and was raging not at his mother's sin, but at his love's betrayal; 'twas clear, every outburst reeked with sex.

Who was it that had deceived Shakespeare and crazed him with jealousy? The riddle began to intrigue me. It was his Richard the Second that revealed him to me unmistakably; Richard was so plainly a younger, more unstable Hamlet, just as Posthumus and Prospero were older, staider Hamlets. I hugged myself for the discovery; why hadn't everyone seen the truth? Time and again I read him and all manner of sidelights fell on the page, till the very fashion of his soul became familiar to me. Long before Tyler's book appeared and discovered Queen Elizabeth's maid of honour, Mary Fitton, as Shakespeare's mistress, I knew that in he had fallen in love with a dark gipsy, with fair skin, who treated him with disdain and was both witty and loose.

Why else should he let Rosaline be thus minutely described in Romeo and Juliet, though she never appears on the stage, while there's not a word of bodily description about Juliet, the heroine? Strange to say, I did not at that time go on to identify her with "false Cressid" or with Cleopatra. I did not get as far as this till I fell across Tyler's book years later and saw that he had confined Shakespeare's passion to the "three years" spoken of in the sonnets. I knew then that Shakespeare had loved his gipsy, Mary Fitton, from the end of on; and I soon came to see that the story told in the sonnets was told also in his plays of that period; and finally I was forced to realize that "false Cressid" and the gipsy Cleopatra were also portraits of Mary Fitton, whom he loved for twelve years down to , when she married and left London for good.

I shall always remember those great months spent in Fluelen, when I climbed all the mountains about the lake and twice walked over the St. Gothard and lived with "gentle Shakespeare's" sweet spirit and noble fairness of mind.

One important result this discovery of Shakespeare had upon me; it strengthened my self-esteem enormously. I picked up Coleridge's essays on Shakespeare and saw that his Puritanism had blinded him to the truth and I began to think that in time I might write something memorable. When the time came to go back to work I returned to Heidelberg, entered again at the university and resolved to read no more Latin except Tacitus and Catullus.

I knew there were beautiful descriptions in Virgil, but I didn't like the language and saw no reason for prolonging my study of it in seminar if I could get out of it. My next lesson in German life was peculiar. I was walking in one of the side streets with an English boy of fourteen or so who was living with Professor Ihne, when we met a tall young corps-student who pushed me roughly off the sidewalk into the street. As I came up he stopped. He went down like a log and lay where he fell.

Just as I bent over him to see whether he was really hurt, there poured out from all the near-by shops a crowd of excited Germans. One, I remember, was a stout butcher who ran across the street and caught hold of my left arm: Down he went like a sack full of coal; the crowd gave way with much loud cursing and my little companion and myself went on our way.

He questioned me and I answered; the case against me would have been dismissed, I was told, had it not been for the butcher's lie that he saw me strike the student with my stick and the stick was found to be loaded. No German of that time could believe that a blow with the fist of a rather small man could be so effective. The student's face was bound up as if his jaw had been broken. The result was I was bound over to come up for trial; and in due time I was tried and convicted of groben Unfugs auf der Strasse, or, as one would say in English, "a rude assault on the street," and sentenced to six weeks in Carcer and dismissal from the university.

Thanks to my "tips" to the jailors and Kuno Fischer's kind words about me to the authorities, I saw friends who visited me from ten in the morning till seven at night; and after that I had lights in my room and could read or write till midnight. My friends, especially my English and American friends, took pleasure in bringing with them all sorts of delicacies, and so my meals ordered from a near-by restaurant became feasts. I used to let down a stout string from my barred window and draw up bottles of Rhine wine; in fact, I lived like a "fighting cock," to use the good English phrase, and had nothing to complain of save want of exercise.

But the detention strengthened curiously my dislike of what men speak of as justice. At the trial the student whom I had knocked down told the truth, that he had pushed me rudely and on purpose off the sidewalk without any provocation; but the judge tried to believe the butcher, who swore that I had used my stick on the student, though he admitted that I had struck him with my fist. The boy who accompanied me told the exact truth; everyone expected I'd get off with a caution, but my ignorance of German insults and how to accept them got me six weeks' confinement. And when I came out, I had to leave Heidelberg and was not allowed even to finish the lectures I had paid for.

I had already been turned out of the University of Kansas and now out of Heidelberg. But Kuno Fischer and other professors remained my very good friends. Fischer advised me to go to Goettingen, "a purely German university," and hear the lectures of Lotze, who was, he said, among the best German philosophers of the time, and he gave me letters that ensured my immediate admission.

Goettingen had many and special attractions for me, partly because it was famous for the best German in accent and in choice of words, partly because Bismarck and Heine had studied there—and already both these men were throned high in my admiration—Bismarck for qualities of character, Heine for intellect and humour. Already the essence of my religion was to learn to know great men and if possible understand their virtues and powers.

So I migrated to Goettingen. But before telling of anything that happened to me there, I must say something of my amusements in the summer months I had passed in Heidelberg. I had tasted all the English and German pleasures: I had rowed on the river nearly every day keeping myself physically fit, and had taken long walks to the Koenigstuhl and all over the neighboring hills.

I had learned a good deal of German music through going to the opera at Mannheim and hearing my American fellow student, Waldstein, praise Wagner and the other masters by the hour, while exemplifying their work at the same time on his piano. I had a fair acquaintance with German poetry and novels, though I had resolved not to try to read Goethe till I knew German as well as I knew English, and strange to say, I underrated Heine, in spite of the fact that I knew half his poems by heart and took delight in his Reisebilder.

But the German opinion of the time placed Schiller infinitely higher and I sucked in the nonsense dutifully. Indeed, it was years before I placed Heine as far above Schiller in thought as the poet is generally above the rhetorician: Common opinion about great men is so wildly beside the mark that even I could not free myself from its bondage for half a lifetime. My steadily growing admiration of Heine has often made me excuse the false estimates of other men and taught me to be more patient of their misjudging than I otherwise should have been.

I was over fifty years of age myself before I began to recognize the myriad manifestations of genius with immediate certitude. I thank fortune that I wrote none of my portraits till I had climbed the height. But I began my acquaintance with Wagner and Bach, Mozart and Beethoven, Schiller and Heine here in Heidelberg and was delighted to find my heaven lit by such radiant new stars. My sex-life in Heidelberg was not by any means so rich. While I was learning the language I had few opportunities of flirting and I had already found out that my tongue was my best recommendation to girls.

Before I begin to tell of my sex experiences in Heidelberg, I must relate an incident that was vital with results for me. While a master at Brighton College I had got to know Dr. Robson Roose quite ultimately, and when dining at his house with men only one evening, the conversation came on circumcision. I was astonished when a surgeon who was present declared that the small proportion of Jews who were syphilized owed their comparative immunity to circumcision, which hardened the skin of the man's sex.

All the morality of the Old Testament," he continued, "is hygienic: I felt sure, too, that the hardening of the cuticle would prolong the act, and already I had begun to notice that in my case the act was usually too quickly finished. Moreover, my power of repeating it was decreasing year by year and in the same proportion the desire to prolong the pleasure was growing keener; for in this, too, I was like Montaigne, who had to admit in that wonderful fifth chapter of the third book that he was "faulty in suddaine-ness" and had "to stay the fleeting pleasure and delay it with preambles.

Though the surgeon had assured me that I'd feel no pain, I felt a good deal, and for ten days after was in misery many times each day, for a chance touch of my organ caused me acute suffering. During my first summer months in Heidelberg my prepuce contracted so that the act would have been difficult besides being painful, and this compulsory chastity taught me the most important lesson of my life. It taught me that absolutely complete chastity enabled me to work longer hours than I had ever worked: At first I thought there must be some virtue in the climate; but one wet-dream made me realize that the power was in the pent-up semen.

I began to make up my mind to sacrifice many pleasures in the future in order to keep this intense energy and sense of abounding vigour. I recognized that I had been all too often the spoil of opportunity and very frequently had sought pleasure when I was not even really in love. Time and again, too, I had given myself out of false vanity when I would rather have restrained myself. In fine, I began at this time to make up my mind only to sacrifice my strength when I was really attracted, or better still, only then when I was deeply in love. I would cease playing the fool, I resolved; I had acted the giddy idiot who squanders his patrimony without any understanding of its value; I would now turn over a new leaf and make an art of life.

How had I been so blind, so foolish! I realized that I had already seriously diminished my capital of vigour, so to speak. In Brighton I had found it difficult to have two embraces in succession, whereas five years before at eighteen there was hardly any limit set. I resolved to restrain myself rigorously and get back to my former vigour, if indeed it were in any way possible. From this time on I date my Lehrjahre, as the Germans call the prenticeyears. I came to see later that I owed my salvation to the chance of circumcision, or as my vanity put it, to the desire to make myself as perfect as possible, which was the reason why I had undergone the pain of the operation.

A word of Goethe came to me fraught with significance to mark this crisis: In der Beherrschung zeigt sich erst der Meister In self-control the master reveals himself. Two experiences at Heidelberg illustrate for me this new attitude towards life. I had met a rather pretty girl on the river bank one day; began a conversation with her and accompanied her to her house, where, she told me, she lived with a sister. It was getting dark and in a shady place I kissed her, and when she kissed me, warmly my naughty hand found its way up her clothes, and I found her sex ready for the embrace.

Already this fact warned and chilled me: I was resolved never to go with any public woman; determined to pay, but restrain myself. In the sitting-room she introduced me to her elder sister, who was chatting with a stout student who had just called. We all fraternized quickly. I soon ordered a bottle of Rhine-wine; the student preferred beer and soon betrayed himself as a most enthusiastic admirer of Kuno Fischer.

Suddenly he said, "You know, Marthe and I are great friends," and he indicated the elder sister, "and I came here tonight to make love to her. They were ten minutes gone, but their proximity seemed to affect Katchen, who kissed me, again and again, passionately. When the student returned he threw four marks on the table, kissed his girl perfunctorily, saying, "I leave one for the Bier," and then addressed me, "Are you coming?

I turned to Katchen, gave her ten marks, kissed her hands and her eyes and followed the student out of the house. I had escaped without being too rude, for Katchen thanked me warmly for the gold piece and begged me with eyes and lips to return whenever I could, but—I could not stand the student or his talk. There was something so common, so animal in the whole performance that I hastened to say "Good night" to him and take thought by myself.

I was frankly disgusted; quite clearly I saw then for the first time that there must be some admiration, some spiritual attraction, or the act would leave me cold. If the fellow had even admired the girl's figure, I said to myself, or her pretty Gretchen face, it would have redeemed the business; but this coupling like animals, brutalized by the four marks thrown on the table, and the curt leave taking—No!

It was disgusting and a stain on the name of love. And now for a better and more memorable experience. I had gone to balls twice or three tunes in the Heidelberg because a friend wished me to accompany him or to complete a gay party. I seldom went of my own accord because dancing made me excessively giddy, as I have already related. But at one ball I was introduced to a Miss Betsy C, an English girl of a good type, very well dressed and extraordinarily pretty, though very small.

She stood out among the large German frauleins like a moss-rose wrapped in a delicate greenery to heighten her entrancing color, and at once I told her this and assured her that she had the most magnificent dark eyes I had ever seen; for bashfulness I had never felt, and I knew that praise was as the breath of life to every woman. We became friends at once, but to my disappointment, she told me she was going next day to Frankfort, where some friends would meet her the day after to accompany her back to England.

Before I thought of what I was letting myself in for, I told her I would love to go to Frankfort with her and show her Goethe's birth-place and the Goethe- Haus; would she accept my escort? The great brown eyes danced with the thought of adventure and companionship—I was in for it—was this my next-born resolution of restraint? Was this my first essay in making an art of my life?

Yet I didn't even think of excusing myself: Bessie was too pretty and too alluring, with a quiet humour that appealed to me intensely. A big German girl passed us and Bessie, looking at her arms, said, "I never knew what 'mottled' was before. I've seen advertisements of 'mottled soap'; but 'mottled' arms! They're not pretty, are they? No wonder I asked, "What time is your train? Shall I take you to the Bahnhof? Did this last admonition mean she would not yield to me? I was in a fever but resolved to be amiable as well as bold.

Next morning we met at the station and had a great talk; and at Frankfort I drove with her straight to the best hotel, walked boldly to the desk and ordered two good rooms communicating; and signed the register Mr. We were shown rooms on the second floor: But at once I opened the door between the rooms and helped her with her outside wraps and then, taking her head in my hands, kissed her on the mouth. At once, almost, her lips grew warm, which seemed to me the best omen. I said to her, "You'll knock when you're ready, won't you?

Or come in to me? After dinner we went out for a walk and then returned to the hotel and went up to our bedrooms. I went into my room and closed the door, my heart throbbing heavily, my mouth all parched as in fever. I must cheat time, I said to myself, and so I put on my best suit of pyjamas, a sort of white stuff with threads of gold in it.

And then I waited for the summons, but none came. I looked at my watch: At last the half hour was up; should I go in? Yes, I would, and I walked over to the door and listened—not a sound. I turned the handle; the room was entirely in the dark. I moved quickly to the lights and turned them on: In a second I was by her side.

Without making any reply I pulled down the clothes and got in beside her. I was thrilled by the slightness and warmth of her, and at first I just took her mouth and held her close to the heat of my body. In a moment or two her lips grew hot and I put my hand down to lift her nightie: With a sigh she resigned herself and gave her lips.

After caressing her for a minute or two her sex opened and I could move her legs apart, so at once I put her hand on my sex. My excitement was so intense that I felt a good deal of pain; but I was past caring for pain. In a moment I was between her legs with my sex caressing her sex; the great eyes closed, but as I sought to enter her she shrank back with a cry of pain: It's terrible— please stop; oh, you said you'd be good.

Naturally, in a few minutes I was again trying to enter paradise; but at once the cries of pain began again and the entreaties to stop and be good and I'll love you so. She was so pretty in her entreating that I said: The fools are always saying that one sex of a woman is very like another; it is absolutely false; they are as different as mouths and this I was looking at was one of the most lovely I had ever seen.

As she lay there before me I could not help exclaiming, "You dear, pocket Venus! For some obscure reason, half of pity, half of affection for the little beauty, I moved and lay beside her as at first, saying: A little later I lifted her upon me, naked body to naked body, and was ravished by the sheer beauty of her. Girls are a strange folk, I decided, but I soon found she was as greedy of praise as could be, so I told her what an impression she had made at the ball and how a dozen students had asked me to introduce them, saying she was the queen of the evening. At length she fell asleep in my arms and I must have slept, too, for it was four in the morning before I awoke, turned out the lights and crept to my own room.

I had acted unselfishly, spared Bessie: When I awoke in the morning, I hastened to her, but found she was getting up and did not want to be disturbed; she'd be ready before me, she said, and she wished to see the town and shops before her friends came for her at two o'clock. I followed her wishes, bolted the door between our rooms, took her for a drive, gave her lunch, said "Good-bye" afterwards.

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When I assured her that nothing had been done, she said that I was a darling, promised to write and kissed me warmly; but I felt a shade of reticence in her, a something of reserve too slight to be defined, and on the train back to Heidelberg I put my fears down to fancy.

But though I wrote to her English address I received no answer. Had I lost her through sparing her? What a puzzle women were! Was Virgil right with his spretae injuria formae? Do they forgive anything sooner than selfcontrol? I was angry with myself and resolved not to be such an unselfish fool next time. I had seen that while immense fortunes were accumulating, the working classes, the creators of wealth, were steeped in the most abject poverty.

I thus managed to keep physically fit. Besides working at German I read philosophy, the Greek thinkers and above all Plato: And then the English thinkers, such as Hobbes, Locke and Hume, and the French, especially Pascal and Joubert, and of course the Germans with Kant, the master of modern scepticism, and Schopenhauer, whose ordinary essays show greatness of mind and soul.

All these men, I saw, are moments in the growth of human thought, and I turned away from the speculations, feeling that I included most of them in my own development. One incident of this life may be worth recording: Lotze, the famous philosopher who preached a God immanent in every form of life, remarked once in seminar that the via media of Aristotle was the first and greatest discovery in morals. I disagreed with him, and when he asked me for my reasons, I said that the via media belonged to statics, whereas morals were a part of dynamics.

A bottle of wine might do me good and make another man drunk: As one's years increase, after thirty or so, the curve should set towards abstinence. Lotze made a great fuss about this; asked me, indeed, to lecture to the class on laws of morals, and I talked one afternoon on all the virtues of chastity. It must be remembered that I was years older than the majority of the students.

Twice I went on public platforms and spoke in great meetings and no one suspected that I was a foreigner—all vanity and waste of tune, as I had to learn later. But at length I read Goethe, everything he had written, in chronological order, and so came into the modern world by the noblest entrance and stood breathless, enthralled by the Pisgah heights and the vision of what may come when men learn to develop their minds as some, even now, know how to develop their bodies.

This was Goethe's supreme gift to men; he taught the duty of self-development to each of us and it is the first and chief duty; he preached culture as a creed, and even to those of us who had felt it beforehand and acted on it, his example was an inspiration. Later I saw that if Goethe had only had Whitman's pluck and had published the naughty poems and dramas that Eckermann tells us about and the true story of his life, he would have stood to the modern world as Shakespeare Und so lang du das nicht hast, Dieses: Stirb und werde Bist du nur ein truber Gast Auf der dunklen Erde.

And unless you master this— This: He, too, was a snob and loved the dignities and flatteries, if not the empty ceremonials, of a provincial German court. Fancy a great man and one of the wisest of men content to sit on that old feudal wall in court attire and dangle buckled shoes and silken hose in the eyes of the passers by beneath him. Oh, Beethoven was right in his revolt when he crammed his hat down on his head as the Gross-Herzog drove by, while Goethe stood on the roadside, hat in hand, bowing.

When Beethoven's brother put on his card Gutsbesitzer land-owner , Beethoven put on his card Hirnbesitzer brain-owner: Goethe had not sufficient reverence for his own genius, and though well-off, did not make the best of his astounding gifts. He should have visited England and France early in life and spent at least two years there. If Goethe had known Blake, he might have won to the heights earlier and understood that he must give his own spirit the richest nourishment; for surely Blake's first songs would have shown him that even a Goethe had worthy competitors and thereby would have rendered the tedious Wander-jahre that were not, alas!

In describing eventide he writes: Let thy west wind sleep on The lake; speak silence with thy glimmering eyes And wash the dusk with silver This "natural magic," as Matthew Arnold called it, is the one quality which Goethe's poetry never showed. Yet though consciously seeking the utmost self-development, how high Goethe grew even in the thin soil of Weimar.

As a lyric poet he ranks with the greatest of all tune; no one has ever written a more poignant dramatic lyric than the appeal of Gretchen to the Madonna; and Mignon's confession is of the same supreme quality. Heine says that Goethe has written the best lyrics in all literature, and Heine knew. But it was Goethe the thinker who won my heart; phrases of his, couplets even, seemed to me pure divination. There is one word about him that I envy. When Emerson was confronted by his insight into botany and into biology, he found the true word for the great German: I make no scruple of reproducing the passage here for the second time; it has never, so far as I know, been quoted by any sociologist or even noticed; and I had arrived at the same conclusion years before reading the fragment of the play Prometheus, that contains the deepest piece of practical insight to be found anywhere.

Joint stock company's management has every fault of state or municipal management and none of then-many virtues and advantages, as Stanley Jevons proved in a memorable essay now nearly forgotten. In this magnificent apercu Goethe was a hundred years before his time, and considering that in the first years of the nineteenth century modern industry was in the cradle, so to speak, and gave scarcely a sign of its rapid and portentous development, Goethe's insight seems to me above praise. Of course he saw, too, that the land and its inherent products, such as oil and coal, should belong to the community.

It should teach us all the inestimable value of the seer and thinker that Goethe, though far removed from the main current of industrial life, should have found the true solution of the social problem a full century before any of the belauded European statesmen!

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What a criticism of democracy in the bare fact! I owe more to Goethe than to any other teacher: Carlyle came first and then Goethe. Carlyle, who only knew two men in the world worthy of respect, the workman and the thinker, the two iron chords out of which he struck heroic melody; and Goethe, who saw even further and was the first to recognize that the artist was the greatest of the sons of men: And his creative work is of the best: I am annoyed whenever I hear Homer, who is not as great as our Walter Scott, placed among the first of men: For my own part and speaking merely personally, I would find a place for Balzac and Heine even in that high company; and who would dare to exclude Rembrandt, Beethoven and Wagner?

One small point which differentiates Goethe from Shakespeare: Shakespeare followed Jesus in insisting on repentance, whereas Goethe will have no sorrow for sin: The counsel is of high courage: But what a counsellor is this Goethe: In Gottingen I learned a good many of the peculiarities of German university life and spent more time on the Pauk-boden duelling-ground and with the corps-students than in socialist meetings.

Thanks to my excellent German, I was admitted everywhere as a German and soon discovered the cause of the extraordinary superiority of the German students in almost every department of life. I think the discovery of value because it enabled me to predict the colossal development of German industry and German wealth twenty years before it took place. The Emperor of Germany of that time, the grandfather of the present man, must have had a rarely good head or he would never have found a Bismarck and given him almost royal power. But his wisdom was shown, I am inclined to think, just as clearly in another field.

Desirous above all things of strengthening his army, he called Wilhelm von Humboldt, the brother of the famous scientist, Alexander, to counsel. What should be done with the ever increasing number of students who year by year entered the army? Von Humboldt recommended that they should form a class apart as volunteers and be subjected to only one year's training instead of three.

At first the old Kaiser would not hear of it: Von Humboldt assured him that the volunteers for one year would soon constitute the pick of the recruits, and he argued and pleaded for his conviction with such fervour that at length the old Emperor yielded. Von Humboldt said that a certain proportion, twenty per cent at any rate, of the volunteers would become non-commissioned officers before their year was over; and the Emperor agreed that if this happened, the experiment must be regarded as successful.

Of course the first volunteers knew what was expected of them and more than fifty per cent of them gained the coveted distinction.

My Life and Loves Vol. 2

All through the army the smartest soldiers were the one-year volunteers. It was even said later that the smartest non-commissioned officers were for the most part volunteers, but that is not generally believed, for the German is very proud of his non-commissioned officers and with good reason; for they serve 16 years with the colours, and as they are rewarded afterwards with good positions on the railways, or in the post-office or the police, and indeed may even rise to esteem as gentlemen, they form the most remarkable class in any army.

I have known a good many German non-commissioned officers who had learned to speak both English and French fluently and correctly while still serving. But not only was the whole spirit and mind and discipline of the army enormously vivified by the competition of the educated volunteers; but the institution exercised in turn the most wonderful effect upon the teaching and learning in the schools; and this has never been noticed so far as I know. The middle and lower-middle classes in Germany wished their sons to become one-year volunteers, and so fathers, mothers and sisters urged their sons and brothers to study and learn so as to gain this huge step in the social hierarchy.

In turn this inspired the masters and professors in the Gymnasien and Real- Schulen, and these teachers took immediate advantage of the new spirit in the scholars: The level of this examination now is about the level of second-honours in Oxford or Cambridge, far above the graduation standard of American universities. There are perhaps a thousand such students in Great Britain year by year, against the hundred thousand in German universities, some of whom are going on to further heights.

I don't for a moment mean to suggest that all these hundred thousand German students are the intellectual equals of the thousand honour men of the English universities; they may be on the same level of knowledge, but the best thousand from Oxford and Cambridge are at least as intelligent as the best thousand from German universities. Genius has little or nothing to do with learning; but what I do assert is that the number of cultivated and fairly intelligent men in Germany is ten times larger than it is in England. Many Englishmen are proud of their ignorance: I've heard an English millionaire, ennobled for his wealth, boast that he had only two books in his house: One scene which will show the enormous difference between the two peoples is bitten into my memory as with vitriol.

In order to get special lessons in Old German, I spent a semester in the house of a professor in a Gymnasium; he had a daughter and two sons, the younger, Wilhelm, an excellent scholar, while Heinrich, the elder, was rather dull or slow. The father was a big, powerful man with a great voice and fiercely imperious temper: Night after night, he gave me an hour's lesson; I prepared it carefully not to excite his irritability and soon we became real friends. Duty was his religion, sweetened by love of his daughter, who was preparing to be a teacher.

My bedroom was on the second floor in the back; but often, after I had retired and was lying in bed reading, I heard outbursts of voice from the sitting room downstairs. I soon found out that after my lesson and an hour or two given to his daughter, the professor would go through his lessons with Heinrich.

One summer's night I had been reading in my room when I was startled by a terrible row. Without thinking I ran downstairs and into the sitting-room. Mary was trying to comfort her father, who was marching up and down the room with the tears pouring from his eyes: The boy threw me a grateful look, but the father would not be appeased. But as the time of the examination approached, similar scenes were of almost nightly occurrence; I've seen the professor working passionately with Heinrich at one and two o'clock in the morning, the whole family on pins and needles because of one boy's slowness of apprehension.

The ordinary German is not by any means a genius, but as a rule he has had to learn a good deal and knows how to learn whatever he wishes; whereas the ordinary Englishman or American is almost inconceivably ignorant, and if he happens to have succeeded in life in spite of his limitations, he is all too apt to take pride in his ignorances.

I know Englishmen and women who have spent twenty years in France and know nothing of French beyond a few ordinary phrases. It must be admitted that the Englishman is far worse than the American in this respect; the American is ashamed of ignorance. In mental things the German is, so to speak, a trained athlete in comparison with an Englishman, and as soon as he comes into competition with him, he is conscious of his superiority and naturally loves to prove and display it. Time and again towards the end of the nineteenth century, English manufacturers grieving over the loss of the South American markets have shown me letters in Spanish and Portuguese written by German "drummers" that they could not get equalled by any English agents: And in the first ten years of the twentieth century the German's pride in his unhoped-for quick success in commerce and industry intensified his efforts, and at the same time his contempt of his easily beaten rivals.

In the spacious days of Elizabeth, Englishmen and Englishwomen too of the best class were eager to learn and prized learning perhaps above its value; the Queen herself knew four or five languages fairly well, better than any English sovereign since. One other fact that an Englishman should always keep before him: That fact and all it involves explains to me the efflorescence of genius in the earlier, greater age: I am the more inclined to preach from this text because it suggests the true meaning of the World War, which England has steadily refused to learn.

When from to she saw herself overtaken by Germany, not only in the production of steel, but also of iron and coal, England ought to have learned what her contempt of learning and love of sport were costing her, and have put her house in order in the high sense of the word. For a hundred years now she has been sending some of her ablest sons to govern India. She ought to have learned from Machiavelli that every possession of the Romans not colonized by Latins was a source of weakness in time of war. England ought to withdraw from India and Egypt as soon as possible and concentrate all her forces on developing her own colonies, who will always trade with her for sentimental reasons and by compulsion of habit.

The Canadian buys six times as much of English goods as the American, and the Australian spends twenty times more on English products than on German, in spite of the superior qualities of the German output. The worst of it is that the English guides and leaders do not even yet grasp the truth.

My Life and Loves

But at the time the growth of Germany and its eager intellectual life only confirmed me in the belief that by nationalizing the land and socializing the chief industries such as railways, gas and water companies, which are too big for the individual to manage, one could not only lift the mass of the English people to a far higher level, but at the same time intensify their working power. It would surely be wise to double the wages of the workman when you could thereby increase the productivity of his labour.

Moreover the nationalization of the railways, gas, water and mining companies would give five millions of men and women steady and secure employment and sufficient wages to ensure decent conditions of life; five millions of workmen more could be employed on the land in life-leases, and in this way Great Britain might be made self-supporting and her power and wealth enormously increased. From Goettingen after three semesters I went to Berlin; it was tune; I needed the stimulus of the theatre and galleries of art and the pulsing life of a great city. But there was something provincial in Berlin; I called it a Welt-dorf, a world-village; yet I learned a good deal there: I heard Bismarck speak several times and carried away deathless memories of him as an authentic great man.

In fact, I came to see that if he had not been born a Junker in a privileged position and had not become a corps-student to boot, he might have been as great a social reformer as Carlyle himself. As it was, he made Germany almost a model state. He was accused in the Reichstag one day by a socialist of having learned a good deal from Lassalle; he stalked forth at once and annihilated his critic by declaring that he would think very little of anyone who had had the privilege of knowing that extraordinary man and had not learned from him.

My life and loves

It was Bismarck, I believe, who was responsible for the first steps towards socializing German industries; Bismarck who established the land-banks to lend money on reasonable terms to the farmers; Bismarck too who dared first to nationalize some German railways and municipalize gas and water companies; and provide for the extension by the state of the canal system. Under his beneficent despotism, too, the municipalities of Germany became instruments of progress; slums disappeared from Berlin and the housing of the poor excited the admiration of even casual foreign visitors; his bureausbureaus, providing suitable employment, were copied timidly forty years later in London.

It is not too much to say that he practically eradicated poverty in Germany. The great minister himself anticipated that his attempts to lift the lowest class to a decent level would hem industrial progress and make it more difficult for the captains of industry to amass riches, but in this he was completely mistaken. He had given help and hope to the very poor, and this stimulus to the most numerous class vivified the industry of the whole nation; the productivity of bureaus increased enormously: German workmen became the most efficient in the world, and in the decade before the great war, the chief industries of steel and iron, which twenty years before were not half so productive as those of Great Britain, became three and four fold more productive, and showing larger profits, made competition practically impossible.

The vivifying impulse reached even to the shipping, and while it became necessary for the British government to help finance the Cunard line, the Hamburg-America became the chief steamship line of the world and made profits that turned English shippers green with envy: And this astounding development of industry and wealth was not due to natural advantages, as in the United States, but simply to wise, humane government and to better schooling. Every officer on a German liner spoke at least French and English as well as German, whereas not one English or French officer in a hundred understood any language save his own.

Looking over the unparalleled growth of the country and its prodigious productivity and wealth, it is hardly to be wondered at that the ruler ascribed the astonishing prosperity to his own wisdom and foresight. It really appeared that Germany in a single generation had sprung from the position of a second rate power to the headship of the modern world.

And already in the early eighties, the future development could be foreseen. I spent one month of my holidays in Dusseldorf and Essen and was struck on all hands by the trained and cultured intelligence of the directors and foremen of the chief industries. The bureaus saving appliances alone reminded me of the best industries in the United States; but here there was a far wider and yet a specialized intelligence.

Someday soon the whole story will be told properly, but even now in it's clear that the rival nations, instead of following Germany and bettering Bismarck's example, are resolved on degrading, dismembering and punishing her.

It makes one almost despair of humanity. After Goettingen and Berlin, I went to Munich, drawn by the theatre and Opera-House, by Ernst Possart, the greatest Shylock I ever saw and assuredly the best-graced, all-round actor, except the elder Coquelin, who ruled the stage and was perfection perfected. And the music at Munich was as good as the acting: Heinrich Vogl and his wife were both excellent interpreters and through them, as I have told, I came to know Richard Wagner.

In my fourth volume of Contemporary Portraits I've done my best to picture him in his habit as he lived; but I left out half-consciously two or three features which it seemed to me hardly right to publish just when I had learned in that Cosima Wagner was still alive. Here I may be franker. In my "portrait" I left it half in doubt as to the person who was the Isolde, or inspiring soul, of that wonderful duo of love which is the second act of Tristan.

Of course there is no doubt whatever that Mathilde von Wesendonck was Wagner's Isolde; he wrote it to her in so many words: He found a great word for her. He complained one day to her that Liszt, his best friend, did not fully understand him. Don't allow yourself to underrate him.

I know a great phrase he once used about you: And yet here, too, when at his best he shows the yellow streak. In , six years after the parting with Mathilde, he allowed Madame von Bulow to write—it is true: Naturally Mathilde wrote in reply directly to Wagner, giving him a list of everything in the portfolio, and adding finely: Wagner's answer that the King wanted to publish the things did not excuse him for having allowed Cosima to crow over her great rival.

But in publishing Wagner's letters to her and his Venice journal, Mathilde got even with Cosima; yet again Cosima was not to be outdone. She had left Von Bulow for Wagner, preferring, as someone said, "God to his Prophet"; but she, too, could reach the heights. Meeting Von Bulow years later, who said to her by way of reconciliation, "After all I forgive you," she replied finely; "it isn't a question of forgiveness, but one of understanding.

The whole story, I think, is of curious human interest. Cosima was Wagner's equal and deserved all his praise of her as "intellectually superior even to Liszt"; but whoever studies Wagner's life will, I think, admit that it was Mathilde who wove the first joy-roses in his crown of thorns, and she it was who helped him to his supreme achievement. The Ring and Parsifal, he used to contend later, constituted his greatest message; and Cosima was the true partner of his soul who gave him happiness and golden days; but there can be no doubt that Mathilde was the Rachel of his prime and the inspiration of all his noblest, artistic masterpieces.

Years later, he wrote the whole truth. With Mathilde my life came to flower and left in me such a wealth of ideas that I have since had merely to return to the treasure-house and pick whatever I wish to develop She is and remains my first and only love; with her I reached the zenith: She came at the right time in his life. After all, he was well over fifty before Cosima joined him.

Wagner's life rests on three persons: In my "portrait" I said little of Cosima, but she was undoubtedly the chief person in his later life. His life with her in Tribschen from to was not only the happiest period of his existence but highly productive. The birth of the son, whom he boldly christened "Siegfried" den ich kuhn 'Siegfried' nennen konnte was to him a consecration. Instead of living with a woman like his wife, who continually urged him to compromise with all conventions because she didn't believe in him and was incapable of appraising his genius at its true worth, he had now a better head and completer understanding than even Liszt's— "Eine unerhort seltsam begabte Frau!

Liszts wunderbares Ebenbild nur intellektuel uber ihm stehend" a singularly gifted woman; Liszt over again though intellectually his superior —to encourage and sustain him. In his delight, Wagner worked his hardest. For years he wrote from eight in the morning till five in the afternoon. In these happy fruitful years in Tribschen he completed the Meistersinger, perhaps his most characteristic work! He finished Siegfried also and composed nearly all the Gotterdammerung. Then, too, he wrote his best work, his Beethoven. In Tribschen he even began to publish the final edition of his works, and at length came the victory of to add a sort of consecration to his happiness.

At long last the Germany he loved had come to honour and glory among men; now he too would live long and make the German stage worthy of the German people. He was really as affectionate as he was passionate, and his whole nature expanded in this atmosphere of well-being, encouragement and reverence. He took on the tone and manner of a great personage; he could not brook contradiction or criticism, not even from a Nietzsche, and this attitude brought with it blunders.

If we mortals don't keep our eyes on the earth, we are apt to stumble. Talking one day about der Fliegende Hollander, he said he had heard the story from a sailor on his memorable voyage from Riga to London thirty-five years before. I could not help interrupting: It was excusable in Wagner, you may say, to have been misled in this instance; he took the story from Heine, but he believed that Heine himself had borrowed it. But there is no such explanation possible in regard to the legend of Tannhauser. Wagner maintained always that he had taken the story from a simple Volkslegent aus dem Volksbuch und dem schlichten Tannhauserlied ; but there is no such Volksbuch, no such legend.

It's all from Heine. And when one day I talked with passionate admiration of Heine and placed him with Goethe far above Schiller, Wagner wouldn't have it. It shows him so much smaller, less sincere even than Beethoven, and with none of that magic of loving-comprehension which our Shakespeare lavished even on his rival Chapman. That Wagner could pretend elaborately in such a case always seems to me to relegate him to a place below the very highest. Why will the men of genius who illumine our life keep such spots to mar their radiance? The impression of Athens is as simple as that of Rome is complex.

The beauty of the human body is the first impression: The second night I was in Athens there was nearly a full moon; all over the sky were small white cloudlets on the intense blue, like silver shields reflecting the radiance. I had nothing to do so I walked across the square where the barracks of a palace stands and went up the Acropolis through the Proplyaea. As I stood before the Parthenon its sheer beauty sang itself to me like exquisite verse; I spent the night there going to and fro from the Caryatides of the Erechtheum to the frieze of the Temple, to the Wingless Victory, and back again.

As dawn came and the first shafts of light struck the Parthenon I stood with clasped hands, my soul one quiver of admiration and reverence for the spirit of beauty I saw incorporated there. Athens is pure pagan and its temples, like its poems, appeal to the deepest humanity in us. These buildings do not lead the eye from pinnacle to pinnacle into the infinite, as the spires of a Gothic temple do: This is the room where noble men and women meet: Pericles and Phidias, Socrates and Aspasia; here the great poet Sophocles, himself a model of beauty, walks among graceful girl-women with their apple-breasts and rounded firm hips.

Here is the deification of humanity; and this religion appeals to me more profoundly than any other both in its sensuousness and in its nobility. Here are the loveliest bodies in the world to be kissed and here too the courage that smiles at Death; and I recall the words of Socrates in the Crito: Is there anything higher?

In Socrates we seem to touch the zenith of humanity, but the commandment of Jesus is sweeter still: But paganism is the first religion and this Athens is its birthplace, its altar and home. Oscar Wilde told me once that he was conscious of his genius as a schoolboy and quite certain he would be a great poet before he left Trinity, Dublin for Oxford. I had attained some originality at five and twenty when I saw Shakespeare as clearly as I saw him at forty, but I was long past thirty before I thought it possible that I might make myself a great writer.

I was always painfully conscious that I had no writing talent, always used to repeat what Balzac said of himself: When I resolved to go to Greece from Munich I felt I had been studying languages long enough, and the great classic writers and heroes did not impress me much.

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Except Socrates, none of them came near my ideal. Sophocles, I saw, repeated himself; his Electro was a bad copy of his Antigone and he ended his Ajax with a political pamphlet in favour of Athens; he was a master of language and not of life or art, and I had lost time over him. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources.

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