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 emancipate 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 quantity 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 nutshell, 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 associate 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 circumstances 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 illustrates 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 tüchtig durchgepeitscht). The whip used, the household sword and sceptre, is handed down from generation to generation as a sacred heirloom." I have translated this passage 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 können 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 glass, 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 classes, 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 sex.
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 mediæval 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 pass 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 Götterdämmerung 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 Brünnhilde? And what does the Siegfried of the Lied say when his wife has failed to keep a guard on her tongue—
And then, just as if he was one of those Volga-Kalmucks admired by Herr Riehl, he beats poor Kriemhilde black and blue.
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-constituted superwoman calling as if she was Eve to the primæval male. It may be perverse of me, but my imagination refuses to behold them mated.
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 protégées 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-Cassel, 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 entitles her to its protection. The example set by the noble families of the Middle Ages was followed in time by other classes, 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 constitution varies greatly, according to the class 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 assistance of women, was the Empress Frederick; and one of the institutions 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 classes. 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 classes; 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 classes 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 Stütze. They were a happy, healthy looking lot of girls. They wear neat serviceable gowns while they are at work, aprons, 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. The professionals apprentice themselves for three years, and from the first receive a small weekly wage. The length of their apprenticeship is determined by the length of time prescribed for men, and not by what is necessary for their training. I asked if they easily found regular work later, and was told that at present the demand for expert women bookbinders exceeded the supply. The Lette-Haus trains women to be photographers, printers, and clerks. In fact, with German thoroughness and foresight it does all one big institution can to save the women of the nation from the curse of incompetence. It turns them out efficient housewives or efficient craftswomen, according to their needs.
The German woman of to-day has travelled far from the ideal set up by Herr Riehl, and still upheld by his disciples. Women have found that the realities of life clash with that particular ideal, and rudely upset it. Just like any man, a woman wants bread when she is hungry, and when there is no man to give it to her she must raven for it herself. She has been driven from a family hearth that has no fire on it, and from a family roof that cannot afford her shelter. On the whole, if I may judge from personal observation, it has done her good. The traditional old maid is dying out in Germany as assuredly as she is dying out in England, and who shall regret her? Her outlook was narrow, her temper often soured. She had neither self-reliance nor charm. She was that sad, silly spectacle, a clinging plant without support. Now that she is learning to grow on her own account, she finds that there is a good deal in life a sensible plant can enjoy without clinging. The German "old maid" of the twentieth century has, like her English sister, transformed herself into a "bachelor," a person who for this reason or that has not married, and who nevertheless has a cheerful time. She has her own work, she often has her own flat, and if she lives in one of the big cities she has her own club.
There are at present three Ladies' Clubs in Berlin all flourishing. The subscription to the Berliner Frauenklub is only six marks a year, yet it provides the members with comfortably furnished rooms and well cooked meals at low prices. A member of this club can dine for ninepence, and have a hot dish from fourpence to sevenpence. She has access to a library of 1300 volumes, to the leading papers and reviews, and to magazines in four languages. She can entertain women at the club, but not men; though she can meet men there at certain hours of the day. Social gatherings of various kinds are arranged to meet the various needs and ages of the members; and one night a week four or five card-tables are set out, so that the older members can have a quiet game of skat or whist. We wonder what Herr Riehl would say if he could see them.
Another German Ladies' Club in Berlin is the Deutscher Frauenklub, and it is nicknamed the Millionaire's Club because the subscription is twenty-five shillings. It is a rather smarter club than the other, and has a charming set of rooms. There are about 450 members. The Third Club is a branch of the London Lyceum, and it has aroused great interest and attention in Berlin, not only because it is on a more magnificent scale than the other clubs, but because of the brave effort it makes to unite the women of all nations and help them. Most of the women distinguished in art and literature have joined it.
I began this chapter by saying something of the Stift, the refuge for unmarried women that Germany established in the Middle Ages and still preserves. I end it with the Lyceum Club, that latest manifestation of a modern woman's desire to help her own sex. The character of these institutions and their history are both significant. In other days men helped women; in these days women try to help themselves. The Stift gives a woman bread and shelter in idleness; the aim of the Lyceum Club is not to give, but to bring women together and to encourage good work. The Stifte are still crowded and the Lyceum flourishes, for in our time the old woman jostles the new. But the new woman has arrived, and is making herself felt; with amazing force and swiftness, you must admit when you reflect on the position of women in Germany thirty or forty years ago.
In the Memoiren einer Idealistin, those genuine and interesting Memoirs that have been so widely read in Germany of late, Malvida von Meysenbug, the daughter of a highly placed official at a small German Court, describes her confirmation day and the long period of preparation and the spiritual struggle that preceded it.
"During a whole year my sister and I went twice a week to the pastor's house to be instructed in the dogma of the Protestant Church," she says.... "The ceremony was to be on Sunday. The Friday before we had our last lesson. Our teacher was deeply moved; with tears in his eyes he spoke to us of the holiness and importance of the act we were about to perform.... According to the German custom amongst girls of the better classes, we put on black silk dresses for the first time for our confirmation, and this ceremonial attire calmed me and did me good. Our maid took special pains with our toilet, as if we were going to a worldly entertainment, and chattered more than usual. It jarred on me, but it helped to distract my thoughts. When it was time to start I said Good-bye to my mother with deep emotion, and asked her to forgive me my faults. My sister and I were to go to the pastor's house on our way to church. There we found everything strewn with flowers. Our teacher received us in his priestly robes, and spoke to all of us so lovingly and earnestly that the most indifferent were moved. When the church bells began to peal our procession set out, the pastor at its head, and we following two by two. The way from the rectory to the church was strewn with flowers, and the church was decked with them. The Choral Society of the town, to which some of our best friends belonged, received us with a beautiful hymn. I felt on wings, I prayed to God that this hour might be blessed to me throughout my life. The sermon preached by the voice that had so often affected me made me calm. When the preacher required us to make our confession of faith, I uttered my 'Yes' with firm assurance. Then I knelt before him with the rest to receive his blessing. He put his hands on our heads, accepted us as members of the Protestant Church, and blessed each one separately, and with a special verse from the Bible. To me he said, 'Be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life.' My heart echoed the solemn vow: Faithful unto death. The choir greeted the young Christians with a song of victory. We did not return to the seats reserved for candidates, but sat with our parents and relatives waiting with them until everyone had left the church, except those who wished to partake of the Holy Communion."
Malvida von Meysenbug is too much absorbed in her intense spiritual experiences to describe the lighter side of confirmation in Germany, which celebrates it with presents and a gathering of friends. A girl gets her first black silk gown for the occasion, and both boys and girls get as many presents as they do at Christmas or on a birthday. These are all set out for the inspection of the friends who assemble at the house after the religious ceremony, to congratulate the parents and the youngest member of their church. There is an entertainment of coffee, chocolate, and cakes; and a few days later both boys and girls return these visits of congratulation in the company of their parents. Some years ago, when a girl had been confirmed, she was considered officially grown up and marriageable, and entered straight away into the gaieties that are supposed to lead to marriage. But the modern tendency in Germany is to prolong girlhood, and the wife of sixteen is as rare there amongst the educated classes as it is here.
Amongst the Jews in Germany marriages are still arranged for the young people by their elders; often, as in France, through the intervention of friends, but also by the business-like office of the marriage broker. It need hardly be said, perhaps, that the refined and enlightened Jews refuse to marry in this way. They insist on choosing their own mate, and even on overlooking some disparity of fortune. Unorthodox Jews marry Christian women, and the Jewish heiress constantly allies herself and her money with a title or a uniform. In the latter case, however, the nuptials are just as business-like as if the Schadchan had arranged them and received his commission. The Graf or the Major gets the gold he lacks, and the rich Jewess gets social prestige or the nearest approach to it possible in a Jew-baiting land. An ardent anti-Semite told me that these mixed marriages were not fertile, and that if only everyone of Jewish blood would marry a Christian, the country would in course of time be cleared of a race that, she solemnly assured me, is as great a curse to it, and as inferior as the negro in America. But as she was an anti-Semite with a sense of humour she admitted that the remedy was a slow one and difficult to enforce. As a matter of fact, the Jews marry mostly amongst themselves in Germany, and men are still living in Frankfurt and other large cities who have made comfortable fortunes by the brokerage they charged on their matchmaking. Formerly a prosperous unmarried Jew used to be besieged by offers from these agents; and so were men who could give their daughters a good dowry. The better-class Jews do not employ them nowadays, but their marriages are suggested and arranged much as marriages are in France. A young merchant of Berlin thinks it is time to settle down, or perhaps wants a little capital to enlarge his business. He consults an uncle in Frankfurt. The uncle tells his old friend, the father of several daughters, that the most handsome, industrious, and accomplished man the world has ever seen, his own nephew, in fact, thinks of marriage, and that his conditions are this and that; he tells his nephew that the most beautiful and amiable creature in Germany, a brilliant musician, a fluent linguist, a devoted daughter, and a person of simple housewifely tastes, lives next door to him, the uncle. Except for the housewifely tastes, it sounds, and in fact is, rather like a courtship in the Arabian Nights so far. The prince hears of the princess, and without having seen her sets out to seek her hand. The young merchant pays a flying visit to Frankfurt, is presented to the most beautiful creature in Germany, finds her passable, has a talk to her father as business-like as a talk between two solicitors, proposes, is accepted, and at once becomes the most ardent lover the world has ever seen.
Amongst Christians marriages are certainly not arranged for girls in this matter-of-course way, and so "old maids" abound. Girls without money have far less chance of marriage in Germany than in England, where young people mate as they please and where a man expects to support his wife entirely; while the spectacle, quite common here, of girls with a good deal of money remaining single from various reasons, sometimes actually from want of opportunity to marry, this every-day occurrence amongst the English better classes is unknown on the continent. In her powerful novel Aus guter Familie, Gabrielle Reuter describes the life of a German girl whose parents cannot give her a dowry, and who is doomed in consequence to old maidhood and to all the disappointments, restrictions, and humiliations of unsought women. While women look to marriage and nothing else for happiness, there must be such lives in every monogamous country, where they outnumber the men; but in England a woman's marriage is much more a matter of chance and charm than of money. If she is poor and misses her chance she is worse off than the German, for she has no Stift provided for her; but if she is attractive she is just as likely to marry without a fortune as with one. Those German women who consider their ideas "progressive" have taken up a new cry of late, a cry about every woman's "right" to motherhood; but they do not seem to have found a satisfactory way of securing this right to the 400,000 women who outnumber the men. One learned professor wrote a pamphlet advocating polygamy, but his proposal did not have the success he no doubt felt it deserved. The women who discuss these questions, in magazines they edit and mostly write themselves, said that his arguments were all conducted from the man's point of view, and were most reprehensible. Their own chief aim at present is to protect the mothers of illegitimate children, and this seems a natural and proper thing for the women of any community to do. Otherwise they are not a united body. There are moderates and immoderates amongst them, and as I am a moderate myself in such matters, I think those who go all lengths are lunatics. It makes one open one's eyes to go to Germany to-day with one's old-fashioned ideas of the German Frau, and hear what she is doing in her desire to reform society and inaugurate a new code of morals. She does not even wait till she is married to speak with authority. On the contrary, she says that marriage is degrading, and that temporary unions are more to the honour and profit of women. "Dear Aunt S.," I heard of one girl writing to a venerable relative, "I want you to congratulate me on my happiness. I am about to be united with the man I love, and we shall live together (in freier Ehe) till one of us is tired of it." A German lady of wide views and worldly knowledge told me a girl had lately sent her a little volume of original poems that she could only describe as unfit for publication; yet she knew the girl and thought her a harmless creature. She was presumably a goose who wanted to cackle in chorus. This same lady met another girl in the gallery of an artist who belonged to what Mr. Gilbert calls the "fleshly school." "Ah!" said the girl to my friend, "this is where I feel at home." One of these immoderates, on the authority of Plato, recommended at a public meeting that girls should do gymnastics unclothed. Some of them are men-haters, some in the interests of their sex are all for free love. None of them accept the domination of men in theory, so I think that the facts of life in their own country must often be unpleasantly forced on them. I discussed the movement, which is a marked one in Germany at present, with two women whose experience and good sense made their opinion valuable. But they did not agree. One said that the excesses of these people were the outcome of long repression, and would wear out in time. The other thought the movement would go on and grow; which was as much as to say that she thought the old morals were dead. Undoubtedly they are dead in some sets in Germany to-day. You hear of girls of good family who have asserted their "right to motherhood" without marriage; and you hear of other girls who refuse to marry because they will not make vows or accept conditions they consider humiliating. These views do not attract large numbers; probably never will. But they are sufficiently widespread to express themselves in many modern essays, novels, and pamphlets, and even to support several magazines. The women holding them are of various types and quality, and are by no manner of means agreed with each other; while those women who are working steadily and discreetly for the progress of their sex condemn the extreme party, and consider them a check on all real advancement.
The German girl, then, is not always the simple creature tradition paints her. At any rate she reads novels and sees plays that would have been forbidden to her mother. Nevertheless she is as a rule just as happy as a girl should be when the man of her dreams asks her to marry him. In other days a proposal of marriage was a ceremonial in Germany. A man had to put on evening dress for the occasion, and carry a bouquet with him. "Oh yes," said a German friend of mine, "this is still done sometimes. A little while ago a cousin of mine in Mainz was seen coming home in evening dress by broad daylight carrying his bouquet. The poor fellow had been refused." But in these laxer times a man is spared such an ordeal. It is more usual in Germany than in England to speak to a girl's father before proposing to her, but even this is not invariable nowadays. Young people make their own opportunities. "Last year my brother proposed to his present wife in the woods near Baden while they gathered Waldmeister," said a young German to a girl he ardently admired. "It will be in flower next week, and your parents have just arranged that I may meet them at the Alte Schloss in time for dinner. After dinner we will walk in the woods—nicht wahr?" But the girl, as it happened, did not wish to receive a proposal of marriage from this young man, so she took care not to walk in the woods and gather Waldmeister with him. It is often said that the sexes herd separately in Germany, and do not meet each other much. But this always seems to me one of the things said by people who have looked at Germans and not lived amongst them. A nation that has such an intimate home life, and is on the whole poor, receives its friends in an intimate informal way. Young men have different occupations and interests from girls, but when they are admitted to a family they are often admitted on terms of easy friendship. In London you may ask a young man with others to dinner at intervals, and never get to know him; in Berlin you ask him without others to supper, and soon get to know him very well. Besides, a German cannot endure life long without an Ausflug or a Landpartie, and when the family plans one it includes one or two of its friends.
When two Germans do get engaged they let their world know of it. A betrothal there is not the informal flimsy contract it often is with us. They begin by publishing the event in their newspapers, and sending round printed forms announcing it to their friends. In the newspaper the announcement is rather bare compared with the advertisement of other family events. "Engaged. Frl. Martha Raekelwitz mit Hrn. Ingenieur Julius Prinz Dresden-Hamburg" is considered sufficient. But the printed intimations sent round on gilt-edged paper or cardboard to the friends of the contracting parties are more communicative. On one side the parents have the honour to announce the engagement of their daughter Anna to Mr. So-and-So, and on the other side Mr. So-and-So announces his engagement to Miss Anna. Here is a reproduction of such a form, with nothing altered except the actual names and addresses. On the left-hand side of the double sheet of cartridge paper the parents of the Braut have their say—