ENGLISH AND GERMANS,

Dominion, Volume 5, Issue 1407, 6 April 1912, Page 9

ENGLISH AND GERMANS,

Mr. Ford Jladox Hueffer thinks many of the novels about English and German life are calculated to do a great deal of harm. Hβ explains why ia the "l)aily News":—

"Tho ordinary German of English fiction is an, immunse, fat, bespectacled person gifted with the cunning and tho craftiness that scarcely go with his obesity and shortness ,of . sight, or for the matter of .that ivith the'amount of beer that he drinks. The ordinary Englishman of German fiction is usually a meagre, sallow, immensely long-toothed individual gifted with a perpetual spleen and such a. melancholy that .ho is perpetually upon ths point of hanging himself. At tho same time he is gifted, with a cunning, a craft, a power of deceit, and a power of bribery which hardly seem worth while in an individual who is usually upon the point of suicide. So that personally when I como to read patriotic and international novels I find myself usually in a state of bewilderment. Is tho German Chancellor, really u bespectacled policeman who has disguised himst-lf as a waiter, arid hides in ii Soho restaurant until the time comes to give a quarter of a-million German waiters in London the signal to sack the city? Or 'is , -the British Chancellor of the- ftxehe3uer a long-toothed, sandy-wliiskerod inividual who scatters sliowcrs of Uritish gold, all across the country from 11ammirg to the Bavarian frontier, causing innumerable, spies to spring up as was the case with the dragon's teeth that Cadmus sowed?"

For evidence of the falsity of tlips-o Tiews, Sir. HuelTer appeals to a recent German novel, "ifax Von Bahring and Seine i'reumdinnon," by I'rand Sonutag. "If I needed any convincing that tho average Englishman and the average German are almost exactly interchangeable," he says— "so that you might take almost any English father of n iainil.r and drop him doivii in, let us say, Dresden, and von might take almost any German lather of.a family and drop him down in, let us say, Manchester, and the one and the other would just go on performing his functions as head of (he house without any inconvenience .or any friction—if I had any doubt of this, I'raii Herhvig Somitag's book would go a very long way to dissipate the doubt. Her picture of the Weimar of Liszt's day is very convincing, and very exactly whnt I know it to have been; her picture of English country house fife nnd of the English up-per-class life of to-day is very exactly

what it superficially is, so that tliousU I do not'happen i-o know anything luunit I'rau Sonuttig's life, I very slireimly suspect tlint she has spent tome r.u.i- .[Uilo a lung time—in an iiiiglisli peers hoiiteor at least in England. "And she has used her eyes remarkably well. It is not only that she has observed the carved oak sideboard, before which at breakfast in a iamiliar way Lady Eileen stands and points out to tho guests that tho fish croquets liavo gono cold but that the kidneys over Ihe spirit lamp in their silver dish remain i-nviably buboliu". It isn't only that she has observed the English lawns, the ludgos, tho prize Highland sheep; or that s-ln> has got tho titles of mi J-Ijlish fainilv rjuiio right, or. that she generally provides her family with qmte Knglisli-souii-liiig names. No; sho has gone really deeper than this, and, as part of her i->s,-rva-tion of English, social oddnesses, slit; gives us a peer's nephew who is meant tur the. Church, but who persists in i-nlering tho Fabian Society ami writing immoral plays for a theatre that we can quite veil recognise as the Court Theatra under (ho Vedreune-Barker regime. • And wlu'.t is still more subtle and still more oddly English, this young man is turned nut of doors by his father, who is a rector, ami the younger brother of the earl; yher.-ns by the earl himself and his family tins dangerous revolutionary is housed, and regarded with a kindly toleration, becausethe earl and his family fay that advanced ideas are a discaso incidental to youth, and one that must bo got thruugh like chicken-pox or measles. "That is a frame of mind Hint would bo almost impossible in Germany, where people still take their politics seriously; 'and of that fact I-'rau Sonntag makes us very cleverly aware. And that is really ono of the differences that separate tho two nations. Another is the difference between tlie German's enormous admiration for the arts ami the Englishman's almost complete contempt for these elVeniiuato matter?. ■ In England Max Von Balirinj is offered the hospitality of the Earl's house not so much because he is the finest violinist in tho world, as because he has a Von to his name, is of gentlemanly descent, and sufficiently well off not to be likely to borrow money. In Germany he is worshipped; dukes and counts press laurel wreaths upon his brotv; countesses kiss his hand and bricklayers call him 'masier.' The arrival in town—in Germany—of such a pianist as Liszt sets the whole country throbbing. There is no potentate who will not bow before him; there is no princess who will not creep stealthily up behind his back to remove one of the white hairs from his coat collar , and to store it up for ever in her royal museum. (And, indeed I, I who write these words, once did this very thin.?, taking one of the whito hairs of Liszt from his coat collar when he sat in front of me at a concert. But, alas! I have long since lost that particular relic, whereas there is no German princess that did such a thing and ever lost the hair afterwards.) So that these are the veal differences between the English and the Germans. To the east of the North Sea we love the arts better; to the west we are more indifferent about politics. And it hardly seems to me that these aro very good reasons for running out the U-inch guns and taking pot shots into each other's peaceful countrysides. And it is the value of Fran Hedwig Sonntag's book that it points out there, peaceful facts, nml shows how the Lion and the Black Eagle can lie down very peaceably together. For, as is to be expected in a German novel, the book contains a complicated tangle of prosperous love affairs; and there are mixed marriages between German artists and ■members of the English upper classes; and it all gcos very well—as indeed it does in real life."