SOLDIERS SUPREME

Evening Post, Volume XCI, Issue 107, 6 May 1916, Page 10

SOLDIERS SUPREME

SCIENCE .AND ARTS SECOND

A CAST-IRON SOCIAL SYSTEM

On social life in Germany the military element is supreme. How an unsophisticated American^Jiad his eyes opened is thus told by Mr. , Poultney Bigelow in

"Prussian Memories"

Where are tho great men of Germany? one asks instinctively when first invited to the German Court. Where are the great poets, dramatists, historians, inventors, painters, sculptors, engineers, singers, actors? A diplomatic frieijd begged me to dine with him and asked irie to same any whom I desired to meet. Of course .1 asked for Germany's firstShakespearean, Ludwig Barnay,\ him whose bust can be seen in the Players' Club, the friend of Edwin Booth, a man who was the Henry Irving or Forbes Robertson of his day. But my host lolled up his eyes in horror and said: "No, no, impossible, an actor—nobody would come!" So I surrendered and learned my lesson, that to find the Barnays and Mommsens, the "Virchows and the Helmlio'.tzes of Germany is not on monuments such as Frederick the Great's or even at the Prussian Court that we should make our search. The wife of Professor Helmholtz said to me in angrytones: "For social purposes I would rather have the youngest- Prussian lieutenant in the Berlin garrison as husband than my illustrious excellency of a scientist." She spoke.in anger under provocation, and when her anger subsided perhaps she changed her mind, but I doubt it.

Berlin is to-day a byword amongst artists for mediocrity, if not vulgarity, in the way of Imperial statuary and architecture. To one who is fresh from the semi-Latin Bavarian capital and who after a night in'the train suddenly finds himself in Berlin face to. face' with a wilderness of stone and marble representing millions of marks paid out to architects, sculptors, and stone-masons, the melancholy conclusion forces itself upon him that all this Imperial quarry would scarcely repay to a successful French .army the cost of carriage—at least not the latter-day stuff. Yet the specimens in Berlin are not a criterion of what Germany could produce to-day if her best artists had been consulted. Berlin has more painters, sculptors, architects, and engineers than .any other. German city—at least a larger proportion of money-makers in these departments. But the city ,as a whole disguises this fact with Prussian thoroughness, and the stranger is made to feel that while the streets are clean and the buildings uniformly placed, and every detail of municipal activity attended, to with intelligence and efficiency of a military camp, there is scarce a monument,'square, blind alley, or nook where wo would linger as we would in, dozens I could name in Paris, London, or Munich.

And the people reflect this perfection of mediocrity—they,, are all soldiers or merchants or officials- or artisans, each one labelled and dressed as per catalogue and wholly incapable of- being mistaken for anything individual or interesting. Occasionally there obtrudes a civilised stranger from Boston, Paris, or Oxford, and he is at once stared at and audibly discussed, for the Berlin burgher prides himself upon a thirst for knowledge and bluntness of speech which in older and more civilised communities would be regarded as provincial curiosity, not to say rudeness.