GERMAN NOTES ON ENGLAND.

THE critical method which was at once the strength and the weakness of Taine—bis way of generalising

positively and confidently as soon as he had ascertained the origins and the environment of his human subject—was only a peculiarly audacious and attractive extension of the method which comes naturally to every one who seeks to judge other men, other nations, other times. Our desiderated facts for the foundation of judgment may not be Taine's, but we all unconsciously generalise from a group of ascertained facts as though the facts might not yield a variety of combinations. Every Padgett, M.P., is ridiculous and pretentious only because he finds that the figures of his problem always add up into exactly the total which he had in his mind before the factors of the problem were set before him. A journalist once went to the United States, and having noticed the first two drivers be saw holding their reins in the right hand, he wrote that all Americans drove with the right hand. But the very mistakes of foreign observers—when they are not so preposterous as that of the journalist in New York—have their value. A wrong judgment by a visitor frequently teaches us a valuable lesson by showing us how we have courted misconception. "How others see us" is an invariably instructive subject; it

is also often amusing, and it is very often disciplinary. We have not read for some time any foreign judgments on us which have struck us with a livelier sense of their author's

penetration than those of a young German student who recently visited England with some of his fellow-students. A

prize for an essay in English on English life was offered to the students by Lady Courtney of Penwith, and it was won by Herr Richard Rifle, of Leipzig. The Manchester Guardian

has reproduced part of it—it is really a series of reflections taken out of a diary—and we agree that it has "high qualities of perception and imagination and an extraordinary ease in the use of English." The italics in the passages we quote are the author's own.

There are a few generalisations--ot course—which are seen to be unjustifiable, but there is an extraordinarily high per- centage of things which are well said and worth saying. The first observation in the essay is surely a pleasure to read for its nice use of simile and metaphor and its just idiom. We have read that when Kossuth, the Hungarian patriot, visited England in the middle of last century he took the town by storm by his orations in the language of Shakespeare and of the Authorised Version of the Bible. Their quaintness had a surprising grandeur and force. We dare say that it is Herr Hille's exact study of English from good models which gives him the advantage over the baser currency of language which is commonly employed even by Englishmen who profess to write. He says :—

"England's trees and shrubs seem to have left their flock, the forest. The Englishmen, their masters, spread all across the world, and so they did in this country. At the borders of the fields they are standing, forgotten by the statisticians, who measure the size of woods by square miles, not by the number of trees. Their rows divide the width of the landscape. This diminishes its grandeur, but makes it more lovely. It gives resting-places for the eye, and animates the uniformity of the green lawn by a darker ornament. In Germany I have found similar landscapes, but at the borders of the North Sea, the home of the ancient Anglo-Saxons. It is to be considered that the bright green of the English turf has been bought by a good deal of the blue of sky. Nature is just." • He goes on to the " Zoo " :—" A great charm of London's Zoological Garden is that it is a zoological ' garden,' and not a zoological courtyard, without any green, as many zoos are in Germany." He does us justice there. Both in Germany and France the fault he complains of exists chiefly in the smaller public gardens ; they are gardens indeed, but they

are too scrupulously arranged, and have an over-rectangularity. The sylvan air which indubitably belongs to some of our old London squares is wanting.

We quote next a passage on house-building :—

"It seems to me that the simple house, which has no attic and a very bare, rectangular face, is the type of the English house. It has but horizontal and vertical lines, and thus it harmonises with the shape of English castles and churches. Its articulation and beauty consists in large windows, with light bordering-stones, in straight balcony rails and white-coloured spaces between the bricks. (Without these aesthetieal means it appears with its neighbours as a long, high, broad wall, excavated for dwelling purposes.) It is cheap, light, and spacious. Unfortunately —being so simple—it offers almost no possibility of development. Many buildings of new garden towns, which found their model in the ancient village houses, are less practical and cheap, but far more apt for development. Many English buildings, hideous themselves, appear nice, and many others which are pretty appear beautiful. Nature was their artist, and her trick was the green of plants. This gives life to dead stones, and it joins the straight stiffness of human buildings into the softness of nature."

Herr Hille's opinion on our new buildings in London is not flattering:—" The new monuments, business houses, and publis buildings I have seen miss what the last decade has brought

to Germany : the severe endeavour to embody in an original manner the grand new soul of modern life." What would he have said of the generation which was building houses when Trafalgar Square was peopled with its notorious monuments ? We should ourselves say that there is no art in which more conscience has appeared in recent years than in the art of architecture. There is a large group of architects whose work is entitled to all consideration and respect, and it is their designs which are transforming the heart of London. Possibly much more might have been done with the opportunities which lie in the erection of new Government buildings, but at all events there is nothing petty

on the one hand, or foolishly grandiose on the other, in most of these new buildings. Herr Hille's stricture need be taken, however, to mean no more than that there is a different ethos

in German and English official or commercial buildings, and that he prefers the German. He has a charming thing to say about the older buildings of England. Who that has looked on the towering height of, say, Amiens Cathedral will not feel that Herr Hille's words satisfy the architectural moods of France and South-West Germany and England P-

"To the bolder and higher Gothic of France and South-west Germany the Perpendicular style, a fruit of Anglo-Gothic, with ita roll arches and lower steeples, is in the same proportion as England's lower but softer sky of clouds to the bluer, higher, but stronger sky of those regions."

Herr Hille's words on English churchyards are full of sympathy :—

" What touches us so much when we look at the simple, straight tombstones of old Engl. churchyards? Is it the modest equality of their shapes, which pictures all-equalising death ? Is it their defying inflexibility at the places of decay, which speaks of something despising the scythe of death ? "

Of the appearance of Englishmen Herr Hille says :—

" England is rich in great and well-shaped human bodies. Small and long skulls are numerous, with nice, close-sitting ears and sharp profiles. And most of the English are clever enough not to weaken the strength of their lines by the swelling of a moustache. Many men, especially the middle-aged, are remarkable for the prominence of muscles in the lower region of the face—the con- sequence, perhaps, of permanent efforts to appear as calm aa possible. It is not impossible that the sharp chin, very common in England, is in correlation to the English pronunciation (which the foreigner masters best if he pushes the lower jaw a little out)."

It is pleasant to learn by inference that our cars sit closer than those of other nations. Yet it is all a question of degree, for we remember an animated correspondence in (we think) the Daily Telegraph on " Why Do Our Children's Ears Stick Out ? "

Oar last quotation shall be on English tea-parties :—

"The mobility of the English tea-meeting has great advantages over a stiff table-round. Everybody has the choice of his partner, and that allows of more individual conversation. If one's remarks have come to a dead point one can change one's neighbour. The solitary who could not avoid the invitation is able to find a quiet corner. On the other hand it is easy for the shallow to conceal his real nature behind some phrases, sent to different addresses. For the man who has not been gifted with bodily beauty it is more difficult to find partnership, for most people see the pearls first."

Alas ! how little, after all, one learns at the first glance, and

how little Herr Rifle knows of the difficulties and embarrass- ments of changing one's neighbour ! The man who can do it with ease has nothing to learn in the arts of life. This most engaging young German student has perhaps suffered too much under the stiff regime of the German drawing-room. where the sofa is the throne of the domestic court, and etiquette is enforced from that position of authority and eminence with a passion of scrupulosity.