A Tramp Abroad
and whether the prisoner ever achieved it or not. But there was no way
of finding out these things.
Occasionally, a name was followed simply by the remark, “II days, for
disturbing the peace,” and without comment upon the justice or injustice
of the sentence.
In one place was a hilarious picture of a student of the green cap
corps with a bottle of champagne in each hand; and below was the legend:
“These make an evil fate endurable.”
There were two prison cells, and neither had space left on walls or
ceiling for another name or portrait or picture. The inside surfaces of
the two doors were completely covered with CARTES DE VISITE of former
prisoners, ingeniously let into the wood and protected from dirt and
injury by glass.
I very much wanted one of the sorry old tables which the prisoners had
spent so many years in ornamenting with their pocket-knives, but red
tape was in the way. The custodian could not sell one without an
order from a superior; and that superior would have to get it from HIS
superior; and this one would have to get it from a higher one--and so on
up and up until the faculty should sit on the matter and deliver final
judgment. The system was right, and nobody could find fault with it; but
it did not seem justifiable to bother so many people, so I proceeded no
further. It might have cost me more than I could afford, anyway; for
one of those prison tables, which was at the time in a private museum
in Heidelberg, was afterward sold at auction for two hundred and fifty
dollars. It was not worth more than a dollar, or possibly a dollar and
half, before the captive students began their work on it. Persons who
saw it at the auction said it was so curiously and wonderfully carved
that it was worth the money that was paid for it.
Among them many who have tasted the college prison's dreary hospitality
was a lively young fellow from one of the Southern states of America,
whose first year's experience of German university life was rather
peculiar. The day he arrived in Heidelberg he enrolled his name on the
college books, and was so elated with the fact that his dearest hope
had found fruition and he was actually a student of the old and renowned
university, that he set to work that very night to celebrate the event
by a grand lark in company with some other students. In the course of
his lark he managed to make a wide breach in one of the university's
most stringent laws. Sequel: before noon, next day, he was in the
college prison--booked for three months. The twelve long weeks dragged
slowly by, and the day of deliverance came at last. A great crowd of
sympathizing fellow-students received him with a rousing demonstration
as he came forth, and of course there was another grand lark--in the
course of which he managed to make a wide breach of the CITY'S most
stringent laws. Sequel: before noon, next day, he was safe in the city
lockup--booked for three months. This second tedious captivity drew to
an end in the course of time, and again a great crowd of sympathizing
fellow students gave him a rousing reception as he came forth; but
his delight in his freedom was so boundless that he could not proceed
soberly and calmly, but must go hopping and skipping and jumping down
the sleety street from sheer excess of joy. Sequel: he slipped and broke
his leg, and actually lay in the hospital during the next three months!
When he at last became a free man again, he said he believed he would
hunt up a brisker seat of learning; the Heidelberg lectures might
be good, but the opportunities of attending them were too rare, the
educational process too slow; he said he had come to Europe with the
idea that the acquirement of an education was only a matter of time,
but if he had averaged the Heidelberg system correctly, it was rather a
matter of eternity.
APPENDIX D.
The Awful German Language
A little learning makes the whole world kin.
--Proverbs xxxii, 7.
I went often to look at the collection of curiosities in Heidelberg
Castle, and one day I surprised the keeper of it with my German. I spoke
entirely in that language. He was greatly interested; and after I had
talked a while he said my German was very rare, possibly a “unique”; and
wanted to add it to his museum.
If he had known what it had cost me to acquire my art, he would also
have known that it would break any collector to buy it. Harris and I had
been hard at work on our German during several weeks at that time, and
although we had made good progress, it had been accomplished under great
difficulty and annoyance, for three of our teachers had died in the mean
time. A person who has not studied German can form no idea of what a
perplexing language it is.
Surely there is not another language that is so slipshod and systemless,
and so slippery and elusive to the grasp. One is washed about in it,
hither and thither, in the most helpless way; and when at last he thinks
he has captured a rule which offers firm ground to take a rest on amid
the general rage and turmoil of the ten parts of speech, he turns over
the page and reads, “Let the pupil make careful note of the following
EXCEPTIONS.” He runs his eye down and finds that there are more
exceptions to the rule than instances of it. So overboard he goes again,
to hunt for another Ararat and find another quicksand. Such has been,
and continues to be, my experience. Every time I think I have got one
of these four confusing “cases” where I am master of it, a seemingly
insignificant preposition intrudes itself into my sentence, clothed with
an awful and unsuspected power, and crumbles the ground from under
me. For instance, my book inquires after a certain bird--(it is always
inquiring after things which are of no sort of consequence to anybody):
“Where is the bird?” Now the answer to this question--according to the
book--is that the bird is waiting in the blacksmith shop on account of
the rain. Of course no bird would do that, but then you must stick to
the book. Very well, I begin to cipher out the German for that answer. I
begin at the wrong end, necessarily, for that is the German idea. I
say to myself, “REGEN (rain) is masculine--or maybe it is feminine--or
possibly neuter--it is too much trouble to look now. Therefore, it
is either DER (the) Regen, or DIE (the) Regen, or DAS (the) Regen,
according to which gender it may turn out to be when I look. In the
interest of science, I will cipher it out on the hypothesis that it is
masculine. Very well--then THE rain is DER Regen, if it is simply in
the quiescent state of being MENTIONED, without enlargement or
discussion--Nominative case; but if this rain is lying around, in a kind
of a general way on the ground, it is then definitely located, it is
DOING SOMETHING--that is, RESTING (which is one of the German grammar's
ideas of doing something), and this throws the rain into the Dative
case, and makes it DEM Regen. However, this rain is not resting, but is
doing something ACTIVELY,--it is falling--to interfere with the bird,
likely--and this indicates MOVEMENT, which has the effect of sliding it
into the Accusative case and changing DEM Regen into DEN Regen.”
Having completed the grammatical horoscope of this matter, I answer
up confidently and state in German that the bird is staying in the
blacksmith shop “wegen (on account of) DEN Regen.” Then the teacher lets
me softly down with the remark that whenever the word “wegen” drops
into a sentence, it ALWAYS throws that subject into the GENITIVE case,
regardless of consequences--and therefore this bird stayed in the
blacksmith shop “wegen DES Regens.”
N.B.--I was informed, later, by a higher authority, that there was
an “exception” which permits one to say “wegen DEN Regen” in certain
peculiar and complex circumstances, but that this exception is not
extended to anything BUT rain.
There are ten parts of speech, and they are all troublesome. An average
sentence, in a German newspaper, is a sublime and impressive curiosity;
it occupies a quarter of a column; it contains all the ten parts of
speech--not in regular order, but mixed; it is built mainly of compound
words constructed by the writer on the spot, and not to be found in
any dictionary--six or seven words compacted into one, without joint
or seam--that is, without hyphens; it treats of fourteen or fifteen
different subjects, each enclosed in a parenthesis of its own, with here
and there extra parentheses, making pens within pens: finally, all the
parentheses and reparentheses are massed together between a couple
of king-parentheses, one of which is placed in the first line of the
majestic sentence and the other in the middle of the last line of
it--AFTER WHICH COMES THE VERB, and you find out for the first time what
the man has been talking about; and after the verb--merely by way of
ornament, as far as I can make out--the writer shovels in “HABEN SIND
GEWESEN GEHABT HAVEN GEWORDEN SEIN,” or words to that effect, and the
monument is finished. I suppose that this closing hurrah is in the
nature of the flourish to a man's signature--not necessary, but pretty.
German books are easy enough to read when you hold them before
the looking-glass or stand on your head--so as to reverse the
construction--but I think that to learn to read and understand a German
newspaper is a thing which must always remain an impossibility to a
foreigner.
Yet even the German books are not entirely free from attacks of the
Parenthesis distemper--though they are usually so mild as to cover only
a few lines, and therefore when you at last get down to the verb it
carries some meaning to your mind because you are able to remember a
good deal of what has gone before. Now here is a sentence from a popular
and excellent German novel--with a slight parenthesis in it. I will make
a perfectly literal translation, and throw in the parenthesis-marks and
some hyphens for the assistance of the reader--though in the original
there are no parenthesis-marks or hyphens, and the reader is left to
flounder through to the remote verb the best way he can:
“But when he, upon the street, the
(in-satin-and-silk-covered-now-very-unconstrained-after-the-newest-fashioned-dressed)
government counselor's wife MET,” etc., etc. [1]
1. Wenn er aber auf der Strasse der in Sammt und Seide gehuellten
jetz sehr ungenirt nach der neusten mode gekleideten Regierungsrathin
begegnet.
That is from THE OLD MAMSELLE'S SECRET, by Mrs. Marlitt. And that
sentence is constructed upon the most approved German model. You observe
how far that verb is from the reader's base of operations; well, in a
German newspaper they put their verb away over on the next page; and
I have heard that sometimes after stringing along the exciting
preliminaries and parentheses for a column or two, they get in a hurry
and have to go to press without getting to the verb at all. Of course,
then, the reader is left in a very exhausted and ignorant state.
We have the Parenthesis disease in our literature, too; and one may see
cases of it every day in our books and newspapers: but with us it is the
mark and sign of an unpracticed writer or a cloudy intellect, whereas
with the Germans it is doubtless the mark and sign of a practiced pen
and of the presence of that sort of luminous intellectual fog
which stands for clearness among these people. For surely it is NOT
clearness--it necessarily can't be clearness. Even a jury would have
penetration enough to discover that. A writer's ideas must be a good
deal confused, a good deal out of line and sequence, when he starts out
to say that a man met a counselor's wife in the street, and then right
in the midst of this so simple undertaking halts these approaching
people and makes them stand still until he jots down an inventory of the