The German university had seemed
a failure, but the German high school was something very near an
indictable nuisance.
Before the month of April arrived, the experiment of German
education had reached this point. Nothing was left of it except
the ghost of the Civil Law shut up in the darkest of closets,
never to gibber again before any one who could repeat the story.
The derisive Jew laughter of Heine ran through the university and
everything else in Berlin. Of course, when one is twenty years
old, life is bound to be full, if only of Berlin beer, although
German student life was on the whole the thinnest of beer, as an
American looked on it, but though nothing except small fragments
remained of the education that had been so promising -- or
promised -- this is only what most often happens in life, when
by-products turn out to be more valuable than staples. The German
university and German law were failures; German society, in an
American sense, did not exist, or if it existed, never showed
itself to an American; the German theatre, on the other hand, was
excellent, and German opera, with the ballet, was almost worth a
journey to Berlin; but the curious and perplexing result of the
total failure of German education was that the student's only
clear gain -- his single step to a higher life -- came from time
wasted; studies neglected; vices indulged; education reversed; --
it came from the despised beer-garden and music-hall; and it was
accidental, unintended, unforeseen.
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