that her husband and her children will
call her blessed. These things come out quite naturally, almost
unconsciously, in the little story that is "not literature," and which
for all that is so truly and deeply German in its quality and tone.
This Gretchen of the schoolroom, this caricature of the country
cousin, is akin in her simplicity, sweetness, and depth of nature to
that other Gretchen whose figure lives for ever in the greatest of
German poems. Just as the women of Shakespeare and the women of Miss
Austen are subtly kin to each other, inasmuch as they are English
women, so Goethe's girl and the girl of the poor little schoolroom
story are German in every pulse and fibre. And this national essence,
the honesty, goodness, and sweetness of the girl, are the real
things, the things to remember about her. Those little matters of the
toilet and the table will soon be out of date, are out of date already
in the greater part of Germany. As a picture of forgotten manners they
will always be amusing, just as it is amusing to read an
eighteenth-century English story of school life, in which the young
ladies fought and bit and scratched each other and were whipped and
sent to bed.

CHAPTER VI

THE STUDENT

When an English lad goes to the university he usually goes there from
a public school, where out of school hours he has been learning for
years past to be a man. In these strenuous days he may have learned a
little in school hours too, but that is a new departure. Cricket and
character are what an English boy expects to develop at school, and if
there is stuff in him he succeeds. He does not set a high value on
learning. Even if he works and brings home prizes he will not be as
proud of them as of his football cap, while a boy who is head of the
school, but a duffer at games, will live for all time in the memory of
his fellows as a failure. But the German boy goes to school to acquire
knowledge, and he too gets what he wants. The habit of work must be
strong in him when at the age of eighteen he goes to one of his many
universities. But when he gets there he is free for the first time in
his life, and the first use he for the most part makes of his freedom
is to be thoroughly, happily idle. This idleness, if he has a backbone
and a call to work, only lasts a term or two; and no one who knows how
a German boy is held to the grindstone for twelve years of school life
can grudge him a holiday. But the odd fact is,