I asked Kloster about anniversaries when I went for my lesson on Friday.  He is a very human little man, full of sympathy,—–­the sort of comprehending sympathy that laughs and understands together, yet his genius seems to detach him from other Germans, for he criticizes them with a dispassionate thoroughness that is surprising.  The remarks he makes about the Kaiser, for instance, whom he irreverently alludes to as S. M.—­(short and rude for Seine Majestat)—­simply make me shiver in this country of lese majeste.  In England, where we can say what we like, I have never heard anybody say anything disrespectful about the King.  Here, where you go to prison if you laugh even at officials, even at a policeman, at anything whatever in buttons, for that is the punishable offence of Beamtenbeleidigung—­haven’t they got heavenly words—­Kloster and people I have come across in his rooms say what they like; and what they like is very rude indeed about that sacred man the Kaiser, who doesn’t appear to be at all popular.  But then Kloster belongs to the intelligents, and his friends are all people of intelligence, and that sort of person doesn’t care very much, I think, for absolute monarchs.  Kloster says they’re anachronisms, that the world is too old for them, too grown-up for pretences and decorations.  And when I went for my lesson on Friday I found his front door wreathed with evergreens and paper flowers,—­pretences and decorations crawling even round Kloster—­and I went in very reluctantly, not knowing what sort of a memorial celebration I was going to tumble into.  But it was only that his wife—­I didn’t know he had a wife, he seemed altogether so happily unmarried—­was coming home.  She had been away for three weeks; not nearly long enough, you and I and others of our self-depreciatory and self-critical country would think, to deserve an evergreen garland round our door on coming back.  He laughed when I told him I had been afraid to come in lest I should disturb retrospective obsequies.

“We are still so near, my dear Mees Chrees,” he said, shrugging a fat shoulder—­he asked me what I was called at home, and I said you called me Chris, and he said he would, with my permission, also call me Chrees, but with Mees in front of it to show that though he desired to be friendly he also wished to remain respectful—­“we are still so near as a nation to the child and to the savage.  To the clever child, and the powerful savage.  We like simple and gross emotions and plenty of them; obvious tastes in our food and our pleasures, and a great deal of it; fat in our food, and fat in our women.  And, like the child, when we mourn we mourn to excess, and enjoy ourselves in that excess; and, like the savage, we are afraid, and therefore hedge ourselves about with observances, celebrations, cannon, kings.  In no other country is there more than one king.  In ours we find three and an emperor necessary.  The savage who fears all things does not fear more than we Germans.