THE cordial, trustful hospitality with which I was received by the old families of Weimar seems to justify an acknowledgment of it, yet makes the task a delicate one.
The prevalent opinion throughout the rest of Germany seems to be that the society of Weimar retains, to an unusual degree, the rigid and cumbersome etiquette of a past generation.
Forgetting that, a hundred years ago, the court was the freest in Germany, and that here, almost for the first time in history, culture was absolutely forced upon rank by the eminence of men who were not of patrician birth, the Prussian or Saxon or Bavarian repeats a few stories current thirty or forty years ago, and comfortably thrusts Weimar into its proper place in his ready - made theory of German society. Such a procedure may save trouble, but it is far from being just.
Unfortunately, there is no intellectual chemistry which will cast the lines of education, prejudice, and inherited tastes upon an infallible spectrum, and enable us to estimate their value. When I say that I found a freer, less conventional social spirit in Weimar than in the other small German capitals with which I have some acquaintance, I am quite prepared to hear the statement denied.
The foreigner receives a more kindly consideration in Germany than in any other country in the world, and nowhere more so than in Weimar, where for so many years all forms of foreign culture were so heartily welcomed.
