UNIVERSITY OF CA RIVERSIDE LIBRARY 3 1210 01981 3060 ^mm' HI'!' ^if-mt-v^-'' 11 ^!ii^^ jB «r r In Memory of Raymond Best THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE ROMANTIC GERMANY DANZir.-JOriiN STRHHT AND ST. MAI.V .. (_11L KCII ROMANTIC GERMANY BY ROBERT HAVEN SCHAUFFLER AUTHOR OF "WHERE SPEECH ENDS" WITH ILLUSTRATIONS BY HANS HERRMANN, ALFRED SCHERRES, KARL O' LYNCH VON TOWN, GERTRUDE WURMB, CHARLES VETTER, AND OTTO F. PROBST fP^^^^K sr^w \v4^'-^^^P^ *mw/>^ PUBLISHED BY THE CENTURY CO. NEW YORK M CM X 'd)jj'+l Copyright, 1908, 1909, by The Century Co. Published October, 1909 THE DE VINNE PRESS TO MY WIFE l^ ^ 3 CONTENTS PAGE I Danzig 3 II Berlin — the City of the Hohenzol- LERNS 40 III Potsdam — the Playground of the HOHENZOLLERNS 100 IV Brunswick — the Town of Tyll EULENSPIEGEL ........ 141 V GosLAR in the Harz 184 VI Hildesheim and Fairyland . . . .198 VII Leipsic 236 VIII Meissen 262 IX Dresden — the Florence of the Elbe . 274 X Munich — a City of Good Nature . . 300 XI Augsburg » . . 343 XII The City of Dreams 358 Index 391 vii LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS PAGB Danzig — Jopen Street and St. Mary's Church . Frontispiece Painted by Alfred Scherres. The Crane Gate 5 Painted by Alfred Scherres. The Stock Tower 16 Painted by Alfred Scherres. The Poggenpfuhl, with St. Peter's Church and the Rathaus Tower 22 Painted by Alfred Scherres. The Mottlau and St. John's Church (Winter Evening) . . 30 Painted by Alfred Scherres. The Fish Market and "The Swan" 35 Painted by Alfred Scherres. The Brandenburg Gate — the Emperor passes .... 43 Painted by Karl O'Lynch von Town. Fountain of Neptune, with Royal Stables and Rathaus Tower 43 Drawn by Karl O'Lynch von Town. The Old Museum (in the distance), as seen from the base of the Monument to Emperor William I 51 Drawn by Karl O'Lynch von Town. The Bridge of the Elector (Kurfiirsten-Briicke) over the Spree, with the river-front of the Royal Castle and the Cathedral 55 Painted by Karl O'Lynch von Town. ix LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS lAGE The Cathedral and the Frederick Bridge, from the Circus Busch on the north side of the Spree 60 Painted by Karl O'Lynch von Town. The Janowitz Bridge over the Spree 70 Painted by Karl O'Lynch von Town. Palace of the Reichstag, fronting the Konigs Platz ... 75 Painted by Karl O'Lynch von Town. The Royal Castle, Charlottenburg, as seen from the Gardens 82 Painted by Karl O'Lynch von Town. In the Tiergarten 82 Painted by Karl O'Lynch von Town. Wertheim's Store in the Leipziger-Strasse 87 Painted by Karl O'Lynch von Town. A Glimpse of Old Berlin (Am Krogl) 87 Painted by Karl O'Lynch von Town. The Landwehr Canal with the Potsdam Bridge^ as seen from the Konigin-Augusta-Strasse 97 Painted by Karl O'Lynch von Town. The Marble Palace on the Holy Lake 104 Drawn by Hans Herrmann. Babelsberg 104 Drawn by Hans Herrmann. Old Potsdam on the Havel 107 Painted by Hans Herrmann. The Town Castle and the "Petition Linden" Ill Painted by Hans Herrmann. The Old Market ^ , «... 118 Painted by Hans Herrmann. X LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS PACK Alley in Sans Souci Park 121 Painted by Hans Herrmann. The Great Fountain in Sans Souci Park, with the Terraces and Palace in the background 126 Painted by Hans Herrmann. The Statue of the Archer and the Old Mill 131 Drawn by Hans Herrmann. View of the Palace of Sans Souci from the Ruinenberg . .136 Drawn by Hans Herrmann. The Ruinenberg, the ruins built by Frederick the Great, north of Sans Souci 136 Drawn by Hans Herrmann. The Broad Bridge 139 Painted by Hans Herrmann. The Old-Town Market 150 Painted by Gertrude Wurmb. Old Houses in the Reichen-Strasse 155 Painted by Gertrude Wurmb. An Old Courtyard in Brunswick l68 Painted by Gertrude Wurmb. Churcli of St. Catherine and Henry the Lion's Fountain in the Hagen Markt 172 Painted by Gertrude Wurmb. The Alte Waage, looking toward St. Andrew's . . . .177 Painted by Gertrude Wurmb. The front of St. Andrew's, as seen from the Weber-Strasse 181 Painted by Gertrude Wurmb. The Kaiserhaus 188 Painted by Alfred Scherres. xi LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE The Brusttuch 194 Painted by Alfred Scherres. Cathedral Cloisters. The Thousand-year Rose-bush • • . 203 Painted by Alfred Scherres. The Nave of St. Michael's Church 209 Painted by Alfred Scherres. "The Old-German House" 215 Drawn by Alfred Scherres. The Rathaus (left). Temple House and Wedekind House in the Market-Place 221 Painted by Alfred Scherres. The Pillar House in the Andreas-Platz 228 Drawn by Alfred Scherres. The Eckemecker-Strasse 234 Drawn by Alfred Scherres, An Old House in the Nikolai-Strasse 241 Painted by Karl O'Lynch von Town. St. Thomas's from the Burg-Strasse ........ 241 Painted by Karl O'Lynch von Town. The Old Rathaus 248 Painted by Karl O'Lynch von Town. The New Rathaus from the Promenade-Ring 255 Painted by Karl O'Lynch von Town. On the Pleisse, in the Naundorfchen Quarter 259 Painted by Karl O'Lynch von Town. Meissen from the right bank of the Elbe 266 Painted by Karl O'Lynch von Town. Ascent to the Albrechtsburg 271 Painted by Karl O'Lynch von Town. xii LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE Church of Our Lady from the Briihl Terrace 278 Painted by Karl O'Lynch von Town. Porcelain Fair in the New Market, the Church of Our Lady on the left 282 Painted by Karl O'Lynch von Town. Court Church and Castle as seen from the Elbe . . . 289 Painted by Karl O'Lynch von Town. Dresden from the left bank of the Elbe, the Queen Carola Bridge in the foreground, the old Augustus Bridge in the distance 296 Painted by Karl O'Lynch von Town. Karl's Place,looking toward Karl's Gate, and the Church of Our Lady 303 Painted by Charles Vetter. Church of St. John 311 Drawn by Charles Vetter. Court of the Hofbrauhaus (Royal Brewery) 318 Painted by Charles Vetter. The Maximilianeum and the Isar 326 Painted by Charles Vetter. The Church of St. Anna 329 Painted by Charles Vetter. The Gardens of Nymphenburg 336 Painted by Charles Vetter. The New Rathaus in the middle ground, and the Towers of the Church of Our Lady, in the distance 339 Painted by Charles Vetter. The North Portal of the Cathedral 3^5 Painted by Karl O'Lynch von Town. The Ludwigs-Platz and the Fountain of Augustus . . . 350 Painted by Karl O'Lynch von Town. xiii LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS PACE The Jakober-Strasse, with the Jakober-Thor in the distance 355 Painted by Karl O'Lynch von Town The Markus Tower 360 Etched by O. F. Probst. The Rathaus (City Hall), the older part having the Tower 363 Etched by O. F. Probst. Court of the Apotheke 368 Etched by O F. Probst. Portal of the Old Rathaus 371 Etched by O. F. Probst. Fountain in the Kapellen-Platz 378 Etched by O. F. Probst. The Klingen-Gate Tower 381 Etched by O. F. Probst. Am Plonlein — Siebers Gate at the left and Cobolzeller Gate at the right 385 Etched by O. F.Probst. XIV PREFACE In the surfeit of books on Germany one subject has been strangely neglected, and that is— the land itself. Its politics, history, sociology, commerce, and science each has a literature of its own. But for the latest account in English of Germany's most repre- sentative and picturesque towns one must turn either to the guide-books or to a rare volume called "Views Afoot," written by young Bayard Taylor in the year 1846. To certain readers prejudiced by this mislead- ing emphasis it may come as a pleasant surprise to learn that Germany still remains the land of the Nibelungenlied and of Grimm's Fairy Tales, of gnomes and giants, storks and turreted ring-walls, of Gothic liouses in rows, and the glamour of medie- val courtyards. But so it is. One must merely know where to look for these things. Many of the towns, like Rothenburg, Danzig, and XV PREFACE Brunswick, have preserved almost intact their Old World magic, and a touch of real romance is to be found as well in almost every one of those larger cities which we have been taught to consider hope- lessly prosaic. There is a peculiar zest in discovering a Krogl or an Auerbach's Keller in such places as Berlin and Leipsic, which so many travelers visit un- aware of their stores of hidden treasures. It is much as though one should chance on a Diirer en- graving fluttering about in Broadway. In composing this picture, therefore, a few of the larger cities were given preference over rural Ger- many with its more obvious charms. Nuremberg and the Rhine country were naturally omitted as they had recently received their share of literary attention. And, for the rest, out of an embarrassing wealth of material, a group of the choicest was with difficulty chosen from among the smaller towns of pure romance. But places are so much like people that whoever makes a book of cities must borrow from the nov- elist's art. The present writer has tried to select from the many that appealed to him a few city-characters so correlated or contrasted as to bring each other into relief. He has endeavored not only to keep in mind their interrelations, but also to reveal the personality of each one as reflected in the character of its build- xvi PREFACE ings, streets, squares, and courts, and of the country beyond its walls; to give a hint of its history, a breath of its legend, a suggestion of the quality of its folk —their customs and costumes, their beliefs, attain- ments, and humors — and thus to lure the traveler from his hard-beaten tracks in Italy and France and England to the fresh regions of Romantic Germany. xvii ROMANTIC GERMANY ROMANTIC GERMANY DANZIG BALTIC fog rolled in from the north as my train rolled in from the south, bring- ing an ideal hour for the first impressions of a city so full of Northern melancholy, one so far from the beaten track and so romantic, as Danzig. Down a street full of gar- goyles and curious stone platforms there loomed through the mist a monstrous church, crowned with pinnacles and a huge, blunt tower. A gate that seemed like the facade of an Italian palace pierced by a triumphal arch opened on a street of fascinating old gables, and beyond them rose a Rathaus with an exquisite steeple. I passed between tall, slim palaces, through the arches of a water-gate, and came out by the river, to fill my lungs with a sudden draught of ozone and to realize that I was almost in the presence of the Baltic. 3 ROMANTIC GERMANY An alcove of the Green Bridge proved the place of places in which to modulate one's soul down from the shrill key of the twentieth century to the deep, mel- low tonality of the Middle Ages. Toward the sea swept an unbroken line of roman- tic architecture, narrow, sharp-gabled houses inter- mingled with towered water-gates, and, last of all, the profile of the Krahn Thor, or Crane Gate, Dan- zig's unique landmark, its stories projecting one beyond another like those of Hildesheim's houses. On the island formed by two arms of the Mottlau the black and white of half-timbered granaries started strongly out of the mist. The river bristled with romantic shipping; and as I walked the quay, I caught, between gables, the glow of the lights of the Lange Markt flushing the fog into a rosy cloud the center of which was the steeple of the Rathaus. It was as though beauty had been given an aureole. I turned a corner, and wandered along the other shore of the island, past a deserted waterway and a strange, crumbling tower called the Milk-can Gate, then back again to the Green Bridge. The darkness had thickened so that one could no longer distinguish the separate house-fronts, but all the lamps along the shore had their soft auras of mist, and the surface of the water was one delicate shimmer, with strong col- 4 THE CRANE GATE DANZIG uinns of light at regular intervals, among which the crimson lantern of a passing boat wrought amazing effects. Where had I known such an evening before? As memory wandered idly about the harbor of Liibeck, the bridges of Nuremberg, the riversides of Wiirz- burg and Breslau, I was flashed in a trice to the "Siren of sea-cities," that floating film upon the wonder-fraught Ocean of dreams, and it came to me with a glow of pleasure that this place had from of old been called "The Venice of the North." This, then, was my introduction to Danzig, and I never think of it without seeing streets full of high, narrow facades melting one into another, gently curving streets alive with rich reliefs, statues of blurred worthies, and inquisitive gargoyles, the blunt, mighty Church of St. Mary looming above them like a mountain. I can never see the name of Danzig wdthout beholding a dusky waterway lined with medieval structures and — strange juxtaposition — a jewel of Reformation art with its rosy aureole. But it is delightful to remember how, on the fol- lowing morning, the city drew aside her veil and stood revealed in that fresh depth of coloring found 7 ROMANTIC GERMANY only near the misty seas of the North in such places as Liibeck and Wisby, Amsterdam and Bruges. Danzig is as easy to compass as Dresden, for the most interesting and beautiful buildings have crowded themselves about the Church of St. Mary as though attracted by a crag of lodestone. The an- cient moat and the earthen wall must have had a concentrative as well as decorative effect on the city, and one can imagine the inward pressure bending the longest streets into their present graceful curves. A few years ago, alas! these fortifications were de- stroyed by the highly socialistic process of shoveling the mound into the moat, leaving the High Gate shorn of the walls into which it had been originally set as the principal entrance to Danzig. Seen from the Hay Market outside, where inter- esting peasant types swarm among wains of green and golden hay, the High Gate composes inevitably with its taller neighbors, the Torture Chamber and the Stock Tower, or prison. This, like the Langgasser Gate, is more a triumphal arch than a city portal. With its four genially modeled gables, the Torture Chamber recalls the Inquisition, its innocent-sound- ing name and its outrageous significance, while the Stock Tower compromises between the religious aspiration of a Gothic church and the self-conscious dignity of a Renaissance town hall. The only hint of 8 DANZIG its real function is supplied by a stone jailer with a ring of keys, who leers from a dormer window at the passer-by with a gesture of welcome. The narrow court below, through which prisoners were led to the red-hot pincers and the rack, is one of the most soothing nooks in Danzig, with its. bracketed arcades and harmonious gloom, its riot of old lumber, the myriad tiny roofs that start out from the tower, and its view, framed by three great arches, of the Lang- Gasse. I did not find the'Langgasser Gate* as charming as when its extravagance had been softened by the mist of the previous evening ; but the Rathaus steeple was even more glorious in the full morning light, and, seen from three directions, finished the street vista superbly. A Rathaus interior is not often inspiring, but here were carvings, mosaics, frescos, and furniture of extraordinary beauty, tokens of the Renaissance relationship between North and South. And it was interesting to find in the White Chamber a modern historical fresco of Danzig delegates presenting a painting of their city to the Venetians in 1601. If this old canvas should come to light to-day in some private Italian collection, it would be a very fair por- trayal of modern Danzig. For in the room sacred to the burgomaster hangs a "Tribute Money," painted 9 ROMANTIC GERMANY in 1601, with the Lange Markt* in the background virtually as it appears to-day, a neat refutation of those pessimists who claim that romantic Germany has been "restored" to death. This room and the Red Chamber rise to the highest levels of the German Renaissance. Between them* winds a unique spiral staircase of carved oak. Separated from the Rathaus by a narrow street and two narrow gables is that most interesting build- ing, the Artushof, or Court of Arthur. This was built by the medieval" Teutonic Order of Knights as a patrician club-house, where were kept alive the traditions of King Arthur and his Round Table. It is good to remember how the Arthurian le- gends penetrated like a sweet savor into these terrible lands, how the Knights built as their Cam- elot, not many leagues away, the Marienburg, which remains the mightiest of German castles; and how, when Poland and Brandenburg were fighting for the prize of fourteenth-century Danzig, the Knights came to her rescue, and kept her under their protection until she grew strong and beautiful. Their first thought was to build this Court of King Arthur where, at the sound of a bell, the patricians assembled at the great round table to pledge each other in the famous local beer they called Joppe, and plan for the good of the city while the town pipers 10 DANZIG made music. Tournaments were sometimes held in the Lange IMarkt outside. The gentlemen rode in the order of their seating at the round table. The fairest ladies awarded the prizes; and all danced to- gether afterward in the great hall. To look at the Artushof is to look back through the centuries to the two brightest periods of local his- tory. The three Gothic windows, fit for the clear- story of a cathedral, typify the monumental life of the Teutonic Order when Danzig was building the Rathaus and the Stock Tower, the Crane Gate and the Church of St. Mary; while the portal and the gable tell of the proud adventurers who, under the protection of Poland, were leading spirits in the Hanseatic League, and, while well-nigh the remotest of Germans from the scene of the Italian Renais- sance, were yet among the most sensitive to its in- fluence. The hall itself would have befitted King Arthur and his knights. Four slender shafts branch out into rich vaulting, as though four huge palms had been petrified by the magic of Merlin. The art of the Artushof was intended rather to amuse than to edify, and the decorations seemed like so many glorified toys. Models of the ships of Hansa days hovered in full sail overhead. The hugest and green- est of Nuremberg stoves filled one corner, a piece of 11 ROMANTIC GERMANY pure ornament which had never known the indignity of fire. The paneled walls were filled with curious wooden statues and large paintings. I noticed a painted Diana about to transfix a stag, which started desperately from the wall in high relief. A buck with real hide and antlers hearkened superciliously to the lyre of a painted Orpheus. But the picture that pleased me most was called "The Ship of the Church." To my unnautical eye it seemed that the Madonna and two popes were trav- eling first cabin, a couple of military saints second, while humble old Christopher was thrust away into the steerage, and microscopic laymen were doing all the work. Arthur's Court has relaxed its ancient rule against "talking shop." In fact, it has become the city ex- change. Yet the old atmosphere of leisure and so- ciability still hangs about it. A notice states that ladies are not allowed on the floor during the hour of business. Having spent that hour in Merlin's hall, I am able to declare that if the brokers of New York would only pattern after their Danzig colleagues, their lives would gain in mellowness what they might lose in brilliance. Grain seemed the sole commodity on the market. The round board of the old knights had given place to smaller tables filled with wooden bowls of it. I watched the brokers chatting and 12 DANZIG dreaming away their little hour, sifting the kernels idly through their fingers in a delicious dolce far niente. Suddenly one group began to buzz with a note of American animation. "Now," thought I, "they are getting down to business." But as I drew near, I heard the most excited bidder saying some- thing about "the ideality of the actual." Suddenly as I stood marveling, and wishing that the author of "The Pit" had been spared to view that paradoxical scene with me, the enigma was solved in a flash. It was clear that the grain in those curious bowls had never felt the contaminating touch of modern bulls and bears, of thrashing-machines or modern eleva- tors. It had come direct from those Long fields of barley and of rye That clothe the wold and meet the sky, And thro"* the field the road loins by To many-towered Camelot. In this atmosphere of medieval romance I moved away, and during my sojourn on the banks of the Vistula I inhaled romance with every breath. For the lure of Danzig is largely the lure of Gothic and Renaissance times; and what is worthier to succeed the spirit of medieval knighthood than the spirit of the age when Europe was born again? An open portal invited me next door into the hall of a well-preserved patrician dwelling. It was a 13 ROMANTIC GERMANY typical Renaissance interior. There was a frieze of the quaint biblical tiles made in Danzig by refugees from Delft, and the furniture, the brilliant brasses, the sculptured doors and ceiling, and the stairway that wound to a gallery at the farther end, were blended in a harmony of refinement that would have cheapened most palace halls. I stepped out into the Lange Markt and gazed to my heart's content on the long lines of Renaissance palaces for which Danzig is famous, the styles of North and South standing side by side in friendly rivalry, and testifying to the cosmopolitanism of that great time. In the evening mist along the water-side I had received — or thought I had received — vague impressions of Venice. Now, as I lingered in a day- dream inside the Green Gate, the city still gave forth a delicate aroma of Italy; but the scene was shifted. Perhaps the change was wrought by the suggestion of Lorenzo de Medici's sculptured head looking down from one of the house-fronts. At any rate, as I enjoyed the Lange Markt through half- closed eyes, the three great arches of Arthur's Court resolved themselves into the Loggia dei Lanzi; the solid, angular body of the Rathaus into the bulk of the Palazzo Vecchio; the fountain of Neptune ex- panded under my eyes ; the same old flock of wheel- ing pigeons filled the air ; and, at a vague glimpse of 14) Tlin STt)CK luWliR DANZIG a blunt and mighty tower looming in the distance, I instinctively murmui'ed the name of Giotto. In leaving Arthur's Court I had traversed at a step the most significant period of local history. The Teutonic Order, its work being done, fell on evil days, became the "old order," and, jealous of the city's growing importance in the Hanseatic League, began to oppress it. Once again the old order yielded place to the new. Danzig cast off the yoke of the Knights, and became the ward of Poland. The people had long been under Dutch influence, and now their contact with the most light-hearted and luxurious of all Slavic races prepared them for the cosmopolitan time when their ships should bear to Venice the grain of the Northeast and bring home in return the glowing spirit of the Italian Renaissance. Those were days w^hen the wealth, the aristocracy, and the splendor of Danzig were proverbial. The merchant assumed the garments and the manners of princes. In his Northern isolation he decreed his own styles, adopting the ruffs of Italy, the mantles of Spain, and the furs of Russia. A Parisian trav- eler who happened upon the city in 1635 wrote in astonisliment of the "ladies who walk about in their furs like doctors of the Sorbonne." And another complained, a few years later, that "you '11 not leave Danzig with a whole skin if you don't address every 17 ROMANTIC GERMANY sailor and small-sulphur-match-peddler as *^Iy Lord.' " In preserving the spirit of aristocratic town life in the Renaissance, the city has done for North Ger- many what Nuremberg has done for South Germany. Nuremberg built its houses with greater picturesque- ness and variety; Danzig, with greater durability, with more unity of style and grouping; and it has kept out modern discords more successfully. The townsman ordered his dwelling in the same lordly spirit in which he ordered his clothes. Brick would do for his church, but stone was none too good for his house. And these rich f a9ades are almost as surprising in this stoneless country as fa9ades of silver. It is interesting to compare the Northern style with the Southern. The Italian tends to horizontal lines, graded orders of pilasters, simplicity and no- bility of proportion, a classical feeling for the struc- tural. The Dutch tends to the vertical, is fond of lofty rooms, of sharply peaked gables, of brick walls sown full of unstructural stone ornament. Legend says that the fax^ade of the Steffen House near the Artushof was brought from Italy. It is, at any rate, one of the purest Italian palaces in Germany. And yet it does not quarrel with the Dutch houses near it. The rivalry is friendly, and 18 DANZIG lends vivacity to the street. It is amusing to see the coalition of North and South that resulted when both styles simultaneously laid hold of the same building, as at Lang-Gasse 37, and in the English House. Mottos are the rule over the doors, and they are apt to be laconic, like "Als ( AUes) in Got" or "Glo- ria Deo Soli." That is the way the townsmen talk- laconically, earnestly, to the point. Latin is very popular, and the city's motto, "Nee temere nee ti- mide," is everywhere. At Topfer-Gasse 23 are these lines : Hospes pulsanti tibi se mea janua pandet: Tu tua pulsanti Pectora pande Deo. (Guest, to you when you knock this my portal will open : Do you open your heart wide to the summons of God. ) And directly opposite the tower of the Church of St. Mary a pious chisel of 1558 cut this into the wall: Wir bauen hier gi'osse Hauser und feste, Und sind doch fremde Gaeste; Und wo wir ewig sollen sein, Da bauen gar wenig ein. (On palaces we waste our force Though here we 're only visitors ; But where we shall forever be Too few build we.) The streets are so rich to-day because, as a Polish city, Danzig suffered little from the Thirty Years' 19 ROMANTIC GERMANY War, and because it was wise enough to build its houses of fireproof materials. But fireproof ma- terials are not intimate, friendly things, and in few other places do the houses seem so aristocratic and aloof as here. Tall, narrow, richly sculptured, they shoot upward as though despising the democracy of the pavement. But even as the dwellings of exclusive Augsburg are frescoed into friendliness, here they are saved from utter misanthropy by a unique architectural feature. For in certain dreamy streets about the Church of St. Mary are the remnants of Danzig's famous Beischldge, stone porches as wide as the house and extending far out upon the pavement, to the confusion of modern traffic and to the joy of seekers after the picturesque. The steps are flanked with carved posts or with huge balls of Swedish granite. The balustrades are arabesques of iron, or slabs of stone decorated, like Roman sarcophagi, with mythological reliefs or with scenes from the Old Testament as naive as Delft tiles. Jolly gar- goyles still grin from the partition ends in memory of the good old times when every townsman lounged on his own Beisclilag, or his neighbor's, in the cool of the day, receiving his tea and his friends. In the Jopen- Gasse the effect of these platforms of irregular height and width is inimitably genial, and the Frau- 20 THE POGGl-NlMllll., Willi SI. Ph 1 UKS Clll KCIl AND Till- KATHAUS TOWER DANZIG en-Gasse, where they stretch in unbroken Hnes, undis- turbed by the practical modern world, is a little idyl that would be quite impossible to duplicate. The Frauen-Gasse is, no doubt, an absolute novelty to the porchless European, but the American is somehow reminded of old Philadelphia, and how a touch of art might have transfigured the poor little front "stoop" at home. In laying out their city, the people developed a truly Latin feeling for composition, and one is con- stantly delighted with Florentine effects of vista. They thought of their streets as narratives the begin- ning of which must be interesting, the end, thrilling. Thus the Lang-Gasse begins with a Gothic prison and an elaborate portal, and curves gently about, to end with a tower that is like "the sound of a great Amen." Likewise the Lange Markt runs from the rhythmic gables and arches of the Green Gate to the Rathaus; and the picturesque battlements of St. Peter's send the Poggenpfuhl toward the same noble cadence. Even that narrow way known as the Kater-Gasse lies between St. Peter's and the triple front of Holy Trinity, while the Frauen-Gasse leads from a water-gate to the choir of the Church of St. Mary, with its high windows, its pinnacles, and its crenelated gables. But the finest street vista is the view down the Jopen-Gasse. a 23 ROMANTIC GERMANY At the head of the street hes the arsenal, rioting in all the happy excesses of the later Flemish Renais- sance. On each side stretch the narrow, aristocratic houses, with their Beischldge; and from among the gables at the end of the street rises the huge, plain fa9ade and tower of the Church of St. Mary. I can never look at that pile, half fortress, half house of God, without imagining the nave full of worshipers ponderously chanting Luther's tremendous hynm, "Ein' feste Burg ist unser Gott." It is the most German thing in Danzig. It is even one of the most German things in Germany. For the brick Gothic of the Baltic and of Silesia was evolved so indepen- dently of foreign influence that it expresses the na- tional spirit better than any other architecture. The original inhabitants of this corner of the world were, in all likelihood, the Goths. And it is amusing to imagine their surprise if they could have foreseen that a French style would be named, in misplaced scorn, after them and that their home would, by a freak of chance, become the headquarters of the only really German variety of that style. For a church like St. Mary's is hardly Gothic in the sense that the cathedrals of Cologne and Ratisbon are; but, in the sense that the Goths were Germans, it is, strictly speaking, the only Gothic. The Church of St. Mary is the largest of all Prot- 24 DANZIG estant churches, equaling Notre Dame In area. And it reflects the character of its builders quite as vividly as does the cathedral of Paris. Its castle-like walls bespeak the military instincts of the North German. The huge, plain body and blunt tower symbolize the downrightness, the sturdiness, the honest largeness of a nature whose lack of polish verges on the coarse. The fine proportions tell of his poise. The obvious construction, unobscured by detail, reminds one that this is the clear-headed country of Schopenhauer and of Kant. Certain traits in this church are specially charac- teristic of the land of the Teutonic Order, such as a square choir, aisles level with the nave, and star vaulting that reminds one of Arthur's Court and the Marienburg. Here as everywhere the Baltic architects were little concerned to ornament the interiors of their churches. They left that to the painter, the wood sculptor, the bronze founder, and the artist in wrought-iron. War has been kind to St. Mary's, so that it remains a veri- table treasure-house of ecclesiastical furniture. And a dramatic touch is given by one of Napoleon's can- non-balls, which for a century has projected from the vaulting— a single, sinister eye looking greedily down on the multitude of beautiful and fragile things below. The world is indebted to the cool, unfanatical Dan- 25 ROMANTIC GERMANY zigers for saving these relics of popery from the de- structive storms of the Reformation, and one recalls that Schopenhauer was born almost within the shadow of the old walls and must have had some of his earliest impressions of the beautiful from the paintings and sculptures there. In no other German church have I found a more engaging group of altarpieces. An added charm came with the feeling that the spectacles of the art professor had been so busy gleaming elsewhere that they had left important things undiscovered here. Special privilege allowed me to enter the Blind Chapel. The pavement was broken, and the guide warned me at every moment not to break through into the graves below. The chapel was well named. It has no windows ; but in the dim light I made out on the wings of an altar two paintings of great beauty, at the same time sweet and virile, as though Stephan Lochner and Memling had been fused. The guide murmured vaguely of the school of Kalkar, which I could readily associate with the other four panels. But only a great master could have created that "St. John" and that "St. Helena." Whose hand had done them? For a moment I prayed to be a German art professor, with time and erudition enough and spectacles sufficiently potent to solve that enticing problem. 26 DANZIG The next moment my prayer had a perverse an- swer; for in the chapel of the Rheinhold Fraternity another problem altar came to light. "All Flemish," said the guide. And in the tender, delicious humor and sympathy of the wooden reliefs from the life of the Virgin I could feel the hand of Van Wavere. But whenever I gazed at the saints of the outer panels, the thought of a great master persisted. For a layman few things are more futile or more exciting than such speculations. But I am sure that these neglected masterpieces will come into their own when travelers begin to realize that they must not miss Danzig. The church teems with other interesting altars, and the chief of them is also the chief work of art in the city. Hans Memling's "Last Judgment" is well known in reproduction, but sj^eech is like an under-exposed negative when it tries to give the contrast of the Lord's dull scarlet robe with the liquid bronze armor of JNIichael, who is weighing the sons of men in a pair of scales. Is it a subtle interpretation of Teutonic physical ideals that the short of weight are cast into the flaming pit, while their corpulent brothers are started toward heaven's late-Gothic portal? At any rate, I found Low Country humor in the curtsies of the blessed to that high official St. Peter, their evident reluctance to pose thus in "the altogether," 27 ROMANTIC GERMANY and their eagerness to slip into their heavenly robes. This altar was painted in Bruges for a representative of the Medici, and was destined for a Florentine church. It had actually started for Italy in a Bur- gundian galley when it was captured by a cruiser of Danzig and presented to St. Mary's, where it stayed, despite the threats and wheedlings of Pope Six- tus IV. The fabulous vies with the beautiful in the atmo- sphere of this old church. It is said that the maker of the mechanical clock was blinded by the burgo- master, so that he might not make another for the rival city of Liibeck. In a chapel pavement I came upon another myih. Here a child was buried that struck its mother, and died soon after; and the five small holes that I saw in the stone floor were made by the little dead fingers reaching up from the grave for forgiveness. These are good specimens of the grue- someness of Baltic legends. But the guide told a gentler one in All Saints' Chapel, pointing out a stone that hung by a cord : "Once upon a time a monk was hurrying home with a loaf of bread. 'Give me what is under your robe,' cried a beggar-woman. *I starve.' " 'It is only a stone to throw at the dogs,' returned the monk. And, sure enough, when he came to look, the loaf had turned to stone. There it hangs." 28 . 1 11. All AND ST. JOHN'S CMUKCII. iWlNTliR liVl'NING) DANZIG Besides its altars and legends St. Mary's Church owns priceless treasures of gold and silver, old ivories and precious stones. It has wonderful reliquaries and manuscripts, Byzantine and Romanesque and Gothic embroideries, and the finest collection of church vestments in Germany. But in money the church is so poor that its beautiful things are fast being ruined for lack of proper attention. It is a worse case of poverty and neglect than that of the notorious cathedral at Worms. Among the other churches, I preferred St. Peter's, with its picturesque tower; and St. Catharine's, with its interesting pulpit and font and its noble west front. But the best thing about St. Catharine's was a little stream called the Radaune, which ran under its walls. It made an island close at hand, filled with grass and flowers and a Gothic mill, put up five hun- dred years ago by the Teutonic Order, still grinding, under its vast expanse of tiles, the sort of grain that brokers dream over in the Artushof. It seemed to me the most patriarchal of buildings, and the Na- poleonic cannon-ball in its side added to its dignity. The brook, with its flowering island and hoary mill, made a picture that would have seemed unreal in a city less romantic. I spent a few moments with the woodbined walls, the font-railing, and the perfect vaulting of St. 31 ROMANTIC GERMANY John's, but after the gloom of so many church-in- teriors, it was good to turn a while from the streets, the tall gables of which conspired to shut out the light. I struck east through the ancient, double-bastioned Crane Gate, and came out suddenly into the sunshine and vivacious life of the water-front. For the time I had forgotten about Danzig history, but a whistled melody floating up from the river brought it back with a rush. For I realized all at once that the tune was part of a Chopin polonaise, and that this scene had once been for two centuries the port of Poland. The port of Poland! The words suggested the famous "sea-coast of Bohemia." And I began to wonder if this very region were not the nearest mun- dane approach to Shakspere's enchanted bourne. The fancy came lightly but it seemed worthy a sec- ond thought. Shakspere had borrowed the plot and the geography of "A Winter's Tale" from a novel by Greene, published only nineteen years after Dan- zig became a part of Poland. The port had long been familiar to English sailors and was beginning then to trade with Sicily, the scene of the story. Now when the romantic fact became known that the Slavic people of Central Europe had at last a seaboard of their own, what would be more natural than for a novelist to use the region as a background, confusing 82 DANZIG two sister nations that are to this day often con- fused ? Touched by the glamour of such speculations it is no wonder that the Long Bridge was fascinating, even in the clarity of noon, with only a suspicion of shadow on it. Unlike other bridges, the Long Bridge runs conservatively along the river-bank, con- tent to have its long melody of narrow, peaked gables rhytlimically marked by the massive, recurrent chords of gate-towers. Unamphibious, it keeps the land without aspiring to the granaries on the other shore, which used to hold four million bushels of Polish and Silesian grain in the days before the tariff destroyed the river trade, and the siege of 1813 de- stroyed the most characteristic of the buildings. Their finest remaining example is the "Gray Goose," the noble proportions of which speak of the wealth and taste of former days. The granaries still bear such old names as Golden Pelican, Little Ship, Whale, JNIilkmaid, and Patriarch Jacob. Although the old town will never regain the prestige of the time when it was one of the chief com- mercial centers of the medieval world, yet it does a thriving business to-day in Prussian beet-sugar, English coal, American oil, and Swedish iron. And it is still famous for its liqueurs, one of which inspired the student song "Krambambuli." The German navy was born in the shipyards at the mouth of the 33 ROMANTIC GERMANY Mottlau; and of late beautiful old Danzig has been threatening to become a factory town and send her sweetness and romance up in smoke. For she is al- ready manufacturing steel, glass, chemicals, ma- chines, and weapons, and has founded a polytechnic school. It was good to dismiss such thoughts and step into a rude ferry-boat that showed no symptoms of twen- tieth-century progress. I paid a single pfennig to a boy, who fished a chain from the water, hitched him- self to it, and walked me across to the Bleihof , where waterways lured in four different directions. I grew fond of that ferry, its ragged official, its rough, sim- ple passengers, and fell into the regular habit of being walked to the Bleihof at dusk to watch through a maze of masts and ropes the color fading from the western sky. The belfry of St. John's would darken into one of Rothenburg's matchless wall-towers. One by one the lights of the opposite shore would throw wavering yellow paths across to beckon me back. A little below the Crane Gate squats an old, round tower called the "Swan," which wears a sharp-peaked dunce-cap of red tiles. It is a pathetic reminder of the Teutonic Order's final attempt to keep Danzig German ; for when the citizens seized the Crane Gate and fortified it against them, the Knights began this round tower near their castle, saying : 34 DANZIG Bauen sie den Krahn, So bauen wir den Schwan. (And if they build the Crane, Why, we shall build the Swan.) The castle vanished with the order, and the Swan to-day is smothered breast-high in small houses, the smallest of which testifies to the cosmopolitanism of its tarry guests by the sign "Stadt London" Near the Fish Market, where the little Radaune rushes with a loud noise into the Mottlau, the quay has been prettily christened "Am Brausenden Was- ser" ("By the Roaring Water") . This is the favor- ite haunt of longshoremen, sailors, and the famous Danzig sack-carriers, herculean figures with their wide blue pantaloons and their swathed calves. And beside the quay belongs a flotilla of dusky fishing- boats, draped with many-colored sail-awnings and with funnel-shaped nets that hang drying from the tips of the masts. Before parting from a city to which I have grown attached, I like to stand on one of its high places and see in one. sweeping glance what it is that I am leav- ing. It is like gripping a friend's hand and looking him square in the eye. Toil and twenty-five pfennigs was the price of climbing the tower of the Church of St. Mary, and I 37 ROMANTIC GERINIANY grew grateful that it had remained blunt and sturdy like its people. But I should have been willing to toil on indefinitely; for I had seen splendid sights from the steeples of Ulm and Munich, of Mayence and Strassburg, but never in Germany a panorama to equal this. A little to the south the exquisite Rathaus steeple was a fellow-aspirant, and one could almost make out the gilt features of its royal weathercock — Sigis- mund of Poland— as the wind twirled him about, and count the false jewels in his crown. Beneath rose the pinnacled back of the Artushof and the fine fa9ades of the Lange Markt, where I had dreamed of Florence ; beyond them a long line of granaries gave proof of the hidden Mottlau. Farther away, over a sea of fantastic roofs, was St. Peter's crenelated tower, and beyond it the fields flowed on to the dis- tant spire of St. Albert's and rolled upward in gentle undulations to a ridge that swung westward, a back- ground for the picturesque Stock Tower. Everywhere was a crowd of entrancing old gables interspersed with the dusky red of well-weathered tiles. Northward was spread a ruddy expanse of church roofs, and behind them swung in noble curves the final reaches of the Vistula, fresh from the lands of Krakow and Warsaw ; while beyond the pinnacles of the Church of St. Mary itself and the tranquil 38 DANZIG streets in its shadow, curving past romantic gate- towers and the woodbined walls of St. John's, the Mottlau wound to join the Vistula and seek the ocean, whose breakers dashed a league away, a mighty gulf of grayish blue, flecked by one immacu- late sail. 39 II BERLIN-THE CITY OF THE HOHENZOLLERNS ROM any account of the romantic cities of Germany, Berlin must not be ex- cluded, if for no other reason than be- cause it is so unromantic. It is the positive degree by which to gage such a comparative as Munich, such a superlative as Roth- enburg. It is the gray sky in which the rainbow gleams the fresher. And its own spot or two of real color breaks this background with a vivid force of contrast that may never be enjoyed in the cities of pure romance. The rare Berlin sun bathed Unter den Linden and wrought happy effects among the columns of the Brandenburg Gate, lovely in its Attic repose against the May foliage of the Tiergarten. In the guard- house on each hand the guard was undergoing in- spection. Each private came stiffly up to his officer and whirled stiffly about, to show that he was un- 40 BERLIN contaminated by the great, dirty human world beyond the pahngs. But just as a spot was found on an unfortunate leg, a trumpet rang out from the Friedens-AUee, the watch before the gate yelled something in a superhuman voice, the officers, with protruding eyes, leaped hysterically through the door, and the soldiers tumbled after, presenting arms to the cloud of dust in the wake of the Em- peror's automobile, which had whizzed, at the Em- peror's speed limit, through the royal entrance. The soldiers* turned dejectedly back to inspection. "Swine-hounds!" cried a pale officer, "why could n't you do that quicker?" And even the by- standers eyed them with reproach; for every citizen in the crowd had been a soldier himself, and knew that he could have managed things better. The people were still glowing with the excite- ment and pleasure of having seen the Emperor, I had caught a glimpse of the familiar face as it flashed by — the keen eyes that seemed to look into the soul of every one of us, their hint of coldness and hardness corrected by the kindly lines about them; the straight, frank nose; the morose mouth, artificially enlivened by the grin of upturned mus- taches, like the enforced jocularity of "The Man Who Laughs"; the determined, energetic, military jaw. This typical Hohenzollern face, coming and 41 ROMANTIC GERMANY going like an apparition, suddenly lent fresh inter- est to a place which I had always found interesting. For, as I drifted down "the Lindens" with the crowd, the question arose whether this modern, mili- tant city, with its zest in commerce and diplomacy, in art and science, were not in many senses an em- bodiment of the HohenzoUern character. A Frenchman once declared that Prussia was born from a cannon-ball, as an eagle is from an egg. And indeed it would be hard to find another Ger- man city with so few old buildings as Berlin and so little atmosphere. A Strassburg cathedral, a mar- ket-place out of Danzig, a row of Hildesheim houses, or a Breslau Rathaus, would be as out of place here as in an arsenal. Most of the Berlin architecture has as much color as a squadron of battle-ships in war- paint, and the little glamour to be found here is almost as well hidden as a pearl in a pile of oyster- shells. The city fairly bristles with weapons and militancy. Its statues, when they are not of mounted warriors with swords, or of standing warriors with spears, tend toward such subjects as Samson plying the jaw-bone of an ass, or hounds rending a stag. Painting, too, has been drafted into the service, and one sees so many military pictures in the public build- ings that even the absurd portrait by Pesne of Fred- erick the Great in the Palais is a relief. For there 42 BERLIN Frederick, aged three, is only beating a drum, al- though a lance, a club, and what looks like a pile of cannon-balls, appear in the background. But sometimes, when surfeited with this martial over-emphasis, I think of the terrible frontiers of Prussia and how well she has guarded them, reflect- ing that, if she had beaten her swords into plow- shares, I should not now be enjoying the gallery or the Tiergarten, the Opera or the Krogl; and then I grow more reconciled to Berlin's eternal bristling. Despite its many repellent qualities, however, Berlin has always had for me on every return an indefinable thrill in store ; indefinable because I have never been able to account for its strange charm, its emotional appeal, as one accounts for the lure of other places. Reason declares it one of the least charming of cities, and yet we are enticed. The truth is that its genius loci^ like its reigning ruler, is not to be gaged by ordinary standards. Unter den Linden, the broadest street in Europe save one, is the principal stage for the drama of Berlin's brilliant and cosmopolitan life. Dorothea's unluxuriant linden-trees extend no farther than Ranch's monument to Frederick the Great, though Unter den Linden goes marching on, despite the anomaly, to the Castle Bridge. The hero, infor- mally sitting his charger in his cocked hat and with • 45 ROMANTIC GERMANY his trusty crooked stick, seems to dominate the situ- ^ation as easily as in the stirring days of the eigh- teenth century. "In this monument," Rodenberg once said, "pulsates something of the monstrous energy of the Prussian state." And the Opern- Platz is in character with its leading figure. Car- lyle wrote of him that "he had no pleasure in dreams, in party-colored clouds and nothingnesses" ; and cer- tainly there is little now before him to offend his sensibilities. There is nothing party-colored about this architecture. A bronze Frederick sits between a plain brown university and a plain brown palace; a severe brown Opera, embellished with fire-escapes, confronts an austere gray guard-house; while far- ther along, an angry arsenal bullies two sad-looking palaces, likewise in brown, all solidly built and with no unseemly levity. One imagines the first emperor with his grand- son in the famous corner window of his Palais, where he always stood to see the guard relieved, watching with sympathetic eyes the students (whom he was fond of calling his "soldiers of learning") in the university across the way, that souvenir of Prussia's darkest hour, when, in 1809, she had lost to France everything west of the Elbe. In that crisis a hand- ful of scholars approached Frederick William III with their project, and the enthusiastic king ex- 4)6 BERLIN claimed: "That is good! that is fine! Our land must make up in spiritual what it has lost in physical strength." In this spirit such men as Fichte and Schleiermacher, aided by Wilhelm von Humboldt, founded Berlin University. And it is no wonder that, with a truly HohenzoUern rapidity and acquisi- tiveness, it has within a century gained 9000 students and 500 teachers, and gathered such stars to its crown as Mommsen, Curtius, Helmholtz, Ranke, and Hegel. Its school of medicine is particularly strong, and attracts the young doctors of all nations, especially Americans. For Germany leads the world in theoretical, America in applied, medicine. But, in spite of our practical bent, Berlin possesses in the Virchow Hospital the most perfect institution of its kind, a group of thirty buildings built on the new pavilion system, which puts our leading hos- pitals to shame. There is one local institution, though, untouched as yet by the imperial love of progress. I remember once crossing the North Sea with a Berlin student, and we fell to comparing our respective universities. "There is, anyway, one point," he argued, "where we go far ahead of you. I talk of our library sys- tem. Yours is not to be mentioned, — how say you? — yours is not to call in the same expression with ours for celerity. Why, if you will order a book 47 ROMANTIC GERMANY in the morning at eight, you may not infrequently obtain it before three in the same afternoon!" This claim I afterward verified. But American methods will prevail in the new building which is being built next to the university. The old library,, with its spirited, curved f a9ade, is one of the last monuments to the baroque spirit in Germany. The opera-house was built by Frederick the Great as the beginning of a huge "Forum Fridericanum," a Prussian counterpart to the gigantic Saxon scheme of which the Zwinger Palace at Dresden was in- tended to be the mere foreshadowing. It is the home of that art for which the Hohenzollerns have always shown the most understanding, one nowhere else so fully represented as at Berlin — the national art of music. The Opera, the orchestra of which ranks second in the land, divides with the Royal Theater an annual subsidy of $225,000. Richard Strauss is one of the conductors, but even he has less author- ity there than the Emperor, who supervises in per- son the slightest details of execution and setting. A larger opera-house is soon to be built on the Konigs- Platz. Berlin has an embarrassment of musical riches. Besides the excellent performances of the Philhar- monic Orchestra, which may be heard for ten cents, the city averages twenty classical concerts daily 48 BERLIN during the season. There one may hear rare works, seldom given elsewhere, and the breathless audiences are filled with an almost religious fen^or of atten- tion. They realize what we do not, that the hearer is almost as important a factor in the making of music as the performer. The Zeughaus, or military museum, is the most Prussian thing in Prussia, and some one has said that this building is to Berlin what its cathedral is to an ordinary city. The facade is alive with spirited sculpture, and Schliiter modeled the beautiful masks of dying warriors inside. Here is one of the most brilliant and complete collections of armor and weapons in the world, while the best human touch is given by Napoleon's pathetic little old hat, guarded by sixty-eight wax soldiers, dressed in every Prus- sian uniform since the time of the Great Elector. The Hall of Fame is filled with bronze busts of Prus- sian men of valor, and with appropriate paintings of better quality than the usual battle-picture. The ruling passion of the Hohenzollern rages here ad libitum, and the impression is not weakened after crossing the Castle Bridge, which the Berliners call "The Bridge of Dolls," after its eight marble groups illustrating the education of the warrior, — poor things, all of them,— cold imitations of the cold Thorwaldsen. ROMANTIC GERMANY The atmosphere of the Lustgarten is profoundly martial. In the center towers Frederick William III on his war-charger, gazing toward the castle, whereon stand figures of the late Emperor Fred- erick III as Mars, and of his father William I as Jupiter. Beneath their glances* five armed princes of Orange guard the terrace, and two men in verdi- gris struggle with wild horses at the portal. In a lamentable position on the bank of the Spree looms Begas's monument to William I, the foremost among Berlin's military sculptures. Four delirious lions, crouching on heaps of arms, snarl at the four cor- ners ; colossal figures intended to represent War and Peace sprawl unhappily on the side steps, and the whole is surmounted by a group which must have suggested to Saint-Gaudens the idea for his Sher- man monument. The helmeted hero of Sedan is led by a Victory whose two sisters drive quadrigas on the colonnade at each side — all in all an impress- ive and ferocious sight. Northward lies the cold, hard, hideous cathedral. Near it, topping Schinkel's noble Old Museum, more wild horses struggle with wild men, while, beside the beautiful, serene flight of steps, an Amazon and a warrior, both mounted, are forever trying to transfix a tiger and a lion, the latter by a sculptor of the savage name of Wolff. And finally, looking down the vista of Unter den 50 BERLIN Linden, that reach so characteristic of the far-see- ing, purposeful Hohenzollerns, the clear-sighted catch a glimpse, past Frederick the Fighter, of a third quadriga and a fourth Victory, sublime on the Brandenburg Gate. Save for some dim frescos in the porch of the Old JMuseum and for the green cupola of the castle, the Lustgarten suffers from Berlin's chronic dearth of color — a dearth that has driven the makers of cheap postal-cards to the desperate expedient of printing the black dome of the cathedral red and the gray steeple of the Memorial Church sky- blue. The Hohenzollern fondness for mottos finds vent on the cathedral and the castle, while the statues of the princes of Orange and counts of Nassau stand there dauntless and beautiful, like true Prince- tonians, over such sentiments as "Nunc aut num- quam," "Patriae patrique," and "Ssevis tranquillus in undis." These latest additions to Berlin's bronze elect are well conceived and executed, with more of mellowness and atmosphere than one meets with in earlier Berlin sculpture. They were evidently mod- eled with the inner eye turned toward King Arthur and his blessed iron company at Innsbruck. The finest views of the castle are from the Burg- Strasse, across the river. Seen from a point oppo- 53 ROMANTIC GERMANY site the cathedral, the northern facade of the venerable Hohenzollern home assumes an austere but very real beauty, lightened by the grace of the ivy-clad Apotheke, with its oriel. It takes time to appreciate this building, but it wears like a true- hearted, steadfast Berliner after you have learned to discount his failings. Sometimes the plain, east- ern facade is very friendly beyond the throng of barges along its water-front; and even the royal stables are a goodly sight from here on a sunny morning, topped by the Gothic spire of the Church of St. Peter. But best of all is the view in June from 'the Elec- tor's Bridge, with the bit of tree-embowered garden at the southeastern corner of the castle, the vines clothing the ancient walls to the very top, and trail- ing over the embankment into the water; with the monumental columns and portals of the southern fa9ade, and the green cupola coming out slightly above the mass with an inimitable effect, while Nep- tune's Fountain in the square throws rainbow mist about his glistening water-folk, and the Great Elec- tor in bronze rides with a true Roman nobility on his bridge, coolly satisfied with the outlook. This is Berlin's greatest monument, and it seems almost a part of the castle itself, for both were largely the creations of the greatest of Prussian architects, 54 > ? > H BERLIN Andreas Schliiter, and both are among the finest examples of baroque art in Prussia. There is a suspicion of legend hanging about this bridge, for the story goes that Schliiter, on discover- ing that he had forgotten to fit the Great Elector's horse with shoes, jumped into the Spree and was seen no more. But, in spite of this defect in equip- ment, old Frederick William, every New Year's Eve, jumps his horse over the heads of the fettered slaves and rides as light as a shadow through the city to find how the seed of his sowing has thriven and how the young HohenzoUerns have been up- holding the family record. In 1750, when Frederick the Great had finished his new cathedral, the bones of all his ancestors since Joachim II had to be shifted from the ancient vaults to the new. "Frederick, with some attendants, wit- nessed the operation," writes the historian Preuss. "When the Great Elector's coffin came, he made them open it; gazed for some time in silence on the features, which were perfectly recognizable, laid his hand on the long-dead hand, and said, 'Messieurs, celui-ci a fait de grandes choses/ " How like the famous scene at Potsdam a few decades later, when Napoleon stood by Frederick's leaden coffin, say- ing, "If this one were alive, I should not now be here." 57 ROMANTIC GERMANY The castle was begun in 1443 by Frederick Iron- tooth, the second HohenzoUern elector, but the old- est remaining part, the round tower near the Elec- tor's Bridge, called "The Green Hat," was built by Joachim II in 1538. The interior is not enlivening. You ascend a long, inclined plane of brick called the Wendelstein, and shift into felt overshoes, wherein you shuffle through an interminable line of flashy festal cham- bers. There is the Red Eagle Room, with its wooden replicas of the silver melted up by Frederick the Great in his dire need ; the Knights' Room, with a chandelier beneath which Luther stood at the Diet of Worms; the Room of the Black Eagle; the Room of Red Velvet; the White Hall; and so forth. The only unoccasional paintings in evidence are a few third-rate Italians outside the White Hall, and these, as the guide declared, are soon to come down. The only old masters are two Vandykes, which look quite appalled in the barbarous wastes of the pic- ture-gallery. And one longs for a glimpse of the famous Watteaus, hidden away in the Emperor's private suite. There are other views from the Burg-Strasse almost as engaging as those of the castle. It is good to stand near the William Bridge and see, beyond the flapping green eagles of the Frederick Bridge, 58 Till: CA'l III-liKAl. A.Mi llll, IKI KI'KUK IMUIM.I I KmM llll- •NOKTH SIDE Ol' THE SPREE iKHS i;rs( 11 (IN iiiE BERLIN the National Gallery riding high above its foliage, which allows a glimpse of the impressive double stairway and the warm browns of the Corinthian faQade. It is a startling adventure to find a barely toler- able view of the cathedral, a building which, as Liibke declares, "looks as if it had been taken from a box of toys." This welcome experience did not come to me until my sixth visit to Berlin, and even then I was guided by a painting of Alfred Scherres, seen on the way. But the painter had undeniably found a spot beside the Circus Busch where it is pleasant to linger at twilight or on a misty autumn morning. In the foreground, on a flotilla of roofed-over barges, are the lively colors and sounds and the sweet odors of a pear market. Across the dusky, sparkling Spree the tree-fringed colonnade of the National Gallery leads the eye to the rising and fall- ing rhythm of the Frederick Bridge, whereunder the river winds, gray and gleaming, past the vivacious cornice of the stock exchange. And above the flow- ing lines of the bridge rises, with its repulsive details mercifully hidden by the mist, the huge, dark dome of the cathedral, really noble and impressive for once, and composing finely with the cupola of the castle. 61 ROMANTIC GERMANY To remember that the cathedral cost almost $3,000,000 and covers a larger area than Cologne minster, and then to look at the cathedral, is an experience that makes the heart sick. True, it ex- presses in a way the present character of Berlin — its cold asperity and self-consciousness. But one won- ders whether a beautiful church in its place might not be doing more to make the city human and lov- able. It was erected between 1894 and 1906 to take the place of the former pitiful little cathedral, which possessed no architectural distinction, and was sadly dwarfed by the majesty of the castle on the one hand and of the Old Museum on the other. It is sup- posed to express the present Emperor's architectural taste; for it is said that he made many changes in the plans, and signed them "William, architect." One turns away with relief to watch the children playing about the great red granite basin in the Lustgarten, and to marvel at the costumes of the Spreewald nurses— the short, scarlet, balloon skirt overspread by a snowy apron. There is a mere pre- tense of sleeves, and the gay neck-cloth is set off by a brave, triangular spread of linen head-dress, fringed five inches deep. The museums of Berlin fortunately show few traces of the influence of the Hohenzollern taste in art. For they have as their Director- General Dr. 62 BERLIN Wilhelm Bode, whose fine feeling and determined will have here been almost supreme. Thirty years ago they were poverty-stricken, but the genius of Bode has made them one of Berlin's chief glories; and that is true not only of the art collections, but also of the Agricultural Museum, the Arts and Crafts, the Costume, Ethnological, Hohenzollern, Marine, Mining, Natural History, Postal, and Pro- vincial museums. The statues of the Old Museum consist chiefly of late Roman sculpture of no special importance, but "The Praying Boy," an early Greek bronze, would be a worthy companion to the most famous statues in Munich's Glyptothek. Here are superb collec- tions of antique gold and silver, of Greek and Roman gems and cameos, vases, and terra-cotta statuettes. A passage leads across the street to the New Mu- seum, a homely building devoted mainly to Egyptian art and plaster casts. But its print collection is the richest and best arranged in Germany, and par- ticularly strong in the works of Diirer and Rem- brandt. Best of all is the set of Botticelli's illustra- tions to the "Divina Commedia," so vividly described by Arthur Symons in "Cities of Italy." In the National Gallery, Hohenzollern influence becomes apparent in the prominence of huge mili- 63 ROMANTIC GERMANY tary scenes and royal portraits. But, with all its faults, the collection ranks next to those of Munich and Dresden as an exhibit of modern German paint- ing. It is rich in Menzel and Bocklin, in Defregger and Lenbach and Marees; while, of the younger generation, Kuehl, Von Uhde, Leibl, Hans Herr- mann, Skarbina, and Liebermann are well repre- sented. The sculpture stands far behind the paint- ing, but Max Klinger's "Amphitrite" is a work in colored marbles that takes rank with his Beethoven in Leipsic. It was an odd coincidence that the altar of Perga- mon should have been unearthed by a German and sent to found a Pergamon Museum in warlike Ber- lin. For the frieze depicting the battle of the gods and the giants is not only our most nearly complete relic of Greek sculpture, a worthy mate to the Elgin Marbles, but it is also our fiercest piece of ancient plastic fighting. The Kaiser Friedrich Museum should rather be called the Bode Museum, for it is a monument to the genius of its director. A few weeks before the day set by the Emperor for its official opening, Dr. Bode was taken seriously ill. But from his bed, with the aid of photographs and water-colors, he actually directed the furnishing and decoration of the entire building, the hanging of the pictures, and 64 BERLIN the arrangement of the sculpture, finishing his task within the time appointed. It is due to him that the gallery ranks third in Germany and that it is the first in equipment and arrangement. Indeed, among the collections of the world it is second only to Lon- don's National Gallery in the balance and complete- ness of all the schools of painting. B ode's idea of placing Renaissance sculpture among the pictures is brilliant, and is being wisely adopted in other galleries. Space allows a mere word of description. The most important works of the old Netherlandish schools are the famous Ghent altarpiece by the Van Eycks, and the "Nativity" by Van der Goes; of the old German school, Holbein's portrait of Gisze and Diirer's of Holzschuher, two of the best known of all German pictures. With their Fra Angelicos, Botticellis, Signorellis, Masaccios, and Da Forlis the elder Italian schools are more complete than the Renaissance, and more character- istic of the serious, scholarly Prussian collectors; but the Renaissance boasts four Raphaels, the "For- narina" of Del Piombo, a masterpiece of Del Sarto, Leonardo's "Ascension," and marvelous portraits by Giorgione and Titian. The later Netherlandish schools are specially rich in Rubens and Vandyke. Here are the largest collections of Rembrandt and 65 ROMANTIC GERMANY Hals outside of St. Petersburg and Haarlem ; while, among the Spanish canvases, are Murillo's most sat- isfying religious work and a famous Velasquez por- trait. The collection of medieval and Renaissance sculpture is the most complete of its kind in the country. This gallery stands at the head of the Spree Island, and on two of its three sides the windows give on the water. There is a peculiar charm in watching the unpretentious, old-fashioned waterway slipping quaintly through the city of blood and iron, of science and hard thinking, of peremptory officialdom and rapid transit. While the buildings and streets of Berlin remind one everywhere of the recent kings and emperors, the Spree still keeps a hint of the day of Irontooth, who refused the crown of Poland for the sake of old-fashioned righteous- ness; of Albrecht Achilles, who leaped alone over the walls of Grafenburg and kept five hundred armed men at bay until help came; of Joachim Nestor, the astrologer; and of the Great Elector, who, watchful above the river, still tries to guard the city's oldest part from a too ruthless modernity. And this is only fair, for he started the mighty move- ment wliich has made Old- World romance exotic in Berlin. Rude barges filled with timber or enameled bricks 66 BERLIN are poled laboriously up and down the shallows by patient men with low brows and dark skins, descend- ants, perhaps, of the original Wendish inhabitants of Brandenburg Mark, figures that sweep the imagi- nation back to the time when Henry the Fowler stormed the heathen fort of Brannibor, long before "Wehrlin," "the little rampart" in Bo-Russia, or "Near-Russia," began to show symptoms of grow- ing up into Berlin, the capital of Prussia and of the German Empire. Old Kolln, the island in the Spree containing the castle, the cathedral, and the principal museums, was first mentioned in 1237, seven years before its neighbor, Old Berlin, eastward across the river. The sister towns were of small importance, and there was not so much as a ripple on the surface of his- tory when, in 1411, they both came under the con- trol of Frederick Irontooth. Johann Cicero made Berlin the permanent Hohenzollern headquarters in 1488, and two centuries later the Great Elector laid there the foundations of modern Prussia. The Fischer- Strasse, running southeastward from the Kolln Fish Market, contains some surprises for the adventurer, and the Nussbaum restaurant will give him a thrill, with its genuine tree, its sharp, picturesque gable, and the hint of Renaissance half- timber wall peeping forth behind it. * 67 ROMANTIC GERMANY But the part of Berlin that stands alone in its at- mosphere of romantic age is the Krogl. From the Fish Market you cross the city's most venerable bridge, pass the Milk Market, and turn down a nar- row alley between tall, old-fashioned houses, the plaster peeling from their poor fronts, but with flowers and vines in the windows — an alley with a charming roof-line, which bends gracefully down toward the river, where boatmen, their poles braced against a pile, walk their boats up-stream with a curious effect. It is good to find water-grasses act- ually growing at the foot of the Krogl, a strange sight within the limits of this stern city. On one worn wooden portal one notices a remnant of the beautiful iron tracery of the Renaissance. You pass through an arch by the waterside into a more picturesque alley. On one hand is a house the upper story of which projects as do those in the streets of Brunswick and Hildesheim, but its corbels must be in the real old style of vanished Berlin, for they are unique. And this house actually lurks in the heart of the German capital opposite a wall blessed with a blind colonnade and the rich patina of ages. Beneath another arch you pause to look through a doorway into a dusky hole where three Rembrandt- ish broom-makers are dipping yellow straws into a pot of pitch. The glare of charcoal is on their pale, 68 TUL. JANinvnz liKIlK,!' (i\l-.K THE Sl'RLIj. BERLIN worn faces and dark beards. Two doves coo on the perch just outside the tiny smoke-blackened win- dow. Hasten, traveler, oh, hasten, if you would enjoy the last of old Berlin! For the Krogl may soon be condemned by the same power that period- ically scours the statues in the Sieges- Allee. A sunset on the Spree, seen from one of the upper bridges, is well worth while. The traffic teeming on the glassy, rosy surface where it broadens into a wide basin, the bridge-lights stabbing the water be- tween boats, the irregular old fa9ades of the right bank backed by the massive tower of the Rathaus and the twin spires of the Church of St. Nicholas; the bulk of the Provincial Museum, the domes of cathedral and castle, — all these compose in the half- light into a picture containing more of the elements of romance than one had dreamed that the city pos- sessed. Only three of the old churches, all begun in the thirteenth century, are noteworthy. The choir of the Cloister Church is Berlin's most interesting bit of medieval architecture. The Church of St. Nich- olas contains monuments of every period from late Gothic to the "Wig Time," as Germans love to call the weak classical reaction late in the eighteenth cen- tury; while St. JNIary's is chiefly remarkable for a Gothic fresco, "The Dance of Death," and for the 71 ROMANTIC GERMANY rude stone cross outside, erected in expiation of the lynching of Provost Nikolaus of Bernau in 1325. From these remnants of medieval Berlin, past the beauty and peace of rare canvases and marbles, the Spree flows direct to the turmoil and fierce energy which the Friedrich-Strasse pours over the Weiden- damm Bridge. This street is the main channel for Berlin's notorious night-life, which eddies about the Central Hotel and its vaudeville "Garden." The Cafe Monopol, near by, is a rendezvous for literary bohemia, and the Cafe Bauer, at the crossing of Unter den Linden, is the cosmopolitan resort par excellence. In Tauben-Strasse and the adjacent cross-streets lies the "Latin Quarter," full of Moulins Rouges and Bavarian hostelries, of ball- houses, variety- shows, and small, select cafes that open at two in the morning. A reckless spirit is the mode here, and one often sees this favorite quatrain on the beer mats : Das Leben froh geniessen 1st der Vernunft Gebot. Man lebt doch nur so kurze Zeit Und ist so lange todt. (" Enjoy your life, my brother," Is gray old Reason's song. One has so little time to live And one is dead so long.) 72 BERLIN The Latin Quarter's frivolity is almost over- shadowed by the dignity of the Gendarmen Markt, the poor twin churches of which were capped by the architect of Frederick the Great with impressive cupolas, and now compose finely with the massive- ness of Schinkel's Royal Theater. These churches, the exterior and interior of which are out of all rela- tion to each other, are good types of the insincere Wig style. The market is particularly effective with the moon riding high between its cupolas and lighting Begas's marble monument to Schiller, a brilliant but heartless work. Two tablets announce that Heine and Hoffmann lived in this square. The Leipziger-Strasse, the southern boundary of Berlin's most interesting section, is the main busi- ness street. Its store-palaces remind one that Ber- lin is the leading commercial and railroad center of the Continent, and take the mind back along the line of shrewd, businesslike Hohenzollerns who have brought this about. It is no freak of chance that placed the stock exchange opposite the castle and cathedral, or that placed the JNIinistry of War and the Herrenhaus in the Leipziger-Strasse. For much of Prussia's political success is due to the fact that Berlin is the chief market for money, grain, spirits, and wool. Until recently the English have supposed that they had a monopoly of Europe::!! 73 ROMANTIC GERMANY business talent; but now Berlin's rapidly growing industries are making England and America look to their laurels in iron-founding, the manufacture of machines, railroad materials, wagons, weapons, electrical supplies, and in the chemical and textile industries. And the city knows how to harmonize the practical with the esthetic; Wertheim's beauti- ful department store was built by the royal architect of museums, Alfred Messel, while the architecture of the Rheingold, near by, compares favorably with that of any American restaurant. From this commercial street, Wilhelm-Strasse leads past the palaces and gardens of the Chancellor, the Foreign Office, the ministers, and the English Embassy to Unter den Linden. In the quality, though not in the quantity, of its activities, Wilhelm- Strasse is considered the diplomatic center of Eu- rope. It is a monument to the ruler who, in spite of his inherited instincts, has preserved the peace of the Continent for twenty years. The masses of marble in memory of Frederick III and the Empress Victoria, erected by William II outside the Brandenburg Gate, are regarded with dismay by artistic Berlin, as is the Column of Vic- tory in the Konigs-Platz, and to a less degree the Reichstag, whose gifted architect, Paul Wallot, was hampered by imperial collaboration. The exterior 74 BERLIN lacks unity, and the sculpture is monotonously mili- tant; but the interior is a masterpiece of arrange- ment. Hamburg's mighty monument to Bismarck dwarfs the Berlin bronze before the, Reichstag both in bulk and in spirit ; but, on each side of it, the mer- men and the fisherfolk are delightfully un-Prussian interludes, while the hawthorns about the Column of Victory add, in June, a grateful glow of color to colorless Berlin. In the Sieges-Allee, William II hit upon a capital idea, which does credit to his love of education and to his pride in his forerunners. But here again it is recognized that the Emperor fell short, and his family feeling came out too aggressively, — worst of all, that he made the old mistake of fettering the individuality of his artists, so that there are few works of genius between the Column of Victory and the Roland Fountain, like Schott's "Albrecht the Bear," and Briitt's "Otto the Lazy." There is, by the way, a popular belief that the latter comes down from his pedestal at night and goes to sleep on the stone bench. And this is the pleasantest thing I have heard the Berliners say of the Sieges-Allee, which they have christened "The Avenue of Dolls." One schoolmaster, however, is said to have set his boys a theme on "The Leg-attitudes of the Hohen- 77 ROMANTIC GERMANY zollerns." The thirty-two monuments are too close together. The formal recurrence of standing ruler, two Hermes of eminent men, and a semicircular bench grows monotonous; and it would have been more fitting to have put the warrior family into bronze instead of brittle white marble. Yet in view of the conditions under which the artists worked the average of individual plastic achievement is high. It is not generally known that the Tiergarten is the private property of the Emperor, and is a rem- nant of the ancient hunting forest of the Hohenzol- lerns, which once extended to the castle itself. It is so full of sculpture that the people jokingly call it the "Marmora See," and deny that there is any room for another piece of marble; yet some of the monu- ments, like those to Wagner and Queen Louise, are excellent. Although it is hard to find a spot in the Tier- garten free from the sound of cabs and trolleys, yet it is to me one of the most delightful of city parks. Its chief charm lies in the beauty of its venerable trees, in the many ponds and streams filled with water-fowl, in the flowers and shrubs, and the con- stantly changing delight of its vistas. On coming here from the tastelessness of the Sieges-Allee, one is impressed with quite another phase of the Hohen- zollern character— its genuine love of nature, merely 78 BERLIN hinted at in the Tiergarten, and which finds a fuller expression in Potsdam. There is another park which is quieter, simpler, more idyllic— the grounds of Charlottenburg Castle. You pass the Technical High School, a model of its kind, and, as you walk westward, the people seem to grow friendlier, the houses older, and you see an occasional alley or court that is almost picturesque. Color creeps imperceptibly into the architecture, and the castle, with its high, graceful dome, is in a warm orange tint that reminds you of Sans Souci. Back of it, in a lengthy line, stand busts of Roman emperors and their wives, with their usually official features relaxed, as is proper on a suburban jaunt. The grass grows long with a delicious informality in the half-neglected grounds, damp and delight- ful as though it knew nothing of officialdom. One feels that one may even venture to set foot on it without starting Prussian fulminations. And one likes to think of those royal dead lying in the lovely mausoleum amid this red-tapeless nature after their etiquette-trammeled lives. The Zoological Garden at the southwestern corner of the Tiergarten is one of the most complete and best organized collections of animals in the world. But the human animal, here as everywhere, is the 79 ROMANTIC GERMANY most interesting exhibit. The "Zoo" seems always full of Berliners, and is an excellent place to study that remarkable species. When I speak of the Berliner, I do not mean the highest stratum of Berlin society; for the gentle- man and the gentlewoman are fairly constant types the world over, and, in judging the average quality of the people of any metropolis, one finds the cul- tured classes forming such a slight proportion of the whole as to be almost negligible. There are, of course, many citizens of Berlin who are represented in no detail of the following picture. It is a composite portrait of that well-known per- sonage whom the young clerk, fresh from the prov- inces, sets about imitating; the person whose origin is recognized the moment he enters any European cafe; the person with whom the stranger in Berlin has almost exclusive dealings. The studies for this portrait were gathered not alone from personal observation during repeated stays in Berlin, but also from a consensus of the opinions of many Berliners and other Germans and foreigners, and from the voluminous literature of the subject. The Berliner inclines to imperial standards in appearance and character, very much as his city does. A smooth, determined chin, a daunting 80 BERLIN glance, a right noble pose, a rapid stride, are all the mode. An upturned mustache has recently been de rigueur, and one notices with a smile that even the bronze mermen on the Heydt Bridge possess the imperial "string-beard." One of the Berliner's most trying characteristics is his superiority. He has known the latest joke at least ten years. Do not try to tell him anything or to strike from him the least spark of enthusiasm; for news is no news to him: he was born blase. His eleventh commandment is, "Let not thyself be bluffed"; his life motto, "Nil admirari." In con- versation he instinctively interrupts each fresh sub- ject to deliver the last word upon it, and to argue with him is to insult him. Here it is easy to trace the didactic influence of the ruler who devotes much of his spare time to the instruction of genius. There is something cutting in the Berliner's speech. Perhaps Voltaire's influence on the great Frederick, the critic-king, started this dreadful habit, which seems to grow with indulgence. It is a curious coincidence that the first performance of Goethe's "Faust" should have been given in Schloss Monbijou, the home of the Hohenzollern JNIuseum, for it would almost seem as though the Berliner s had modeled their daily speech after the caustic, sneering style of the engaging villain in that drama. 83 RO]\IANTIC GERMANY They have little humor, but much wit of the barbed, barracks variety. And their target is the universe. Of a cross-eyed man they say: "He peeps with his right eye into his left waistcoat pocket"; of one with a large mouth: "He can whisper into his own ear"; of a pock-marked person: "He sat on a cane- bottomed chair with his face." Bismarck often showed this kind of wit, as, for instance, in the letter written in 1844 from Norderney : Opposite me at table sits the old Count B . . . , one of those shapes that appear to us in dreams if we are not feel- ing well, a fat frog without legs, which before each bite tears open its mouth like a sleeping-bag down to the shoul- ders, so that I hold on giddily to the edge of the table. This sort of thing is telling, but it hardly makes for brotherly love, and a little of it goes a great way. Humor implies sympathy; wit, the opposite; and this exclusive cultivation of wit is a product of the ancient reserve and Ungemutlichkeit of the North. In the "Germania," Tacitus describes the North German's coldness and reserve, his love of solitude, his custom of settling far from high-road and neigh- bor. And he has changed little at heart since Tacitus. Many of the Hohenzollerns have pos- sessed this quality, but none more than Frederick the Great. "He had," wrote Carlyle, "the art of 84 BERLIN" wearing among his fellow-creatures a polite cloak- of-darkness ... a man politely impregnable to the intrusion of human curiosity; able to look cheerily into the very eyes of men, and talk in a social way face to face, and yet continue intrin- sically invisible to them." The Berliner is unapproachable and outwardly cold. He is prudish about showing emotion, and considers the gemiitlich Bavarian effeminate. True, allowance must be made for the disappearance of hu- man qualities among the people of a metropoHs ; but Berliners are far less friendly than Parisians or Lon- doners. The most merciless critics of Berlin, however, are its own citizens. "We are become such dreary people," writes Nau- mann, "that we are almost dead of inner cold. We are rich in knowledge, and beggars in feeling. We are become too withered for boundless offering, for love unto death, for sacrifice and devotion, for prayer and eternal hope. We have been taught that we must be sapless, heartless half -men if we would stand on the summit of the times. Alas ! this barren, this parched, this pitiful civilization!" Aggressiveness has ever been a leading Prussian trait, and without it the historj^ of Europe would have been quite different. But this quality has 85 ROMANTIC GERMANY often shown to poor advantage, as when Frederick William caned the shrinking Potsdam Jew, ex- claiming, "I '11 teach you to love me!" The city is alive with uniforms. The citizen brings the manners of the camp into his daily life, and, in lieu of an epaulet, goes about with a chip on his shoulder. In the shops it is common for the clerk to inquire sneeringly, "Is that all you 're going to buy?" And presently those trite old phrases about "the world's broad field of battle" and "the bivouac of Life" begin to take on, for the stranger, a little more vital meaning. In the Museum of Arts and Crafts I had an ex- perience characteristic of the city. A pile of five- cent catalogues lay on a table in the main hall. I thought of investing, but my hand was still on the way when, from fifty feet behind, came the roar of a guard: "Don't touch! Those cost money." There is a favorite Berlin motto apropos of this quality: Bescheidenheit ist eine Zier, Doch kommt man welter ohne ihr. (Humility has charm, no doubt, But one can get ahead without.) Though the Berliners are their own most extrava- gant critics, they will not tolerate disparagement 86 WERTHEI.MS S lURb IN THE LEIPZIGERSTRASSE BERLIN from any one else. The other Germans call them "aufgeblasen," which is to be interpreted, "pneu- matic." A popular story is apropos: "Ah," cried the provincial, "behold the beautiful full moon!" "Pshaw!" sniffed the Berliner. "That 's nothing at all to- the full moon in Berlin." Their esthetic standards are reflected in the homes and the dress of the people, and not long ago Dio- tellevi, an Italian critic, maliciously wrote, "Their ideal in domestic architecture is that of the universal exposition." Over-ornamentation, and discords in colors, materials, and styles are the fashion. In this connection A. O. Weber, the most popular of recent German satirists, has written somewhat as follows : Berlin 's a place that makes me laugh — Marble and plaster, half and half; A city that reminds me ever Of some sublime, some howling swell Who wears a smart black frock-coat never Without high rubber boots as well. But the beautiful new statues of the princes of Orange show that the taste of official Berlin has improved of late. And that the taste of the Ber- liner has made a corresponding advance is evident in the charming new cement houses of Charlottenburg, 89 ROMANTIC GERMANY in the great retail stores of the Leipziger-Strasse, and in the villas of Grunewald. Finally, before turning to the more agreeable side of the Berliners, it must be remarked that they are unconscionable martinets. A socialist once declared that it took half of all the Germans to control the other half. This is truer of Berlin than of any other place I know. There even the street-sweeper, highly conscious of his officialdom, wields his broom like a scepter. The sign Verhoten! (Forbidden!) is more common than the posters of America's favor- ite articles of commerce in New York. The city is superbly governed, but with a nagging, tedious pa- ternalism that is at first amusing and then oppressive to one whose ancestors never formed the habit. There is a true story of a Berlin conductor and a lady who was standing with a lap-dog in her arms. "Sit down!" cried the conductor. "But I prefer to stand." "Sit down!" he shrieked, forcing her into a seat. "Lap-dogs must be carried in the lap." Because their unpleasant qualities are on the sur- face, and their admirable ones are below, the Ber- liners do a grave injustice to the rest of Germany. Many foreigners go first to the capital, are repelled by the people they first meet, and hasten on to France or Italy with the idea that all Germans 90 I BERLIN have corrosive tongues and the manners of a drill- sergeant. Whereas there is no wider difference in temperament between the people of Naples and those of Warsaw than between the citizens of JNIunich and the citizens of Berlin. There is a story of a Thuringian woman who was asked if she had seen Berlin. "No," she replied; "I have never been abroad." In fact, their countrymen regard the Berliner s with almost as little sjinpathy as though they were foreigners. In Leipsic the word "Prussian" means "angry"; in Thuringia, "exacting"; in Altenburg, "in strained relations"; in Erfurt, "obstinate"; and in South Germany, "raging." Yet when one comes to know the Berliners, it is not hard to discount these irritating, superficial traits and to love the people for the splendid, enduring qualities that lie so deep. What was said of Bis- marck might apply to the typical Berliner. He is like a flannel shirt that scratches at first, but in the mountains you can wear no other. The Hohen- zollerns have worn so well that they have, as a rule, been more beloved in old age than in youth. It takes years to make a friend of a Berhner, but then you have a friend indeed. His chief virtue is his uprightness, his sturdy sense of duty. When the Great Elector was urged in turbulent times to « 91 ROMANTIC GERMANY marry, he responded, "My dagger must be my bride until this task is done." Frederick the Great said: "It is not necessary that I live; but it is necessary that I do my duty." The first Emperor had "no time to be tired," and his noble Empress Augusta was fond of saying, "Empires pass; God alone remains." Principles like these are the foundation of the Berliner's character. No other city in the world has such an honest and efficient administration. Of an annual municipal report Professor Richard T. Ely writes, "One finds it difficult not to believe it a description of some city government in Utopia." Over forty-four thousand citizens take part with- out reward in the administration of affairs, and these include the foremost Berliners. There is no body of men more public-spirited, more really benevolent, more imbued with the idea of progress. And over 2000 of the 2,000,000 inhabitants are members of local charity commissions which have discovered how to help the poor without imposing degrading conditions. In the gift for organization and in executive talent the Berliners rival their rulers. "No Euro- pean court," writes Bryce, "has been more consis- tently practical than that of Berlin. . . . Her rulers have eschewed sentimental considerations them- 92 BERLIN selves and have seldom tried to awaken them in the minds of the people. . . . Ever since the Reforma- tion the Hapsburg princes and their policy have been regarded with aversion by the more intelligent and progressive part of the nation ; while Prussia, recog- nized from the days of the Great Elector as the lead- ing Protestant power, naturally became the reposi- tory of intelligence, liberty, and enlightenment." So it is not surprising that they should have borne a leading part in forming the Tariff Union of 1833, in making education compulsory, in agrarian re- form, in the conscription movement, and in the uni- fication of the German Empire. "Berlin is new, all new, too new," exclaimed Huard in his caricature, "Berlin comme je I'ai vu," —"newer than any American city, newer than Chi- cago, which is the only city comparable to it in the prodigious rapidity of its development." Indeed, in freshness, in youthful energy and initiative, the Hohenzollerns and the Berliners are more like Americans than like Germans. And in the matter of municipal comfort they have left every one else far behind. Public utilities are managed by the city, and are such models of efficiency, cheapness, and profitableness as to make an American sick with envy. Every street is thoroughly cleaned in the small hours of the night, and the humblest pave- 93 ROMANTIC GERMANY ments are as immaculate as the asphalt of Unter den Linden. It is possible that such splendid re- sults might have been reached in a kindlier way; but after years in Berlin the advantages of the system neutralize one's irritation at being over- governed. The Berliners have inherited their masters' love of independence — a reason for the periodic friction between ruler and subject. This quality of the North Germans (whose ancient names were derived from words meaning "sword" and "warrior") made them the most obstinate opponents of the Roman rule, and led them to embrace Protestantism long before the rest of Germany. And in Berlin to-day the Protestants outnumber the Roman Catholics by nine to one. Like their Emperor, the people of Berlin have an earnest desire for culture, and, like him, are con- stantly trying to make encyclopedias of themselves. Though the city has produced few artists of the first rank, it has been more fortunate in begetting scholars and philosophers, and has always succeeded in in- ducing genius to come and work in its unfavorable atmosphere, although such men as Goethe and Mendelssohn have denounced the anticreative spirit of the place. Though the Berliners are such virulent self -critics, 94 BERLIN they are their own most devoted adorers. So it is not strange that they abuse in set terms the princes after whom they have patterned — and love them as their own souls. It is touching to see the devotion in the faces of the crowd as the Emperor every morning leaves the Chancellor's palace, or as he drives in Unter den Linden down an avenue of hatless subjects. I recollect a characteristic scene. The Emperor was taking the air on foot, followed by two adjutants, the Empress trotting to keep up with his vigorous pace. Lined along the curb ahead were forty droshkies, their rabid, anti-imperialistic, socialistic drivers drooping on their boxes or lolling inside. The first man to spy his Majesty gave a sharp hiss, and the whole line, with more alacrity than I had ever before noticed in them, leaped to the ground and devotedly swept off their shiny, water- proof hats, while the Emperor, greatly amused, strode along, saluting as regularly as though he were chopping a cord of wood. The damp, misty climate has undoubtedly had a disagreeable effect on the character of the people, for the city is in the latitude of Labrador and lies low, near that fog-breeder, the Baltic. But a mellow, perfect bit of autumn weather creates the illusion, by sheer force of contrast, that Berlin is one of the most ravishing places in the 95 ROMANTIC GERMANY world. One can dream in the parks or wander along the streams, filled with the dolce far niente of Fiesole or Sorrento. And the people, the harsh, corrosive Berliners, seem suddenly to secrete a little of the milk of human kindness. On such a day I have seen a group of wry-faced Prussians run into the street and help a weak horse to get his load over the ridge of the Frederick Bridge. Such moments are wonderfully effective against their somber back- ground, and the most engaging sight I have ever seen in the city was that of a little green bell-boy in his brand-new uniform, being kissed on the sly by his dear mama behind the Palace Hotel. After a day of Berlin's best weather, the sunset along the Landwehr Canal is beyond praise. From the confusion and din of the Potsdamer-Strasse I came out upon a scene at the bridge as unreal as a vision— a suddenly flashed symbol of the good, true heart of Berlin. I shall never again look with a careless eye upon the Potsdam Bridge after having seen that sky flam- ing behind it a deepening crimson. And when I stood on the Cornelius Bridge, watching in the un- rippled surface the inverted pyramids of rosy and pale-blue sky framed by the dusky softness of the leaves; when I saw a curl of pale-blue smoke rising from an apex broken by a single magnificent tree, 96 THE LANUWEHR CAN'AI. -WITH THE POTSDAM BRIDGE. AS SEEN I-ROM THE KOMGIN-AUGISTASTRASSE BERLIN as though the sun itself were smoldering away, and, in the watery foliage, two high lights, picked out by the arcs on the bank, I praised God for letting His great out-of-door loveliness into the heart of that self-contained, repellent city. Framed by the trees the cold, Romanesque, Berlin-like spires of the Memorial Church took on a more than earthly glamour. I walked down- stream to watch the moored boats, never so pic- turesque as then; to contrast the Zoo's broad blare of yellow light with the radiance dying in ever fainter bars of azure, rose, and robin's-egg blue above the luscious curve of the bank; to enjoy the pronounced splashes of liquid light reflected from the bridge behind. A launch puffed into the sunset with a jet of creamy smoke, sending the brazen ripples vibrating to the rhythm of the sensitive, beauty-loving human hearts for whom the scene was made. 99 Ill POTSDAM-THE PLAYGROUND OF THE HOHENZOLLERNS ,T would be as unjust to form an estimate g» of the Hohenzollerns or of their capital without visiting Potsdam as to form an estimate of Germany without visiting Ba- varia. For Potsdam is more than "the Prussian Versailles." It represents the comple- ment of those sterner Hohenzollern qualities which are embodied in the city of blood and iron. Cold, colorless Berlin may well be seen on the gray days of standard Prussian weather. Sunlight seems exotic there. But the characteristic charm of Potsdam is revealed only when skies are bright and flowers are in bloom. One should prepare himself for the visit by spend- ing a while with the "History of Frederick the Great," and by studying, in the National Gallery, the pictures of Menzel, who created for our eyes the great character whom Carlyle created for our imaginations. 100 POTSDAM On the morning when the traveler awakes with the prospect of a sunny day in Sans Souci, he should chasten himself, leaving his Berlin-irritated critical faculty to seek what it may devour in the city, and with a free heart come away for a day of pure plea- sure in the playground of the HohenzoUerns. It is customary to visit Potsdam by rail and plunge at once into the rococo interior of the castle. But it is far better to rise early and alight at Wann- see; for a better approach is by boat, or, better still, on foot through the pines and beside the quiet waters of that string of lakes called the River Havel. One passes the Peacock Island, the home of the Great Elector's alchemist, where Frederick Wil- liam III planted his famous garden of roses. It is a memorable experience to emerge from the per- fume, the color, the breathless peace of wood and water, upon the magnificent sweep of road that skirts the Jungfern-See and to catch the first faint glimpse of the spires and domes of Potsdam. Near the bridge of Glienicke flashes out a glint of "the glory that was Greece," — a copy of the choragic monument of Lysicrates, — to remind the wayfarer of Voltaire's exclamation: "Potsdam is Sparta and Athens in one." Prince Leopold, who lives here in the lovely park of Glienicke, is no lover of art, and has made him- 101 LIBRARY UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RWEKSIDE ROMANTIC GERMANY self unpopular by refusing admittance to the castle and the hunting-lodge which the Great Elector built for himself in the days of elk and wildcat; but a Berlin painter who once made his way inside by impersonating an official has told me of the neglected ancient marbles and the wonderful Venetian cloister he saw there. Beyond the southern waters the Tudor Gothic of Babelsberg Castle shows through the trees, a style rare in these Northern lands and harmonizing with the Flatow-Turm, which was copied from Frank- fort's finest gate-tower. The first German emperor spent his last days at Babelsberg, and nowhere else may you have so vivid an impression of the character of that plain, kindly, ascetic old soldier. Across the bridge and beyond the "Berlin Sub- urb," the Marble Palace rises from among the trees beside the Holy Lake, the birthplace and home of the present crown prince. Seen from the opposite shore, the building has a really monumental effect, and the classical forms are handled with unusual elegance. Gontard, the architect of the twin towers in Berlin's Gendarmen-Markt, created in this palace the sincerest example of the "Wig style." Through these grounds, along the shore of the Jungfern-See, a charming path leads to the Pfingst- 102 THL MARBLfc PALACE UN TUT HOL\ LAkL BABELSBERG POTSDAM berg, with its huge, unfinished belvedere in the style of the Florentine Renaissance. It is difficult not to spend days among these out- posts of Potsdam. Indeed, it is an achievement to gain a clear idea of the town, so numerous are its interesting points and so widely dispersed. The way to the oldest part leads through the drowsy Dutch quarter, the austere red-brick houses of which, with their unfamiliar gables, were built by Frederick William I in a curious fit of enthusiasm for the architecture of Holland. Through a courtly old street flows a canal — a dozing canal — the func- tion of which is to float its groups of stately swans and to convince the traveler that he is in some quiet corner of Amsterdam. Beside the Church of the Holy Ghost, in the shadow of Potsdam's finest steeple, one may linger, watching the informal river life and enjoying the quaint houses that huddle on the banks. This is the site of Potsdam's earliest civilization. Here in the swamp lived the ancient Semnones until, in the fourth century, they were driven away by the Wends, who called the place "Potzdupimi," "Under the Oaks." These people gave their Slavic names to all the places of the neighborhood. It is interest- ing to know that, although most of these names have lived, the remnants of the elder Teutonic population 105 ROMANTIC GERMANY managed to preserve traces of their ancient religion ; for the legend of "The Wild Hunt" is a chapter from the life of Odin; and even the modern belief in the nightly apparition of a white horse near the Long Bridge may be traceable to Odin's horse Sleipnir. Late in the thirteenth century Potsdam was men- tioned in a mortgage as a Stedeken, or little city, and obliged to send as its military contingent to the league of cities "enen Wegener und enen Schiitt" — one mailed halberdier and one crossbowman. The Hohenzollerns came to the Mark of Brand- enburg in 1416. But they were a busy race and paid small attention to Potsdam, which they mort- gaged over and over again to princes, abbots, knights, and other financiers of those days. From these early rulers and the Thirty Years' War Potsdam suffered many things, and gained, importance only with the rise of its mighty neighbor Berlin. Then it became the royal playground. The Town Castle was begun by the Great Elector, and finished by Frederick the Great, in a pleasant classical style in the midst of a wicked and perverse generation of architecture. Its noble colonnade is the first thing to greet the traveler coming from the station, and the mellow orange tint of its walls is grateful after the colorless facades of Berlin. In- 106 POTSDAM deed, this color contrast between the cities is sym- bolic; for one is the office of the HohenzoUerns, the other their garden. The castle stands for the two men who have done most for Potsdam: Frederick William I, who cared for its utility, and his great son, who developed its beauty. The rooms of the Spartan king have been left as bare and forbidding as even his taste could have desired. Above his death-bed are two atro- cious pictures painted by him while he had the gout {In tormentis innooit F. W.), one of which por- trays a nude female with two left feet. And here are a chair and a clock which he constructed under the same grim conditions of "torment." Memories of the notorious Tobacco Parliament still hang about the castle. This function was at once an informal council of state and a royal "rough-house." It is not definitely known in which room it was held, for Frederick the Great loathed smoke and obliterated all traces of the odious custom; but one cannot wander through the west wing without imagining the fat king and his courtiers seated about a table with pipes, beer, and pans of glowing peat, having their Brobdingnagian fun with poor Dr. Gundling, author. President of the Academy of Sciences, and court fool. Carlyle declared that the art of writ- ing was to Frederick William I "little better than 109 ROMANTIC GERMANY that of vomiting long coils of wonderful ribbon for the idlers of the market-place." And so the court, in need of diversion, put the drunken Gundling to bed with young bears. When he refused to attend "Parliament" they broke down his door and forced him out with fireworks. Between the doctor and the minor court fool they arranged a duel first of burning peat-pans, then of blank cartridges in which the sublime goat's-hair wig of Gundling was mor- tally burned. And, to crown all, the king presented him with a coffin shaped like a wine-cask, in which he was actually buried, to the horror of the clergy. His grave with its pitiful mock epitaph may still be seen in the church at Bornstadt. Frederick the Great ushered in a more humane period, and it is a relief to pass on to his rooms, which have been preserved as religiously as the study of Goethe at Frankfort. There is the confidential dining-room, the trap-door table of which communi- cated with the kitchen, an invention of Frederick's to foil long-eared servants. The library consists of the works of Voltaire, some of the king's own writings unbound, and French translations of the classics. For French was his language; he read little German, and never learned to speak or write it correctly. Before Napo- leon's invasion, the silver furniture was painted 110 POTSDAM black, a needless precaution; for the conqueror al- lowed nothing but the paintings to be disturbed, and merely cut a strip of silk as a souvenir from Fred- erick's desk in the writing-room. Here the uphol- stery is much torn by the claws of the king's favorite dog, and his pet brass gargoyle still disgorges warm air from a corner. Outside the window is the "Peti- tion Linden," where any subject with a grievance used to wait for the kindly Frederick, who believed in the "square deal." In case they had to wait too long, they would climb the tree and flutter their petitions from its branches. Then Frederick would see the reflection in the mirror by his desk, and come to the window. His answer to one of these petitions in the second month of his reign brought him world-wide renown. The Fiscal-General sent in a complaint that the Roman Catholics were proselytizing. On the mar- gin Frederick, in his wretched German, annotated this sentence: "Die Religionen Miisen alle Tollerirt werden, und Mus der Fiscal nuhr das Auge darauf haben, das keine der andern abrug Tube, den hier mus ein jeder nach seiner Fasson Selich werden." ("All religions must be tolerated, and the Fiscal must have an eye that none encroach unjustly on the other ; for in this coun- try every one must get to heaven in his own way.") 113 ROMANTIC GERMANY The Town Castle possesses one of the most friendly of palace interiors. There the brilliant ro- coco decorations of Knobelsdorff ramble about, naively unconcerned with the structural and the official. And — blessed change from Berlin usage — the guides are men, not weapons of offense. Both Frederick and his father made a point of reviewing the daily drill on the parade-ground south of the castle, and to this day the spring parade at Potsdam is the most brilliant event of its kind. I remember attending one of these pageants at the invitation of the Foreign Office. Even the card of admission was strictly military, prescribing where to stand, what to wear, and exactly when to vacate the rampart in favor of the "allerhochsten Herr- schaften." After Berlin, the brilliant uniforms were almost blinding. The Lustgarten was a rain- bow, and though too small for a parade-ground, it was pleasant to have the trees so near. It lent an added charm of mystery and surprise to have a com- pany suddenly charge out of the wood, leaving be- tween the trunks only the sunlight mirrored from the steel-like surface of the Havel. Such a scene is characteristic of Potsdam's military life. In no other German city is it so picturesque, and it has had this quality ever since the days of Fred- erick William I and his mania for tall grenadiers. 114 POTSDAM Even the uniforms are more attractive than others, and I shall long remember the picture of a military harvest here, the soldiers in scarlet, gold-barred jackets riding as postilions before wagons piled with golden grain. It seems as though troops were for- ever marching past the obelisk in the Old Market, between the noble portal of the castle and the nobler dome of Schinkel's Church of St. Nicholas. And they step out as though aware of being important and harmonious elements of the composition. In the Garrison Church, near the barracks which adjoin the Lustgarten, is the tomb of Frederick the Great. His will left directions that he be buried with his favorite dog on the terrace before Sans Souci ; but his successor cruelly buried him in church beside his cruel father. When Napoleon visited the place, he bowed the knee and exclaimed, "If this one were alive, I should not now be here." Then he stole the conqueror's sword, which hung above the grave. The German people have never forgiven this outrage, and, by way of reparation, have hung the church with mellow old standards captured from French armies. When the first emperor placed his trophies there he exclaimed: "God was with us. His alone is the glory." In the royal vault one evening in 1805, Frederick William III and Alexander I of « 115 ROMANTIC GERMANY Russia sealed their friendship and laid the founda- tions of the Russo-German Alliance. On its way to Sans Souci, the tram passes the Wilhelms-Platz, an eloquent testimony to the prac- tical nature of old Frederick William I. This was the site of the Lazy Lake, and the picturesque canal was dug to drain it; but the lake was too lazy even for canal adventures, and had to be filled in, a labor of years. For the greater part of his reign Fred- erick William I struggled obstinately with this prob- lem, but the site of the Lazy Lake could not be called terra firma until his son brought more modern methods to bear on it. The domestic architecture of Potsdam may best be studied in the Nauener, Charlotten, and Hoditz Strassen. Under the two soldier-kings, even the houses were forced into uniform, and one may see whole streets of quaint, two-storied facades, with baldachined windows and tall classical columns topped by putti and plump urns of plenty, a dig- nified style, staid and self-important perhaps, yet gracious and in perfect harmony with its setting. As one goes westward, farther and farther from the asperities of Berlin, the atmosphere grows friendlier, and, as it seems, less Prussian, until — wonder of wonders!— there appears a real Italian campanile. 116 TlIU OLD MAKKI-T POTSDAM That lover of Italy, Frederick William IV, modeled the Church of Peace after the Roman San Clemente, with a bell-tower copied after Santa Maria in Cosmedin. The corner-stone was laid on the centenary of Sans Souci, and the king wrote to Bishop Eylert: After much thought, I will name the new suburban church "Christ Church" or "Church of Peace." A church belonging to the grounds of a palace that bears the name "Sans Souci," "Care-free," strikes me as suitable to dedicate to the eternal Prince of Peace; and so to confront — or, bet- ter still, to contrast — the worldly negative "Care-free" with the spiritually positive "Peace." Here in the mausoleum the Emperor Freder- ick III (father of the present Emperor) lies in a sarcophagus of Greek marble under a dome of Vene- tian mosaic. But the cloisters are best of all. To come suddenly upon such cloisters in Prussia is as though an arctic explorer should stumble upon "a beaker full of the warm south." Near the mausoleum entrance are Ranch's "Moses" and Thorwaldsen's "Christ," the latter a replica of the dominant figure in the Frue Kirke in Copenhagen. But one forgets them in looking out between the columns of the ivied cloisters to the pools, the gay, shadow-flecked turf, and the May foliage of Sans 119 ROMANTIC GERMANY Souci. I shall never forget the morning I first en- tered those gardens. Rhododendrons were every- where in royal purple, lavender, old rose, and white. There were fuchsias and honeysuckles among cop- per-beeches that grew like single, huge, austere flowers. There were effective arrangements of haw- thorn, and the lindens were in full flower. Little daisies made specks of brightness on the springy, swarded banks of a lazy brook, where willows drooped over drowsing lily-pads. There were rose- bushes as tall as Frederick William's grenadiers, who used to grow vegetables on the very spot where a goat-footed marble Marsyas now capered gaily to save his skin, among clouds of lilac and great, bloom- ing fruit-trees. Delightfully un-Prussian gardeners snored under sacking in the shade, and their new- mown grass lay heaped informally by them on the walks. The branches were full of bird-song, and the thought came that the musical Frederick must have stocked his gardens with songsters as he stocked his palaces with philosophers and painters and mu- sicians. May the birds of Sans Souci prove as hardy a race as the Hohenzollerns themselves! The grounds were full of surprises. I came upon masses of fern backed by feathery spruces, dwarf cypresses, and curious, glistening trees that crawled on the ground, smothered in ivy. 120 ALLEY IN SANS SULCI I'ARK POTSDAM At three, the old gardeners whom I had left snor- ing at eleven were still making music in the shade, and I rejoiced to find that here the discipline of the land was suitably relaxed. Berlin is strictly business to the HohenzoUerns ; but they do not let that grim affair spoil the sweet- ness of Potsdam. The people seem human and sympathetic, the martial statuary gentle and ama- teurish after the ferocity of Berlin. Even the four Romans about one of the fountains who are hurry- ing away with the four Sabines are doing it like gentlemen, and the frowns of the ladies are palpably assumed. A lion and a tiger, both on the verge of purring, watch you as you climb toward an arch surmounted by the most genial eagle in the world. Beside the main fountain there is a statue of Mars shying a little javelin. His dog-like wolf is joy- ously on the bound to retrieve it, and you fancy that the man of might is about to wink at Mercury, who is placidly tying his winged shoes over beyond the goldfishes, and at Diana, who is taking a roguish ride on an inimitable dragon. The Germans are an out-of-door people, and this place is a continual rendezvous for picnics. From the splendid fountain little Noah's-ark evergreens run uphill to my favorite bit of rococo. With a childish gravity Sans Souci, in pale orange, sits up 123 ROMANTIC GERMANY there above its enormous terraces, with its flat, water-green cupola and its dear, absurd statues, which one can take no more seriously than an idyl of Lancret or a fete of Watteau. I shall always see it as in that first glimpse, with a foreground of happy goldfish and Germans, through a veil of iridescent spray, and flanked by masses of foliage. I particularly like Carlyle's account of the tiny palace : One of the most characteristic traits, extensively sym- bolical of Friedrich's intentions and outlooks at this Epoch, is his installing of himself in the little Dwelling-House, which has since become so celebrated under the name of Sans-Souci. The plan of Sans-Souci, — an elegant com- modious little "Country Box," quite of modest pretensions, one story high ; on the pleasant Hill-top near Potsdam, with other little green Hills, and pleasant views of land and water, all round, — had been sketched in part by Friedrich himself; and the diggings and terracings of the Hillside were just beginning, when he quitted for the Last War. (Second Silesian.) April 14, 1745. . . . the foundation- stone was laid (Knobelsdorff being architect,) . . . and the work, which had been steadily proceeding while the Master struggled in those dangerous battles and adventures far away from it, was in good forwardness at his return. An object of cheerful interest to him ; prophetic of calmer years ahead. It was not till May 1747, that the formal occupation took place. . . . For the next Forty Years, especially as years advanced, he spent the most of his days and nights in this little Mansion; which became more and more his favourite 124 Tim GKhAT lUU.NTAIN IN SANS SOUCI PARK, WITH TIIU THKKACLS AND PALACE IN THE UACKGKUUND POTSDAM retreat, whenever the noises and scenic etiquettes were not inexorable. "Sans-Souci"; which we may translate "No- Bother." A busy place this too, but of the quiet kind; and more a home to him than any of the Three fine Palaces (ultimately Four), which lay always waiting for him in the neighborhood. . . . Certainly it is a significant feature of Friedrich ; and dis- closes the inborn proclivity he had to retirement, to study and reflection, as the chosen element of human life. Why he fell upon so ambitious a title for his Royal Cottage.'' "A^o-Bother" was not practically a thing he, of all men, could consider possible in this world : at the utmost perhaps, by good care, "Less-Bother !" The name, it appears, came by accident. He had prepared his Tomb, and various Tombs, in the skirts of this new Cottage: looking at these, as the building of them went on, he was heard to say, one day (Spring 1746), D'Argens strolling beside him: "Out, alors je serai sans souci (Once there, one will be out of bother) !" A saying which was rumoured of, and repeated in society, being by such a man. Out of which rumour in society, and the evident aim of the Cottage Royal, there was gradually born, as Venus from the froth of the sea, this name, "Sans-Souci." The lines of orange-trees before the castle recall a celebrated flash of diplomacy. Frederick once complained to the French ambassador that his oranges did not thrive in such a cold climate. This was so painfully evident as to give the courtier a bad moment. Then he answered: "Your Majesty may at least console himself with the thought that how- 127 ROMANTIC GERMANY ever it may be with your orange-trees, your laurels can never fade." The guide through this toy palace was unfor- tunately of the aggravated Berlin type. But even he could not entirely spoil one's pleasure in the mementos of this mighty age and in the pure French style of the decoration, one of the most brilliant ex- amples of rococo art in the land. I longed to shut the door upon the fellow and his guttural voice, and dream of the great little man who talked such bad German and of the Versailles of his ideals. Scattered through the rooms are many of the better paintings of the Watteau school, and the library is a veritable gem of pure Louis Quinze style, with French classics and a fine bust of Homer. Voltaire's apartment throws light on the relations between the king and the philosopher, for Freder- ick himself designed the decorations. There are birds of passage on the walls to symbolize Voltaire's love of travel, peacocks for his vanity, monkeys for his homeliness, squirrels for his love of dainties, and parrots for his curiosity. To crown all, scenes from the fables of La Fontaine are embroidered on the upholstery, to remind him of the author he most detested. This is a faint but significant echo of the heartless generation before, the days of Gund- ling's bear-baiting. 128 POTSDAM In the music-room are the king's spinet and music- stand, with an autograph flute sonata by his master Quantz, and the clock that is said to have stopped when Frederick's life ran down — at twenty minutes past two on the morning of August 17, 1786. In his last days old Fritz was fond of sitting on the terrace outside, looking upon the beauty he had created out of a barren hillside. And one after- noon, as he gazed into the sun, he was heard to mur- mur, "Perhaps I shall be nearer thee soon." In the chamber where he died stands Magnussen's marble of him in his last moments. He is sitting with his favorite dog, looking back with keen, weary eyes upon his life, as though not wholly dissatisfied, but content not to try it again. On his last midnight he noticed the dog shivering with cold. "Throw a quilt over it!" he commanded. His last utterance came after a severe fit of choking: "La montagne est pas- see; nous irons mieux." ("The mountain is passed; we shall go better now.") The picture-gallery, with a few good Dutch paint- ings, lies on one side of the castle, balanced on the other by the famous mill of Sans Souci. History — or more probably legend — relates that Frederick coveted the mill, and Avhen the miller refused to sell, threatened angrily to bring suit. "Ah," retorted the miller, "but there are still judges 129 ROMANTIC GERMANY in Berlin!" and he kept his mill. It remains one of the most delightful landmarks of Potsdam. In the Sicilian Garden below, in an open space surrounded by beechen arbors, stands a modern Apollo amid scarlet geraniums. I know not whether the humor was conscious or unconscious that placed there the god of war and music and poetry, bending his brazen bow toward the mill, symbolizing the attitude of his eighteenth -century successor and viewed from the terrace above by judicial white philosophers. Near the obelisk outside the main gate is a delight- ful wooded spot looking over a sheet of water to the Italian cloisters, a corner where nurses in Spreewald costume like to congregate. Taking a southern route through the outskirts of town to the New Palace, I came upon such homely scenes as are dear to the dweller in cities. An old man was making rope in a field where women were hoeing; barefoot peasant girls in bright rags were filling a flat-car with sand ; behind some crazy palings near a thread of brook I saw a little brother and sister holding a tow-headed baby above a fence to compete in a crowing contest with an appreciative and lusty rooster. Charlottenhof, an Italian villa built by Schinkel for Frederick William IV, lies in a wilder stretch of Sans Souci park, a charmingly effective bit of 130 ' AiMi ii j J/ ■! " f rju i ■■ l aa. ■-Sv;.-. 'i^ I. '''^=5Sg^#^«^ Honf Hvrrrnjnn ' '"" 1 ^i' (" riiiT ''•• 'i* i^rni i i 1 T ■7?rf*'' ' _'jMumijjj |i »j: i .j,'»j i j i *a» r«2saf:i'*y--i; VIEW OF THE PALACE Of SANS SOUCl FROM Tllli Kl IMCNBIiRG THE Kl'lNENliHRG, THE RUINS BUII-T BY IREDERICK TIH; r,KI-:AT NORTH OE SANS SOUCl POTSDAM all over, a wanderer went strolling by, actually draw- ing real music from that antimusical instrument, the harmonica. And the whole place was alive with the spirit of his art. Above, at the end of a meadow, loomed the arti- ficial ruins which Frederick had built. It struck me as pathetic that the man who had unwillingly made so many modern ruins should have felt a craving for ancient ones. There were three Roman col- umns, with a fragment of entablature from which young saplings sprouted; a dwarfed pyramid of Cestius, a little round temple, a tower, and a seg- ment of amphitheater about a basin of water which the king had intended as the scene of such naval battles as the Colosseum once staged. The bloom of a great tree lay like snow on the surface, like eider-down on the earth. Ever since coming upon that Roman campanile below, I had been breathing the atmosphere of Latin lands, and even the exotic Berlin lackey had not made me quite realize where I was. I had just walked in a meadow that might have been trod bj'' the feet of the Gracchi and Brutus to a ruin that might have stood below the Palatine Hill. It remained for the height of the tower, with its broader outlook, to restore me gradually to the German atmosphere. Southeastward lay Potsdam, with its picturesque 137 ROMANTIC GERMANY steeples and cupolas, and, across the sparkling rib- bon of river, the half-timbered walls of the military academy. Southward, beyond the campanile, spread the reaches of the Havel, flecked with the white wings of yachts. In the foreground stood the little house where Frederick had hoped to find peace, and his pathetic ruins, with their snowy sheet of water. In the southwest, over a green, billowy field of grain and an ocean of boughs, rose three towers and the dome of the New Palace. Northward, like a turgid lake, spread the wastes of the parade-ground. On the horizon were etched the spires of Spandau. While to the northeast, beyond the fair waters of three lakes and the long sweep of the Grunewald, I saw, or seemed to see, a huge, dark dome domi- nating a huge, dark Berlin, even as, viewed from Tivoli across the Campagna, St. Peter's dominates the Eternal City. 138 THE BROAD BRIDGE IV BRUNSWICK-THE TOWN OF TYLL EULENSPIEGEL N a tiny square called the Backerklint, surrounded by glamourous, half-timbered houses as bright with color as they were in the Middle Ages, there plays a unique fountain. An apprentice youth sits above the bowl, balancing a slipper on his toes and smil- ing whimsically down at a semicircle of spouting monkeys and owls. To the observant stranger it seems a curious coincidence that the window of the crooked old bake-shop hard by should be occupied by gingerbread owls and monkeys with currant eyes. But presently he discovers the inscription on the back of the fountain : Dem lustigen Gesellen Till Eulenspiegel dort errichtet wo er die Eulen und Meerkatzen buk Erdacht und gemacht von Arnold Kramer aus Wolfenbiittel 141 ROMANTIC GERMANY (To the jolly chap Tyll Eulenspiegel erected in the place where he baked the owls and the long-tailed monkeys Thought out and wrought out by Arnold Kramer of Wolfenbuttel) Americans know of this medieval hero chiefly through the great tone-poem by Richard Strauss, and by his lesser descendants, such as Max und Moritz, and Peck's Bad Boy. But his name is a mighty one in Germany, and may almost take rank with graver heroes such as Tannhauser and the Wan- dering Jew. For he was the first Teutonic humorist, a sort of Socrates turned practical joker, who always affected naivete and always turned the laugh upon the other fellow. "To few mortals," wrote Carlyle, "has it been granted to earn such a place in universal history." Tyll was born at the beginning of the fourteenth century in the province of Brunswick, and played many of his most famous pranks near the spot where he now sits, more brazen than ever, laughing at the droll little creatures he once baked, to the scandal of the good baker, his master, in the old shop close at hand. Those liveliest of German children, the young Brunswickers, are never tired of poking their 142 BRUNSWICK fingers into the monkeys' mouths and squirting the water at one another. Tyll is the last to say them nay, and always seems vengeful whenever the police- man comes to spoil sport. The monkeys are notice- ably more popular than the owls, and there is some- thing almost pathetic in their bright little skulls, from which the patina has already been rubbed by the caressing hands of countless children. Perhaps the chief reason why the Brunswickers are the only Germans who have thus honored Tyll is that they feel an affinity for him. At any rate, they im- pressed me as having a greater love of practical fun and a more genuine Low- Saxon humor than any other Germans of my acquaintance. Nowhere else have I been so often accosted on the streets, and by such a variety of people. They seem to be fairly bubbling with mischief. They have not the malicious, cutting satire of Berlin, nor the polished wit of Dres- den; not the uncouth pleasantry of Silesia, nor the effervescence of the Rhine, nor the mellow, hearty, kindly humor of Bavaria. Brunswick is like a mild but continuous hazing party. The people are amaz- ingly quick with their tongues. You turn a corner in a long mackintosh, and are instantly hailed by a group of burghers with, "Well, my Mantle-Mister!" You pass a group of middle-class girls on a bridge. "Too tall for me!" cries one. ^ 143 ROMANTIC GERMANY "Down at the heel, oh, shockingly!" remarks an- other. "Think he understands?" '^Jawohl. See how fast he runs away!" In these free-and-easy manners it is not difficult to trace the Brunswicker's inherent democracy. His humor, like Tyll's, inclines toward terseness and point. He is fond of such epigrams as the following : "Every beginning is hard," said the young thief. Then he stole an anvil. "I punish my wife only with good words," said Lehmann. Then he threw the hymn-book at her head. They are fond of making so-called "neighbor- rhymes," in which the peculiarities of each house- holder in a given street are tersely hit off with a win- ning combination of sharpness and shrewd geniality which neatly characterizes the people of Brunswick. Naturally these affinities of the medieval Tyll are deeply romantic and superstitious folk. And they come honestly by the quality ; for the oldest Teutonic myths, like that of Walpurgis Night, had their origin in the region north of the Harz. And it is a welcome thought that our Anglo-Saxon appetite for the romantic and the picturesque may be due in part to inherited remnants of exactly such ancient beliefs 144 BRUNSWICK as are still alive in the province and the city of Brunswick. The people believe to-day in vampires. They shut the door after the outgoing coffin so that the dead may not return and work mischief. Still they place a coin in the dead hand to pay for the outward journey,— that coin of Charon which seems to run through all historj^— and intone this formula: Ik gewe dik dat dinige, Blif mik von den minigen. ( I give thee what is thine ; Oh, spare thou what is mine.) There are countless tales current in Brunswick, of wailing women with eyes of fire, the harbingers of death; of the World Dog, who appears in clanking chains every seven years; of will-o'-the-wisps, who hover over burning gold. It is a matter of common knowledge that he who moves a boundary-stone must wander about headless after death. Was it not re- cently that a Brunswicker met his former pastor at midnight in a forest? The reverend gentleman car- ried his head under one arm, but with the other he gave his late parishioner such a box on the ear that he never ventured out again after dark. Until the middle of the nineteenth century there were "Fire-riders" in Brunswick, whose function it 145 ROMANTIC GERMANY was to mount a horse at the outbreak of fire, and with a saucer of salt in hand gallop thrice around the flames, chanting this magic formula: Feuer, du heisse Flamm', Dir gebeut Jesus Christ, der wahre Mann, Das du sollst stille steh'n Und nicht weiter geh'n. Im Namen des Vaters, etc. (Fire, you fervid flame, Christ Jesus, that true Man, demands this same: That you stand still yonder And no further wander. In the Name of the Father, etc.) The folk believe that people whose eyebrows meet become Marten at night and oppress the breasts of sleepers. They believe in the Werwolf, in the Wild Hunter, in gnomes and giants; and in the witches who ride on pitchforks, broomsticks, goats, and swine to their unhallowed tryst on the Brocken every Wal- purgis Night. Just before her head was cut off a local witch once confessed that she had "shut up a thief in a gimlet-hole in the foul fiend's name, so that the fellow peeped like a swarm of mice" ; and to this day the witches of Brunswick are keeping up their grand old traditions. The devil is a familiar character, and one often hears : 146 BRUNSWICK Wenn't rant und de sunne schint, dann hat de duwel hochtlt. (When it rains and the sun shines, the devil is getting married.) And there is a remarkably circumstantial legend of how the devil married his grandmother at midnight in a hall in Brunswick, leaving behind him a costly carpet and a ring worth two thousand ducats. People believe that he flies away with atheists, and that on February 15, 1781, his victim was no less a person than the great Lessing. For they always thought of their local poet and philosopher as an atheist, harder than steel, who was condemned to glow in the eternal fires. Indeed, there is a rhyme about this painful episode, which the children sing at play: De duwel kam emal up eren Un wull he gem en blanksmit weren. Doch harr he weder tinn noch messing, Drum nam he den professor Lessing. The translation must be free : Once on a time the devil came And wished to try the blacksmith game. But lack of metal kept him guessing Until he took Professor Lessing. Finally, lest it should be imagined that such beliefs and customs are no longer representative of modern 147 ROMANTIC GERMANY Brunswick, let us take an instance from the police records of 1897. At two o'clock on the morning of January 19, Gottlieb Kitzke, a servant, and Fritz Krodel, a coachman, were arrested in the Wolfen- biittler-Strasse because they answered the night- watch evasively. It came out in the examination that they had been trying to conjure up his Satanic majesty. They had carried to a field outside the city a sack of firewood, a number of wax candles, a spirit-lamp, and a cornucopia of salt. They had lighted the fire, the candles and the lamp, had offered up the salt on the latter, and had prayed fervidly for an hour; but no devil! The wood burned up, the candles down; but still no devil. Loud recrimina- tions on the way home led to their arrest. In Krodel's pocket was found a "Book of Spirits." The title- page ran as follows : The Seven-sealed Book of the Greatest Secrets: Secret Art School of Magic Wonder-forces, Angel-help for Defense and Protection at Direst Need. The Book of Holy Salt, The True Fiery Dragon. There was a book-mark at the chapter on How to Conjure up Lucifer. There are still other points of resemblance be- tween the city and Tyll Eulenspiegel. Brunswick liked Tyll because he was no respecter of persons. 148 BKUNSWICK Tyll liked Brunswick for the same reason. Indeed, it is not strange that the place should be so demo- cratic, for it lies in that cradle of the Anglo-Saxon race between the Harz Mountains, the Elbe, and the Rhine and has obstinately preserved the old breed and the old speech. It has always been plebeian in spirit, and was one of the first Northern communities to fight for democracy— a fight prolonged in vain for four centuries. Because it is such an excellent type of a Low-German city, it is a shame that the late invasion of the High-German tongue should have "restored" its mellow Saxon name of "Brunswyk" into "Braunschweig." But its medieval democratic spirit has never been "restored" away from those incomparable streets, and to this day fills many of the public buildings with its poetry. The Rathaus of the Old-Town was designed with a true feeling for municipal propor- tion so that it might not overpower its private neigh- bors; while the Gewandhaus was influenced even further by them, for it shows traces of the compact- ness and conservatism of timber construction. Each of these, is a type of the municipal archi- tecture of its period. The richness and interest of the Rathaus come wholly from a two-storied Gothic colonnade, filled with tracery and gargoyles and Saxon princes under delicate baldachins. It is a 151 ROMANTIC GERMANY happy instance of that self-restraint, unusual in Ger- many, which has made poems of Brunswick's wind- ing streets. In these the builders would allow no one house to lord it over the others, and here in the Rathaus the entire effect comes from a tenfold repe- tition of one theme. The Gewandhaus, as it looks down the sweep of the Post-Strasse, seems to fuse in itself all the ele- ments of the German Renaissance — the Italian's fondness for a classical play of proportion, his con- servative adherence to certain medieval effects, and the reckless passion of the Low Countries for pic- turesque, unstructural ornament. But the building has a lightness and a hint of gaiety which remind one that Brunswick, lying just beyond the Westphalian border, is touched by the happy spirit of the Harz and of Thuringia. And one has the impulse to climb that lofty gable among the caryatids and alle- gorical statues, the volutes and obelisks and inscrip- tions, to search the horizon for the blunt profile of the Brocken. These two structures stand as monuments of the city's wealth in the flourishing Hanseatic days when she controlled the main highway to the ports of Bremen- and Hamburg and Liibeck. They sym- bolize as well the democratic ideal that preferred poverty to oppression. In 1293 the people, led by 152 BRUNSWICK the gilds, began their fight against a tyrannous gov- ernment. In consequence they were declared "auf- riihrerisch," or riotous, by the Hanseatic League, and were repeatedly placed under the commercial ban, which almost ruined the city's prosperity. But it took four centuries to break their spirit, and though the cause was finally lost, democracy is still plainly written upon many of their streets. It is true that the name of Brunswick is in evil odor in the pages of American history. But we should not harbor resentment against her because, in the darkest period of her history, after the power of the people was finally broken, the worst of her rulers sold a few thousands of her sons to England to fight against us in company with the Hessians. The Brunswickers could not help themselves. They were suff^ering reaction from their long struggle against the same evils that had roused America to arms. Who knows whether, if the people had won their fight, they might not have been our allies instead of our foes? Brunswick's most striking quality is the delight- fully homelike atmosphere that seems to pervade it. No doubt the conservatism of a folk as rich as they in superstition made for loyalty to the family and the ancestral dwelling, and likewise the democratic spirit led each citizen to make his house his palace. 153 ROMANTIC GERMANY These humble builders stamped their work with their own personality as completely as though they were sculptors and each house a model in moist clay. And they are the personalities of family men. Several of the streets, like the Weber- Strasse, the Hagenbriicke, and Meinhardshof have stood virtually unchanged since the sixteenth century, and they seem fairly to exude domesticity. On coming out suddenly into one of the many squares, if you have already caught the spirit of the place, your eyes seek first, not the great church or public building, but the row of old dwellings oppo- site, glowing with color, redolent of romance. In that nucleus of Brunswick, the Burg-Platz, for ex- ample, one is aware of something more significant than the castle and the cathedral. For these sump- tuous chords are a little sharp to the city's real key- note, as one finds on catching a glimpse of the dwell- ings opposite and the crooked street into which they lead. This is the authentic key-note — a crooked street filled with half-timbered houses rich with carv- ings, their stories pushing out eagerly beyond one another as if anxious to mingle their gargoyles and saints above the happy life of the pavement; and, closing the enchanted vista, some noble building of the people, or some real native church, its traceried bell-house riding high between twin towers. 154 BRUNSWICK A deal of Brunswick's charm is due to its street plan. Many of the old cities, founded by pure Teu- tonic stock, in the south and west of Germany devel- oped from a group of houses huddled together without rhj^me or reason — an arrangement called "Haufendorf," or "Heap village." On the other hand, the Slavic cities of the east were laid out on a deadly rectilinear plan, as monotonous as Manhat- tan's sorry scheme of things. In Brunswick these two influences complemented each other and produced a plan both of irregular, curving streets and of far vistas — a plan that sur- passes the others as a design by Diirer surpasses a design by a cliff-dweller or by Euclid. And Bruns- wick has known better than most cities how to keep her scheme pure of modern improvements. No other German city has preserved so many of its Gothic houses. The earlier ones often bear friezes in which a characteristic step-like design frames low reliefs. The later Gothic retaliates on the church bell-houses, which are, in a sense, only transfigured dwellings, by borrowing their ecclesiastical tracery. But the most fascinating friezes are the allegorical, religious, and grotesque reliefs supported by carven beam-ends and consoles that seem to run the gamut of piety and humor. A scene at Stecher-Strasse 10 hastens naively from Isaac to the Resurrection with 157 ROMANTIC GERMANY a smile and a touch of real religious feeling. But the Brunswicker seems most at home in carvings that ex- press his whimsical, mischief -loving nature, as in the frieze of Neue-Strasse 9, a melange of monkeys, clowns, storks, mermen, and aggressive dwarfs. Animal symbolism lies close to his heart and is often inimitable, as at Gordelinger-Strasse 38, where a fox is making away with a goose and an ass is per- forming solemnly on the bagpipes. There is a fa- vorite kind of grotesque called Luderzielien, or "Bummers' Tug of War," depicting an old game in which two men wrestle back to back with a rope passed over their shoulders. As for the gargoyle who pulls wide the corners of his mouth like a bad boy, he is found everywhere, even interrupting the decent progression of a row of wooden saints. This is the sort of carven fun that is often seen on old town halls, but nowhere else is it found in such pro- fusion on German homes as here. In the transition style the old "step" ornament developed into the fan-shaped rosette, which often radiates from some grotesque head. "She has the form of the rising sun," exclaims a sentimental German writer. "She is the rising sun of the Renaissance !" This design evolved into the egg-like ornament called Ship's Keel, and at length, reluctantly, into 158 BKUNSWICK the Renaissance. But such is the conservatism of private timber architecture that the reawakening was delayed by half a century, and even then the good burghers held fast to many Gothic motifs. The Hofbrauhaus is a good type of this period. But it has few rivals, for Renaissance energy seems to have focused here largely on portals. Those at Reichen-Strasse 32 and Siidklint 15 are almost Italian in their severity and poise. The most pic- turesque of all is opposite the north transept of St. Martin's, with its human and leonine caryatids and its elaborately costumed halberdiers. Another fine portal surprises the prowler in a narrow lane back of the Briidern Kirche, and another leads from the Backerklint to the place where they still make one of the oldest beverages in German lands, the famous Mumme beer — a dusky syrup like the most infamous cough mixtui'p /hat ever darkened my childish in- terior. Brunswick has little noteworthy private archi- tecture built later than the Renaissance except the amusingly exaggerated portal of Bank-Platz 1 and the consummate baroque portal and oriel at the head of that jewel among streets, the Reichen-Strasse. Many of the older dwellings have an architectural feature as unique as are Danzig's Beischldge, — one that adds its element of mystery and romance. The 159 ROMANTIC GERMANY Kemnaten are stone rooms built massively into the center of the half-timbered houses. No one knows their function. Were they fireproof vaults in the inflammable times of thatched roofs? Or were they the private strongholds of the days when every man's hand was against his neighbor and his house was literally his castle ? Among the chief fascinations of Brunswick are the old Hofe, or courts. They are not so narrow or so teeming with life as in Hamburg, nor so opulent in color and effects of vista as in Liibeck ; but they are richer architecturally, and in their inimitable inscrip- tions that show at once the dry wit and the piety of the North German, as in the following: Allen die mich kennen den gebe Gott wass sie mir gonnen. (God make my friends all free Of what they wish for me.) Court-hunting offers all the excitement of search- ing for hidden treasure ; for the most medieval court may be masked by the most modern facade. The only way is to enter boldly at every open portal, and presently you find yourself plunging through a door of the twentieth century straight into the fifteenth. There the low-class artisan — the "Little Citizen" as he is called — sits before his house cobbling as in 160 BRUNSWICK the days of Hans Sachs, or blows at a quaint forge the flare of which picks out Rembrandtesque high hghts amid the dusk of the overhanging stories — stories quite unrestored and full of dim carvings and inscriptions. It was a memorable surprise to stumble upon the court at Schiitzen-Strasse 34 and find this motto : Wer wil haben das im geling der sehe selbst wol zu seinem Ding, a sentiment that might be translated : Who loves Fortune and would woo her Let him tend in person to her. There was a long inscription running along an entire side of this court. So time-worn and cobwebby was it that I had to clamber upon a rickety wain to de- cipher it; and with the tail of my eye I could see a group of eager young Brunswickers trying to muster courage enough to upset me. At length I made it out: Dorch Gottes Segen und sine Macht Habe ich das Gebew Darhen gebracht. (Through God's own might And benison This building as You see I 've done.) 161 ROMANTIC GERMANY The most elaborate of the courts is entered through an interesting portal in the Jacob-Strasse. The richly carved beam-ends are supported on columns with curious triple capitals and this "Low" variant of a common inscription: Wer Got vortruwet Der hat wol gebuwet, which might be Englished : The man whose thoughts in God repose Has builded better than he knows There is no discordant note in these Brunswick courts. Everything seems there by right divine. At number 2 in the Wenden-Strasse (the ancient Via Slavorum) a heap of poles leans by a fine, late- Gothic, church-like window as naturally as though it were a necessary buttress. The court of Reichen- Strasse 32 has even its dovecote embellished with Empire medallions. And in the long garden-court of number 21, where numerous "Little Citizens" are packed in together — not without friction — this motto is conspicuous : Wenn Hass und Neid brandte wie Feuer So were das Holtz lange nicht so teuer, freely rendered: 162 BRUNSWICK If hate and envy burned like fuel The cost of wood would be less cruel. Some of the squares are hardly less perfect in their way than the best of the courts. The little Platz, "Am Nickelnkulk," for instance, where one of Brunswick's numerous iron serpents pokes his head out of the under-world and looks about in surprise at the picturesque cottages by the tiny stream. This is the home of legend. For "Nickelnkulk" is cor- rupted from "Nickerkulk," meaning a water-hole in- habited by a divinity called "Nicker," a sort of nix or water-sprite. This personage lived for centuries in his hole by the stream, and fifty years ago was still celebrated in a children's game. One child lurked in a ditch and tried to catch the others, who jumped over it singing, in the lowest of German: Nickelkerl keitschenbora, Ik sitt in dinen locke: Fange mik doch. (Nix of the elder-bush, I squat in your den: Catch me, then.) It has the genuine smack of the soil, this Low-Ger- man language, so much older and so much more akin to the English than the High German. A Platt- « 163 ROMANTIC GERMANY deutsch poet has written some sonorous lines in its honor : Uns' Sprak is as uns' Heiden, urspriingelk noch an free. Uns' Sprak is deep un machtig un prachtig as de See. Anything so near our language almost translates itself : Our speech is like our heath-land, Primordial and free. Our speech is deep and mighty And splendid as the sea. In Brunswick the lower classes speak "Piatt" almost exclusively, and, in picking it up, English is almost as potent a help as German. There is the little Ruhfiiutchen-Platz in the heart of town, dreaming over its water-filled fragment of the old castle-moat; the Kohl JVIarkt, with its fine fountain, its view of the Gewandhaus, and its three Renaissance houses. Sun, Moon, and Star. (Al- though "Star" recently suffered total eclipse, its memory still twinkles on.) Then there is the Altstadt Markt, especially "when a great illumination surprises a festal night," and the Gothic fountain, transformed into rainbow mist, sends a gentle glow playing over the old houses on the southern side, and the band makes soft music 164 BRUNSWICK behind the tongues of flame outlining the arches of the Rathaus colonnade. Then the square is filled with gaily dressed, fun-loving folk who seem held within bounds only by the austere spires of St. Mar- tin's above them. Because Brunswick has preserved inviolate so many of its intimate old streets and the old stock in them, and because the stranger feels at once that this is a city of families, it is peculiarly fitting that it should possess the one work of art that expresses most completely the poetry of family life. In re- visiting the picture-gallery it is natural for the lover of Brunswick to hasten past even the pure spiritual- ity and mysticism of Rembrandt's "Noli Me Tan- gere," the royal coloring of his armed warrior, and the shimmering Vermeer interior, until he comes to the hall which contains the goal of his pilgrimage. If he is wise, he will look first at the remarkable Lievensz and at Steen's uproarious wedding-scene, because everything else pales after one glance at the Rembrandt. To me it is one of the grandest of all exhibitions of sheer creative power. For there is nothing un- usual in the subject, no dramatic or pathetic situa- tion, no scene of inherent poetic inspiration, no religious afflatus. It is a mere family of every-day people, caught amid their prosaic surroundings, and 165 ROMANTIC GERMANY irradiated, transfigured by the fire of the master's genius. I know of no one else who has ever made more of such unpromising material. The Germans call the picture a Farhen-Rausch, and we can only call it an ecstasy in color. The figures, in a delicious trance, seem in possession of the ultimate secret, and the eldest child brings toward the mother a basket of flowers as though moving through some precious spiritual rite. One returns repeatedly to worship before this painting as before a shrine and to realize why its spell could not be as potent elsewhere as in this city of homes. Just as the Rathaus and the Gewandhaus are subsidiary to the dwellings of Brunswick, so are the other noteworthy buildings : all but two ; for the aris- tocratic castle and cathedral are exceptions. But it must be remembered that these are both memorials of the maker of Brunswick's fortunes and her great- est ruler, Henry the Lion, whose death ended the days when the B runs wickers were content to be gov- erned by any one man. In the ninth century. Burg Dankwarderode was built by the brother of that Bruno who founded Brunswick, calling it Brunonis Vicus. Three hun- dred years later it was sumptuously rebuilt by Henry the Lion; but during the centuries of democratic agitation that followed it was ruined, over-crusted, 16G BRUNSWICK and forgotten. Finally, in recent days, some of Henry's noble arches and capitals were discovered and made the basis of the present restoration, which is a masterpiece of its kind, a worthy mate of the Marienburg in East Prussia. Henry's famous bronze lion in the little Burg-Platz outside, which has guarded his name for the last seven hundred years, snarls ferociously at you when you dare to won- der why the cathedral exterior is so unassuming. Indeed, the great burgher churches were all built on this general scheme, with a plain, massive western front, a lofty bell-house riding high between two towers, and a long, low nave, like a giant dachshund at the heels of his master. On entering the cathedral you see that the magnifi- cence was all saved for the interior as a setting for Henry's famous Gothic tomb before the altar. The architecture runs a brilliant scale from early Roman- esque to the fantastic, spiral-ribbed piers of the late- English Gothic. The place is filled with treasures. On the walls is a fascinating cycle of Romanesque frescos, the principal works of their kind on the plain of North Germany. There is a trinity of sculptures, in the apse, worthy of the lion in the square outside: a twelfth- century altar of bronze and marble, an old brazen repHca of the Seven Golden Candlesticks at Jeru- 169 ROMANTIC GERMANY salem, and, above all, a wooden crucifix of the tenth century, to which one returns again and again with ever new joy and reverence. It is a light out of the grossly Dark Ages. The face, hands, and feet are long and slim, the body is robed, and the folds are channeled as formally as Assyrian hair. Yet the figure has about it something benignant and royal, at once fraternal and paternal. A German authority named Doring has made the curious suggestion that this is not a statue of Our Lord, but of St. Era, the patroness of the crypt, who, as a foil to unpleasant attentions, was given a beard in answer to prayer. But I prefer not to associate this Christian Ariadne with my favorite Brunswick statue. There is no such splendor inside the other churches. They breathe, on the contrary, the spirit of men whose tastes were, first of all, democratic and domes- tic. They are eloquent of the solidarity that should exist between the religious life and the secular. In this town the street is no mere frame, as in so many other picturesque German cities, for an impor- tant building at its end; it is the major part of the picture, with the great tower or chiseled f a9ade as a background. St. Catherine's and St. Andrew's are splendid foils for the ways that surround them. St. Martin's, indeed, is almost too subservient, for it faces directly down none of the fascinating streets of the 170 CIIUKCH Ol'" ST. CATHHRINIi AND HENRY THIi LION'S 1-OUNTAIN IN THE HAGEN MARKT BRUNSWICK quarter. The best it can do is to enliven the Altstadt Markt, with its chain of traceried gables and its rich choir, where a statue of Luther usurps the place of a Romish predecessor. The other churches, however, atone for St. Mar- tin's unfortunate position. It is a joy to prowl through the narrow Steelier- Strasse and come out suddenly on the broad expanse of the Hagen INIarkt, where, beyond the misty waters of Henry the Lion's fountain, rises the facade of St. Catherine's, tall and slim and queenly, like some fair daughter of the peo- ple. It expresses more nearly than any other local building the proud independence of the Brunswick- ers, their joy and pride in the beauty they were creat- ing, and their feeling for the composition of the city. St. Catherine's is a typical Brunswick church. You encircle it to enjoy the gable-fields and to see, from many angles, how gracefully the western front detaches itself from the nave. The best view comes last. Inevitably you retire to the Hagenbriicke, backing up the crowded little street. And the people courteously make way for any one who is appreciat- ing how the high, corbeled stories of their houses close in on each side of the distant fa9ade, the opulent red of the gable-tiles gradually moving in to bring out the green patina of the lesser tower and the creamy delicacy of the window tracery. You zigzag from 173 ROMANTIC GERMANY curb to curb, comparing the scores of rival effects, and the cHmax comes on the corner of the Reichen- Strasse. These Gothic houses, teeming with twenti- eth-century humanity, are brought out by that Gothic house of the God of all centuries, beyond. They seem enriched and spiritualized by its very presence, much as the ideal church enriches and spiritualizes the lives of its children. That the rela- tion of the infinite to the finite could be so embodied in a double row of worm-eaten houses leading crook- edly from a church, I had never realized until the hour when I first stood in the Hagenbriicke. St. Andrew's has less of the gracious sweetness of St. Catherine's and more of the monumentality of the cathedral. But it heightens the beauty and no- bility of the surrounding streets as potently as its sister church, if in a more virile way. And it has a wider range of effects. The view down the Weber- Strasse is a worthy companion to that down the Hagenbriicke, only the houses are plainer, and the church more obscured by them. But St. Andrew's has in its repertory other pieces almost as inspired as this. You give yourself up to the curvetings of the ca- pricious little Meinliardshof, where the overhanging f a9ades, leaning on their saint and sinner corbels, let only a narrow ribbon of sunshine slip between them; 174 BRUNSWICK where the tiles run up suddenly into incorrectly made dunce-caps or break out into dormers or little eye- like windows bulging with surprise — tiles that cast a ruddy reflection upon tlie grotesque carvings of the opposite house-front, from which the glow rebounds across the cobbles and plays about a portal of black- ness leading into some, indescribable court full of the mysterious and the medieval. At length, if you can tear yourself away at all, you round another bend and see, beyond a Gothic house more crooked, if possible than the street itself, the southern tower of St. Andrew's, the tallest and most impressive of Brunswick's many, shooting up from the picturesque Alte Waage that nestles at its base, looking more like*a home than a public building. Amid such intimate enjoyment of the humbler houses of the people, to come suddenly upon this stately tower harjnonizing so completely with them was to find a new point of view. Brunswick came to mean the city of homes above all, and this tower, seen from here or down the steps from the Promenade to the Woll-Markt, never failed to sound this charming note of domesticity. The gables of St. Andrew's are the most interest- ing in Brunswick, and its water-spouting gargoyles the most enthusiastic. Only too often I have seen them discharging their liquid task with the most 175 ROMANTIC GERMANY fluent joy, a condition alone attainable by complete fitness for one's vocation. And there is one, a lovable fellow, a cousin of those on the houses, pulling wide the corners of his mouth as though performing a duty. The huge Gothic groups on the southern gable-fields representing the "Flight into Egypt" and the "Slaughter of the Innocents" are so delicious in their naivete and yet so touching that one chuckles as one looks at them through moist eyes. One of the most affecting and amusing of the reliefs shows Christ sitting with a group of cripples; for the church is supposed to have been founded by a group of wealthy cripples who lived in the Kroppel-Strasse adjoining. The learned Doring, however, contends that this is Christ in the Temple disputing with the doctors, whose spiritual infirmities are physically portrayed.. The bell-house of St. Andrew's, though simpler than that of St. Catherine's or that of the cathedral, is almost as effective. There is a threefold beauty in the conception of these lofty gables of stone lace- work. Tenderly they sound the city's dominant do- mestic theme, and embody the thought that the Ger- man art of music should have a separate architectonic expression. For the burghers conceived that the music of their chimes should be no mere adjunct to the steeple, the function of which is not to contain 176 THE ALTL \. .lA 1 (JOKING TOWARD ST. ANDREWS BRUNSWICK bells, but to direct the eye of the soul toward heaven. They also sound a note distinctly human, for they break the too abrupt idealism of the tower's leap from cobbles to sky by interjecting, half-way up, something that means to the Teuton the most spirit- ual joy short of religious ecstasy, and yet a joy that he may feel as keenly in a seance with his violin, be- neath the homely red tiles yonder, as when the organ reverberates through the nave on Sunday morning. These medieval bell-houses were prophetic as well ; for Brunswick was to have a musical history pecu- liarly honorable, as is shown to-day by the monu- ments to its two citizens, Abt and Spohr. Sometimes it is pleasant to punctuate this Old- World romance with a walk around the charming promenades or among the new villas beyond, or to go farther, to the Park of Richmond, the estate of the Duke of Cumberland, rightful heir to the prov- ince. But one always returns with new zest to the narrow, winding streets, full of the color and spirit of the Middle Ages, where the houses lean together across the ways as if to embrace one another. Not long ago an enthusiast was asked which Ger- man city he loved best. It proved a difficult problem. None of the large ones, certainly. They were too huge and many-sided. It would be like adoring a score of wives at the same time. Besides, unlike 179 ROMANTIC GERMANY wives, great cities are too impersonal. On the other hand, little Rothenburg was for him almost too full of the romantic elements to be real. The people seemed like actors on a stage. He found himself constantly watching for the spot-light, straining his ears for the prompter, and fearing lest the curtain be abruptly rung down. Nuremberg's alloy of modern buildings and the modern spirit put it out of the question. Neither were the dwellings of Danzig friendly enough, nor its half-Slavic atmosphere. Strassburg he cherished for its cathedral, but disliked for its people. In spite of all their romance and beauty, Regensburg and Bautzen were too somber, Augs- burg too formal. Cologne he would almost have chosen but for its discordant foreign note, its dirt, and its beggars. The houses of Liibeck were hardly beautiful enough; those of Hildesheim, on the other hand, were almost too self-conscious and brilliant and precious. One cannot hold a treasure-casket in warm, human affection. And so, although he prefers the gemutlicli southern temperament to the northern, yet, all in all, he felt he must choose Brunswick. For the town of Tyll Eulenspiegel is almost unspoiled by the modern note; its architecture is the spontaneous expression of natures uniting Thuringian gaiety, sweetness, and taste with Northern depth and sincerity. It is a 180 THE FRONT OF ST. ANDREWS, AS SEEN FROM THE WEBER-STRASSE BRUNSWICK hearty, wholesome, true kind of romance that Brunswick exhales. And perhaps the democracy of the people, perhaps their humor, is what tipped the beam, and made him love more than any other in Germany the town that is summed up by the view of St. Catherine's down the Hagenbriicke and by the little old Backerklint where sits Tyll Eulen- spiegel, his monkeys' heads rubbed bright by the loving hands of children. 183 GOSLAR IN THE HARZ ^ODULATION is as important an ele- ment of the art of traveling as it is of I those cousin arts, painting and music. I have had occasion to speak of get- ting the soul down from the shrill modern key of Berlin to the deep, mellow tonality of old Dan- zig. But there is another sort of modulation, quite as important to the traveler and more difficult. It is a smooth transition from the simple, deliberate, care- less romanza of outdoor life to the exciting, exacting, exhausting scherzo movement of some rich historic city where attention, memory, and sympathy are every moment astrain. In recuperating from the exhausting demands of a tour among the Northern cities the lover of beauty is often tempted to lose all sense of the flow of time in wandering with Rucksack and staff among the evergreen forests of the Harz Mountains, following where the charming Oker's music leads; idling in the fabled region where sleeps Barbarossa, his red 184 GOSLAR IX THE HARZ beard grown clean through the table ; or held fast in the "wild romantisch" gorge of the Bode Thai, where, from each wall of cliff, the Hexentanzplatz and the Rosstrappe look down on the river boiling far be- neath. Standing on that lofty crag whence the princess, pursued by the giant, made her mythical leap across the valley and left her horse's hoof-print in the vock, the traveler gazes over the sandy level that is North Germany and makes out on the horizon, far beyond the spires of Quedlinburg and of Halberstadt, the massive towers of Magdeburg cathedral. With a start he realizes that there are other won- ders in this region than mountains and rivers and their genii. The fever of civilization seizes him. Rashly importunate, he crashes down on the itiner- ant keyboard with both elbows and rushes headlong into such a bewildering treasure-house of the ages as Halberstadt or Hildesheim. The transition is too abrupt. He is no longer used to cathedrals and Rembrandts and streets of Gothic houses with overlapping stories. If his time in Germany is really inelastic it would be far wiser to lop a day or two from Berlin or Leipsic or Frank- fort, from Dresden or even from JVIunich, and so make his journey conform to the canons of the art of traveling. 185 ROMANTIC GERMANY Suppose that our tourist should, for example, actually come to his senses at Thale. Let him not make a hysterical dash at Hildesheim, but rather stop over a train at little Wernigerode to marvel at the ancient Rathaus and empty a glass in its vaulted cellar; to enjoy a slight foretaste of what the half- timbered houses of the Harz country are like; and then move on for a day in the more impressive and interesting town of Goslar, with its august history and its curious legends. Your entry into town is reminiscent of Nurem- berg ; for you come at once upon a huge, round fort- ress tower guarding the approach. But instead of lingering here you hasten to the farther end of town to see the building that made Goslar famous— its very raison d'etre. Goslar came into the world because it lay on the fringe of the Harz forests and at the foot of the silver-yielding Rammelsberg, both of which were owned by the ninth-century emperors of the Holy Roman Empire. They put up there a succession of hunting-lodges and small palaces until Emperor Henry III built the Kaiserhaus, which is to-day the oldest secular building in Germany. Here Henry IV began his ill-starred life. His preference for liv- ing at Goslar and the number of castles he built in the neighborhood roused the fears of the Saxon 186 GOSLAR IN THE HARZ nobles, who tried to assassinate him one evening at the Kaiserhaus. And this was the opening scene of the drama that culminated at Canossa, when, bare- footed, the Emperor waited three days in the snow before Pope Gregory's portal. The last Holy Roman emperor in these spacious halls was Barbarossa. After him the noble building gradually fell into ruin until the coming of the new empire, when it was restored in a rather hard Prus- sian style, and received into its halls the second great German leader, William I. Now, in bronze, the pair sit their war-horses on either side of the main flight of steps — Barbarossa and Barbablanca, as the people call them. The main hall is decorated with frescos of the Sleeping Beauty and the Barbarossa legends, and scenes from local and imperial history. Its principal attraction is the old Kaiserstuhl, seat of a long line of emperors. In the chapel of St. Ulrich the heart of Henry III lies buried. It lay formerly in the famous cathedral which Henry built near his palace and which was torn down in 1819. This piece of vanished glory possessed an extraordinary collection of treasures and relics. It made nothing of the bones of such saints as Nicholas, Laurence, Cyril, and Dionysius; for it boasted important remains of the Apostles ^ 189 ROMANTIC GERMANY themselves. There was half of the Apostle Philip, an arm of Bartholomew and one of James, a hand, arm, and the head of Matthew, and a large part of the bodies of Peter and Paul. There were also, among other wonders, an original portrait of St. Matthew and part of a nail from the true cross. Many of these valuables were stolen in Goslar's sack by Gunzelin in 1206, and when the Swedes occupied the town four years during the Thirty Years' War. Others were sold to keep up the cathe- dral during the hard times brought on by the Ref- ormation. So that the only remnant of the build- ing and its treasures to-day is a part of one transept near the Kaiserhaus, with some interesting statues, some of the oldest stained glass in existence, and an early Romanesque reliquarium borne by still earlier brazen figures of the Four Rivers of Paradise, old as the city itself. From this one piteous fragment with its sculptured portal one can reconstruct the whole— e MUNICH-A CITY OF GOOD NATURE Charlemagne is said to have been found at Aix-la- Chapelle. There is a black foot^Jrint on the pavement under the organ-loft at a place where a curious architec- tural trick has made all the windows invisible. There one is told how the builder of the church made a com- pact with the devil, who agreed to help him on con- dition that God's sunlight should be kept out of the building. The devil saw the windows growing, and was glad. "Come along with me," said he to the builder. "Come along yourself," cried the builder, and led him under the choir-loft. The devil looked in vain for a window, stamped his foot in impotent rage, and vanished. But his footprint has remained to this day. The builder of St. Michael's was less fortunate, for when he had completed the bold barrel-vaulting that spans the most noteworthy of German Renais- sance halls, it is said that he cast himself from the roof in despair, fearing that his work would not stand. This majestic church was built by the Jesuits to celebrate the coming triumph of the Counter-Ref- ormation. It was an eloquent prophecy of Munich's present Roman Catholic solidarity. St. Peter's is the oldest local church, and contains the choicest tombstones ; but the interior has suffered shockingly from the vandals of baroque times. 15 327 ROMANTIC GERMANY These older examples of the Munich churches well represent the broad, simple, reposeful characteristics of the place. Certain younger ones, however, like All Saints', Trinity, St. John's, and the Church of the Jesuits, fairly sparkle, in their baroque and ro- coco finery, with the carnival spirit. The most noteworthy modern churches are the Court Church, a little Byzantine pearl of a place that transports one in a breath to the atmosphere of the Cappella Palatina at Palermo; and the Basilica of St. Boniface, Ludwig's record of his most precious hours in Ravenna and Rome. But, of all the later churches, St. Anna's is my favorite. Built of rough coquina, its picturesque complex of gables, turrets, and spires grouped about the central tower is already finely weathered. The broad, walled terrace, the moated fountain borne on pillars, the deeply felt modeling of the fa9ade, the portal worthy of some great medieval builder — all these blend in an ensem- ble the equal of which I have not seen elsewhere in modern Romanesque architecture. All these churches are real places of worship. One finds there the same spirit of fervor that one expects to find in Tyrol or Italy. And this is natural, for the city grew out of a religious institution near by, and its very name — Ad Monachos, or "At the Monks" — stamps it as the child of Cloister Schaftlarn. The 328 a^ THE CHURCH OF ST. ANNA MUNICH-A CITY OF GOOD NATURE whole daily walk and conversation of the people is connected in some way with ecclesiasticism. They say of anything that moves rapidly: "It runs like a paternoster"; of a heavy drinker, "He guzzles like a Knight Templar." A mild state of intoxication is called a Jesiiitenrduschlein; while an unfortunate in the advanced stages is "as drunk as a Capuchin father." In Catholic communities farther north there is a strain of cooler intellectuality in the devotions of the people. Here all is emotion. In fact, until recently this lack of balance has had a grievous effect on IMu- nich's intellectual life, which can boast few writers of note. But it has, on the other hand, kept a warm place in the hearts of the people for romantic legends and superstitions. The Miinchener has clung so much more successfully to these beliefs than to his medieval buildings that the place gives the illusion of having more atmosphere than its architecture would warrant. The folk still call Tuesday and Thursday by the ancient names, Irtag ( day of the war-god Ares ) and Pfinztag, from the Greek for Fifth Day. On Twelfth Night they cast evil spirits out of their homes with a ceremony descended in substance di- rectly from the heathen rites of Odin. They move from room to room, sprinkling the powder of sacred 331 ROMANTIC GERMANY herbs on a shovelful of live coals, and write up over every door with consecrated chalk the mystic initials f C f M f B. These letters stand for the three Wise Men of the East, Caspar, Melchior, and Balthasar. This is of a piece with the conservative instinct that still continues the Passion Play in the neighboring village of Oberammergau. With their Bavarian zest m anecdote, the people love to tell of a basilisk which lived in a well on the Schrammer-Gasse opposite the present bureau of police. The glance of this medieval Medusa killed all who looked at it, until some German Perseus held a mirror over the well and let the creature slay itself. The local belief in witches and black art is wonder- fully persistent. Tales are still current of spirits who took the form of black calves and could be out- witted only by being banned into a tin bottle with a screw-top. There is the legend of an unprincipled lawyer who died and was laid out in the usual way with crucifix and candles. All at once two black ra- vens appeared at the window, broke the pane with their beaks, and flew away again with a third raven which suddenly appeared from within the chamber of death. The candles were quenched in a trice, the cru- cifix overturned, and the lawyer's corpse turned as black as night. Then there is the favorite story of Diez von Swin- 332 MUNICH-A CITY OF GOOD NATURE burg, a robber knight who, with four of his men, was caught and condemned to death. Diez begged in vain for the lives of his comrades. Finally he cried : "Will you, then, spare as many as I run past after I have been beheaded?" With contemptuous laughter the request was granted. Diez placed his men in a line, eight feet apart, with those he loved best nearest him. Well pleased, he knelt down. His head fell. Then he rose, turned, ran stumbling past all of his followers, and collapsed in a heap. People who cherish such beliefs do not easily give up time-honored customs, and IMunich is still rich in romantic rites. During the plague of 1517, when half the city lay dead and the other half was stricken with despair, the Gild of Coopers gave every one fresh heart by organizing an impromptu carnival of dance and song in those terrible streets. Once every seven years, in honor of this act, the Schaffler Tanz, or Coopers' Dance, still takes place, the coopers dancing in their ancient garb — green caps, red satin doublets, long white hose — and carrying half-hoops bound with evergreen. Sad to say, the picturesque Metzgersprung, or Butchers' Leap, has been recently done away. After a jolly round of dancing and parades and a service in "The Old Peter," the Butchers' Gild would meet 333 ROMANTIC GERMANY around the Fish Fountain in the Marien-Platz and, after elaborate ceremonies, the graduating appren- tices, dressed in calfskins, would leap into the basin and thus be baptized as full-fledged butchers. In this same beloved square the pick of all Munich, old and young, joins in the Corpus Christi proces- sion, which, gay with students' caps and banners and gild-insignia, winds from the Church of Our Lady and groups its rainbow colors around the old Pillar of Mary, where the archbishop, who has been pre- ceded by white-robed maidens with flowers and can- dles, reads the Scriptures. Despite its worship of the past, however, Munich is, on the whole, a progressive city. Its recent com- mercial strides have been astonishing. For a century it has led Germany in artistic matters. And that it still leads, is shown by its annual exhibitions of painting and sculpture, of arts and crafts, and by such architecture as the National Museum, St. Anna's, the building of the "Allgemeine Zeitung," and some of the new school-houses. The Isar Valley, Schleissheim, and Nymphenburg belong even more intimately to Munich than the Havel and Potsdam belong to Berlin. To wander through the fragrant woods and by the castles and quaint villages of the Isar gorge is to hear and see 334 MUNICH— A CITY OF GOOD NATURE the Miinchener at his best. For he is always taking a few hours off there, and is always laughing and singing and yodeling. It seems as though the happy creature cannot turn his face away from town and swing into stride without breaking into one of his hearty songs. The castle of Schleissheim was built, like St. Michael's and the Propylsea, to celebrate a future triumph. For Max Emanuel imagined that he was going to be elected emperor, and could not restrain his exuberance at the thought. Those splendid ba- roque halls never held his imperial court, for he was driven into exile before they were finished; but they hold to-day one of the foremost Bavarian collections of paintings, especially rich in the old German school. The formal gardens, with their statues, vases, and tree-fringed waters, contrast pleasantly with the severe facades of the castle, and form a sort of prelude to the more generous scale of Nymphen- burg, the most lovable of all the many German para- phrases of Versailles. My first visit to Nymphenburg was on a perfect afternoon in late summer. I came into a circle of buildings almost a mile in circumference, a barren, baroque circle inclosing a cheerless waste full of ugly canals and ponds, where the lords and ladies of the eighteenth century, in their gondolas, used to ape the 337 ROMANTIC GERMANY water fetes of France and Italy. There is all too little of the festal spirit left there now. But on the other side of the castle the atmosphere changed like magic. I plunged into a brilliant Ver- sailles, but a sweeter, more gemutlich one than any of my acquaintance— a vast garden that knew how to be at once formal and natural. There was a wide sweep of lawn where old women and bullocks and rustic wains were busied with haycocks among long rows of marble deities and urns. In the middle of the scene a fountain flashed high in the sunlight, fall- ing among rough rocks. Humorous lines of Noah's Ark evergreens stood attention. In the distance, be- yond a linden-flanked canal, were waterfalls; and one caught a glimpse of the misty horizon. Right and left, narrower lanes of foliage opened vistas of water-flecked lawns checkered with patches of sun- light. Far away gleamed little pools, as bright as pools of molten steel, and near one of them I came upon a dream of a summer-house called the Amalien- burg, one of the most delicate and radiant bits of rococo fantasy in the German land. Munich is so diffuse a city that it is hard to think of it as a unit until one has seen it from some high place. It was a revelation to me when I climbed past the chimes of "The Old Peter" to the town-pipers' bal- 338 THE NEW RATHAUS IN THE MIDDLE GROUND, AND THE TOWERS OF THE CHURCH OF OUR LADY IX THE DISTANCE MUNICH-A CITY OF GOOD NATURE cony. There lay the city as flat as a lake. To the westward was a jumble of sharp, tiled roofs, turning the skylights of myriad studios searchingly toward heaven, as though the houses were all bespectacled professors. Beyond the eloquent front of St. Michael's rose the court of justice in all its dignity, with the humorous annex which the murderer begged to see. The Church of Our Lady towered over old JNIunich, symbol of the warm South-German heart. Immediately to the north rose that "mount of mar- ble" the New Rathaus, a, reminder of Milan cathe- dral, in its dazzling, restless opulence, and with a touch of the theatrical manner seen beside the quiet comeliness and reserve of the Old Rathaus. Beyond, the Pitti-like fa9ade of the palace stood out against the soft leagues of the English Garden. Eastward the Maximilianeum's perforated front reposed like a well-kept ruin amid the luxuriance of its waterside park. The Isar, itself invisible, made a bright zone of green through the city ; and in the south, crowning and glorifying the whole scene, the snow glistened on the far peaks of the Bavarian Highlands. A party of students had come up, and were gazing with affectionate eyes on their city. Quite without warning they burst into a song which I shall always associate with that tower and its glorious panorama: 16 341 ROMANTIC GERMANY So lang die griine Isar durch d' Miinchnerstadt noch gcht So lang der alte Peter auf 'm Peter's-Platz noch steht, So lang dort unt' am Platzl noch steht das Hofbrauhaus, So lang stirbt die Gemiitlichkeit in Munchen gar net aus. Freely rendered : So long as through our Munich the Isar rushes green, So long as on St. Peter's Place Old Peter still is seen, So long as in the Platzl the Court-brew shall men nourish. So long the glowing, kindly heart of Munich-town shall flourish. 342 XI AUGSBURG MONG the romantic cities of southern Germany there are few more striking con- trasts than Augsburg and Rothenburg. The former is a proud, patrician place, once the host of emperors and the home of famous financiers. It spreads out on a level plain its monumental streets, its palaces, its great public buildings and churches. The other is a city of dreams crowning a fair hill ; a quiet plebeian town, the tower-studded ring-wall of which has preserved more jealously than any other city wall the aspect and the atmosphere of old Ger- many. Just as one pauses at Goslar to modulate one's journey from the Harz to Hildesheim, so, in coming from the morning brilliance of nineteenth-century Munich, it is well to pause at Augsburg, where ro- mance and brilliance are blent as in some sunset sky, before climbing from the valley of the Tauber to the 343 ROMANTIC GERMANY hill-crest that is comparable only to those cloud-cities we sometimes discover when the moon rides high on a spring evening. When, with this idea of modulation, I last stopped at Augsburg, it was not to hunt up the scores of fas- cinating tombs and altars in the churches, or to visit the old German painters in the gallery, or to study the style of Elias HoU's architecture, or to make the rounds of all the interesting old houses. I wished to catch again the unique feeling of the place — the at- mosphere of proud Italian opulence that made its highways a fit resort for princes, combined with the native Old- World glamour of its intimate, homely byways. It was Sunday morning, and I sought the cathedral, a building too old, on the whole, to participate archi- tecturally in Augsburg's grand manner. At the Diet of 1530, the famous Augsburg Confession was pre- sented to the Emperor in the episcopal palace oppo- site. And legend relates that Martin Luther, fleeing from one of these diets after dark, in fear of his life, lost his way in the St. Gallus-Gasschen, whereupon the devil came and pointed out a little gate in the city wall, with the words, "Da hinab." ("Down there.") The Reformer went, and found a saddled ass and a servant to help along his flight. The evil one de- 3U THE NORTH PORTAL OF THE CATHEDRAL AUGSBURG parted chuckling, feeling that he had done a deed worthy of his reputation. And the place is called Dakinah to this day. The cathedral nave was crowded with rapt wor- shipers. I stood near the four altarpieces painted by that famous Augsburger, the elder Holbein ; and looking from them to the rows of earnest faces, I realized that these conservative people had not changed even the type of their features for over four hundred years. Here were anachronistic costumes as well — peas- ant women with limp black head-dresses, gay neck- erchiefs of white and rose and yellow, flaming short skirts of blue, pleasantly overlaid with buff aprons. And there were short -jacketed Holbein men who wore odd silver coins for buttons. Orchestra, organ, and choir made sonorous music in the Gothic balcony. The officiating clergy showed splendid in their gold and silver vestments against the sculptures and the delicate pinnacles of the high altar. The priceless old stained glass of the clear- story painted the sunlight, and the great windows of the southern aisle sang a psalm of ultramarine and emerald and old gold. Despite its modest architec- ture, the nave took on a splendor that Sunday morn- ing like the splendor of Amiens. It was the authen- tic spirit of old Augsburg making itself felt. 347 ROMANTIC GERMANY I paid a visit to the cloisters, with their wealth of tombs and quaint Latin. A goodly wash was spread out to dry on the lawn, tempting my companion into a pale pun about the "cathedral close." And far above them was another sight almost as homely — the north steeple, with its crude, tiny Romanesque arches. The ancient bronze doors of the southern portal remind one of Bishop Bernward's epoch-making doors at Hildesheim, only these are more delicate and sophisticated, and have less of the elemental thrill. The most imposing part of the cathedral architec- ture is the northern portal; and here the South-Ger- man's Gemiltlichkeit and love of animals are charm- ingly displayed. Surrounded by an attentive company of prophets and sibyls, the jFZ'i^rr^o/^ is lolling carelessly on a throne, with a sword between his legs, listening to King David, who is playing on a harp. All seem to be getting the greatest pleasure from the music. Below, a lot of baby bears are trying to push one another off a molding above naive reliefs of the Annunciation, The Death of the Virgin, and the Na- tivity, the last a scene at which little donkeys peep edified over the rim of a wicker basket. Above them all are three gargoyles which, though suffering the most violent pangs of some indeterminate complaint, are yet as lovable as the guffawing crocodile near the other portal. 348 AUGSBURG In the Fish Market, after church, I found another commentary on Augsburg's love of animals. One side was lined with rabbits peeping out of boxes, per- ambulators, and baskets like the donkeys on the por- tal; two sides were taken up with birds and puppies — the salesmen seeming really loath to part with them — while in the middle was a host of dogs in leash. About the only creature not on sale in that Fish Market was the fish. But there was no snarling or fighting, for the menagerie seemed as full of Gemiit- lichkeit as its owners. Peace on earth, good will toward man and beast, was the order of the day. On a wall near by was a curious relief of a one- armed man. A question to a vender of puppies drew about us a beaming circle of citizens, who listened proudly \vhile the tale of the siege was retold. It was in 1635, when the Swedes had reduced the town to the point of starvation, that the immortal baker took his last loaf, climbed up on the parapet during a charge, and threw it to the enemy, declaring that Augsburg had more bread than it could eat. The baker lost his arm up there on the walls, but the Swedes lost heart, and in disgust raised the siege. This part of town, however, never long beguiles one away from its splendors with such homely things as puppies and bakers. Near by I discovered a stately campanile and the fa9ade of a great Renais- 351 ROMANTIC GERMANY sance building so imposingly Italian that it seemed less natural to call it the Rathaus than the municipio. And within was a room, the Golden Hall, able to compare with many of Italy's most opulent interiors. This Rathaus typifies the formal, splendor-loving side of Augsburg, and is the worthy center of a city three of whose daughters married princes. One is reminded of the remark of Emperor Charles V, after having seen the royal treasures of France: "I have a weaver in Augsburg named Fugger who could pay spot cash for all this." The building bisects that old Roman road, now, as then, the main highway through the town, formed by the Karolinen-Strasse and Maximilians- Strasse, a broad, proud way lined with stately palaces. Among them shines forth the fres- coed house of the Fuggers, those Rothschilds of the Renaissance, to remind one of an age when most of Augsburg's walls were gay with color, and when many of its interiors could vie with those of Italy's royal palaces. In those days a merchant named Welser, whose daughter had married the Archduke of Austria, fitted out a squadron single-handed to take possession of Venezuela. And one of the Fuggers is said to have taken a note of hand for a large sum and burned it on a fire of cinnamon wood before the eyes of his debtor, Charles V. The old 352 AUGSBURG Augsburgers always did things handsomely. It is pleasant to remember that Emperor Maximilian I, on leaving his favorite city near the close of his life, turned in the saddle for a last look and exclaimed: "Now God preserve thee, thou dear Augsburg ! We have had many a good time within thy walls. Now we shall behold thee nevermore." The Maximilians-Strasse is broader than any other street in Old-World Germany, and its Italian atmosphere is intensified by the splendid fountains that punctuate it, which are surrounded by ara- besques of the ironwork for which Augsburg is fa- mous. One of these fountains, the Augustus, commemo- rates the German emperor who founded the city, and after whom it was named Augusta Vindelicorum. But the Fountain of Hercules, down near the Fug- ger House, in its eloquent power and grace and humor, has never been equaled in Germany, though its influence may be seen to-day from Danzig all the way down to Munich. While the imposing, public side of Augsburg is strongly Italian in quality, the intimate, romantic side is quite as German; and it was good to feel the sudden change in the Church of St. Ulrich. This church is supposed to occupy the site of the ancient 353 ROMANTIC GERMANY Roman capitol, and there were excavated here those huge stone pine-cones which became the symbols of the municipahty. A confirmation service was going on. The piers and aisles were decorated with white birch saplings that looked very friendly and human against the ele- gance of the large altars, and reminded one that he was in the land of the Christmas-tree and that sort of thing. As I entered, a group of little children, in all their touching German artlessness, was moving out in front of the congregation. The vast throng stood for some moments in a profound silence, then sud- denly burst into the most beautiful congregational singing that I have ever heard. It was a fitting introduction to romantic Augs- burg, and I went away finally, to wander in a sort of day-dream among the maze of little brooks and canals that make the southeastern quarter so pictur- esque, where the dwellers in fascinating old cottages have had to bridge a merry little river to get to their own flower-gardens. Here Augsburg's greatest son, the younger Holbein, was born, and a wall is still there, covered with the colored arabesques that he drew in his sixth year. There was the quaint little Fuggerei, a town within a town, which one of the Fuggers built to house the local poor on condition that they pay a gulden a year as rent, and daily offer 354 AUGSBURG up to heaven "a paternoster, an Ave Maria, and a credo, for the help and comfort" of all Fugger souls. The best came last ; for as I turned into the Jako- ber-Strasse, there was spread out such a vision of Old- World Germany as I had not dreamed of find- ing in Augsburg, the portal of Italy. An unbroken array of old houses swung down into the distance, with gables lofty and low, sharp and blunt, severe as a pyramid, or undulating like a maiden's curls, glow- ing with all the colors of the sunset, full of shapely windows and flowering balconies and wooden saints enshrined, set off against the richly weathered walls and ruddy tiles of a huge tanner's tower; and, with their perfect rhythm, leading the eye down to where a Gothic gate closed the prospect with the mellow masonry of its arches and the vivid green patina of its pointed tower. The ideal place to take one's leave of Augsburg is beside the crumbling ramparts where, deep under- foot, the shattered marbles of the Roman city lie; where grasses clothe the venerable defenses of medi- eval daj^s; and where beautiful old wall-towers, re- flected from the surface of a stream once lapped by the wild horses of the Huns, dimly foreshadow the glories the traveler is so soon to taste — the glories of a city that is set upon a hill above the Tauber. 357 XII THE CITY OF DREAMS S the small railway-carriage crept along, with- frequent stops, it began to fill with old-fashioned men, quaintly dressed, who uncovered and made courteous inclinations to all present. Every one began to say, "God greet thee!" to every one else. Last of all came a small, wizen figure in a low, round, black peasant's hat, abbreviated pantaloons of buff, and a short jacket trimmed with a double row of large stone buttons. He was simple, genial, very ancient, and in his thin white locks and kindly wrinkles he would have made Diirer surpass his por- trait of Holzschuher. More than once afterward I met him within his native walls, and his well-pre- served beauty came to be for me a living symbol of the place itself. The Rothenburger still keeps his conservative re- sentment toward such a crass new invention as the railway. It was characteristic of him that when the 358 THE MAKKUS TOWER THE CITY OF DREAMS hateful thing had to come, he hid the station half a mile from his walls. After a discouraging walk between modern build- ings, I came finally to a round arch flanked by squat towers, passed over a water-filled moat, the very scum of which was more beautiful than ordinary scum, through a humpy gate-house, over another bridge, under a lofty, square tower inlaid with coats of arms, and found myself at length in the City of Dreams, so complicated is the approach to that en- chanted spot. Nichts gleicht an deutschom Zauber Dir Stadt im Tal der Tauber sang the poet — (No other German magic may avail To match thine own, town of the Tauber-dale) — and once inside the Roder Gate it is evident that he sang true. Right and left run the old city walls, and at a glance one knows that he is in the presence of a Ger- man Carcassonne. These walls are of gray stone, tinged with brown, and covered with a sloping roof of crumbling, orange-red tiles. Along the inside, supported by rude corbels and engaged buttresses, and raftered with low, worm-eaten beams, runs a 361 ROMANTIC GERMANY gallery where one may walk ( stooping a little, if one is so unfortunate as to be tall) nearly around the en- tire city. A few steps toward the center of things, and down the curve of a fascinating street, just beyond an old fountain and some particularly rustic-looking, vine- clad, half-timbered dwellings, I caught a glimpse of another arch spanning the way, crowned with a clock-steeple, and marking the course of the original ring-wall. Behind it rose the wonderful, saddle-backed Mar- kus Tower, bearing that most intimate symbol of Old- World Germany, a wheel for a stork's nest. And, like so many more of Rothenburg's choicest pictures, this one was closed by the lofty, distant tower of the Rathaus. To one who has never known Nuremberg, such a scene strongly recalls what he has imagined Nurem- berg must be like. But, as a matter of fact, this is a purer bit of Germany's most precious past than any that remains to us in t-he metropolis of Middle Fran- conia; although it is true that- in the Renaissance Nuremberg surpassed Rothenburg in the matter of beauty as much as Rothenburg surpasses Nurem- berg to-day. As I lingered here in the Roder-Gasse, unconsciously humming fragments of "Die Meister- singer" and dreaming of the vanished days when all 362 THE KATHAUS i:CITY HAUL). THE OEUER I'ART HAVING THE TOWER THE CITY OF DREAMS men were artists and all artists were men, a charming adventure came my way. For I happened suddenly upon a brother german of Hans Sachs cobbling away under a gable inscribed thus : Im Hause meiner Vater Klopf ich allhier das Leder, Und mache meinen Reim dazu, Ich sorge nicht wer's nach mir thu'. (Here in the house of my paters I hammer and hammer on leather, And thread my rhymes together. Careless of imitators.) A few steps farther, and the market-place glided into view. I shall always remember the first glimpse of that forum where the different architectural styles har- monize as perfectly as the fusion of the Old Rathaus and the New, a combination in which the romantic Gothic has tried to smooth itself out and compass an approach to austerity, while the classical Renaissance has bedizened itself into romance with pinnacles and little dormer windows, with a decorative corner oriel, a stair-tower, and a perfectly proportioned, flower- ing colonnade. In the center is the Herterich Fountain, a tenderly wrought, poetic thing, as fit to be the center of the 365 ROMANTIC GERMANY City of Dreams as the imposing fountains of Augs- burg are fit to adorn the monumental street wherein stands the palace of the Fuggers. From the stone basin, carved with splendid grotesques, rises a pillar in gray and gold, bearing a figure of St. George lancing a dragon — the dragon Thirst, no doubt, for in the museum hard by is still to be seen the huge tankard which Burgomaster Nusch drained at a draught to save the lives of the town councilors from the infuriated Tilly. But I am not rehearsing the famous story of the Meistertrunk, for two reasons. In the first place, it has already been told a thousand times. In the second place, it was probably manu- factured out of whole cloth in the eighteenth century. Next door to the museum, on the Apotheke, a charming oriel window with a green-and-red-tiled roof serves as background for the fountain and as baldachin for an old saint. Happy is he who is allowed to visit the courtyard behind this Apotheke, where the Rathaus tower peers down upon its riot of roofs, its ivied walls, and its latticed gallery, reminiscent of the best courtyard galleries in Nuremberg. From all sides of the market-place run alluring streets and alleys which, taking a line from the bogus instruments of torture in the Straf Tower, pull one in seven different directions at once. 866 COURT Ol-' Tlllv A1'()TI11:KE THE CITY OF DREAMS The Herren-Gasse pulled me the hardest, a street running to the site of the red castle that gave Roth- enburg its name and was destroyed by a fourteenth- century earthquake. Here the patricians lived, and the way is lined with courtly houses, many of them Gothic. In the Herren-Gasse I found a number of well-preserved interiors, with good old paneled ceil- ings and stucco-work. In front were interesting portals with sculptured coats of arms, and in the rear, idyllic little courts or wooded gardens. Nimi- ber 2 proved to be a medieval bake-shop, and near by was a time-honored wine-house with separate rooms for patrician and plebeian. Behind a lofty "stepped"* gable some one was playing a rondo by Mozart on a spinet-like piano, and the eighteenth-century music sounded as radical in that older atmosphere as would a Debussy tone- poem heard in the baroque quarter of Leipsic. Beneath the Castle Gate, over a bridge, and be- tween friendly, dunce-capped gate-houses, the way led Into a small paradise of a park on a spur jutting into the valley; and here I first began to feel* the fas- cination of Rothenburg as a whole. Northward there was a splendid view of the western wall, brought out the more strikingly, with its towers and bastions, by the foliage of the hillside below. Eastward Rothen- burg built itself massively up about the Rathaus and 369 17 ROMANTIC GERMANY the Church of St. James. From where I stood the wall swept inward in a magnificent semicircle toward a southern pendant of the town, sown full of idyllic towers, and called the Kappenzipfel, or Cap-Tassel. This curious name was invented by Emperor Al- brecht. The citizens had long teased him for per- mission to include the rich Hospital of the Holy Ghost within the walls. "Well," he cried at last, "since your town looks already so much like a night- cap, you may as well make this the tassel." Deep in the valley below, the Tauber wound under its double bridge, which showed up in the distance like a fragment of Roman aqueduct. I thought of the company of crusaders who once rode down the zigzag hillside path and across that bridge, bound to redeem the Holy Sepulcher ; and of the innumerable bands of pilgrims the olden times had seen winding up that hill toward the city that more than all others resembled, and still resembles, Jerusalem, to adore the drop of the Saviour's blood treasured in St. James's. The Tauber sparkled on, past the tiny castle of the celebrated Burgomaster Toppler, with its moat and two-arched bridge; past the delightful old mill, creaking and groaning among its poplars; toward the Romanesque church and the wonderful lime-tree of Detwang, that gem of a hamlet which Vernon Lee selfishly wished to conceal from the world. 370 PORTAL OF THE OLD RATHAl'S THE CITY OF DREAMS An old woman sat down on a bench near by, and, as a matter of course, gave me a hearty salutation. She had lived in Rothenburg for seventy years, and it had hardly changed, except that more strangers came all the while to enjoy it. Frau Weller invited me into her home, a minute, vine-smothered affair in the Herren-Gasse, quite overpowered by its aristocratic neighbors. I had begun to hope that she would bring out my old man of the train and present him as her husband. But, alas ! it developed that she was a widow and alone in the world. "Ja, da lebt rnan halt bis man stirbt" ("Yes, one just lives here till one dies") , she said simply. The tiny rooms had timbered ceilings and furni- ture of the Biedermeyer period. Frau Weller's greatest pride and joy was a porcelain clock with weights, and she brought out all the pathetic bright handkerchiefs of her youth to show me. Up doubtful stairs, almost too narrow for any but very frail hu- manity, I caught a glimpse of her fascinating attic full of fagots and rich gloom, with holes in the tiled roof through which soft white clouds were visible, sailing in the bluest of heavens. Old Frau Weller and I plighted our friendship on the spot, and I shall never again see the neighborly 373 ROMANTIC GERMANY nose and chin of Judy without remembering mine hostess of Rothenburg and her sweet simpHcity. With much pride she introduced her cat. "She is a direct descendant of the famous Kdtz- chen of Vorbach. What! Hast never heard tell of her? Well, it was this way: many years before I was born there was a plague of rats and mice in this neighborhood, and never a cat to be found. Finally the two hamlets of Vorbach and Detwang clubbed together and bought a cat from a peddler for two pounds of coppers. She was rented out by the day all over this neighborhood. That cat had so many opportunities that she knew not which way to turn. And to this day, if any one seems especially hurried and flurried, we tell him, 'You 're as busy as the Kdtzchen of Vorbach.' " Past the Church of the Franciscans, with its deli- cate Gothic spire and its wealth of interesting sculp- tures and inscriptions, I returned to visit the court- yard between the Old Rathaus and the New. There are great round arches upholding a goodly half-tim- bered fa9ade. But its principal treasure is the cele- brated Renaissance portal. With its carvings in stone and mellow wood, and the old Putzenscheiben lantern still hanging over the steps, the portal seems to offer such promise of wonders within as no Ger- man Rathaus could fulfil, not even this one, with its 374 THE CITY OF DREAMS fine Kaisersaal, where the M eistertrunh i^lay is per- formed every year, and with its ghastly underground torture-chamber and dungeons where Burgomaster Topler met his death. Near by, in the sleepy Kapellen-Platz, I found a fountain — a sort of step-brother to the one in the market-place — flashing away in front of a fa9ade full of half -timber work as gracefully patterned as the choicest lattice-galleries of the courtyards. And it was a peculiar pleasure to discover an inscription facing this fountain that told of the time when Roth- enburg awoke to the conscious enjoyment of her own beauty : Der alten Kunst gar lang versteckt, Hab' ich hier wieder aufgedeckt, Dass sie nun lacht in neuer Pracht Und mir und andern Freude macht. (The art of old, so long concealed, I 've in such wise again revealed That splendors new smile into view To gladden me and others too. ) The White Tower, a souvenir like the Roder Arch of the original ring-wall, is happily framed from the town side by the Georgen-Gasse ; and the low arch- way, with the tower stairs creeping above it, reveals the distant Wiirzburg Gate, with its background of foliage. 375 ROMANTIC GERMANY Outside, near the Crown Tavern's curious relief of a girl feeding a stag with a spoon, one may best see how perfectly the venerable fortification melts into the street picture. The "White" Tower is slate-colored, brown, blue, gray, dusky red, and a roof falls sheer away from it with bright patches of red down to a captivating corner oriel. This building, with its bit of walled garden, was once the Jewish dance-house. Old Jewish baths are still to be seen in the cellars. From the Wiirzburg Gate, as from so many of the others, there looks down a stone face, probably the portrait of a would-be traitor ; and inside of the arch- way a mysterious profile is roughly chiseled — a pro- file about which one hears all sorts of contradictory reports. This northern part of the town wall is the best pre- served, for it was built according to the theories of Vitruvius, and is the foremost example of its kind. On its broad top the maidens dance after the festival play. Here my friends, two young American paint- ers, once gave their memorable Fourth of July cele- bration, and, after the fireworks, were carried home on the shoulders of the delighted inhabitants, an event that will doubtless be talked of in Rothenburg for generations. I walked to the Klingen Gate along the gallery. This passage has never been much used except for 376 FOUNTAIN IN THU KAI'EI.I.EN-PLATZ THE CITY OF DREAMS defense, but its deeply worn pavement is eloquent of the town's martial history. I found it the haunt of rope-makers, with hemp flying from their girdles and lodged in their flaxen whiskers. Many of the loop- holes were walled up, but through the open ones I caught rare little vignettes of flowering moat and a pleasant countryside in bloom. The Klingen Gate, with its side turrets, rivals the Stoberlein Tower, with its corner ones, for the dis- tinction of being Rothenburg's most beautiful tower. From the wall here a dark stairway winds down into the little Church of the Shepherds. Some centuries ago the local Jews were believed to have conspired to poison the fountains, murder the watch, and make Rothenburg in very deed into a new Jerusalem. But the shepherds of the neighborhood discovered and published the plot. As a reward, they were allowed, until late in the eighteenth century, to hold an annual festival in honor of this event. It began with a service in the little church, was contin- ued, crescendo, at the Lamb Tavern, and ended in a hilarious dance about the Herterich Fountain, in which any burgher who joined the dance was incon- tinently doused. I found a delicate oriel with PutzenscJieihen at the corner of the Klingen-Gasse and the Cloister Court. The venerable cloister building had been turned into 379 ROMANTIC GERMANY public offices, but an obliging official showed me that rare sight, a genuine medieval kitchen, and the finely vaulted refectory above, from the window of which could be seen, on a distant hill, the ruins of a robber castle beyond the border in Wiirttemberg. The Klingen-Gasse leads through a gloomy arch- way under the Church of St. James. It is a fit set- ting for the legend of The Poor Soul of Rothenburg. In olden days the burghers did not believe much in the devil, which angered that personage. Once upon a time when a peasant was passing under this arch- way the devil caught him suddenly and hurled him against the vaulting with great force. The poor body fell down again at once, but the poor soul re- mained sticking to the stones. You may see it there to-day. "It is sort of brown," writes the chron- icler, "with black spots." On the southern roof of the church is a reclining figure which recalls another legend. In building the two towers the architect let his pupil try his hand at one of them. And when he saw how much his pupil's tower outshone his, he leaped to his death from the scaffolding. The pupil then carved his master's por- trait on the roof. The architecture of the interior is rather more cold and austere than one would expect of Rothenburg's principal church ; but there is a compensatory richness 380 i THE KI,1N'GEX-GATE TOWER THE CITY OF DREAMS of imagination in the altars by Herlin and Riemen- schneider and in the blaze of color that pours through the fifteenth-century windows. Here also is a touch of that naivete which is so enjoyable in the local house inscriptions. For the eastern windows repre- sent the Fall of the Manna as a rain of South-Ger- man rolls and pretzels. Of all the alluring ways beckoning out of the mar- ket-place, one of the most alluring to me was the Schmied-Gasse, with its view of that notable Renais- sance dwelling, the Architect's House. The caryatids between the windows with their reminiscence of the Erechtheimi, and the stately portal and gable, bring out vividly the classical dignity and poise of the period, while the courtyard is teeming with Rothen- burg's unique charm. There you may loll at tables made of old millstones, with moss and flowers grow- ing from the hole in the center, and sip your coffee from earthenware cups of the quaint local pattern. That is the place to loaf and invite your soul while vaguely enjoying the carved shields and window- frames, the iridescent window-panes, the colons and patterns of the half -timber work, and the red gal- leries smothered in flowers. As you sip and dream, you begin to wonder whether it is not all too good to be true ; whether the curtain will not suddenly clatter down on this astonishing stage and the orchestra be- ^« 383 ROMANTIC GERMANY gin to scrape and toot, for your sins, the popular rag- time of the moment. A few steps southward, between the upper and lower Schmied-Gassen, I stumbled on a curious fountain, a mossy shaft capped by a hybrid figure with the head of a Gothic Christus and the tail of a merman. The lower Schmied-Gasse ends Am Plonlein, where the road hesitates and grows charmingly con- fused between the rival seductions of two gate- towers. It finally compromises by forking down crookedly on the one hand to the Cobolzeller Gate, and running up on the other hand to the Siebers Tower, which bears above a Romanesque arch just the proper touch of color in a sky-blue clock. Above the Gothic arch on the other side I made out a stone traitor staring blindly down the Cap-Tassel; and, in delightful contrast to him, the bright face of a young girl with a halo of flying flaxen hair peeping out of the embrasure above. The Cobolzeller archway framed a scene of the purest beauty, which came to typify romantic Ger- many to me as much as any one scene could. On the left rose the town wall, clothed with vines in all the colors of early autumn. On the right an arm of wall swept around, with the rich, deep tones of its wooden gallery, into the ruddy roof of a porter's lodge that 384 AM PLONLHIN— SIEBERS GAT1-: AT THE LEFT AND Ct UtOI.ZELLER GATE AT THE RIGHT THE CITY OF DREAMS nestled at the foot of a mighty, square tower. Above its roof was visible the onward sweeping rhythm of wall and tower, and, through the porter's archway, a glimpse of hillside foliage. Mounted on corbels in the courtyard was a half- effaced stone relief equally suggestive of a Roman sacrificial procession and of an early Gothic pro- cession to Calvary, so much can Nature do toward leveling religious differences. It came to me how Cobel, the neighboring hermit for whom the gate was named, would have been scandalized at such an ambiguity. I walked outside the wall to look through the arch of the Lime Tower and see how majestically the city composed itself from there; then went within for a few moments beside the huge mill where two-and- thirty horses used to grind Rothenburg's grain in time of siege. Then on to the hospital inclosure, with its crowd of quaint buildings and its rustic atmosphere. Near a fragment of pond the pointed Hegereiter House squatted like some mysterious but kindly gnome, as though caricaturing the beautiful Stoberlein Tower hard by. The Spital Gate with its involved complex of courts and towers and bastions seemed the most elaborate of the outworks of Rothenburg. Anti- 387 ROMANTIC GERMANY quated cannon still looked through the loopholes, as though to confirai the legend on the keystone of the outermost arch: Pax intrantibus, Salus exeiintibus. (Peace to the entering, Safety to the departing.) I had long heard of the glories of the "red city" seen toward dusk from the heights across the Tauber, when the flaming west made the roofs and tile- capped towers glow like a sunlit beaker of ruby wine. And each afternoon I had taken my way across the double bridge and past the old heathen place of sacri- fice to the hillside opposite, hoping for perfect weather. But though the sky, during my stay, steadfastly refused to "blossom in purple and red," I had the chance to see how well Rothenburg could endure the ordeal of a colorless sunset. The distant city made exactly the setting one would desire as the background for the most roman- tic story in the world. And I recalled with pleasure a passage from the memoirs of Ludwig Richter, that pioneer of romanticism: "Touring through Bavaria, I discovered a town which made one exclaim: 'This looks as if it had been designed by Ludwig Richter.' " Here, for once, reality had equaled the most radiant 388 THE CITY OF DREAMS work of the imagination. The dozens of distant tow- ers stood out in Hvely contrast to one another over the mellow, ruddy city that sat its hill with a gra- cious, genial air far removed from the frightened way that little Italian towns cling to their heights — towns which Carducci once compared to flocks of mountain goats terrified by wolves. Against the light background of the western wall a line of regu- larly shaped trees gave the effect of a Gothic colon- nade. All about me was peace. It was the season of the hay harvest. I could not see the laborers beyond the western ridge — only the forks of green grass that came tossing rhythmically up over the sky-line. A sickle of moon stood over the wain, and I could hear the harvest song. One after one the far-away steeples rang out the hour of eight. And, as the sounds came floating across the valley, mingled with the low, delicate color-harmony of Rothenburg, I was glad that Na- ture had not seen fit to paint the rose. 889 INDEX INDEX Albrechtsburg Castle, Meissen, 363, 267-270 Arthurian legends, 10 Augsburg: Atmosphere of Italian opulence, 344 Cathedral, 344 Church of St. Ulrich, 353 Fountain of Hercules, influence in Germany, 353 Fuggers, the, 352 Holbein's birthplace, 354 Old houses, 357 One-armed man. Story of, 351 Rathaus, 353 Babelsberg Castle, 102, 103 Barbarossa, 189 Beethoven, Klinger's statue of, 257 Berlin : Administration of mimicipal af- fairs, 92 Architecture, 42, 46, 53, 62, 74, 79, 89 Brandenburg Gate, 40, 43, 53 Castle, 53, 54, 55, 58 Castle Bridge, 49 Cathedral, 54, 57, 60, 61, 62 Characteristics and manners of people, 80-92 Charlottenburg Castle, 79, 82 Churches, 71, 73 City an embodiment of Hohen- zoUern character, 42 Climate and character of people, 95 Colimin of Victory, 74 Elector's Bridge and statue, 54, 55 Fountain of Neptune, 43 Frederick Bridge, 60, 61 Berlin: (Continued) Fried rich-Strasse, 79 Gendarmen Markt, 73 Heine and Hoffmann tablets, 73 Historical notes, 66, 67, 93 Janowitz Bridge, 70 Kaiser Friedrich Museum, 64 Krogl, its romantic atmosphere, 68, 87 Landwehr Canal, 97 Latin Quarter, 72 Leipziger-Strasse, 73 Lustgarten, 50 Military Museimi, 49 Mottos, 53 Museums and the genius of Dr. Bode, 62, 63, 64 Musical riches, 48 Napoleon's hat in museum, 49 National Gallery, 61, 63 New Museum, 63 Old Museum, 50, 51, 63 Opera-house, 48 Parks, 78, 79 Pergamon Museum, 64 Pictures, 42, 49, 58, 64, 65 Reichstag, 74, 75 Royal Theater, 48 Sieges-Allee, 77 Spree, The, 66, 71 Statues, 42, 45, 49, 50, 53, 54, 63, 64, 66, 74, 77, 78 Tiergarten, 78, 82 Unter den Linden, 45 Virchow Hospital, 47 Wilhelm-Strasse, 74 Zeughaus, 49 Zoological Garden, 79 Berlin University, 47 Bismarck monuments, 77 Bismarck's wit, 84 393 INDEX Brunswick: American history, 153 Architecture, 151, 154, 157, 159, 166, 173, 175, 176 Beliefs and customs, 145 Bell-houses, 176, 179 Burg-Platz, The, 154 Carvings, 158 Cathedral, 169 Characteristics of people, 143 Churches, 169, 170, 173, 175 Compared with other cities, 179, 180 Courts, 160, 168 Democratic spirit, 151, 152 Fountain of Henry the Lion, 172 Fountain of Tyll Eulenspiegel, 141 Gothic houses, 157 Henry the Lion, 166, 169, 172 Historical notes, 153 Name, Change in, 151 Old town market, 150 Pictures, 165 Squares, 163 Stone rooms, 160 Street plan, 157 Superstitions, 145 Tyll Eulenspiegel, Town of, 141 Ceiling, Painted wooden, Hildes- heim, 211 Charlottenburg Castle, 79, 82 Charlottenhof Castle, 130 Christ Pillar at Hildesheim, 205, 211 Dante and cloister-school, Meissen, 267 Danzig : Architecture, 4, 14, 18, 20, 24 Arthurian legends, 10 Church of St. Mary, 8, 24-31 Court of King Arthur, 10, 11 Crane Gate, unique landmark, 4, 5, 32 Dwellings, 13, 18, 20 Fish market, 35, 37 Fortifications, Ancient, 8 Granaries, 31, 33 Green Bridge, 4 High Gate, 8 Historical notes, 9, 10, 11, 17, 19, 32, 33, 34 Danzig: (^Continued) Jopen-Gasse, finest street vista, 23 Langgasser Gate, 8, 9 Long Bridge, 33 Milk-can Gate, 4 Mottos over doors, 19 Napoleon's cannon-balls, 25, 31 Navy, German, 33 Pictures, 9, 12, 26, 27 Poggenpfuhl, 22, 23 Poland's protection, 10, 17, 19,32 Porches, Stone, 20 Port of Poland, 32 Badaune, 31, 37 Rathaus interior, 9 Rathaus steeple, 3, 4, 7, 9, 22, 38 Sack-carriers, Haunt of, 37 St. Catharine's Church, 31 St. John's Church, 30, 31, 34 St. Peter's Church, 22, 31 Shakspere and "A Winter's Tale," 32 Steffen House, Italian palace, 18 Stock Tower, 8, 16 Streets, Character of, 23 Swan, The, 34, 35 Teutonic Order of Knights, 10, 17, 34 Torture Chamber, 8 Venice of the North, 7, 14 Doors, Bronze, Hildesheim Cathe- dral, 205, 211 Dresden : Augustus Bridge, 275, 292 Briihl Terrace, 297 Castle, 288-291 Characteristics of the Dresdener, 293 Church of the Cross, 280 Church of Our Lady, 275 City of Pleasure, 279 Fairs, 274 Florence of the Elbe, 285 F'rederick Augustus the Strong,283 Gallery of paintings finest in Germany, 284-288 Historical museum, 297 Historical notes, 279 Humor of, 292 Name, Origin of, 279 Roj^al porcelain collection, 298 Zwinger, The, 283 394 INDEX Dresden Gallery, 284-288 Emperor. See William II. Faustus, Doctor, 240, 244 Frederick Augustus the Strong, 283 Frederick William, The Great Elector, 51, 57 Frederick William I, Castle of, at Potsdam, 106-114 Frederick the Great: Beside tlie coffin of the Great Elector, 57 Castle at Potsdam, 110, 111 Coldness and reserve, 84 Last daj-s of, 129 Napoleon at tomb of, 57, 115 Portrait as a child, 42 Rauch's monument in Berlin, 45 Ruins built at Potsdam, 136, 137 Statue of, in his last days, 129 Tomb at Potsdam, 115 Frederick William III: Friendship with Alexander 1, 115 Garden of roses. Famous, 101 Statue of, in Berlin, 50 Glienicke Castle, 101 Goethe : Altarpieces of Cranach discov- ered by, 238 Auerbach's Cellar in Leipsic and Doctor Faustus, 240, 243 Goslar: Barbarossa, 189 Brusttuch, 194, 195 Clus, a grotto chapel, 196 Heart of Henrv III in chapel of St. Ulrich, 189 Henry IV and his castles, 186 Kaiserhaus, oldest secular build- ing in Germanv, 186 Legend of the "Blood-bath," 191 Name, Origin of, 192 Remains of saints and apostles, 189 St. Ulrich's chapel, 189 Zwinger, old tower, 192 Henry III, Heart of, at Goslar, 189 Henrv IV and his castles at Gos- lar, 186 Henrv the Lion, Brunswick, 166, 169, 172 Hildesheim: Altar by Fra Angelico, 207 Architecture, 217, 223, 226-235 Bronze doors, 205, 211 Butchers' gildhouse, 225 Cathedral, 201, 203 Cathedral cloisters, 203 Cathedral cupola. Story of, 207 Christ Pillar, 205, 211 Church of the Cross, 213 Comparison with Brunswick, 199, 213 Houses, Noteworthy, 226-235 I-egends, 200, 214, 218 Little Princess, Storj' of, 218 Magdalene Church, 212 Maid of Hildesheim, 214, 235 Old German House, 215, 223 Origin, Legend of, 200 Pillar House, 228, 229 Roland Hospital, 230 St. Godehard's Church, 212 St. ^Michael's Church, 208, 209 Thousand-year rose-bush, 201,203 Turn-again Tower, 235 Wedekind House, 224 Hohenzollerns: Berlin characteristic of stern qualities of, 40 Characteristics, 47, 53, 78, 84, 91 Face, Tj-pical, 41 Historical note, 106 Music, L"'nderstanding of, 48 Potsdam, playground of the H., 100 Humboldt's Cosmos written at Charlottenhof, Potsdam, 133 Isar Valley, 324 Leipsic: Architecture, private baroque,244 Auerbach's Cellar, 240 Bach, 249, 250 Beethoven, 257 Characteristics of people, 252-254 Conservatory, Creation of, 250 Fairs, 254 Gewandhaus Orchestra, 250 Goethe, 238, 240, 244, 245 Xaundorfchen, 258 Origin, 261 395 INDEX Leipsic: (Continued) Pleisseiiburg, 251 Princes' House, 237 Publishing center of Germany, 257 St. Matthew, Church of, 246 St. Nicholas, Church of, 238 St. Thomas, Church of, 249 Streets with quaint names, 236 Supreme Court building, 252 Wagner's birthplace, 245 Leipsic University, Founding of, 268 Lessing: Legend concerning, 147 Princes' School at Meissen, 267 Luther, Martin, Legend concern- ing, 344 Marlenburg, mightiest of German castles, 10 Meissen : Albrechtsburg Castle, 263, 267- 270 Ascent of Souls, 267 Church of St. Afra, 267 Gellert and Lessing and the Princes' School, 267 Meissen porcelain invented in Dres- den by Bottger, 284 Munich : Beer, 313, 314 Butchers' Leap, 333 Center of arts and crafts move- ment, 313 Characteristics of people, 306- 309, 321, 322, 324 Churches, 323-328 City's symbol, 314 Coopers' Dance, 333 Dult, a biennial rag-fair, 313 Festival in October, 309 Galleries, 301, 302 Gemutlichkeit of Munich, 307 Legends, 324, 327, 331-333 Miinchener's love of nature, 305 Name, Origin of, 328 National Museum, 302 Palace, 316-321 Panorama of city, 341 Prophecy of Ludwig I, 300 Streets, Characteristic, 322 Wittelsbachs, Devotion of people to, 315 Napoleon: Cannon-balls, Danzig, 25, 31 Hat in Berlin Museum, 49 Visit to tomb of Frederick the Great, 57, 115 Navy, German, birth at mouth of the Mottlau, 33 Nymphenburg, 337 Peacock Island, 101 Pergamon Museum, Berlin, 64 Porcelain collection, Royal, Dres- den, 298 Potsdam: Approach to, 101 Architecture, 106, 116 Babelsberg Castle, 102, 103 Charlottenhof Castle, 130 Church of the Holy Ghost, 105 Church of Peace, 119 Cloisters, 119 Dutch quarter, 105 Frederick the Great's tomb, 115 Gardens of Sans Souci, 120, 121 Glienicke Castle, 101 Historical notes, 105, 106, 129 Legend, 106, 129 Marble Palace, 102, 103 Military life, 114 Mill, Legend concerning, 129, 131 New Palace, 133, 134 Old Potsdam, 107 Pictures, 109, 128, 129, 134 Ruins built by Frederick the Great, 136, 137 Sans Souci, 123, 126, 136 Town Castle, 106-114 Prussian, Meaning of word, 91 Prussian Versailles: Potsdam, 100 Reichstag, 74, 75 Rose-bush, Thousand-year, at Hil- desheim, 201, 203 Rothenburg: Architect's House, 383 Cap-Tassel, 370 Castle Gate, 369 Cat of Vorbach, Story of, 374 Church of St. James, 380 City of dreams, 358 Cobolzeller Gate, 384 Comparison with Nuremberg, 362 Courtyard of the Rathaus, 374 396 INDEX Rothenburg: (Continued) Hegereiter House, 387 Herren-Gasse, 369 Herterich Fountain, 365 Klingen Gate, 376 Legends, 380 Lime Tower, 387 Market-place, 365 Markus Tower, 362 Resemblance to Jerusalem, 370 Schmied-Gasse, 383 Siebers Tower, 384 Spital Gate, 387 Wall of the city, 361, 376 White Tower, 375, 376 Wurzburg Gate, 376 Russo-German Alliance, Founda- tion of, laid at Potsdam, 116 Sans Souci at Potsdam, 133, 126, 136 Schleissheim Castle, 337 Shakspere and "A Winter's Tale," Danzig, 32 Sistine Madonna in Dresden Gal- lery, 285, 286 Stained glass. Some of oldest, in existence, 190 Teutonic Order of Knights, 10, 17^4 Tj'U Eulenspiegel, Brxmswick, the town of, 141 Venice of the North, Danzig, 7, 14 Voltaire's apartment, designs by Frederick the Great, 128 Wagner, Richard, house in which he was born, 245 William the One-eyed, 268 William I, Begas monument in Berlin, 50, 51 William II: Architectural taste, 62 Devotion of people, 41, 95 Face, Character of, 41 Sieges-A116e of Berlin, 77 397 Date Due , UC SOiJTHi p; ^itG.Or.AL LiBRARy FACILITY AA 001339 243 6 Library Bureau Cat. No. 1137 ^3i '<<-^'%?g ■'•' "1 - A