nation can approach.
An Englishman writing about Germany lately says that you often hear
very bad music there, but I think his experience must have been
exceptional and unfortunate. I am sure that Germans do not tolerate
the vapid dreary drawing-room songs we listen to complacently in this
country; for in England people often have beautiful voices without any
musical understanding, or technical facility without charm. I suppose
such cases must occur amongst Germans too, and in the end one speaks
of a foreign nation partly from personal experience, which must be
narrow, and partly from hearsay. I have met Germans who were not
musical, but I have never met any who were pleased with downright bad
music. On the whole, it is the art they understand best, the one in
which their instinctive taste is sure and good. You would not find
that the Byron amongst composers, whoever he may be, was the one they
set up for worship. Nor do you find the street of a German city or
suburb infested with barrel-organs. There is some kind of low dancing
saloon or _cafe chantant_ called a Tingl-Tangl where I imagine they
have organs and gramaphones and suchlike horrors, but then unless you
chance to pass their open windows you need not endure their strains.
In England, even if we are fond of music, and therefore sensitive to
jarring sounds and maudlin melodies, yet in the street we cannot
escape the barrel-organ nor in the house the drawing-room songs. As if
these were not enough, we now invite each other to listen to the
pianotist and the pianola.

"I will explain my country to you," said the artist one day when I had
expressed myself puzzled by the curious gaps in German taste, and even
in German knowledge; by their enthusiasm for the second rate in poetry
and literature, and by their amazing uncertain mixture of information
and blank complacent ignorance. For when an Englishman says "Goethe!
Schiller!--Was is das?" you are not surprised. It is just what you
expect of an Englishman, and for all that he may know how to build
bridges and keep his temper in games and argument. But when a German
teacher of literature tells you Byron is the only English poet, and
when the whole nation neglects some of our big men but runs wild over
certain little ones, you listen eagerly for any explanation
forthcoming. "We have _Wissen_," said the artist, "we have _Kunst_;
but we have no _Kultur_."

I did not recover from the shock he gave me till the evening,