mad king used to play. We visited the
State Theatre, where Wagnerian opera still holds the patient ear, and
there we heard, not Wagner, but Shakespeare's "Lear," done in a
jog-trot, uninspired, later-Victorian style. One felt as if the
theatre had slept for thirty years and then, awakening, had resumed in
the same style as before. It is often said reproachfully in Germany
that Queen Victoria would never have made the late war, and that
Victorian England was much nearer to Germany. It was nearer to the
Germany of Queen Victoria's time. That is quite true.

England has gone on and become more European; her passion for
individual freedom and self-expression has steadily developed, whilst
Germany has remained submissively under the yoke of authority and
discipline. Germany, with all her learning and her industry, her
unstinted application, and her good parts, has become dull. There was
an enormous amount of dulness, genuine uninspired dulness, in the
Germans in the war. You can identify it now when you visit Germany in
peace.

LETTERS OF TRAVEL

XII. FROM BERLIN (I)

Old men and war-cripples as porters at the station, dirty streets
encumbered by hawkers and their wares, strings of pitiful beggars
shaking their hands and exposing mortified limbs--can this be Berlin,
Berlin the prim, the orderly, the clean? Something has happened here
in seven years, some sort of psychological change has been wrought in
the mind of a people. Here, as in some Slav countries, there are laws
and they are not kept, regulations and they are not observed. Unshaven
men and ill-washed women on the streets, and dowdy, hatless girls with
dirty hair crowding into cheap cinema theatres! A city that had no
slums and no poor in 1914 now becoming a slum _en bloc_. And the
litter on the roadways! You will not find its like in Warsaw. You
must seek comparisons in the Bowery of New York or that part of the
City of Westminster called Soho. The horse has come back to Berlin to
make up for loss of motors, and needs more scavengers to follow him
than the modern municipality can afford.

Not that Berlin has broken down in any way. It is the same great hive
of industrialism. Everyone is employed. More are employed than
before. The leisured class is smaller. All the workshops and
factories and offices are full. The shops display as many wares.
There is evidence of an enormous overflowing productivity. Cheap lines
of goods are run o