scenes and acting,
and a man's very soul developing before you all the time--sandwiches and
beer and more music and poetry, until that tragedy of the egoist is no
longer a play but a part of you, so many years of living, almost, added
to one's life. Yes, it is all here, along with the forty-two-centimetre
shells--good music and good beer and good love of both; simplicity,
homely kindness, and Gemutlichkeit.

Mere talk about plays would not be much encouraged in Germany nowadays.
In one of the Cologne papers the other day there were two imaginary
letters--one signed "One Who Means Well," asking that there be a little
relief from war poems, war articles, and the like; and the other signed
"One Who Means Better," demanding if it were possible for any German to
waste time in artistic hair-splitting when the Germanic peoples, in
greater danger than in their entire history, stood with their back to
the wall, facing and holding back the world. A Berlin dramatic critic,
going through the motions of reviewing a new performance of "Hedda
Gabler" the other morning, finally dismissed the matter as "Women's
troubles--if anybody can be interested in that nowadays!" Yet a woman,
asking at the same time that the "finer and sweeter voices of peaceful
society" be not forgotten, concluded her letter with "East and west the
cannon thunder, but in men's souls sound many bells, and it is not
necessary that they should always and forever be drowned out."

I mention the theatre only as an easy illustration of that many-sided
vitality one feels at once on entering Germany, that development of all
a people's capabilities, material and spiritual, which is summed up, I
suppose, in that hapless word Kultur.

You may not like German learning or German art, and consider the one
pedantic and the other heavy and uninspired. A Frenchman wrote very
feelingly the other day, in the Revue des Deux Mondes, about a return to
the old French culture, an escape from what he described as the German
habit of accumulating mere facts to something that, in addition to
feeding the brain, nourished the taste as well--carried with it, so to
speak, a certain spiritual fragrance.

You may be of this persuasion. The thing one cannot escape, however, in
Germany, whether one likes its manifestations or not, is the vitality,
the moral and intellectual force, everywhere apparent, whether it be
applied to smashing forts or staging a play. When a people can hold
back E