FR

ROM any account of the romantic cities of Germany, Berlin must not be excluded, if for no other reason than because it is so unromantic. It is the positive degree by which to gage such comparatives as Breslau and Munich, such superlatives as Hildesheim and Rothenburg. 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 Thiergarten. In the guard-house on each hand the guard was

undergoing inspection.

Each private came stiffly up to his officer and whirled stiffly about, to show that he was uncontaminated by the great, dirty human world beyond the palings. But just as a spot was found on an unfortunate leg, a trumpet rang out from the FriedensAllée, 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 Emperor's automobile, which had whizzed, at the Emperor's own speed limit, through the royal entrance.

The soldiers slunk dejectedly back to inspection.

"Swine-hounds!" cried a pale officer,

"why could n't you do that quicker?" And even the bystanders 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 excitement 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 mustaches, like the enforced jocularity of "The Man Who Laughs"; the determined, energetic, military jaw. This typical Hohenzollern face, coming and going like an apparition, suddenly lent fresh interest 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, militant city, with its zest in commerce and diplomacy, in art and science, were not in many senses embodiment of the Hohenzollern char

acter.

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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 German city with so few old buildings as Berlin and so little atmosphere. A Strasburg cathedral, a market-place out of Dantzic, 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 battleships in war-paint, and the Old-World glamour which one naturally expects from Germany is almost as well hidden here as a pearl in a pile of oystershells. The city fairly bristles with weapons and ferocity. Its statues, when they are not of mounted warriors with swords, or of standing warriors with spears, represent Samson laying about him with 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 buildings that even the absurd portrait by Pesne of Frederick the Great in the Palais is a relief. For there Frederick, aged three, is only beating a drum, although a lance, a club, and what looks like a pile of cannonballs, 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, reflecting that, if

she had beaten her swords into plowshares, I should not now be enjoying the gallery, or the Thiergarten, the opera, or the Krögel; and then I grow more reconciled to the eternal bristling and snarling of the city of the emperors.

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 has declared it one of the least charming of cities, and yet we are enticed. The truth is that its genius loci, like

Drawn by K. O'Lynch von Town. Half-tone plate
engraved by W. G. Watt

A GLIMPSE OF OLD BERLIN. (AM KRÖGEL)

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 Rauch's monument to Frederick the Great, though Unter den Linden goes marching on, despite the anomaly, to the Castle Bridge. The hero, informally sitting his charger in his cocked hat and with his trusty crooked stick, seems to dominate the situation as easily as in the stirring days of the eighteenth 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. Carlyle wrote of him that "he had no pleasure in dreams, in party-colored clouds and nothingnesses"; and certainly 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-es

capes, confronts an austere, gray guardhouse; while farther 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 grandson in the famous corner window of his palace, 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 handful of scholars approached Frederick William III with their project, and the enthusiastic king exclaimed: "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 William von Humboldt, founded Berlin University. And it is no wonder that, with a truly Hohenzollern rapidity and acquisitiveness, 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 hospitals 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 system. Yours is not to be mentioned,-how say you?-yours is not to call in the same expression with ours for swiftness. Why, if you will order a book 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 façade, is one of the last monuments to the baroque spirit in Ger

many.

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 intended 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 far less authority there than the Emperor, who supervises in person the slightest details of execution and setting. A larger opera-house is soon to be built on the Königs-Platz.

Berlin has an embarrassment of musical riches. Besides the excellent performances of the Philharmonic Orchestra, which may be heard for ten cents, the city aver

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ages twenty classical concerts daily during the season. There one may hear rare works, seldom given elsewhere, and the breathless audiences are filled with an almost religious fervor of attention. They realize what we do not, that the hearer is quite as important a factor as the performer in the making of music.

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 façade is alive with sculpture better fitted to inspire fear than any other emotion. But Schlüter 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 Prussian uniform since the time of the Great Elector. The Hall of Fame is filled with bronze busts of Prussian 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 warrior,—poor things, all of them,-cold imitations of the cold Thorwaldsen.

The atmosphere of the Lustgarten is profoundly martial. In the center towers Frederick William III on his warcharger, gazing toward the castle, whereon stand figures of the late Emperor Frederick 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 verdigris struggle with wild horses at the portal. In a lamentable position on the bank of the Spree looms Begas's huge monument to William I, the fiercest of Berlin's military sculptures. Four delirious lions, crouching on heaps of arms, snarl at the four corners; colossal figures intended to represent War and Peace sprawl unhappily on the side steps, and the whole is surmounted by the helmeted hero of Sedan, led by a Victory whose two sisters drive quadrigas on the colonnade at each side an impressive and ferocious