One tried to think of the “Categorical Imperative” in a New York playhouse—­of the desperate endeavor to make the young schoolmaster really look simple and boyish, and yet as if he might have heard of Kant, and of convincing the two ladies that they lost their sweet comfortableness by dressing like professional manikins; how the piece might succeed with luck, or if it could somehow be made fashionable; and how here, with all the unaffected and affectionate intelligence with which it was played—­and watched—­it was but part of the week’s work.

And, in spite of the desperation of the time, you might have seen a dozen such audiences in Berlin, that night—­and yet tourists generally speak of Berlin, compared with some of the German provincial cities, as a rather graceless, new sort of place, full of bad sculpture and Prussian arrogance.  You might have seen them at the opera or symphony concerts, at Shakespeare, Strindberg, or the German classics we used to read in college, or standing in line at six o’clock, sandwiches in hand, so that they might sit through a performance of “Peer Gynt,” with the Grieg music, beginning at seven and lasting till after eleven.  A wonderful night, with poetry and music and splendid 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.