We fear other nations, we fear other people, we fear public opinion to an extent incredible, and tremble before the opinion of our servants and tradespeople; we fear our own manners and therefore are obliged to preserve the idiotic practice of duelling, in which as often as not the man whose honour is being satisfied is the one who is killed; we fear all those above us, of whom there are invariably a great many; we fear all officials, and our country drips with officials.  The only person we do not fear is God.”

“But—­” I began, remembering their motto, bestowed on them by Bismarck,

“Yes, yes, I know,” he interrupted.  “It is not, however, true.  The contrary is the truth.  We Germans fear not God, but everything else in the world.  It is only fear that makes us polite, fear of the duel; for, like the child and the savage, we have not had time to acquire the habit of good manners, the habit which makes manners inevitable and invariable, and it is not natural to us to be polite.  We are polite only by the force of fear.  Consequently—­for all men must have their relaxations—­whenever we meet the weak, the beneath us, the momentarily helpless, we are brutal.  It is an immense relief to be for a moment natural.  Every German welcomes even the smallest opportunity.”

You would be greatly interested in Kloster, I’m certain.  He sits there, his fiddle on his fat little knees, his bow punctuating his sentences with quivers and raps, his shiny bald head reflecting the light from the window behind him, and his eyes coming very much out of his face, which is excessively red.  He looks like an amiable prawn; not in the least like a person with an active and destructive mind, not in the least like a great musician.  He has the very opposite of the bushy eyebrows and overhanging forehead and deep set eyes and lots of hair you’re supposed to have if you’ve got much music in you.  He came over to me the other day after I had finished playing, and stretched up—­he’s a good bit smaller than I am—­and carefully drew his finger along my eyebrows, each in turn.  I couldn’t think what he was doing.

“My finger is clean, Mees Chrees,” he said, seeing me draw back.  “I have just wiped it, Be not, therefore, afraid.  But you have the real Beethoven brow—­the very shape—­and I must touch it.  I regret if it incommodes you, but I must touch it.  I have seen no such resemblance to the brow of the Master.  You might be his child.”

I needn’t tell you, darling mother, that I went back to the boarders and the midday guests not minding them much.  If I only could talk German properly I would have loved to have leant across the table to Herr Mannfried, an unwholesome looking young man who comes in to dinner every day from a bank in the Potsdamerstrasse, and is very full of that hatred which is really passion for England, and has pale hair and a mouth exactly like two scarlet slugs—­I’m sorry to be so horrid, but it is like two scarlet slugs—­and said,—­“Have you noticed that I have a Beethovenkopf?  What do you think of me, an Englanderin, having such a thing?  One of your own great men says so, so it must be true.”