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BAYREUTH IN 1897

To Bayreuth again, through dirty, dusty, nasty-smelling, unromantic
Germany, along the banks of that shabby--genteel river known as the
Rhine, watching at every railway station the wondrously bulky
haus-fraus who stir such deep emotions in the sentimental German
heart; noting how the disease of militarism has eaten so deeply into
German life that each railway official is a mere steam-engine,
supplied by the State with fuel in case he should some day be needed;
eating the badly and dirtily cooked German food,--how familiar it all
seems when one does it a second time! One week in Bayreuth was the
length of my stay in 1896; yet I seem to have spent a great part of my
younger days here. The theatre is my familiar friend in whom I never
trust; the ditch called the river has many associations, pleasant and
other; I go up past the theatre into the wood as to a favourite haunt
of old time; I lunch under the trees and watch the caterpillars drop
into my soup as though that were the commonest thing in the world; I
wander into the theatre and feel more at home than ever I do at Covent
Garden; I listen to the bad--but it is not yet time for detailed
criticism. All I mean is, that the novelty of Bayreuth, like the
novelty of any other small lifeless German town, disappears on a
second visit; that though the charm of the wood, of the trumpet calls
at the theatre, of the greasy German food, and the primitive German
sanitary arrangements, remains, it is a charm that has already worn
very thin, and needs the carefullest of handling to preserve. Whether,
without some especial inducement, the average mortal can survive
Bayreuth a third time, is, to me, hardly a question. As for my poor
self, it suits me admirably--certainly I could stand Bayreuth half a
dozen times. I like the life--the way in which the hours of the day
revolve round the evening performance, the real idleness, passivity,
combined with an appearance of energy and activity; I like to get warm
by climbing the hill and then to sit down and cool myself by drinking
lager from a huge pot with a pewter lid, dreamily speculating the
while on the possibility of my ever growing as fat as the average
German; I like to sit in a cafe with my friends till three in the
morning, discussing with fiery enthusiasm unimportant details of the
performance we have lately endured; I like being hungry six times a
day. All these trifles please me, and please others. B