pfeffer_, noodles, sauerkraut, _Wiener Schnitzel_ ... drinking
seidels of beer. They escort sausages with them to the opera. All the
women have their skirts honeycombed with capacious pockets, in which
they carry substantial lunches to eat while Isolde is deceiving King
Mark. Why, the very principle of German music is based on a theory of
well-fed auditors. The voluptuous scores of Richard Wagner, Richard
Strauss, Max Schillings and Co. were not written for skinny,
ill-nourished wights. Even Beethoven demands flesh and bone of his
hearers. The music of Bach is directly aimed against the doctrine of
asceticism. "The German capacity for feeling emotion in music has
developed to the same extent as the capacity of the German stomach for
containing food," writes Ernest Newman, "but in neither the one case
nor the other has there been a corresponding development in refinement
of perceptions. German sentimental music is not quite as gross as
German food and German feeding, but it comes very near to it
sometimes.... 'The Germans do not taste,' said Montaigne, 'they gulp.'
As with their food, so with the emotions of their music. So long as
they get them in sufficient mass, of the traditional quality, and with
the traditional pungent seasoning, they are content to leave piquancy
and variety of effect to others."... Once in Munich in a second
storey window of the Bayerischebank I saw a small boy, about ten years
old, sitting outside on the sill, washing the panes of glass. Opposite
him on the same sill a dachshund reposed on her paws, regarding her
master affectionately. Between the two stood a half-filled toby of
foaming Lowenbrau, which, from time to time, the lad raised to his
lips, quaffing deep draughts. And when he set the pot down he whistled
the first subject of Beethoven's _Fifth Symphony_. On Sunday
afternoons, in the gardens which invariably surround the Munich
breweries, the happy mothers, who gather to listen to the band play
while they drink beer, frequently replenish the empty nursing bottles
of their offspring at the taps from which flows the deep brown
beverage.... The food of the French is highly artificial, delicately
prepared and served, and flavoured with infinite art: _vol au vent a
la reine_ and Massenet, _petits pois a l'etuvee_ and Gounod, _oeuf
Ste. Clotilde_ and Cesar Franck, all strike the tongue and the ear
quite pleasantly. Des Esseintes and his liqueur symphony were the
inventions of a Frenchman.... H