hout keeping
time, and here lips of bronze sing the song of patriotism till your
heart thumps, and you are ready to throw up your hat as the splendid
young figure and his negro soldiers march by -- and they do march by!
It is almost a consolation for what Boston has done to that gallant
soldier and humble servant of God, that modest gentleman, Phillips
Brooks. In a statue to him they have travestied the virtues he
expounded, slain the ideal of the Christ he preached, theatricalized
the least theatrical of men, and placed this piece of mortifying
misunderstanding in bronze under the very eaves of the house that grew
out of his simple eloquence. There is in Leipsic a similar misdemeanor
in a statue of Beethoven. He sits, naked to the waist, in a bronze
chair, with a sort of bath-towel drapery of colored marble about his
legs, and an eagle in front of him. He has a chauffeurish expression
of anxious futility, as though he were about to run over the eagle.

Men are without great dreams in these days, and art is elaborate and
fussy and self-conscious. The technical part of the work is
predominant. One sees the artist holding up a mirror to himself as he
works. Pygmalion congratulates the statue upon the fact that he carved
it, instead of being lost in the love of creating. It is as though a
lover should sing of himself instead of singing of his lady. The
subtle poison of self-advertisement has crept in, and peers like a
satyr from the picture and from the statue. Even the most prominent
name in German music at this writing is that of a man who is notorious
as an expert salesman of symphonic sensationalism.

Though the streets are so well kept, the buildings in these miles of
new streets are flimsy-looking, and evidently the work of the
speculative builder. The more pretentious buildings ape a kind of
Nuremberg Renaissance style, and are as effective as a castle made of
cardboard. This does not imply that there are not simple and solid
buildings in Berlin and, in the case of the new library and a score of
other buildings, worthy architecture; but the general impression is
one of haste multiplied by plaster.

The whole city blossoms with statuary, like a cosmopolitan 'Arriet who
cannot get enough flowers and feathers on her Sunday hat. A certain
comic anthropomorphism is to be seen, even on the balustrades of the
castle, where the good Emperor William is posed as Jupiter, the
Empress Augusta as Juno, Emperor Frederick as Ma