rs, and his wife as
Minerva! On the facades of houses, on the bridges, on the roofs of
apartment houses, on the hotels even, and scattered throughout the
public gardens, are scores of statues, and they are for the most part
what hastily ordered, swiftly completed art, born of the dollar
instead of the pain and travail of love and imagination, must always
be.

A certain literary snob taken to task by Doctor Parr for pronouncing
the one-time capital of Egypt "Alexandria," with the accent on the
long i, quoted the authority of Doctor Bentley. "Doctor Bentley and
I," replied Doctor Parr, "may call it 'Alexandria,' but I should
advise you to call it 'Alexandria.'" It was all very well for the
Medici, to ornament their cities and their homes with the fruit of the
great artistic springtime of the world, but I should strongly advise
the Berliners to pronounce it "Alexandria" for some years to come. No
matter how fervid the lover, nor how possessed he may be by his
mistress, he cannot turn out every day, even,

"A halting sonnet of his own poor brain,
Fashion'd to Beatrice."

All this pretentious over-ornamentation is cosmeticism, the powder and
paint of the vulgarian striving to conceal by a futile advertisement
her lack of refinement. Paris was teaching the world when there was no
capital in Germany; London has been a commercial centre for a thousand
years, and Oxford was a hundred years old before even the University
of Prague, the first in Germany, was founded by Charles IV in 1348.
You may like or dislike these cities, but, at any rate, they have a
bouquet; Berlin has none.

When Germany deals with the inanimate and amenable factors of life,
she brings the machinery of modern civilization well-nigh to the point
of perfection. As a municipal and national housewife she has no equal,
none. But art has nothing to do with brooms and dust-pans, and human
nature is woven of surprises and emergencies, and what then? An
interesting example in the streets of Berlin is the difference between
the perfection of the street-cleaning, which deals with the inanimate
and with accurately calculable factors, and the governing of the
street traffic. Horses and men and motor-driven vehicles are not as
dependable as blocks of pavement. When the traffic in the Berlin
streets grows to the proportions of London, Paris, and New York, one
wonders what will happen. Nowhere are there such broad, well-kept
streets in which the traffic is so awkward