ing country districts, and the people for
miles around subscribe for their seats for the whole winter, and
attend the theatre and certain concerts as regularly as children go to
school. It sounds oddly to the ears of an American to hear criticism
to the effect, that there are more high-class music and more classical
plays than the people have either time or money for. Here is a
population which is actually overindulging in culture. We complain of
too little; here they complain of too much. It makes one wonder
whether any of the problems of social life are satisfactorily soluble;
whether indeed it be not true that even the virtues carried to an
extreme do not become vices. Philanthropy in more than one city in
America is spending time, money, and energy to bring about this very
enthusiasm for music and the more intellectual arts which, it is
maintained, here in Schwerin at least, has gone too far.

These problems are not so easy of solution as the ignorant and the
inexperienced think. Imagine the inhabitants of Hoboken, New Jersey;
of Lynn, Massachusetts; of Kalamazoo, Michigan; of Bloody Gulch,
Idaho, spending too much time and money listening to the music of
Palestrina and Bach, or to the plays of Shakespeare; and yet what
money and energy would not be spent by certain enthusiasts for the
arts did they think such a result possible! And, after all, it might
prove not a blessing, but a danger.

Whenever or wherever you are in the company of Germans you notice
their pleasure and their keen interest in the subjective, rather than
in the objective side of life. It is from within out that they are
stirred, not as we are, by outside things working upon us. They are
still the dreaming, drinking, singing, impulsive Germans of Tacitus.
Titus Livius, Plutarch, and Machiavelli, all maintained that the
successive invasions of the Germans into Italy were for the sake of
the wine to be found there. Plutarch writes that "the Gauls were
introduced to the Italian wine by a Tuscan named Arron, and so excited
were they by the desire for more that, taking their wives and children
with them, they journeyed across the Alps to conquer the land of such
good vintages, looking upon other countries as sterile and savage by
comparison. Even if this be not history, it is an impression; and at
any rate, from that day to this the Germans have agreed with the
dictum of Aulus Gellius: "Prandium autem abstemium, in quo nihil vini
potatur, canium dicit