BERLIN, when I reached it, first manifested itself in a driving rain. If I laugh at it forever and ever as a blunder-headed, vainglorious¹, self-appreciative city I shall always love it too. Paris has had its day, and will no doubt have others; London is content with an endless, conservative day; Berlin’s is still to come and come brilliantly. The blood is there, and the hope, and the moody², lustful³, Wagnerian temperament⁴.
 
But first, before I reached it, I suffered a strange mental revolt at being in Germany at all. Why? I can scarcely say. Perhaps I was beginning to be depressed⁵ with what in my prejudice I called the dullness of Germany. A little while later I recognized that while there is an extreme conflict of temperament between the average German and myself, I could yet admire them without wishing to be anything like them. Of all the peoples I saw I should place the Germans first for sobriety, industry, thoroughness, a hearty⁶ intolerance of sham⁷, a desire and a willingness to make the best of a very difficult earthly condition. In many respects they are not artistically⁹ appetizing, being gross physically¹⁰, heartily¹¹ passionate¹², vain, and cocksure; but those things after all are unimportant. They have, in spite of all their defects, great emotional, intellectual, and physical capacities, and these things are important. I think it is unquestionable that in the main they take life far too seriously. The belief in a hell, for instance, took a tremendous grip on the Teutonic mind and the Lutheran interpretation¹³ of Protestantism, as it finally worked out, was as dreary¹⁴ as anything463 could be—almost as dreary as Presbyterianism in Scotland. That is the sad German temperament. A great nationality, business success, public distinction is probably tending to make over or at least modify the Teutonic cast of thought which is gray; but in parts of Germany, for instance at Mayence, you see the older spirit almost in full force.
 
In the next place I was out of Italy and that land had taken such a strange hold on me. What a far cry from Italy to Germany! I thought. Gone; once and for all, the wonderful clarity of atmosphere that pervades¹⁵ almost the whole of Italy from the Alps to Rome and I presume Sicily. Gone the obvious dolce far niente, the lovely cities set on hills, the castles, the fortresses¹⁶, the strange stone bridges, the hot, white roads winding¹⁷ like snowy ribbons in the distance. No olive trees, no cypresses¹⁸, no umbrella trees or ilexes, no white, yellow, blue, brown and sea-green houses, no wooden plows²⁰, white oxen and ambling²¹, bare-footed friars. In its place (the Alps and Switzerland between) this low rich land, its railroads threading it like steel bands, its citizens standing²² up as though at command, its houses in the smaller towns almost uniformly red, its architecture a twentieth century modification²³ of an older order of many-gabled roofs—the order of Albrecht Dürer—with its fanciful decorations, conical roofs and pinnacles²⁴ and quaint²⁵ windows and doors that suggest the bird-boxes of our childhood. Germany appears in a way to have attempted to abandon the medieval architectural ideal that still may be seen in Mayence, Mayen, the heart of Frankfort, Nuremberg, Heidelberg and other places and to adapt its mood to the modern theory of how buildings ought to be constructed, but it has not quite done so. The German scroll-loving mind of the Middle Ages is still the German scroll-loving mind of to-day. Look and you will see it quaintly²⁶ cropping464 out everywhere. Not in those wonderful details of intricacy, Teutonic fussiness²⁷, naïve, jester-like grotesqueness²⁸ which makes the older sections of so many old German cities so wonderful, but in a slight suggestion of them here and there—a quirk²⁹ of roof, an over-elaborateness of decoration, a too protuberant³⁰ frieze³¹ or grape-viney, Bacchus-mooded, sex-ornamented panel, until you say to yourself quite wisely, “Ah, Teutons will be Teutons still.” They are making a very different Germany from what the old Germany was—modern Germany dating from 1871—but it is not an entirely³² different Germany. Its citizens are still stocky, red-blooded, physically excited and excitable, emotional, mercurial³³, morbid³⁴, enthusiastic, women-loving and life-loving, and no doubt will be so, praise God, until German soil loses its inherent essentials, and German climate makes for some other variations not yet indicated in the race.
 
 
 
But to return to Berlin. I saw it first jogging down Unter den¹⁹ Linden from the Friedrichstrasse Bahnhof (station) to Cook’s Berlin agency, seated comfortably in a closed cab behind as fat a horse and driver as one would wish to see. And from there, still farther along Unter den Linden and through the Wilhelmstrasse to Leipzigstrasse and the Potsdamer Bahnhof I saw more of it. Oh, the rich guttural value of the German “platzes” and “strasses” and “ufers” and “dams.” They make up a considerable portion of your city atmosphere for you in Berlin. You just have to get used to them—just as you have to accept the “fabriks” and the “restaurations” and the “wein handlungs,” and all the other “ichs,” “lings,” “bergs,” “brückes,” until you sigh for the French and Italian “-rics” and the English-American “-rys.” However, among the first things that impressed me were these: all Berlin streets, seemingly, were wide with buildings rarely more than five stories high. Everything,465 literally³⁵ everything, was American new—and newer—German new! And the cabbies were the largest, fattest, most broad-backed, most thick-through and Deutschiest looking creatures I have ever beheld³⁶. Oh, the marvel³⁷ of those glazed³⁸ German cabby hats with the little hard rubber decorations on the side. Nowhere else in Europe is there anything like these cabbies. They do not stand; they sit, heavily and spaciously—alone.
 
The faithful Baedeker has little to say for Berlin. Art? It is almost all in the Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum, in the vicinity of the Kupferdam. And as for public institutions, spots of great historic interest—they are a dreary and negligible list. But, nevertheless and notwithstanding, Berlin appealed to me instantly as one of the most interesting and forceful of all the cities, and that solely³⁹ because it is new, crude, human, growing feverishly⁴⁰, unbelievably; and growing in a distinct and individual way. They have achieved and are achieving something totally distinct and worth while—a new place to go; and after a while, I haven’t the slightest doubt, thousands and even hundreds of thousands of travelers will go there. But for many and many a day the sensitive and artistically inclined will not admire it.
 
My visit to Cook’s brought me a mass of delayed mail which cheered me greatly. It was now raining pitchforks but my bovine⁴¹ driver, who looked somehow like a segment of a wall, managed to bestow⁴² my trunk and bags in such a fashion that they were kept dry, and off we went for the hotel. I had a preconceived notion that Unter den Linden was a magnificent avenue lined shadily with trees and crowded with palaces. Nothing could have been more erroneous. The trees are few and insignificant⁴³, the palaces entirely wanting. It is a very wide business street, lined with hotels, shops, restaurants, newspaper offices and filled with a parading466 throng⁴⁴ in pleasant weather. At one end it gives into an area known as the Lustgarten crowded with palaces, art galleries, the Berlin Cathedral, the Imperial Opera House and what not; at the other end (it is only about a mile long) into the famous Berlin Thiergarten, formerly⁴⁵ a part of the Imperial (Hohenzollern) hunting-forest. On the whole, the avenue was a disappointment.
 
For suggestions of character, individuality, innate⁴⁶ Teutonic charm or the reverse—as these things strike one—growth, prosperity, promise, and the like, Berlin cannot be equaled in Europe. Quite readily I can see how it might irritate and repel⁴⁷ the less aggressive denizens⁴⁸ of less hopeful and determined⁴⁹ realms. The German, when he is oppressed is terribly depressed; when he is in the saddle, nothing can equal his bump of I-am-ity. It becomes so balloon-like and astounding⁵⁰ that the world may only gaze in astonishment⁵¹ or retreat in anger, dismay, or uproarious amusement. The present-day Germans do take themselves so seriously and from many points of view with good reason, too.
 
I don’t know where in Europe, outside of Paris, if even there, you will see a better-kept city. It is so clean and spruce and fresh that it is a joy to walk there—anywhere. Mile after mile of straight, imposing⁵² streets greet your gaze. Berlin needs a great Pantheon, an avenue such as Unter den Linden lined with official palaces (not shops), and unquestionably a magnificent museum of art—I mean a better building. Its present public and imperial structures are most uninspired. They suggest the American-European architecture of 1860–1870. The public monuments of Berlin, and particularly their sculptural adornments are for the most part a crime against humanity.
 
I remember standing and looking one evening at that noble German effort known as the memorial statue of467 William I, in the Lustgarten, unquestionably the fiercest and most imposing of all the Berlin military sculptures. This statue speaks loudly for all Berlin and for all Germany and for just what the Teutonic disposition⁵³ would like to be—namely, terrible, colossal⁵⁴, astounding, world-scarifying, and the like. It almost shouts “Ho! see what I am,” but the sad part of it is that it does it badly, not with that reserve that somehow invariably indicates tremendous power so much better than mere⁵⁵ bluster⁵⁶ does. What the Germans seem not to have learned in their art at least is that “easy does it.” Their a............