increasing delight. In the growing zest of the evening the prosperous
crowds toss pfennigs to the begging old “Linden Angels” and patronize
the flower-venders and newsboys. Of the Linden’s fivefold boulevard,
the outer streets are rumbling with heavy wagons and cabs, the drive
with carriages, the bridle-path is lively with belated riders and the
broad middle promenade is overflowing with pedestrians. Good Americans,
on passing the United States Embassy headquarters, at the corner of
Schadowstrasse, raise their hats in a sudden welling of patriotic
reverence, and very likely with a wistful sympathy for the _heimweh_
that must frequently oppress the two thousand members of the American
colony that tarry in the pleasant environs of Victoria Louise Platz.
Diplomats are coming and going on aristocratic Wilhelmstrasse, which
sweeps southward at this point, and where the lights are beginning to
sparkle before the double line of government department buildings,
royal palaces, and foreign embassy houses. The famous palace of mellow
gray stone, in which the Iron Chancellor lived and held court like a
king in the heyday of his power, shrouds itself proudly in the deep
green of its garden of thick shrubbery.
But all this fails to hold the stroller’s attention when he glances
about and sees he is at the end of the Linden and that a dozen steps
will carry him to a sudden widening into stately Pariser-Platz, at the
bottom of which, flanked by fountained lateral lawns and light-flecked
in the twilight blur, rises one of Berlin’s chiefest features—the
famed Brandenburg Gate. When the Berlin exile is homesick this is
the picture he always sees—the imposing five-arched gateway, creamy
against the misty deep green of the Tiergarten tree-tops, the dignified
fronts of surrounding embassy houses, flowered grass plots on either
hand, leaping fountains, the long lines of the trees of the Linden, and
through the gateway-portals glimpses of colonnades and white statues in
the cool, dusky _allées_ of the park.
It is an inspiring spot. The classic grace of Greece is present in the
gate itself,—a copy of the Athenian Propylæa,—and the eventualities
of warfare are suggested in Schadow’s bronze Quadriga above it, which
the envious Napoleon carried off to his Paris. These old trees of the
Linden know much of the turning of the wheel of fortune; they shook
to the tread of the conquering legions of Napoleon the Great, after
Jena, when Queen Louise and her little ten-year-old son fled in want
and humiliation; but they also rocked, threescore and five years later,
to the shouting of the armies of a united and triumphant Germany when
that same little boy, become Emperor William I, returned from the
annihilation of Napoleon the Little.
Any German student, adequately inspired, will tell the legend of the
Quadriga; how the Goddess of Victory each New Year’s Eve drives her
chariot and four up the Linden, pays her respects to Frederick the
Great on his bronze horse and is back in her place by 1 A.M. And that
is the night, by the way, that the Great Elector rides his charger all
over the city, taking note of the year’s changes, and returns to his
position on the Kurfürsten Brücke before the stroke of one. Out of
the same Nibelungen Land comes the legend of the White Lady that goes
moaning through the Royal Palace when a Hohenzollern is about to die.
Now we are on Berlin traditions, it may be said that there is more
agreeable flesh and blood to the custom of receiving bouquets from the
witches of the Blocksberg on Walpurgis Nacht (May 1), and an altogether
human foundation for the ancient torch dances at Hohenzollern weddings,
of which Carlyle has given so enthusiastic a description.
Beyond the gate, we face a beautiful picture. The sweeping arc of
the _Anlagen_, rimmed with marble benches, balustrades, and statues,
is spirited with pleasure seekers, and its thick lines of lights are
all glowing brightly, and carriages and cabs are speeding noiselessly
across it. An attractive dilemma presents, as to whether we choose to
reach the adjoining Königs-Platz by the embowered and vernal Path
of Peace—the tree-arched Friedens-Allée through this corner of the
Tiergarten—or by the celebrated War-Way—the Sieges-Allée—between the
double lines of the thirty-two marble groups portraying the rulers of
the House of Brandenburg. There are advantages to either; the first is
shorter and supremely sylvan, but the second presents an opportunity
of settling for one’s self the violent difference of opinion as to the
artistic merits of this elaborate gift of the Kaiser to his capital.
Each of the groups of the latter has a heroic statue of a Prussian
ruler half encircled by a marble bench whose ends are Hermes busts
of eminent men of that period. We are entitled to an opinion. Some
pronounce it incomparable; others think it pompous and insipid, and
very much like a stone cutter’s yard.
In either event one soon reaches the Königs-Platz, and beholds
envisioned the power and glory of the Fatherland. At no hour does it
appear to such advantage as at twilight. The dusky shadows lie heavy
about the great circular field of trees and shrubbery, shrouding the
sculptured mass of the vast Reichstag building until its huge glass
dome looms like a colossal moon in a lake of emerald. Bismarck and Von
Moltke rise above their statue-groups like demigods of bronze, and
the lofty Column of Victory, studded with captured cannon, rears its
brisk and lightly-poised angel to acclaim the glories of Germany to
an invisible world among the skies. Kroll’s neighboring summer garden
is gay in hundreds of colored lights that glow in the grass plots
and dim arbors and hang like pendent fruit from the branches of the
trees. The dusk deepens into gloom, and twilight plays Whistler-tricks
with fountain spray and statue. Distant domes pass, in night wizardry,
for ghostly war-tents of Von Moltke. Faint vapors steal among the
trees of the lower levels, and the dark of dim retreats is deeper
for the brilliance of groups of lights that fade surrounding foliage
into shades of pale olive. Music drifts softly over from Kroll’s,
and the subdued hum of engulfing Berlin conveys a pleasant sense of
companionship and a feeling of admiration and affection.
In the vivid appreciation of all we have just been seeing, one thinks
in amazement, _What a people!_ Harveyized against everything but
progress, they are bending their tremendous energy to the enormous
task of transforming Berlin from the capital of a kingdom into the
capital of an empire. To see what they are accomplishing is to whip
one’s wastrel forces and holystone his resolution. Here is energy and
power of a kind to move mountains. Foreign critics bite their nails in
envy and decry Berlin as “a parvenu among capitals”; they say it lacks
distinction, is solemnly conscious of its new dignity, is “big without
being cosmopolitan, and imposing without being impressive.” That it
is garishly modern is true enough, as in the light of its sudden
apotheosis it could not have otherwise been, and its own people are
first to admit frequent grave errors in artistic taste. But taken all
in all, a fairer, more substantial or more worthy city has never before
been reared in the same length of time in the history of mankind. Nor
is the end yet. The soaring impetus of the capital waxes with its own
effort; gathers strength with each fresh achievement. Germany may be
pardoned for taking pride in having risen as a world power to the very
van of the nations, with her war-lord one of the foremost figures of
the era. That his capital is his special pride is well known, and there
are many who feel that he has gone far to realizing his expressed
determination to make Berlin the most beautiful city of Europe.
One rests in the Königs-Platz, at the foot of Bismarck’s statue, and
regards with wonder the stern features of that man of “blood and iron,”
to whose prescience and indomitable resolution these vast results
are so largely due. The best of Bismarck is not dead, but lives and
increases in the activities of his countrymen. As was said of another,
“Would you see his monument, look about you.” The destiny Germany is
working out is the one he bequeathed her; all this fair fruition is
the flower of his seeding. The Kaiser may continue his idolatry of his
grandfather by sowing the empire with statues of the war emperor, but
the people do not for a moment forget that the man who previsioned and
compelled these results was he at the feet of whose grim statue we
uncover in deep respect in the evening calm of the Königs-Platz. The
hand was the hand of Bismarck.
[Illustration]
LONDON
7 P.M. TO 8 P.M.
It will probably have seemed to many that in London the evening hour
between seven and eight o’clock is the most distinctive and significant
of the twenty-four, the one that is most expressive of the city’s real
life and character. It has something in its mellowness and repose
that stimulates in the spectator a subtle receptiveness and quickens
a special sensitiveness to the trooping impressions of this manifold,
multi-faceted community. One comes nearest then to truly “sensing”
colossal, world-weary, indomitable London, as she relaxes a gracious
hour to catch breath in the turmoil and struggle that has endured for
more than a dozen centuries. For quite the same reason as you would not
say that the ocean is most characteristic in either calm or storm, but
rather when rolling in long and steady swells, so London is not so much
her real self at her most vacant hour of sunrise when the milk carts
clatter where the omnibuses usually are and the street lights turn as
wan and sickly as the tramps on the benches, nor yet at the height of
her turbulence when busy men are dashing hatless about Cheapside and
loaded drays are delayed for hours in traffic blocks, but rather in
the agreeable period of early evening “let-up” while truce is effective
between the working-hours of day and the playing-hours of night.
Of course, “let-up” is meant in a comparative sense only, for in
the bright lexicon of London there is properly no such word; but
there comes at seven o’clock at least as much of a lull as is ever
to be looked for here. The savage roar of the streets is dulled to a
deep growl, the crowds become shuffling and idle and their relative
depletion and the proportionate activity and congestion in restaurants,
_pensions_, and hotel dining-rooms are eloquent of the fact that the
great city is now engaged in solemn rites before the Roast Beef of
Old England. Nor does the altered complexion of things come amiss to
the distracted foreign visitors who, though at odds in everything
else, are of one opinion in this, that, without reservation on the
part of humor, during the greater part of the day they cannot see
London for the people. By that they mean that the life of the streets
is so intense and so varied that it proves a serious distraction
from taking adequate note of the appearance and significance of the
city itself. It is, therefore, with profound satisfaction that they
welcome an hour in which they may devote a portion of their energy to
something more edifying than jostling pedestrians or escaping sudden
and sordid destruction by motor-car, hansom, or bus. It is now that
the town throws off the yoke of its drivers and the very buildings
become instinct with individuality and character. Every little dim and
noiseless square, each broad and lordly park, the massive mansions of
the great whose names have been in history for ages, business blocks
of Old-World charm to which trade seems the merest incident, blackened
pavements and Wren’s slender steeples, every memory-haunted nook and
corner, all wrought by smoke and fog to a blood-brotherhood of neutral
tones, are joining the song Father Thames is singing of dignity, power,
and grandeur,—all breathe the common exultation of being London. It is
more than Self-Assertion. It is Apotheosis!
If this may seem an extravagant idea to some, it is certain there can
be but one mind as to the relief that comes with the “let-up.” It
gives a man a chance to find himself after being lost and daunted and
disheartened all day, and to square off and give the giant a good look
between the eyes and happily attain to some just impression. “Some just
impression” is doubtless within the possibilities, but any complete
one is not. London is so vast in territory, interests, activities, and
history—such a “monstrous tuberosity of civilized life,” as Carlyle
observed—that it effectually defies comprehension. It cannot be taken
in. Look south on it from Hornsey or Primrose Hill, or west on it from
Blackwell or the Greenwich Observatory, or east from the top of the
opera house at Hammersmith, or north from Crystal Palace, and you may
see a vast prairie of house-tops and sharp, aspiring steeples and
irregular, twisting streets, but you also observe quite the same kind
of prairies rolling away under the horizon beyond your ken. If one were
to try such an experiment right at the heart of things, futility would
still be obvious, for either the Victoria Tower of Parliament or the
slightly higher dome of St. Paul’s lifts you only four hundred feet
above the pavement to hang like a lookout in midocean. There might be
hope of a completer impression if you tried an aëroplane; in which case
prostrate London-town would take the seeming of some fabulous “questing
beste” of the “Morte d’Arthur,” in format the traditional lion, rotund,
monstrous, and oddly marked, half-reclining and gazing fixedly seaward
down the Thames. A monster, indeed, fourteen miles by ten, and of a
vitality so expansive that his nebulous aura pervades an area of seven
hundred square miles! Along his grim, grimy side the Thames draws a
crawling blue band with a deep _U_ for the convenience of his paws as
it swings around the Isle of Dogs, the Regent’s Canal marks him lightly
up the shoulder and clear across the upper body, and along the profile
of the head meanders the marshy River Lea. Odd green patches would
stand for the parks—Regent’s on his back, Hyde, Green, and St. James’s
on his flank, and on his right ear, Victoria. At the present hour he
is speckled with a myriad of lights from the tip of his tail to his
chin-whisker, and doubtless in all respects looks wild enough to daunt
Sir Launcelot himself.
To the average visitor London is the Strand, Fleet Street, Regent
Street, the Embankment, Piccadilly Circus, Trafalgar Square, the
British Museum, and the Tower. But tastes differ in this as in other
things, and Boswell was doubtless justified in amusing himself by
noting how different London was to different people. Opinions on the
subject have always been very decided but hopelessly conflicting.
“Sir,” quoth Dr. Johnson to Boswell at the Mitre Tavern, “the happiness
of London is not to be conceived but by those who have been in it.”
Note Heinrich Heine, on the other hand, observing in his “English
Fragments”: “Do not send a philosopher to London, and, for Heaven’s
sake, do not send a poet. The grim seriousness of all things; the
colossal monotony; the engine-like activity; the moroseness even of
pleasure; and the whole of this exaggerated London will break his
heart.” There is wisdom, as always, in a happy mean; and one might do
worse than to go about his sight-seeing with the whetted curiosity and
flaming imagination of those country children once described by Leigh
Hunt as fancying they see “the Duke of Wellington standing with his
sword drawn in Apsley House, and the Queen, sitting with her crown on,
eating barley-sugar in Buckingham Palace.”
To such a mood as this, evening impressions are fresh and vivid, and
the goggle-eyed stranger, suddenly set down at seven o’clock before the
Shaftesbury Fountain in the centre of Piccadilly Circus,—“feeling in
heart and soul the shock of the huge town’s first presence,”—would
probably have his own opinion of any intimation that there was really
very little doing at that time in view of the hour and the absence
of Londoners in the country. He would rather incline to the view of
the Chinese prince who took one look at the wave of humanity sweeping
across London Bridge and went back to his hotel and wrote home that
he had reached the spot where all human life originates. Certainly
the stranger at Piccadilly Circus would need but one wild glance at
the glare and blaze of lights, the excitement around the “Cri,” the
beckoning bill-boards of the Pavilion, the dazzle of shop windows in
the sweeping curve of the Regent Street quadrant and the tremendous
interweaving of carriages, swift hansoms, delivery bicycles, lumbering
busses, “taxis,” “flys,” and “growlers,” to start him shouting to the
nearest “Bobby” through the roar of the wild surge for safe passage to
the sidewalk—which would be readily and obligingly accomplished by
that calmest and most tranquil of officials, the mere lift of whose
hand is as miraculously effective as the presence of a regiment at
“charge.”
And yet the intimation to the stranger would be entirely within
the facts, for a good proportion of Londoners are too far away to
hear the seven o’clock bells ring in town. The Briton’s passion
for out of doors leads him far afield. Thousands are at this hour
in the surf at Brighton or strolling on the terraced streets of
the chalk cliffs there; hundreds are at Harrow enjoying the wide
prospect beloved by the boy Byron; others in the pleasant villages of
Hatfield and St. Albans; some are spying for deer in Epping Forest;
and a happy multitude is turning from the “Maze” and Dutch Gardens
of Hampton Court to roll homeward by brake and motor-car along the
incomparable chestnut avenue of Bushy Park, among the placid deer of
Richmond, and the manifold delights of Kew Gardens. For hours the
“tubes,” surface cars, and busses have been working to capacity to
get business men home, and loaded trains have been groaning out of
Charing Cross, Euston, Paddington, St. Pancras, Victoria, and Waterloo.
They have all arrived by now at their various destinations—around
the picturesque Common of Clapham, the breezy heights of Highgate,
the river greens of Hammersmith, the lush meadows of Dulwich, the
stuccoed villas of Islington, the quietude of Bethnal Green, or the
wooded gardens of Brixton Road. Fancy residential property, in every
guise of architectural surprises, is drowsing in the shade of elm
and oak and poplar and humming to the contented chatter of reunited
families. The fortunate stranger whom Sir Launcelot has “asked down”
to “Joyous Garde” is reveling in the generous roast that makes its
august appearance between courses of Scotch salmon and Surrey fowl,
and presently there will be politics and Havanas after the ladies have
left, and later on a general assembling in a serene walled garden
with light laughter and low-voiced talk and mild discussion of
water-parties, dinners, and dances.
The London parks are in full revelry now, with bands at play and
tens of thousands of loiterers crowding the benches and moving along
broad, graveled walks under the deep shadows of old elms and in the
fragrance of trim flowerbeds. At Hampstead Heath, for example, not so
much as the ghost of a highwayman haunts the bracken-carpeted hills,
and East-Enders are out there in force along “Judge’s Walk,” and in
the “Vale of Health” that Keats and Leigh Hunt admired, or up at the
“Flagstaff” inspecting “Jack Straw’s Castle,” as Dickens so often did,
or speculating upon the sources of the ponds with as much aplomb as
ever did Mr. Pickwick himself.
Down on rugged and untamed Blackheath the band is playing at “The
Point,” and in all that region where Wat Tyler and Jack Cade stirred
Kent to rebellion the talk is now of London docks and the latest scores
of the golfers.
Up at airy Victoria Park the swans in the ponds and the chaffinches in
the hawthorn bushes are performing to enthusiastic audiences, and the
Gothic Temple of the Victoria Fountain is rimmed with rough gallants
and the “Sallies of their Alleys” who betray no inclination to “attempt
from Love’s sickness to fly.”
The cyclists are foregathered at picturesque Battersea Park and
chatting with their sweethearts over tea in the refreshment rooms,
while hundreds of unemployed who can afford neither bicycle,
sweetheart, nor tea gaze gloomily on the gorgeous blooms of the
sub-tropical garden, loll over the balustrade of the long Thames
embankment, and end up by sprawling face down on the grass or dozing
fitfully on the benches.
Perhaps the largest outpouring of all is at ever popular Regent’s Park,
preferred by the substantial middle-class,—long noted, like George
I, for virtues rather than accomplishments. Doubtless they are now
rambling through the Zoo, exploring the Botanic Gardens where flowered
borders and large stone urns are spilling over with brilliant color,
watching the driving in the “Outer Circle,” or swelling the throng on
the long Board Walk. Hundreds on these shady acres are taking their
ease with all the unction of Arden:—
“Under the greenwood tree
Who loves to lie with me,
And tune his merry note,
Unto the sweet bird’s throat.”
In all probability tremendous admiration is being expressed at
aristocratic Hyde Park, as usual, for the broad reaches of velvety
turf and the venerable oaks and elms. More than one will indulge a
pleasant reverie over the dead and gone who have braved it there—Pepys
in his new yellow coach, dainty ladies in powder and patches flashing
sparkling eyes on the gallants, and the scented, unhappy beaux who have
sighed with Shenstone along these _allées_:
“When forced from dear Hebe to go
What anguish I felt at my heart.”
Across the Serpentine in the children’s paradise of Kensington Gardens
we should find that the Board Walk and the “Round Pond” lose none of
their drawing-power with the years and that the fountains and flowers
are as beautiful and as highly prized as ever. There is the additional
attraction of having a chance, by keeping a sharp eye on the tops of
the tall ash-trees, of catching a glimpse of Peter Pan preparing to fly
home to his mother’s window.
The exclusive shades of Green Park and St. James’s have a convenient
nearness that entices hundreds from the roaring thoroughfares of the
neighborhood, and at this hour their old elms and graceful bowers
give impartially of their repose and peace to hearts that are heavy
and hearts that are gay. It would seem inevitable that thoughts must
come of the royal and princely companies that once trod these ways—of
Charles II, at least, strolling in St. James’s surrounded by his dogs,
pausing a while to feed his ducks and then tripping gayly up the
“Green Walk” for a chat with Nell Gwynn over the garden wall, while
scandalized John Evelyn hurries home to make note in his journal of “a
very familiar discourse between the King and Mrs. Nelly.”