have somewhere in us a little sample, some fibres and corpuscles, of the German heart. And I maintain that we are all of us the better, of whatever nationality (and most, perhaps, we rather too-too solid Anglo-Saxons) for such transfusion of a foreign element, correcting our deficiencies and faults, and ripening (as the literature of Italy ripened our Elizabethans) our own intrinsic qualities. It means, apart from negative service against conceit and canting self-aggrandisement, an additional power of taking life intelligently and serenely; a power of adaptation to various climates and diets of the spirit, let alone the added wealth of such varied climates and diets themselves. Italy, somehow, attains this by her mere visible aspect and her history: a pure, high sky, a mountain city, or a row of cypresses can teach as much as Dante, and, indeed, teach us to understand Dante himself. While as to France, that most lucid of articulately-speaking lands, explains herself in her mere books; and we become in a manner French with every clear, delightful page we read, and almost every thought of our own we ever think with definiteness and grace. But the genius of Germany is, like her landscape, homely and sentimental, with the funny goodness and dearness of a good child; and we must learn to know it while we ourselves are children. And therefore it is from our governesses that we learn (with dimmer knowledge of mysterious persons or things "Ulfilas"—"Tacitus's Germania," supposed by me to have been a lady, his daughter perhaps, and the "seven stars" of German literature) a certain natural affinity with the Germany of humbler and greater days, when no one talked of Teuton superiority or of purity of Teuton idiom; the Germany which gave Kant, and Beethoven, and Goethe and Schiller, and was not ashamed to say "scharmant."

I, too, was taught to say "scharmant" and "amüsiren". It was wrong, very wrong; and I feel my inferiority every time I come to Germany, and have to pause and think by what combination of words I can express the true Germanic functions and nature of booking offices and bicycle labels. For it was long ago: Count Bismarck was still looked on as a dangerous upstart, and we reckoned in kreutzers; blue and white Austrian bands played at Mainz and Frankfurt. It was long ago that I was, so to speak, a small German infant, fed on Teutonic romance and sentiment (and also funny Teutonic prosaicalness, bless it!) by a dim procession of Germania's daughters. There was Franziska, who could boast a Rhineland pastor for grandfather, a legendary pastor bearding Napoleon; Franziska, who read Schiller's "Maria Stuart" and "Joan of Arc," and even his "Child Murderess" (I remember every word of obloquy hurled at the hangman—"hangman, craven hangman, canst thou not break off a lily") to the housemaid and me whenever my father and mother went out of an evening; and described "Papagena," in Mozart's opera which she had seen, all dressed in feathers; and was tempted to strum furtive melancholy chords on my mother's zither…. Dear Franziska, whose comfortable blond good looks inspired the enamoured upholsterer in letters beginning "My dearest little goldfish"—Franziska, what has become of thee? And the Frau Professor, who averred with rhythmic iteration that teaching such a child was far, far worse than breaking stones on a high-road; in what stony regions may she have found an honoured stony grave? What has become of genial Mme. E., who played the Jupiter Symphonie with my mother, instead of hearing me through my scales, and lent me volumes of Tonkünstler-Lexikons to soothe her conscience, and gave us honey in the comb out of her garden of verbena and stocks? But best of all, dearest, far above all the others, and quite different, Marie S., charming enthusiastic young schoolmistress in that little town of pepper-pot towers and covered bridges, you I have found again; I shall soon see your eyes and hear your voice, quite unchanged, I am certain. And we shall sit and talk (your big daughter listening, perhaps not without an occasional smile) about those hours which you and I, a girl of twenty and a child of eleven, spent in the little room above the rushing Alpine river, eating apples and drinking café au lait; hours in which a whole world of legend and poetry, and scientific fact and theory more wonderful still, passed from your ardent young mind into the little eager puzzled one of your loving pupil. We shall meet very soon, a little awkwardly at first, perhaps, but after a moment talking as if no silence of thirty years had ever parted us; as if nothing had happened in between, as if all that might then have come true … well, could come true still.

These thoughts came into my head that morning in the promenade at Cassel, brought to the surface by the mellow autumn sun and the special pleasure of being again in Germany. There mingled with them also that recent conversation about the lady with the bonnet from Hanover, who had written that paper so precious to my American friend. And I determined to take my pen some day I should feel suitably happy, and offer up thanks for all of us to our governesses, to those dear women, dead, dispersed, faded into distance, but not forgotten; our spiritual foster-mothers who put a few drops of the milk of German kindness, of German simplicity and quaintness and romance, between our lips when we were children.

ON GOING TO THE PLAY

We were comparing notes the other day on plays and play-going. My friend was Irish; so, finding to our joy that we disliked this form of entertainment equally, we swore with fervour that we would go to the play together.

Mankind may be divided into playgoers and not playgoers; and the first are far more numerous, and also far more illustrious. It evidently is a defect, and perhaps a sign of degeneracy, akin to deafness or to Daltonism, not to enjoy the theatre; not to enjoy it, at least in the reality, when there or just after coming away. For I can enjoy the thought of the play, and the thought of other folks liking it, so long as I am not taken there. There is something pleasant in thinking of those brilliant places, full of unrealities, with crowds engulfing themselves into this light from out of the dreary, foggy streets. Also, of young enthusiastic creatures, foregoing dinner, waiting for hours in cheap seats (like Charles and Mary Lamb before they had money to buy rare prints and blue china), with the delight of spending hoarded pennies; all under circumstances of the deepest bodily discomfort. I leave out of the question the thought of Greek theatres, of that semicircle of steps on the top of Fiesole, with, cypresses for side scenes, and, even now, lyric tragedies more than Æschylean enacted by clouds and winds in the amphitheatre of mountains beyond. I am thinking of the play as we moderns know it, with a sense of stuffiness as an integral part. Indeed, that stuffiness is by no means its worst feature. The most thrilling moment, I will confess, which theatres can still give me is that—but it is really sui generis and ineffable—when, having got upstairs, you meet in the narrow lobbies of an old-fashioned playhouse the tuning of the fiddles and the smell—of gas, glue, heaven knows what glories of yester-year—which, ever since one's babyhood, has come to mean "the play." People have expended much genius and more money to make theatrical representation transcend imagination; but they can never transcend that moment in the corridor, never transcend that smell.

Here is, most probably, one of my chief motives of dissatisfaction. I do not like the play—the play at the theatre—because it invariably falls short of that in my imagination. I make an exception for music; but not for the visible theatrical accompaniments thereof. Well given on the stage, Don Giovanni, for instance, remains but the rather bourgeois play of Molière; leave me and the music together, and I promise you that all the romance and terror and wonder of ten thousand