Surely life in Berlin can be made very attractive, but after a long residence there I am convinced that it has little religious life. The climate is depressing, the expense of living great, two other detractions. Potsdam, Sans Souci, Charlottenburg Tegel, and many other places in the suburbs, are, historically and naturally, charming resorts.
It is more compensating in Europe to go from place to place with some special work or subject in view than to go for mere sight-seeing. Your special work brings you nearer the people. If your landlady asks you what it is, and you take the trouble to tell her, she or some of her friends will at once see that you know all their acquaintances who are engaged in the same line of inquiry, and while the new acquaintances may not be socially or intellectually your ideals, yet their conversation will help you in the language and give you many opportunities.
Dresden I only know through hard work in the galleries, as though all its sights are familiar—the Schloss, Green Vaults with their immense treasures, the Military Museum, Museum of Natural History, the Grand Opera House, the Frauenkirche, Japanese Palace, cafés, coinages and statues; yet the picture gallery, with its priceless “Madonna di San Sisto” of Raphael is to me the starting point of interest and the essence of Dresden life.
From eight o’clock in the morning until four o’clock in the afternoon faithful copyists labor in the gallery. The price received for their work scarcely keeps them from starving. To go in among them for a time and work and feel as they do, enlarges one’s sympathies, and teaches one to love the masterpieces of the great artists. To the uninitiated in such matters it may be well to explain that before the permission is given to copy a picture in any of the European galleries, a good deal of red tape must be looked after, especially in Germany. The director demands a specimen of the applicant’s work, which must be a study from nature, either figure or landscape or still life. It is with considerable trepidation that the office of the “Herr Director” is entered. If the applicant is successful, he or she comes out with an elaborate paper containing the agreement, the name of picture to be copied, the number, room, etc., with the director’s name and the seal attached. One of the gallerie diener, as they are called in Germany, takes you under his care, arranges an easel, a piece of carpet, a rest-stick and table. You are recognized among the copyists, and the hat of every gallerie diener is raised at your approach or departure. When you have finished, the inspector is allowed to criticise your work. You must pay the diener who has waited upon you some trink geld, or a fee, as we would express it. At noon you can eat your cold lunch, in company with the other copyists, in front of a Raphael or a Correggio, a Titian or a Rubens, scrutinize its merits or laugh at its blunders, or speculate on the old master’s methods of using their pigments, without being amenable to any court. An artist’s life is a life of liberty—of thought, at least. Many of these copyists spend their afternoons in sketching, thus establishing their originality and emancipating themselves from servile observance of other men’s methods. In company with these plodding, intelligent artists, I have spent many delightful hours sketching in the “Alt Markt,” or the Zwinger, or at Sans Souci or Charlottenburg.
I have often wondered if the little Greek church in the suburbs of Dresden was as attractive to all travelers as to me. It is surrounded on one side by golden wheat fields, with red poppies and dark blue corn flowers growing among it. Its gilded dome, semi-domes, and minarets, shine like blazing lights against the dark blue sky. The style is such pure Byzantine and the inside so perfect in its appointments, and yet so simple; the service conducted in so solemn and devout a spirit, there seems to be much to impress the looker-on. There are no seats. On one side stand the women and on the other side the men, and before the altar the patriarch, or priest. The service is short, consisting almost entirely of singing by the men and boys, without the aid of an instrument. When the plate is passed for the collection it contains a roll of bread, the meaning of which I have never discovered, although James Freeman Clark may give it in the account of the Greek church in his “Ten Great Religions.” Their belief that the Holy Ghost proceeds from the Father, and not from the Father and Son, seems to be the most essential difference in prayer between the English Church and the Greek.
A summer in the Harz Mountains, taking in Weimar and Eisenach, and the “Wartburg,” is a charming experience. To find out that one can live in this age in so interesting a retreat as Weimar, for twenty dollars a month, gives back some of the simplicity to German life.
To a student of Goethe, Schiller, Wieland and Herder, no spot offers more pleasure than the quiet, old streets and groves and houses of Weimar. A mere drive through the park, passing Goethe’s summer house and on out to “Tiefert,” where the Grand Duchess Amelia held her little court, and the open air theater attracted a charming coterie to listen to Goethe or Schiller in some representation, re-awakens the genius of the times and arouses the appetite of the traveler for more acquaintance with the place. The next drive or stroll through the park will prove that every stone contains some rhyme, and every bench some association with those great men. There is a line to Frau Von Stein in the garden of Goethe’s country house, an elegy engraved on the stone as one ascends to the Roman house in the park. The front approach to this house is not so attractive, but the back is a fascinating place. It contains on the first floor an open room with round table and benches, where the Duke and his poets sat for hours, looking over the old stone steps into the park. A short stroll from there brings one to the large open space, in the middle of the park, which was laid out by Goethe, and represents precisely the dimensions of St. Peter’s in Rome. The immense ground plot of that church is here to be recognized more definitely than when one stands under its dome.
The grand ducal palace at Weimar contains one unique room, while all the others are handsome. The one which differs from similar palatial apartments is frescoed with scenes from the works of Weimar’s great poets. The halls are silent and one longs to see little fat Karl August step out of a saal or the Duchess Amelia greet Goethe or Schiller on the stairway as in days of yore. Mr. Lewis, in his life of Goethe, portrays such scenes with a graphic pen.
In 1832 the house in the Goethe-platz was left vacant by its great occupant. Its art treasures, its library, its various collections, showing how comprehensive Goethe’s mind was, and how many things he had investigated, were abandoned, as all human efforts must be abandoned, when the silent messenger calls the soul into the presence of its Great Creator. If self-denial is required of those on earth who hope to enter into his rest, then who can answer for Goethe? But surely the choir of angels in “Faust” sing beautifully of it:
“Christ is arisen,