This was all true enough, and we assented. The guide continued, Did not the king take the public money to make beautiful museums for the people, where they could study the fine arts?—and did our government do any such thing?
I thought of our surplus revenue, and laid my hand on my mouth. But yet there is a progress of democratic principle indicated by this very understanding that the king is to hold things for the benefit of the people. Times are altered since Louis XIV. was instructed by his tutor, as he looked out on a crowd of people, "These are all yours;" and since he said, "L'élot, c'est moi"
Our guide seemed to feel bound, however, to exhaust himself in comparison of our defects with their excellences.
"Some Prussians went over to America to live," he said, "and had to come back again; they could not live there."
"Why not?" said I.
"O, they said there was nothing done there but working and going to church!"
"That's a fact," said W., with considerable earnestness.
"Yes," said our guide; "they said we have but one life to live, and we want to have some comfort in it."
It is a curious fact, that just in proportion as a country is free and self-governed it has fewer public amusements. America and Scotland have the fewest of any, and Italy the most. Nevertheless, I am far from thinking that this is either necessary or desirable: the subject of providing innocent public amusements for the masses is one that we ought seriously to consider. In Berlin, and in all other German cities, there are gardens and public grounds in which there are daily concerts of a high order, and various attractions, to which people can gain admittance for a very trifling sum. These refine the feelings, and cultivate the taste; they would be particularly useful in America in counteracting that tendency to a sordid materialism, which is one of our great national dangers.
We went over the Berlin Museum. In general style Greek—but Greek vitalized by the infusion of the German mind. In its general arrangements one of the most gorgeous and impressive combinations of art which I have seen. Here are the great frescoes of Kaulbach, Cornelius, and other German artists, who have so grafted Grecian ideas into the German stock that the growth has the foliage and coloring of a new plant. One set of frescoes, representing the climate and scenery of Greece, had on me a peculiar and magical effect. Alas! there never has been the Greece that we conceive; we see it under the soft, purple veil of distance, like an Alpine valley embraced by cloudy mountains; but there was the same coarse dust and débris of ordinary life there as with us. The true Arcadia lies beyond the grave. The collection of pictures is rich in historic curiosities—valuable as marking the progress of art. One Claude Lorraine here was a matchless specimen—a perfect victory over all the difficulties of green landscape painting.