By the way, right here in Worms, in the part of the city that looks about as it did in Luther’s time, we were wandering down a narrow street when we were stopped by familiar music, the popular two-step, “Whistling Rufus.” The German bands play a great deal of American music, mostly Sousa’s marches or our “ragtime,” and it always gets an encore. At Heidelberg the military band played “Hiawatha.” For two years it has been almost against the law in the United States to play “Hiawatha.” But the Germans liked it. I don’t think the German bands play ragtime properly. They go at it seriously, as they do the selections from Wagner and such like which make up most of the program. They add a good deal of noise and they do not get the “swing” that is given by American musicians.
I have discovered in Germany that Wagner and his kind of composers wrote a lot of good music that never gets across the water, the kind that has tune to it,—not so much tune as Sousa’s pieces, but a good deal more than is ever rendered in the United States. And I suppose the German bands understand Wagnerian music better than the American bands, just as Sousa can direct a better two-step or march than a German conductor. A German municipal band or military band, such as plays every night in one of the public parks in every city, is as good a band as Sousa or Innes ever took on the road. I am not a musical critic, I am thankful to say. I like music whether it is good, bad, or indifferent. I like grand opera some and light opera a great deal. I enjoy a fine band or a poor one, a selection from Chopin or a street piano. I will follow a band, a drum corps or a bagpipe all over town. I am even fond of the “Blue Bells of Scotland.” Probably my recommendations will not be accepted by all the musical experts at home after these admissions, but I can’t keep from saying that German band music is the best in this world to which I have been introduced.
I have written of the growing use of the English-American language on the continent of Europe. Here at Worms we are stopping at a very Dutch hotel. When the waiter came for the first time I went to work in German. The construction of a supper bill of fare in German is not easy for me, but I tackled the job bravely. I know enough German to order meat and potatoes, but my pronunciation is ragged on the edges and my verbs are not hitched right and the genders of the nouns are only likely to be right one guess in three. After I had floundered along for about three minutes the waiter gravely and politely interrupted: “Won’t you please give me the order in English?”
RICH OLD FRANKFORT.
Frankfort, Germany, July 24, 1905.
This is one of the old and wealthy cities of Germany, with 300,000 people and a fine country around about. It is the place the Rothschilds came from. A few years ago when the Populists were pretty much the whole thing in Kansas and to be against them was to be in the pay of the Rothschilds and the Great Red Dragon, I was on the Rothschilds’ side, and never having received any compensation I thought I would call and see what was the matter. It was no trouble to find the Rothschild house, for it is described in every guidebook and is marked by an inscription on the front. The morning after we reached the city we went to formally make a call, and found the place to be an old and unpretentious building. I rang the bell and asked the little girl who came to the door if Mr. Rothschild was at home. She ran away and I went on in and part way up the stairs, when a man appeared and said “fifty pfennig.” I told him I was an old friend and merely wished to pay my respects—pay nothing else, not even fifty pfennig. I talked English and he talked German, but I had no difficulty in understanding that it would cost me 12½ cents American money to go through the house. This I declined to do, and unless the gentleman who wanted the fifty pfennig tells Mr. Rothschild I don’t suppose he will ever know I came. In fact, I was afterward told that none of the present members of the Rothschild family live in Frankfort, but have their homes in Vienna, Paris, and London, where they dictate the financial policy of the world. Only a little over a hundred years ago the law of Frankfort was that every night at sundown and on Sundays and feast days all Jews must stay in their own part of town, and the gates inclosing their section were locked until the following day. As an illustration of how rapidly the wheel of fortune turns I was told that now, although comprising but one-tenth of the population, the Jews handle three-fourths of the business, own over half the real estate, and hold most of the high and responsible positions in Frankfort, where their great grandfathers had no more show than a rabbit.
Goethe, the great German poet, was born in Frankfort, and we visited the house of his birth and boyhood. His father was a lawyer, but the poet could not help that. Young Goethe was a bright lad, and took to writing poetry as readily as he did to going with the girls; and he kept at both occupations all his life. A petty German prince took him under his patronage and Goethe never had to work for a living, so he went on writing poetry and having a good time until he died at the age of 83 years. The Germans love Goethe as the Americans do Longfellow, for he was a poet who loved his country, his countrymen and his country-women, and his works are full of sweet and patriotic sentiment as well as being beautiful in construction. Goethe and his friend Schiller and the literary crowd which followed their lead, made the German language classical and correct, and occupy the same place in German literature that Shakespeare does in English. The “Goethe house” here is under the charge of a historical society, and has been put in the same shape that it was when Goethe was a boy. It is an interesting place, for it is not only full of mementoes of the poet but of the time in which he lived.