Catching sight of an elegant, well-starched gentleman strutting and waddling and prancing toward me, I had the melancholy thought: “And poor little ill-dressed neglected children? Is it possible that such a well-dressed, elaborately groomed, splendidly tailored and upholstered, beringed and jewelbehung, spick-and-span beau of a gentleman does not give a moment’s thought to poor young creatures who go about often enough in rags, show a sad lack of care and attention, and are lamentably neglected? Is the peacock not a little uneasy? Does this Adult Gentleman who goes about so beautifully not feel in any way whatsoever concerned when he sees dirty speckled little children? It seems to me that no mature man ought to want to appear all elegance as long as there are children who have no finery to wear at all.”
But one might have just as much right to say that nobody ought to go to concerts, or visit the theater, or enjoy any other kind of amusement as long as there are prisons in the world and places of punishment with unhappy prisoners in them. This is of course asking too much. And if anyone were to wait content and enjoying life until finally the world should contain no more poor miserable people, then he would be waiting until the gray impenetrable end of all time, and until the ice-cold empty end of the world, and by then all joy and life itself would in all probability be utterly gone from him.
A disheveled, discomfited, spent, and tremulous charwoman, extraordinarily weak and weary, and yet hurrying along because she evidently still had many more things to do, reminded me for an instant of spoiled, pampered little girls, or larger girls, who are often ignorant, or seem to know what sort of delicate elegant occupation or diversion to pass the day with, and who perhaps are never thoroughly tired, who consider all day and for weeks on end what they can wear to increase the polish of their appearance, and who have time and to spare for long meditations on the subject, whence continually more and more exaggerated refinements wrap round their persons and sweet confectionlike little forms.
But I am myself usually a lover and admirer of such amiable, utterly pampered moonbeam maidens, beautiful, delicate, plantlike girls. A charming young thing could command of me whatever might occur to her, I would blindly obey her. Oh, how beautiful beauty is, and how charming is charm!
Once more I return to the topic of architecture and building, and here a bit, or spot, of art and literature will need consideration.
But first a note: the cleaning of ancient, noble, dignified, historic places and buildings, with their traceries of ornamental flowers, reveals considerable bad taste. Whoever does this, or causes it to be done, sins against the spirit of dignity and beauty, and injures the lovely remembrance of ancestors, who were as brave as they were noble. Second, never garland and conceal the architecture of fountains with flowers. Of course, flowers in themselves are beautiful; but they do not exist to declarify and erase the noble austerity and austere beauty of images in stone. At any time the predilection for flowers can deteriorate into a foolish mania. Personalities, magistrates, whom this concerns, may make inquiries in the authoritative circles as to whether I am right, and thereafter be kind enough to behave nicely.
To mention two beautiful and interesting edfices, which powerfully arrested me and claimed my attention to an unusual degree, it may be said that as I followed my road farther I came to a delightful, curious chapel, which I immediately named Brentano’s Chapel, because I saw that it dated from the fantastical, golden-aureoled, half-bright and half-dark age of the Romantics. I recalled Brentano’s great wild, dark, temptestuous novel Godwi. Lofty, slender, arched windows gave this most original and peculiar building a delicate, delightful appearance, and laid upon it the spirit of enchantment, spirit of inwardness and the meditative life. There came to my mind fiery and profound landscape descriptions by the poet mentioned above, particularly the account of German oak forests. Soon after this I was standing in front of a villa called Terrasse, which reminded me of the painter Karl Stauffer-Bern, who lived and stayed here for a time, and, simultaneously, of certain very superb, noble edifices which lie on the Tiergar-tenstrasse in Berlin, and which, owing to the austere, majestical, and simple classical style to which they give expression, are congenial and worth seeing. To me, Stauffer’s House and Brentano’s Chapel were monuments to two worlds which are to be strictly distinguished from each other, each being in its curious way graceful, entertaining, and significant: here a measured, cool elegance; there the exuberant, deep-minded dream, here something subtle and beautiful, and there something subtle and beautiful, but in substance and structure completely different from the other, although each lies near to the other in point of time. Evening is now gradually beginning to fall upon my walk, and its quiet end, I think, cannot any more be very far away.
Perhaps this is just the place for a few everyday things and street events, each in its turn: a splendid piano factory and also other factories and company buildings; an avenue of poplars close beside a black river, men, women, children, electric trams croaking along, each with a responsible field marshal or general peering out, a troupe of charmingly chequered and spotted pale-colored cows, peasant women on farm carts, and the rolling of wheels and cracking of whips thereto appertaining, several heavily laden, high-towering beer wagons and beer barrels, homeward-bound workers streaming and storming out of the factories, the overwhelming sight and actuality of all this mass, and the relevant curious thoughts; goods wagons with goods, coming from the goods station, an entire traveling and wandering circus with elephants, horses, dogs, zebras, giraffes, fierce lions locked in lion cages, with Singalese, Indians, tigers, monkeys, and creepy-crawly crocodiles, girl rope dancers and polar bears, and all the requisite opulence of camp followers, servants, packs of performers and staff; further: boys armed with wooden rifles, imitating the European War as they unleash all the furies of war, a small scoundrel singing the song “One Hundred Thousand Frogs,” of which he is mightily proud; further: foresters and woodsmen with trucks full of wood, two or three splendid pigs, whereat the lively imagination of the observer greedily paints him a picture of the deliciousness and acceptability of a marvelously redolent, already roast joint of pork, which is understandable; a farmhouse with a motto over the entrance, two Bohemian, Galician, Slav, Wend, or even gypsy girls in red boots and with jet-black eyes and ditto hair, at the sight of whom one thinks perhaps of the plummy novel The Gypsy Princess, which actually happens in Hungary, though it makes little difference, or of Preziosa, which is of course of Spanish origin, but there is no need to take it literally. Further, in the way of shops: paper, meat, clock, shoe, hat, iron, cloth, grocery, spice, fancy goods, millinery, bakery, and confectionery shops. And everywhere on all these things delicious evening sun. Further, much noise and uproar, schools and schoolteachers, the latter with weighty and dignified faces, landscapes and air and much else that is picturesque. Further, not to be overlooked or forgotten: signs and advertisements, as: “Persil,” or “Maggi’s Unsurpassed Soups,” or “Continental Rubber Heels Enormously Durable,” or “Freehold Property for Sale,” or “The Best Milk Chocolate,” and I honestly know not what else. If one were to count until everything had been accurately enumerated, one would never reach the end. People with insight feel and observe this fact. A placard or board struck me especially; it read as follows: