CHAPTER XV.

BERLIN-SOCIETY AND THE ARTS.

WHEN you come direct from Vienna to Berlin, the change is, socially speaking, about as complete as it well can be. In the one, all is elegance and pleasure; in the other, nothing is thought too serious to be every one's habitual occupation. The most abstruse questions are looked upon as mere "daily bread;" and for the finer condiments of existence, you must have recourse to the most nebulous speculations of transcendental philosophy. The clever author of 'La Philosophie du Droit,' Lerminier, has said, truly enough, in his 'Lettres d'un Berlinois," "Ils ont l'habitude de l'infini ;" and this is unluckily correct. In the first place, it makes them pedantic; and in the next, it renders them unpractical. They have all of them, more or less, their Utopia; and if this produces eccentricity amongst the women, and

those of the other sex, who remain within the sphere of private life, in the more stirring amongst the men, it has gone nigh to produce irretrievable mischief to

the State.

I know of nothing more accurately descriptive of the school to which belong many more than mere revolutionists in the north of Germany, than the following Steckbrief, or advertisement, to aid in the apprehension of a man convicted of high treason: "He is of the Lutheran Confession, and of middle height," so runs the document, "strongly built, and of healthy aspect, with a high forehead, and a long he has fair, curly hair, and has studied theology in Leipsick!"

nose;

Well done for an intelligent Steckbrief that will catch neither thief nor traitor, for it gives the portrait of the whole genus! So are they all, more or less-" blondes gekraustes Haar und studierte zu Leipzig die Theologie!" Why, since the day when the Devil, in the shape of Mephistopheles, instructed the scholar in "Faust" in the " way that he should go," they have done nothing else but "study theology in Leipsick," and that is why they are sorry doctors of divinity, and most profoundly lamentable politicians. "Fair, curly hair, and studied theology in Leipsick!" Alas! alas!

This is the Frosch-Spiegelberg race; (let my

reader look over "Faust" and Schiller's "Robbers," if he wish to see how exact is the resemblance).

But do not imagine that these are the only specimens of intelligent humanity to be met with in Berlin. Every one is not demented in the Prussian capital; take to witness Groddeck, who has published, and who openly delivered a lecture (in Latin by the bye) upon the new form of insanity, entitled "Nova Insania Forma; or, the Democratic Sickness."* But these are the weeds of a garden too large for all its walks to be kept in order, but where, in the better trimmed portions, flowers are plentiful. The male gramen we have seen; I will just, en passant, remark that the female weed is called Bettina,† and is the perfect type of the whole race.

Now I will not affirm that the ladies of Berlin are too blue, but they are "woundy learned," as Tony Lumpkin says, and it is lucky for you if you do not find yourself called upon to decide a knotty

* "De Morbo Democratico, nova Insania forma," by C. Th. Groddeck, M.D. Berlin, 1850.

† Bettina Brentano, the very clever author of "Göthe's Correspondence with a Child," and of one or two other rhapsodies, such as: "Diess Buch gehört dem König," the wife of the poet, Arnim,-"A nosegay of pretty flowers," says of her own brother, "but not tied together." Au demeurant, a most eccentric person, who might have "studied theology in Leipsick" with the best of them.

point concerning literature in the days of Rhâmesès, even whilst you are sucking an orange at a Damen Caffee, or if you do not have the smoked Hamburgh beef rammed down your throat by an unexpected shot from Hegel or Kant. These Damen Caffees, where ladies assemble after dinner to discuss ham, chocolate, and psychology, are formidable things, let me tell you, and not to be encountered lightly. Corinne's tea was nothing to them, (I always suspected the cups filled by "Miladi," whose name I forget, to have contained a great deal more milk and water than anything else), the coffee parties of Berlin are a very different sort of affair, and have a perfume of Molière and "Les Femmes Savantes," to be scented a mile off.

But now the excess of thing never exists anywhere without the thing itself, of which it is the excess undeniably existing also; and if, in some societies of Berlin, you meet with Bélise, and even the "Précieuses Ridicules," it is your own fault if you do not discover the Hôtel Rambouillet, of which these are the caricature. The refinement of the society whence sprung the grand siècle of Louis XIV., its tone of decorum, its love of intellectual pursuits and pleasures are not to be judged of in Molière's lighter pieces, and he himself proved that, when he wrote the "Misanthrope," for there, in the salon of

Celimène is the Hôtel Rambouillet as it really was, and we all know that Alceste is no other than the Duc de Montansier, husband of Madame de Rambouillet's daughter, Julie d'Angennes; I think then that the salon where Bossuet read his first sermons; where Corneille read his tragedies and of which Madame de Sévigné is the truest representative, scarcely needs to be defended against its detractors, and the ladies of Berlin will hardly feel offended if I say their handsome city abounds in Hôtels Rambouillet.

I will not take any other type in France, because no other is exact; the salons of Berlin are not, as in Paris, salons de causerie, where everything is talked of; no! they are, I repeat it, salons where everything is discussed; politics, philosophical subjects, the more learned questions of science, and the lighter questions of art, all are taken into serious consideration; but the difference between these and the French drawing-rooms is, that here, however light may be the subject in itself, nothing is lightly handled.

Now, it will be objected this must lead to heaviness and inevitable ennui, and that to hear the peculiarities of Jenny Lind's talent examined as ought to be a treatise on the Cunei-formed alphabet, must be insufferable-not a bit; but there is an originality