It is true that we in America are living in a glass house to some extent in these matters, but where in all Germany is there any modern sculpture to compare with our Nathan Hale, our Minute Man, and that most spirited bit of modern plastic art in all the world, the Shaw Monument in Boston? You cannot stand in front of it without keeping time, and here lips of bronze sing the song of patriotism till your heart thumps, and you are ready to throw up your hat as the splendid young figure and his negro soldiers march by--and they do march by! It is almost a consolation for what Boston has done to that gallant soldier and humble servant of God, that modest gentleman, Phillips Brooks. In a statue to him they have travestied the virtues he expounded, slain the ideal of the Christ he preached, theatricalized the least theatrical of men, and placed this piece of mortifying misunderstanding in bronze under the very eaves of the house that grew out of his simple eloquence. There is in Leipsic a similar misdemeanor in a statue of Beethoven. He sits, naked to the waist, in a bronze chair, with a sort of bath-towel drapery of colored marble about his legs, and an eagle in front of him. He has a chauffeurish expression of anxious futility, as though he were about to run over the eagle.
Men are without great dreams in these days, and art is elaborate and fussy and self-conscious. The technical part of the work is predominant. One sees the artist holding up a mirror to himself as he works. Pygmalion congratulates the statue upon the fact that he carved it, instead of being lost in the love of creating. It is as though a lover should sing of himself instead of singing of his lady. The subtle poison of self-advertisement has crept in, and peers like a satyr from the picture and from the statue. Even the most prominent name in German music at this writing is that of a man who is notorious as an expert salesman of symphonic sensationalism.
Though the streets are so well kept, the buildings in these miles of new streets are flimsy-looking, and evidently the work of the speculative builder. The more pretentious buildings ape a kind of Nuremberg Renaissance style, and are as effective as a castle made of cardboard. This does not imply that there are not simple and solid buildings in Berlin and, in the case of the new library and a score of other buildings, worthy architecture; but the general impression is one of haste multiplied by plaster.