Post Office in New York, for instance, or the Auditorium Hotel in
Chicago, with a band of white paper, like newspapers, spread out and
pasted end to end, running along one side, round the corner, and down
the other. Not inches, but yards, rods, two city blocks almost, of
microscopic type; columns of names, arranged in the systematic German
way--lightly wounded, badly wounded--schwer verwundet--gefallen. Some
have died of wounds--tot--some dead in the enemy's country--in
Feindesland gefallen. Rank on rank, blurring off into nothingness,
endless files of type, pale as if the souls of the dead were crowding
here.

One tried to think of the "Categorical Imperative" in a New York
playhouse--of the desperate endeavor to make the young schoolmaster
really look simple and boyish, and yet as if he might have heard of
Kant, and of convincing the two ladies that they lost their sweet
comfortableness by dressing like professional manikins; how the piece
might succeed with luck, or if it could somehow be made fashionable; and
how here, with all the unaffected and affectionate intelligence with
which it was played--and watched--it was but part of the week's work.

And, in spite of the desperation of the time, you might have seen a
dozen such audiences in Berlin, that night--and yet tourists generally
speak of Berlin, compared with some of the German provincial cities, as
a rather graceless, new sort of place, full of bad sculpture and
Prussian arrogance. You might have seen them at the opera or symphony
concerts, at Shakespeare, Strindberg, or the German classics we used to
read in college, or standing in line at six o'clock, sandwiches in hand,
so that they might sit through a performance of "Peer Gynt," with the
Grieg music, beginning at seven and lasting till after eleven. A
wonderful night, with poetry and music and splendid scenes and acting,