"There is no soul in them," he muttered, and he set down his lamp and frowned; a sullen mechanical art made him angered like an insult to heaven; and these were soulless; their drawing was fine, their anatomy faultless, their proportions and perspective excellent; but there all merit ended. They were worse than faulty—they were commonplace. There is no sin in Art so deadly as that.

He had been only a poor lad, a coppersmith's son, here in Munich; one among many, and beaten and cursed at home very often for mooning over folly when others were hard at work. But he had minded neither curse nor blow. He had always said to himself, "I am a painter." Whilst camps were soaked with blood and echoing only the trumpets of war, he had only seen the sweet divine smile of Art. He had gone barefoot to Italy for love of it, and had studied, and laboured, and worshipped, and been full of the fever of great effort and content with the sublime peace of conscious power. He had believed in himself: it is much. But it is not all. As years had slid away and the world of men would not believe in him, this noble faith in himself grew a weary and bitter thing. One shadow climbed the hills of the long years with him and was always by his side: this constant companion was Failure.

Fame is very capricious, but Failure is seldom inconstant. Where it once clings, there it tarries.

It was a brilliant and gay day in Munich. It was the beginning of a Bavarian summer, with the great plain like a sea of grass with flowers for its foam, and the distant Alps of Tyrol and Vorarlberg clearly seen in warm, transparent, buoyant weather.

Down by the winding ways of the river there were birch and beechen thickets in glory of leaf; big water-lilies spread their white beauty against the old black timbers of the water-mills; and in the quaint, ancient places of the old streets, under the gables and beams, pots of basil, and strings of green pease, and baskets of sweet-smelling gillyflowers and other fragrant old-fashioned things, blossomed wherever there was a breadth of blue sky over them or a maiden's hand within; whilst above the towers and steeples, above the clanging bells of the Domkirche and the melon-shaped crest of the Frauenkirche, and all the cupolas and spires and minarets in which the city abounds, the pigeons went whirling and wheeling from five at sunrise to seven of sunset, flocks of grey and blue and black and white, happy as only birds can be, and as only birds can be when they are doves of Venice or of Munich, with all the city's hearths and homes for their granaries, and with the sun and the clouds for their royal estate.

In the wide, dull new town it was dusty and hot; the big squares were empty and garish-looking; the blistering frescoes on the buildings were gaudy and out of place; the porticoes and friezes were naked and staring, and wanted all that belongs to them in Italy. All the deep, intense shadows, the sultry air, the sense of immeasurable space and of unending light, the half-naked figures graceful as a plume of maize, the vast projecting roofs, the spouts of tossing water, the brown barefoot straw-plaiter passing in a broad path of sunshine, the old bronze lamp above the painted shrine, the gateway framing the ethereal landscape of amethystine horizons and silvery olive ways—they want all these, do these classic porticoes and pediments of Italy, and they seem to stare, conscious of a discordance and a lack of harmony in the German air. But in the old town there is beauty still; in the timbered house-fronts, in the barred and sculptured casements, in the mighty gables, in the gilded and pictured signs, in the sunburnt walls, in the grey churches, in the furriers' stalls, in the toysellers' workshops, in the beetling fortresses, in the picturesque waysides, here is the old Munich of the Minnesingers and master masons, of the burghers and the burschen, of the Schefflertanz, and of the merry Christchild Fair. And old Munich keeps all to itself, whether with winter snow on its eaves, or summer leaves in its lattices; and here the maidens still wear coloured kerchiefs on their heads and clattering shoes on their feet; and here the students still look like etchings for old ballads, with long hair on their shoulders and grey cloaks worn jauntily; and here something of the odour and aspect of the Middle Ages lingers as about an illuminated roll of vellum that has lain long put away and forgotten in a desk, with faded rose-leaves and a miniature that has no name.

The Munich of builder-king Ludwig is grand, no doubt, and tedious and utterly out of place, with mountains of marble and granite, and acres of canvas more or less divine, and vast straight streets that make one weep from weariness, and frescoed walls with nude women that seem to shiver in the bitter Alpine winds; it is great, no doubt, but ponderously unlovely, like the bronze Bavaria that looks over the plain, who can hold six men in her head, but can never get fire in her eyes nor meaning in her mouth—clumsy AthenÆ-Artemis that she is.

New Munich, striving to be Athens or Rome, is monotonous and tiresome, but old Munich is quaint and humble, and historical and romancical, with its wooden pavements under foot, and its clouds of doves above head; indeed, has so much beauty of its own, like any old painted Missal or golden goblet of the moyen Âge, that it seems incredible to think that any man could ever have had the heart to send the hammers of masons against it, and set up bald walls of plaster in its stead. Wandering in old Munich—there is not much of it left, alas!—is like reading a black-letter ballad about Henry the Lion or Kaiser Max; it has sombre nooks and corners, bright gleams of stained casements, bold oriels, and sculptured shields, arcades and arches, towers and turrets, light and shade, harmony and irregularity, all, in a word, that old cities have, and old Teutonic cities beyond all others; and when the Metzgersprung is in full riot round the Marienplatz, or on Corpus Christi day, when the King and the Court and the Church, the guilds and the senate and the magistracy, all go humbly through the flower-strewn streets, it is easy to forget the present and to think that one is still in the old days with the monks, who gave their name to it, tranquil in their work-rooms and the sound of battle all over the lands around them.

It was the Corpus Christi day in Munich now, and the whole city, the new and the old, had hung itself with garlands and draperies, with pictures and evergreens, with flags and tapestries, and the grand procession had passed to and from the church, and the archbishop had blessed the people, and the king had bared his handsome head to the sun and the Holy Ghost, and it was all over for the year, and the people were all happy and satisfied and sure that God was with them and their town; especially the people of the old quarters, who most loved and clung to these ceremonials and feasts; good God-fearing families, labouring hard, living honestly and wholesomely, gay also in a quiet, mirthful, innocent fashion—much such people as their forefathers were before them, in days when Gustavus Adolphus called their city the golden saddle on the lean horse.

The lean horse, by which he meant the sterile plains, which yield little except hay, looks rich with verdure in the mellow afternoon light, when midsummer is come, and the whole populace, men, women, and children, on Sundays and feast-days pour out of the city gates eagerly to their own little festivities under the cherry-trees of the little blue and white coffee-houses along the course of the river, when the beanflowers are in bloom. For out of the old city you go easily beyond the walls to the grey glacier water of "Isar rolling rapidly," not red with blood now as after Hohenlinden, but brilliant and boisterous always, with washerwomen leaning over it with bare arms, and dogs wading where rushes and dams break the current, and the hay blowing breast-high along the banks, and the students chasing the girls through it, and every now and then upon the wind the music of a guitar, light and dancing, or sad and slow, according as goes the heart of the player that tunes it. At this season Bavaria grows green, and all is fresh and radiant. Outside the town all the country is a sheet of cherry-blossom and of clover. Night and day, carts full of merrymakers rattle out under the alders to the dancing places amongst the pastures, or to the Sommerfrischen of their country friends. Whoever has a kreuzer to spend will have a draft of beer and a whiff of the lilac-scented air, and the old will sit down and smoke their painted pipes under the eaves of their favourite Gasthof, and the young will roam with their best-loved maidens through the shadows of the Anlagen, or still farther on under the high beech-trees of Grosshesslohe.