WHAT next! A glass of good MÜnchner beer, and away we go to Munich on the “Schnell Zug” (fast train), over a rolling, pleasant country, past pretty railway stations covered with vines and gay with flowers, as all German windows are; past switchmen in flaming scarlet jackets, who stand at the switches, raising their hand to their temple in a military salute as we go by. As you travel by rail through Bavaria you see the conductors and guards dismount from the train at the little country stations to replenish their mugs. Beer takes the place of water. When you arrive at Munich, pre-eminently the beer capital of the world, the porters set their mugs down on the platforms anywhere to solicit your custom. The ever-present stein stands beside the cab-wheel. Next to London, Paris, and Berlin, Munich is visited by more travellers than any other European city. Gradually this influence has modernized it, but there still remain sufficient of the old Bavarian curiosities of life to entertain and instruct the travelled worldling. Nobody here thinks of doing anything without an accompaniment of beer. It is always in order: before breakfast, after dinner, the inevitable nightcap. The youngsters sit at table and sip it when they are too young to leave their mothers’ laps. We have listened to loud yelps go up over the contention for the stein between babies; still they are not a nation of drunkards. The law prescribes how much beer you shall give your servants daily. Thank fortune, it has no power to regulate the appetite of the private consumer. You sweeten all chores, whether to chop wood, shovel coal, or chaperon a party to an art gallery, with a glass or stein of beer. Strange as it seems here, where art has attained its highest, the consumption of beer seems to be the prime business. One of the curious decorations of Munich streets is its mugs and bottles; some full, some empty, hem one in on all sides. They are left indifferently by the owners, but none are ever stolen. The cardinal command for every Bavarian is, “You shall not steal my beer.” It is a panacea, food, and drink. If you don’t drink beer at all, the Bavarian does not think you are merely odd, but he thinks you are in danger in mind and body.

Munich was rebuilt after the great fire, and extended by Emperor Ludwig, the Bavarian. Indeed, the rulers of Bavaria have spared neither pains nor expense to make their capital beautiful and attractive. Artistic buildings and monuments are distributed everywhere. The “PropylÆn,” a magnificent gateway across the handsome “Brienner Strasse,” is an imitation of that on the Acropolis at Athens, with its Doric columns on the outside and Ionic within; the pediment groups are scenes in modern Greek history. Wherever you go, through churches, palaces, galleries, streets, parks, and gardens, you find frescoes so crowded out of the way, and rooms so overloaded with statuary and pictures, all so good, as to sacrifice all effect. Such overproduction as this gives one the feeling that art has been forced beyond use in Munich. But when you consider the army of artists there in the way of painters, sculptors, and plasterers, working with that great unrest and desire to do something, it is no wonder that everything is painted and bedecked; seemingly determined to leave nothing for the sweet growth and blossoming of time. It is the cheapest thing in the world to criticise when you are filled with their foaming beer (three and a half cents a quart), which is said by antiquarians to be a good deal better than the mead drunk in Odin’s Halls; then view the city in a cheerful, open light, cram-jam full of works of art, ancient and modern, and its architecture a study of all styles. The long, wide “Ludwig Strasse” is a street of palaces, built up by the old king. All the buildings, in Romanesque style, are, in a degree, monotonous. A street with no pretty shop windows, neither shade nor fountain, leading nowhere, never attracts, no matter how many kings dictated it.

It has so much that could be criticised, but should not be, by a passing tourist, if he is a little wearied by repetition. Munich seems to be the home of the dove; a regular colony is domesticated in the decorations on the faÇades of the buildings; they, too, seem seized with the decorative spirit. My companion differed with me again, when I thought it added to the artistic interest; the fact that they were doves seemed to make no difference, “Wouldn’t want them ruining a home of mine.”

The royal palace is a building of great solidity, but plain. The Emperor’s room contains valuable jewels and precious stones, including a large blue diamond called the “Hausdiamant,” and the “Palatinate Pearl”; an interesting relic of Mary Stuart; also a work ascribed to Michael Angelo. After you make an effort to see these things, with slippers drawn over your shoes to protect their highly polished floor, you are easily satiated. A visit to our own Tiffany is much more to our taste, with the musty smell and sliding feet barred out. The palace, built in late Renaissance style, has its main faÇade toward the Hof Garden. In a suite of six rooms, strikingly frescoed, representing scenes from the “Odyssee,” are reliefs by Schwanthaler; portraits of thirty-six beautiful women are in the banquet hall, with forty-one paintings of various battles. Its throne-room contains twelve large gilded statues by Schwanthaler. The Royal Chapel is built in Byzantine style (1837). North of this is the Hof Garden, a beautiful square whose two sides have arcades, decorated with frescoes by Kaulbach, Rottmann, and others. Attached to it are the premises of the Art Union, containing a permanent exhibition of work of leading masters. To the west lies the “Odeonplatz,” embellished with an equestrian Statue of King Ludwig I. Opposite the Palace rises the handsome “Theatiner Kirche,” in Italian baroque style (1675 A.D.), with all its portals bestatued and bedecked. The palace of Duke Max has a porch embellished with statues of the four Evangelists, by Schwanthaler. It contains celebrated frescoes of the “Day of Judgment,” the most important of Cornelius’s pictures. Cornelius is of the “DÜsseldorf” school, a rival of the Munich schools.

It seems strange to see these same people, with their steins in hand and abdomens much in evidence, enjoying these gems of art—largely Biblical subjects—and the most classic music. A seat under the trees, with open arcades on two sides for shops, decorated with frescoes and landscapes of historical subjects, is more interesting. The arcade is eight hundred feet long, in the revived Italian style, with a fine Ionic porch, and good MÜnchener beer to order. The color was not a pleasing one to me, as it was the royal dirty yellow, an imitation, not fully carried out, of the Pitti Palace at Florence, so I have heard. They try hard to imitate the classic and Italian in Munich. They boast that their Royal Court Chapel’s interior resembles St. Mark’s in Venice; but the building needs southern sunlight to get the right quality. The “Glyptothek,” a Grecian structure of one story, erected to hold the treasures of classic sculpture that the extravagant Bavarian kings have collected, has a beautiful Ionic porch and pediment. The outside niches are filled with statues. In the pure sunshine and under a deep blue sky its white marble glows with an almost ethereal beauty. Don’t think Munich is all imitation. Its finest street, the Maximilian, built by the late king of that name, is of a novel and wholly modern style of architecture, that reminds one of the new portions of Paris (the only part of Paris that we did see). It begins with the Post-Office, with its long colonnade and Pompeian-red lining; then the Hof Theatre, with its pediment frescoes, the largest opera house in Germany, and so on. Here we saw the opera, “Die Zauberflote,” beginning at 6.30 summer evenings.

The English Garden must not be forgotten. This was laid out originally by the munificent American, Count Rumford (Benjamin Thompson), born in Vermont. Why this should be called English Garden, I don’t know; perhaps because it is different from their Continental style. Paris has nothing to compare with it for natural beauty. We have our Central Park, New York. Wearied tourists generally go to some of the huge beer gardens and surrender themselves to the divine influence of music, and watch the honest Germans drink beer and gossip in friendly fellowship.

I have referred before to the great regiments of soldiers mounted and on guard at all times in Germany. But nowhere outside of Berlin are they so thick as in Munich. This little kingdom of Bavaria is full of them. Thousands of troops are in line. Every male must serve three years continuously; every man between the age of twenty-one and forty-five must go with his regiment into camp or barracks several weeks each year, no matter if the harvest rots in the fields or the customers desert the shops, leaving the unsold wares on shelves. The service takes three of the best years of a young man’s life. You can see young soldiers with their hot-looking uniforms, until you feel everybody is “soldiering” for a living. You meet these young officers everywhere, most of them fine-looking fellows—good figures—in what, I suppose, they think handsome-looking uniforms. On the street, salutes between officers and men are perpetual; the hand being raised to the temple and held there a second. Their politeness impresses you as much more sincere than the French. At hotels the landlord, wife, and servant join in wishing you a good night’s sleep, while the “Deutsche MÄdchen ‘Bitte schÖne’s’” everything. The most polite I ever knew, with one exception, at Hotel Windsor in London: the maid there thanked us for bringing us a pitcher of hot water. The young German is much more stylish and prepossessing in appearance than his fraulein. A young officer in his shining uniform, white kids, long sword clanking on the walk, raising his hand in a condescending salute to a lower in rank or with affable grace to a superior, is pleasant to see.

One always turns to the strains of the military band and views the mounted musicians, as well as the uniformed soldiers, mounted as if born to the saddle, with invariably fine horses that prance in the sunshine. The clatter of their hoofs on the cobble pavement, the jingle of bit and sabre, an occasional word of command, the onward sweep of the well-trained cavalcade, continued for so long a time that I turned to a gentleman on the sidewalk and said, “How many men are in line?” He shrugged his shoulders in that detestable fashion, an imitation of the French, I suppose. I then said, “Wie viel?”—“Zehn tausend.” I then remarked, “What a foolish waste of time and money”; he no doubt would have responded to this if he could.

Their chief use (the soldiers), as far as I could see, was to make pageants in the streets and to furnish music for the public squares.

The Isar River is one of the curiosities of Munich. It is chiefly noted for running rapidly, and for being nowhere near the battlefield of Hohenlinden, the poet to the contrary notwithstanding. They say it is a river sometimes as white as milk, at others as green as grass; and it is probably the only river of its size in the world that has no boats on it; nor may one bathe in it, on account of the swiftness of the current. Its principal use is for people to drown themselves in. They do use it, however, for the Isar is turned into this beautiful English Garden. Art takes hold of it and turns it to use, causing it to flow into more than one stream with its mountain impetuosity, forming lakes gracefully overhung with trees, which present ever-changing aspects of loveliness as you walk along its banks.

There are always idlers everywhere. Everybody has leisure in Europe. One can easily learn how to be idle and let the world wag. They are not troubled with “Americanitis.” They have found out that the world will continue to turn over every twenty-four hours without their valuable aid. They give so many hours to recreation and amusement.