H. L. Mencken

“ Should you meet her the following afternoon in the Prater or on parade in the Kärntnerstrasse, her eyes will look past you, for the night has gone, carrying with it its memories and its intoxications.
It is this spirit of evanescence, this youthful buoyancy, snatched out of the passing years, lived for a moment and then forgot, which constitutes the genuine gaiety of Vienna. It is an unconscious gaiety, sensed but not analysed, in the very soul of the people. It keeps the Viennese young and makes him resent, intuitively, the invasion of other nations to whom gaiety is artificial. ”

“ Always it's there, across the seas, for some one—maybe no longer you and me, exiles of the years in this far-away America—but still for some one younger, some one for whom the loves and adventures and the hazards of life are still so all-wondrous, so all-worth-while, so almighty. But, however old, however hardened by the trickeries of passing decades, those who have loved Paris, those to whom Paris has lifted her lips in youth, these never say good-bye to her. For in their hearts sings on her romance, for in their hearts march on the million memories of her gipsy days and nights. ”

“ I shall never think again of Vienna without picturing that stranded girl, sipping at her reddish drink in the Amerikan-bar in the Kaisergarten. But her case is typical. The Viennese are not hospitable to strangers. They are an intimate, self-sufficient people.
Let us turn, however, from the little Gabrielle to a more fascinating and exquisite creature, to a happier and more buoyant denizen of Viennese night life, to a lady of more elegant attire.56 In short, behold Fräulein Bianca Weise. In her are the alkaloids of gaiety. She irradiates the joyfulness of the city. ”

“ Gaiety in Vienna is an end, not a means. It is born in the blood of the people. The carnival spirit reigns. There are almost no restrictions, no engines of repression. Alongside the real Viennese night life, the blatant and spectacular caprices of Paris are so much tinsel. The life on the Friedrichstrasse, the brightest and most active street in Europe, becomes tawdry when compared with the secret glories of the Kärntnerring. In the one instance we have gaiety on parade, in strumpet garb—the simulacrum of sin—gaiety dramatised. ”

“ The Marseillaise of romance is not stilled. In the little Yvette whose heart is weeping because the glass case in the Café du Dôme this day reveals no letter from her so grand André, gone to Cassis207 and there to transfer the sapphire of the sea and mesmerism of roses to canvas, is the heart of the little Yvette of the Second Empire. In the lips of Diane that smile and in the eyes of Hélène that dream and in the toes of Thérèse that dance is the smile, is the dream, is the dance in echo of the Paris of a day bygone. ”

“ And all hopelessly nodding at him: "the man of finance, the man of accounts, the man of law, we all nodded at him over the polished table that like a still sheet of brown water reflected our faces, lined, wrinkled; our faces marked by toil, by deceptions, by success, by love; our weary eyes looking still, looking always, looking anxiously for something out of life, that while it is expected is already gone—has passed unseen, in a sigh, in a flash—together with the youth, with the strength, with the romance of illusions...." ”

“ It is a pleasure to say a kind word for little Rosa, with her coal black hair and her slanting eyes, for she is too fragile a fräulein to be toting around those gigantic German schnitzels and bifsteks, those mighty double portions of sauerbraten and rostbif, those staggering drinking urns, overballasted and awash.
Let us not, however, be unjust to the estimable Herr Wirt of the Hoftheatre Café, with his pneumatic tread, his chaste side whiskers and his long-tailed coat, for his drinking urns, when all is said and done, are quite the smallest in Munich. ”

“ And nowhere on earth is there a more cosmopolitan gathering than sits down to the Savoy supper when the theatres are over. Here at least is visual romance; and when we inspect the people at closer range we glimpse a more intimate romance. One catches snatches of conversation from a dozen languages within the radius of hearing. Here is modern civilisation at apogee—the final word in luxury—the dénouement of spectacular life. Go to the Aquarium in St. Petersburg, to the Adlon in Berlin, to the Bristol in Vienna, to the Café de Paris ”

“ Did Nora never dance upon the pavement? Was Violet but the figment of a poet's dreams? And was that painted angel, Peppina, a mere psychic snare? Could any man—even a poet—write as he did of Muriel at the Opera if there had been no Muriel? It seemed highly improbable. Finally I decided that, ere departing for Reine or Anna or Bianca, I would sally forth into the night of London and see if, after all, romance did not lurk in the darkened corners. ”

“ For they—we—may kill the laughter of Berlin's streets—as we have killed it in Paris—but we can never kill the heart, the spirit and the living, quivering corpuscles of German blood. The French may drink stronger stuffs, eat richer foods and love oftener than the Germans, and may be better fighters—but they cannot laugh, they cannot sing as the Germans laugh and sing. ”

“ The maquereau spirit of Montmartre, with its dollar lust and its poisoned blood, has not yet the throat of this German night city full in its fists; but the fists are tightening slowly—and the voice behind them speaks not135 French, but the jargon of Broadway. And yet, when finally the fingers work closer, closer still, around that throat, when finally the death gurgle of spontaneous pleasure and of clean, honest, fearless night skies comes—and yet, when this happens, Berlin will still rise from the dunghill. ”

“ What once on a time was, is no more. But Romance, notwithstanding, has not yet altogether deserted the Paris that was her loyal sweetheart in the days when the tricolour was a prouder flag, its subjects a prouder people. There is something of the old spirit of it, the old verve of it, lingering still, if not in Montmartre, if not in the edisoned highways of the Left Bank, if not in the hitherward boulevards, then still somewhere. ”

“ It is night in Paris! It is night in the Paris of a thousand memories. And the Place de la Concorde lies silver blue under springtime skies. And up the Champs Elysées the elfin lamps shimmer in the moist leaves like a million topaz tears. And the boulevards are a-thrill with the melody of living. Are you, now far away and deep in the American winter, with me once again in memory over the seas in this warm and wonderful and fugitive world? ”

“ Good beer, to be sure, and a hundred times better than the common brews, even in Munich, but not perfect beer, not beer de luxe, not super-beer. It is the human equation that counts, in the bierhalle as on the battlefield. One resents, somehow a kellnerin with the figure of a taxicab, no matter how good her intentions and fluent her technique, just as one resents a trained nurse with a double chin or a glass eye. ”

“ You will find them up a flight of stairs in one of the all-night Linden cafés, throwing celluloid balls at the weary, patient, left-over women. You will find them sitting in the balcony of the Pavilion Mascotte, blowing up toy balloons and hurling small cones of coloured paper down at the benign harlotry. You will see them, hatless, shooting up the Friedrichstrasse in an open taxicab, singing "Give My Regards to Broadway" in all the prime ecstasy of a beer souse. You will find them in the rancid Tingel-Tangel, blaspheming the kellner because they can't get a highball. ”

“ This park presents a bizarre and chaotic mingling of outdoor concerts, variety theatres, bierkabaretts, moving picture halls, promenades and sideshow attractions of the Atlantic City type. The Kaisergarten is the rendezvous of the bourgeoisie, the heaven of hoi polloi—rotund merchants with walrus moustachios, dapper young clerks with flowing ties, high-chokered soldiers, their boots polished into ebony mirrors, fat-jowled maidens in rainbow garb.... There is lovemaking under the Linden trees, beer drinking on the midway, schnitzel eating in the restaurants. ”

“ They were really the symbol of London's night romance. They were the tuning fork which gave the pitch for London pleasures. For romance and gaiety in London are grafted to an otherwise unromantic and lugubrious hulk. All joys in that terrible city are lugged from overseas, and, in the process of suturing, the spontaneity has been lost, the buoyancy has disappeared, the honesty has vanished.
But no people can be without romance. No nation can withstand forever the engines of repression. Not all the moral lawmakers of England have succeeded in stamping out160 the natural impulses. ”

“ There is, indeed, no race in Europe more innocent, more frank, more clean-minded. Postcards of a homely and harmless vulgarity are for sale in every Munich stationer's shop, but the connoisseur looks in vain for the studied indecencies of Paris, the appalling obscenities of the Swiss towns. Munich has little to show the American Sunday school superintendent on the loose. The ideal there is not a sharp and stinging deviltry, a swift massacre of all the commandments, but a liquid and tolerant geniality, a great forgiveness. Beer does not refine, perhaps,97 but at any rate it mellows. ”

“ But no; for still I see in the brilliant Berlin moonlight the bronze Quadriga of Victory atop the distant Gate of Brandenburg and still I hear a group of students singing in the Café Mozart, and still—but what is moonlight beside the fairy light in your eyes, fair Hulda? What is song beside the soft melody of your smile? Normandy is in the night air ... "man lacht, man lebt, man liebt und man küsst wo's Küsse giebt" ... and we and all the world are young. ”

“ There, when he has passed out himself, his pallbearers in their gauds of grief will stop to refresh themselves, and to praise him in speech and song, and to weep unashamed for the loss of so gemüthlich a fellow.
But, as I have said, the Hofbräuhaus is no playroom for amateurs. My advice to you, if you would sip the cream of Munich and leave the hot acids and lye, is that you have yourself hauled forthwith to the Hoftheatre Café, and that you there tackle a modest seidel of Spatenbräu—first one, and then another, and so on until you master the science. ”

“ At these theatres, equipped with numerous and eminently available cafés, women, frail and fair, sit and walk about on the promenades and generously waive introductions when the young gentlemen evince a desire to speak to them. But there is no romance here. These promenades are even without illusion. Here, among the theatres, is where London tries to be Paris. ”

“ Some lay of amour, I venture, breathing the hot passion of the Viennese Jew who wrote it. But so heard, filtered through that golden haze, echoed back from that lovely panorama of stone and water, all flavour of human frailty has been taken out of it. There is, indeed, something wholly chastening and dephlogisticating in the scene, something which makes the joys and tumults of the flesh seem trivial and debasing. A man must be fed, of course, to yield himself to the suggestion, for hunger is frankly a brute ”

“ Her steel heart flutters at the touch of a wheedling phryne. She, too, can wear the strumpet garb of youth. She, too, in the vitals of her153 nature, longs for the gay romance of the Boulevard Montparnasse ere the American possessed it. She, too, admires the rhythmic parabolic curve of bare shoulders. Silken ankles and amorous whisperings stir her—if not to deeds of valour, then at least to deeds of indiscretion. London, it seems, cannot look upon the moon without suffering some of the love qualms of Endymion. In fine, London, the mentalized, is human. ”

“ As we pass out into the bleak street, the first faint flush of dawn is in the east. The wässerer are washing off the cabs; a helmeted hauptmann salutes lazily as we pass, and we drive home full of the intoxications of that pagan gaiety which the Viennese, more than any other people, have preserved in all its innocence, its sensuous splendour, its spontaneity and youth.68
Bianca? By now she has forgotten with whom she came to the dance. ”

“ For them,141 shall be no memory of that vast and insuperable gemütlichkeit, that superb and pacific democracy, that dwells and shall dwell forever by night in the spirit of the German people. They will never know the Berlin that lifts its seidel to the setting sun, the Berlin that greets the moonrise, the Berlin that meets the dawn. The Berlin that they know is a Berlin of French champagnes, Italian confetti, Spanish dancers, English-trained waiters, Austrian courtesans and American hilarities. They interpret a city by its leading all-night restaurant ”

“ But here we catch the spirit of Vienna, the transforming of what the other cities do publicly into the intimacies of the home.
At one o'clock, the meal finished, the intimate theatre claimed us. There the glorious Bianca met her lovers, her little following. At these theatres every one knows every one else. It is the social lure as well as the theatrical appeal that brings the people there. Bianca chats with the actors, flirts with the admiring Lotharios and drinks champagne. At her side sit the greatest artists and dramatists of the day, princes63 and other celebrities. ”