Jerome K. Jerome

“ Opposite, a family group sit discussing omelettes and a bottle of white wine. The father contented, good-humoured, and laughing; the small child grave and solemn, eating and drinking in business-like fashion; the mother smiling at both, yet not forgetting to eat.
I think one would learn to love these German women if one lived among them for long. There is something so sweet, so womanly, so genuine about them. They seem to shed around them, from their bright, good-tempered faces, a healthy atmosphere of all that is homely, and simple, and good. ”

“ In the morning, trainload after trainload of villagers and mountaineers pour into the town, and trainload after trainload of good and other citizens steam out to spend the day in wood and valley, and upon lake and mountain-side.
We went into one or two of the beer-halls—not into the swell cafés, crowded with tourists and Munich masherdom, but into the low-ceilinged, smoke-grimed cellars where the life of the people is to be seen.
The ungenteel people in a country are so much more interesting than the gentlefolks. One lady or gentleman is painfully like every other lady or gentleman. ”

“ We had another grand railway-ride from Munich to Oberau. We passed by the beautiful lake of Starnberg just as the sun was setting and gilding with gold the little villages and pleasant villas that lie around its shores. It was in the lake of Starnberg, near the lordly pleasure-house that he had built for himself in that fair vale, that poor mad Ludwig, the late King of Bavaria, drowned himself. Poor King! Fate gave him everything calculated to make a man happy, excepting one thing, and that was the power of being happy. Fate has a mania for striking balances. ”

“ With a mug of beer before me, and a pipe in my mouth, I could sit for hours contentedly, and watch the life that ebbs and flows into and out of these old ale-kitchens.
The brawny peasant lads bring in their lasses to treat them to the beloved nectar of Munich, together with a huge onion. How they enjoy themselves! What splendid jokes they have! How they laugh and roar and sing! At one table sit four old fellows, playing cards. How full of character is each gnarled face. One is eager, quick, vehement. ”

“ How, during the performance of the Passion Play, they act and sing and stand about upon the uncovered stage without taking the slightest notice of the downpour of water that is soaking their robes and running from their streaming hair, to make great pools upon the boards; and how the audience, in the cheaper, unroofed portion of the theatre, sit with equal stoicism, watching them, no one ever dreaming even of putting up an umbrella—or, if he does dream of doing so, experiencing a very rude awakening from the sticks of those behind. ”

“ At various places on the route, thoughtful Society had taken care to be ready for me with all kinds of refreshment (her sandwiches might be a little fresher, but maybe she thinks new bread injurious for me) . When I am tired of travelling and want to rest, I find Society waiting for me with dinner and a comfortable bed, with hot and cold water to wash in and towels to wipe upon. Wherever I go, whatever I need, Society, like the enslaved genii of some Eastern tale, is ready and anxious to help me, to serve me, to do my bidding, to give me enjoyment and pleasure. ”

“ If you are within a mile of a Munich military band, and are not stone deaf, you listen to it, and do not think of much else. It compels your attention by its mere noise; it dominates your whole being by its sheer strength. Your mind has to follow it as the feet of the little children followed the playing of the Pied Piper. Whatever you do, you have to do in unison with the band. ”

“ A visit to Germany is a tonic to an Englishman. We English are always sneering at ourselves, and patriotism in England is regarded as a stamp of vulgarity. The Germans, on the other hand, believe in themselves, and respect themselves. The world for them is not played out. Their country to them is still the “Fatherland.” They look straight before them like a people who see a great future in front of them, and are not afraid to go forward to fulfil it. ”

“ It is evident that he can stand her conversation just so long as he has a mug of beer in front of him. He has brought her in here to give her a treat. He will let her have her talk out while he drinks. Heavens! how she does talk! She talks without movement, without expression; her voice never varies, it flows on, and on, and on, like a great resistless river. Four young artisans come clamping along in their hob-nailed boots, and seating themselves at one of the rude wooden tables, call for beer. With their arms round the waist of the utterly indifferent Fraulein, they shout and laugh and sing. ”

“ Silence is the only real thing we can lay hold of in this world of passing dreams. Time is a shadow that will vanish with the twilight of humanity; but Silence is a part of the eternal. All things that are true and lasting have been taught to men’s hearts by Silence.
Among all nations, there should be vast temples raised where the people might worship Silence and listen to it, for it is the voice of God. ”

“ Tell how unsophisticated visitors, informed that their lodgings are at number fifty-three, go wandering for days and days round fifty-two, under the not unreasonable impression that their house must be next door, though, as a matter of fact, it is half a mile off at the other end of the village, and are discovered one sunny morning, sitting on the doorstep of number eighteen, singing pathetic snatches of nursery rhymes, and trying to plat their toes into door-mats, and are taken up and carried away screaming, to end their lives in the madhouse at Munich. ”

“ I told him so.
“No,” he replied, “it never does occur to you tourists. You treat us as if we were mere Providence, or even the Government itself. If all goes well, you say, what is the good of us, contemptuously; and if things go wrong, you say, what is the good of us, indignantly. I work sixteen hours a day to fix things comfortably for you, and you cannot even look satisfied; while if a train is late, or a hotel proprietor overcharges, you come and bully me about it. ”

“ I do not mean a sainted face, suggestive of stained glass and marble tombs, but a rugged human face that has had the grit, and rain, and sunshine of life rubbed into it, and that has gained its expression, not by looking up with longing at the stars, but by looking down with eyes full of laughter and love at the human things around it. ”

“ A steeple appears far away upon the horizon. (The first thing that we ask of men is their faith: “What do you believe?” The first thing that they show us is their church: “This we believe.”) Then a tall chimney ranges itself alongside. (First faith, then works.) Then a confused jumble of roofs, out of which, at last, stand forth individual houses, factories, streets, and we draw up in a sleeping town.
People open the carriage door, and look in upon us. They do not appear to think much of us, and close the door again quickly, with a bang, and we sleep once more. ”

“ Fashion, in its world-wide crusade against variety and its bitter contest with form and colour, has recoiled, defeated for the present from the mountain fastnesses of Bavaria. Still, as Sunday or gala-day comes round, the broad-shouldered, sunburnt shepherd of the Oberland dons his gay green-embroidered jacket over his snowy shirt, fastens his short knee-breeches with a girdle round his waist, claps his high, feather-crowned hat upon his waving curls, and with bare legs, shod in mighty boots, strides over the hill-sides to his Gretchen’s door. ”

“ The roots of Christianity are planted deep down in the very soil of life, amid all that is commonplace, and mean, and petty, and everyday. Its strength lies in its simplicity, its homely humanness. It has spread itself through the world by speaking to the hearts, rather than to the heads of men. If it is still to live and grow, it must be helped along by such methods as these peasant players of Ober-Ammergau employ, not by high-class essays and the learned discussions of the cultured. ”

“ One thing I have enjoyed at Munich very much, and that has been the music. The German band that you hear in the square in London while you are trying to compose an essay on the civilising influence of music, is not the sort of band that you hear in Germany. The German bands that come to London are bands that have fled from Germany, in order to save their lives. In Germany, these bands would be slaughtered at the public expense and their bodies given to the poor for sausages. The bands that the Germans keep for themselves are magnificent bands. ”

“ You have none of you ever heard of a second-class railway carriage—didn’t know that such things were made. You want a first-class Pullman car reserved for each two of you. Some of you have seen an omnibus in the distance, and have wondered what it was used for. To suggest that you should travel in such a plebeian conveyance, is to give you a shock that takes you two days to recover from. You expect a private carriage, with a footman in livery, to take you through the mountains. You, all of you, must have the most expensive places in the theatre. ”

“ The unbeliever, also, passes out into the village street full of food for thought. The rude sermon preached in this hillside temple has shown to him, clearer than he could have seen before, the secret wherein lies the strength of Christianity; the reason why, of all the faiths that Nature has taught to her children to help them in their need, to satisfy the hunger of their souls, this faith, born by the Sea of Galilee, has spread the farthest over the world, and struck its note the deepest into human life. ”

“ Amid the babel of the schools we stand bewildered and affrighted. Silence gives us peace and hope. Silence teaches us no creed, only that God’s arms are around the universe.
How small and unimportant seem all our fretful troubles and ambitions when we stand with them in our hand before the great calm face of Silence! We smile at them ourselves, and are ashamed. ”

“ The scene of Christ’s entry into Jerusalem surrounded by the welcoming multitude, is a wonderful reproduction of life and movement, and so also is the scene, towards the end, showing his last journey up to Calvary. All Jerusalem seems to have turned out to see him pass and to follow him, the many laughing, the few sad. The people fill the narrow streets to overflowing, and press round the spears of the Roman Guard. ”

“ To others he is the Christ, the Saviour of mankind, setting forth upon his mighty mission to redeem the world. To loving Mary Mother, he is her son: the baby she has suckled at her breast, the little one she has crooned to sleep upon her lap, whose little cheek has lain against her heart, whose little feet have made sweet music through the poor home at Bethany: he is her boy, her child ”

“ One rubs one’s eyes and stares after them as they pass. They seem to have stepped from the pictured pages of one of those old story-books that we learnt to love, sitting beside the high brass guard that kept ourselves and the nursery-fire from doing each other any serious injury, in the days when the world was much bigger than it is now, and much more real and interesting.
Munich and the country round about it make a great exchange of peoples every Sunday. ”

“ They would appear to have studied “attitude” from the pages of the London Journal, coquetry from barmaids—the commoner class of barmaids, I mean—wit from three-act farces, and manners from the servants’-hall. To be gushingly fawning to those above them, and vulgarly insolent to everyone they consider below them, is their idea of the way to hold and improve their position, whatever it may be, in society; and to be brutally indifferent to the rights and feelings of everybody else in the world is, in their opinion, the hall-mark of gentle birth. ”

“ A German has no anti-nature notions as to its being wicked for him to enjoy his life, and still more criminal for him to let anybody else enjoy theirs. He likes his huge pipe, and he likes his mug of beer, and as these become empty he likes to have them filled again; and he likes to see other people like their pipe and their mug of beer. ”