Masks And Minstrels of New Germany

better chamber-songs than those to-day, in any tongue. So, though this liaison between literature and the stage did not last, it made history, and left valuable legacies. In imperishable print and score we still retain some charming lyrics set to haunting music. Gems by Heine himself were used in jhis young romantic movement that he might himself have delighted in; trifles too by that versatile Parisian, Catulle Mendes, were adopted. In all this you could find trace of the great change that was moving over all Continental art. The incident of the Uberbrettl', from the view of mere entertainment, is surely not without its lesson for English and American emulation. Surely we have plenty of talent; surely the artistic taste of our people, toward miming and toward minstrelsy, chief factors in the Uberbrettl', has been left long enough to the influence of the money-changers. Could not, as in the German cabaret of the better sort, a little art be wedded to a little commerce, so that neither the public's taste nor its intelligence beinsulted? In England something of the tiber- brettl' idea has, consciously or otherwise, been developed by Pelissier. In America few efforts in this direction have been made, save such as smacked of fashionable pastime for fashionables. The tiberbrettl' aimed at no pink tea elements, no mere fashionable cliques. It was greater than mere cliques. Though dead, it lives; a vital chapter in the history of young Germany. Alive, too, supremely aliv...