AMERICA, GERMANY, AND SPAIN-1897-1903 177 



ceptions seemed to be in the art world. The number of 

 my artist friends during my stay as minister had been 

 large, and every one of them was living when I returned as 

 ambassador; the reason, of course, being that when men 

 distinguish themselves in art at all, they do so at an earlier 

 age than do high functionaries of state and professors in 

 the universities. It was a great pleasure to find Adolf 

 Menzel, Ludwig Knaus, Carl Becker, Anton von Werner, 

 and Paul Meyerheim, though grown gray in their beauti 

 ful ministry, still daily at work in their studios. 



Three only of my friends of the older generation in 

 the Berlin faculty remained; and as I revise these lines 

 the world is laying tributes upon the grave of the last of 

 them Theodor Mommsen. With him my relations were 

 so peculiar that they may deserve some mention. 



During my earlier stays in Berlin he had always seemed 

 especially friendly to the United States, and it was there 

 fore with regret that on my return I found him in this 

 respect greatly changed : he had become a severe critic of 

 nearly everything American ; his earlier expectations had 

 evidently been disappointed; we clearly appeared to him 

 big, braggart, noisy, false to our principles, unworthy of 

 our opportunities. These feelings of his became even 

 more marked as the Spanish-American War drew on. 

 Whenever we met, and most often at a charming house 

 which both of us frequented, he showed himself more 

 and more bitter, so that finally our paths separated. There 

 comes back to me vividly one evening when I sought to 

 turn off a sharp comment of his upon some recent Ameri 

 can news by saying : You must give a young nation like 

 ours more time.&quot; On this he exclaimed: &quot;You cannot 

 plead the baby act any longer. More time! You have 

 had time; you are already three hundred years old!&quot; 

 Having sought in vain to impress on him the fact that 

 the policy of our country is determined not wholly by 

 the older elements in its civilization, but very largely by 

 newer commonwealths which must require time to de 

 velop a policy satisfactory to sedate judges, he burst into 



II.-12 



