But most of all, he has praises for the Bohemian cuisine, with
its incomparable apple tarts, and its dumplings of cream cheese, and for
the magnificent, the overpowering, the ineffable Pilsner of Prague. This
Pilsner motive runs through the book from cover to cover. In the midst
of Dutch tulip-beds, Dublin cobblestones, Madrid sunlight and Atlantic
City leg-shows, one hears it insistently, deep down in the orchestra.
The cellos weave it into the polyphony, sometimes clearly, sometimes in
scarcely recognizable augmentation. It is heard again in the wood-wind;
the bassoons grunt it thirstily; it slides around in the violas; it
rises to a stately choral in the brass. And chiefly it is in minor.
Chiefly it is sounded by one who longs for the Pilsen _Urquell_ in a far
land, and among a barbarous and teetotaling people, and in an atmosphere
as hostile to the recreations of the palate as it is to the recreations
of the intellect.
As I say, this Huneker is a foreigner and hence accursed. There is
something about him as exotic as a samovar, as essentially un-American
as a bashi-bazouk, a nose-ring or a fugue.
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